[CHRISblog] The Joy of Jason Fritz Michael

People often ask me who made the signature image used to represent the collaborative sitcom project I do with my boyfriend Greg Youmans, entitled Falling In Love… with Chris and Greg. My friend Jason Fritz Michael did! And while he’s not an FTM transgender person himself, he is a great friend and collaborator to many of our kind. Not only is he the star of two of my movies (co-directed with Eric Stanely) and a few of my short videos, he is also one of the most talented and tireless artists I know: his hands are constantly busy with something, whether it be an oil painting, some mysterious yet grand knitting project, taping all the gay references from every Golden Girls episode ever made, or making awesome and trippy commissioned portraits of people. You should ask him to make you one… after you read this interview, of course!

Hi, Jason. How are you doing today?

JFM: I just got over being really sick and having the flu. I haven’t had the flu in years, it’s such a bummer.  One day I had to change my clothes four times because I was sweating so much.  I ran out of pajamas.

What do you do for money?

JFM: I work at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, the oldest and first free medical clinic in the country.  I would say I help people navigate the system.

What drives you to make the kind of work you do?

JFM: I find that collaboration forces a lot of projects to happen.  It’s about building connections and having these little babies come out.  The chance to leave our bodies for a new reality was something that Sam Lopes [as seen in OP #3: The Safer Sex Issue] and I got off on when we worked together for a year-plus on our show. It was like we were married and had to be around each other non-stop, only it was really inspiring and productive—like new ways and sections of our brains started working. And it’s similar with my life partner/muse Leoni Figueredo. She’s really epic and strong and nuts. Good nuts. Or crackers, as she would say.

And movies drive me. They drive me crazy and I stay up too late.

Tell me more about the show you did with Sam Lopes “Just Because There Are Questions Doesn’t Mean There Are Answers” at Blankspace*! And also the work you do with Leoni!

JFM: The show at Blankspace was amazing. Sam and I worked like crazzzzzy non-stop on these drawings and sculptures for over a year, tweaking and tripping out.  And then other friends came in and added touches to pieces that only they could do. Everything was bleeding on everything, and we were copying each other back and forth and trading papers and fingers and clothes. It really made a mess of any kind of artistic identity and personal claim to any of the work.  There were no definitive answers to anything, just a collection of invitations and questions.

Leoni is one of the most creatively committed people I’ve ever met.  She’s like Marina Abramovic meets Julianne Moore meets Bob Flanagan meets Quentin Crisp. She’ll do the most epic things and do them really, really well. For a video we did she had to roll down a rocky hill, get dumped into the freeeezzzing ocean in December, and cough up black bile until she lost her voice. She pushes her body and it’s true love.  She’s the best hunk of meat!  We are currently writing a film together about hypochondria, healing, and dealing with one’s body.  The project looks at ideas of projected futures and individual responsibility in relation to one’s own health. It explores the belief that “you can heal your life” and that anything that happens to you is your fault and the obsessions behind that.  The project is about the blurring between what is real and what is imagined.

What would you say your art is “about”?

JFM: alternative personal realities

fantasy and abstract storytelling

collaboration!!!

constant performance

mind/body connections

false memories ‘vs’ false futures

transforming bodies

low-fi psychedelic

confusing/funny

I’m trying to find a way to live out fantasies through portraits and other work that’s not always allowed in the everyday life.

Tell me about “Joy”. Would you say she’s your alter ego?

JFM: Joy totally became her own physical ego.  Joy is all about twisting reality.  It began as a performance around what counts as a body, as a physical being, and about pushing ideas of believability and transcendence, broadening identity, and moving away from explicit meanings.  It blurs everything—fiction, reality, history—and tries to put it all together. Forming an image that could be copied and reworked in many mediums.

Raul de Nieves then went on to write these beautiful pieces about popularity and Joy that we did in three different performances in New York, San Francisco, and Berlin.  Blending ideas of acceptance within different worlds and within yourself/ourselves.  Raul and Joy have since fallen in love and for a few years now we just cant get enough of each other.

Tell me about Joy’s role or character in Homotopia and Criminal Queers (my movies, co-directed with Eric Stanley)?

JFM: I play an exaggerated version of a lesbian-feminist (maybe even a lesbian separatist) who isn’t willing to conform to the mainstream ideas of female or queer or human, and this makes her very nervous and uncomfortable. The world seems to misunderstand her acts of outrage over contemporary politics.

Tell me about Portrait of Bonnie? Who is Bonnie Sawyer? What’s your relationship to her? Why’d you make the video?

JFM: Portrait of Bonnie is a video project I started with my friend Hoku a few years ago. I met Bonnie at a drag bar and we hit it off.  Bonnie had a really intense quest for fame. She would talk about how she turned down a chance to go to Vegas or how she would maybe become a Dolly Parton impersonator. The idea of a video about her came up one night and she was super into it.  We began filming and it just went on for three years. She would talk about her family in Michigan and doing drag and boyfriends and changing her name and we would meet at the drag bars and hang out.  It was really fun.  The video was made to be this portrait/collage. Her style of drag was so unique because she was only interested in performing country music and didn’t really dance, just a soft sway under the lights to Emmylou Harris and Lorrie Morgan. Epic. I still have days and days of footage…

Got any big plans for the future? Or this weekend?

JFM: I’m working on stuff for a show this summer and painting a graveyard.  There is some new gay goth club I was going to check out and the closing show at 2nd Floor Projects on Sunday, today!!  It was going to snow this weekend but it never did.

Thanks so much for talking with me, Jason***!

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* Read a review of the show :Just Because There Are Questions Doesn’t Mean There Are Answer” at Blankspace on KQED.org: HERE

** Find out more about the photography of Keith Aguiar: THERE

*** Get more Joy and Jason in your life: EVERYWHERE