Artist honours dad’s memory — and confronts fear
‘Disquieting’ sad-clown photographs evoke child’s discomfort with father’s odd hobby
Shortly before Jay Procktor’s dad Larry Procktor died of cancer, his son made a proposition. The two were terrific friends and the son asked his father to pose for a formal portrait in a Burger Baron they loved, dressed as a sad clown.
That may seem strange and random, but when Procktor was young, his dad used to play saxophone in a clown marching band for corporate and family events. “This clown band would march in with their cymbals and their drums, and I would just jump under the table and grab my mom’s leg.
“I bawled my eyes out,” he laughs. “It was horrifying.”
Being a decent dad, the elder Procktor subsequently tried to soften the blow. “My dad would put on the clown makeup at home, so I could see the transformation slowly — but the same thing would happen. I’d just bawl my eyes out.”
Years later, as he sensed his dad getting sicker, Procktor had the idea for the clown photograph in Burger Baron. “After chemo, the third time it came back, I said to him, ‘If we’re going to do this, I think we need to do it now.’
“He said, ‘Well, why don’t we wait till after the treatment?’ And as hard as it was I was like, ‘I don’t know if there’s necessarily going to be an after.’
“He was sick and exhausted. It was a gift he gave me.”
Here’s where the story gets fascinating, and brings us to Procktor’s amazing performance art photo show, Good Grief, up at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts through Feb. 5. For its photos printed on aluminum, over the course of five years, Procktor travelled as far as Boston, dressing as a clown to confront his own feelings of something gigantic now missing.
Known around town for his energetic, luminous portraits, 2012 was rough for the artist.
First, he lost his best friend Sean Devine — who endured the
physical cocktail of nonprogressive muscular dystrophy and scoliosis. Procktor lived with Devine and provided home care for more than a decade. “We were basically a common-law relationship,” 43-year-old Procktor smiles. “As much as I was a home-care provider, he really took care of me.”
Then five months after losing Devine, his dad died at 82 years.
“Just because my dad was gone, I wasn’t done with him. I missed him. A year later I felt like doing this project, as cheesy as it is, to spend more time with him. This whole process was coming to terms with the loss of those two guys, my closest friends who knew me better than anyone — good or bad, right or wrong.”
The 15 photos of and directed by Procktor (various others pressed the trigger) are striking, strange and beautifully revealing. From them we know the father loved his wife, swimming, skating, playing the sax with his friends. He also loved Peanuts, and the Charlie Brown connection has to do with an old-timers hockey tournament cartoonist Charles M. Schulz founded in 1975 that he attended year after year, while the show’s title Good Grief came from a boat’s name found in a video the elder Procktor had shot.
“When I saw it, it was such serendipity, just perfect,” said the photographer.
One of the photos has sad clown Jay Procktor in the suit outside Fenway Park in Boston, his dad a Celtics fan. In another, the artist is “a stone’s throw from where (his father) grew up,” knee deep in Lake Manitou, holding balloons.
“The idea was to revisit places that were meaningful to him.
“I kept asking myself, ‘I just don’t get it, where is he?’ This sad clown is looking for him in all these places. And I found him in all these places.”
I ask him if strangers ever came up and asked to pose with him. He laughs, “No, it’s more like they were afraid.”
Returning to Procktor’s reaction to his dad-as-clown as a kid, that discomfort is actually naturally baked into this art show about death — there’s a very clean metaphor here. “I’m not a happy-looking dude in that outfit. It’s a little disquieting, and I don’t mind if people feel a little bit uncomfortable.”
Procktor hasn’t shown his family the 15 photos yet, waiting to present them all at once at the opening Saturday afternoon, where his dad’s longtime bandmate Larry Harris will play keyboards. Procktor’s performance photos end with the amazing photo of his father at Burger Baron as a sort of striking punchline: sad and wonderful. It’s extremely moving.
“I’m a school teacher, and no one really teaches us how to deal with grief — our society doesn’t know how to handle it.
“It seems silly — but it was literally like hanging out with him. There was a 40-year age difference between us, and I wasn’t a big sports guy, and he wasn’t into what I was into — but we’d go for lunch and I’d take his photo because it was something we could do.”
Procktor notes, during the five-year endeavour, “I did find him. I needed to feel it all the way and twist the knife. But the funny, stupid clown part of it was he was there all the time. I’d go out searching, but I didn’t really need to go anywhere — because he’s right here.”