| Even before he began to paint Jas was involved with photography and as a teenager was printing his own photographs using the bathroom as darkroom and a slide projector as an enlarger. The acquisition of a used Kodak D40 digital camera in 1998 led to a renewed interest in photographic imagery. Felter had been collecting discarded cigarette packs for his millennium project: The Smoking Room, since a six month sojourn to Barcelona in 1994 and, with the acquisition of the digital camera, decided to document the cigarette packs before he picked them up. In the year 2000 Jas published a limited edition (25), signed and numbered hardcover book entitled In Situ - Volume 1, a collection of fourteen digital images created during expeditions to France, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the United States during 1998 and 1999. Among the primary purposes of these expeditions was the location, documentation and collection of discarded cigarette packs for use in the creation of ‘The Smoking Room - A Memorial to the 20th Century. This portable room will have its interior walls, ceiling and floor covered with patterned designs made from a collection of twelve thousand four hundred and seventy three empty cigarette packs, assorted gold and silver cigarette pack foil and cigarette ash collected by Jas between January 1, 1994 and January 1, 2000. Jas continues to collect discarded cigarette packs for use in the construction of collages and continues to document them in situ for his series of digital images. In the fall of 2001 he traveled to the island of Jeju, Korea and a year later, after acquiring a new Nikon digital camera, traveled to South America, where he visited Ecuador and Peru, and explored Easter Island (Chile), and southern Argentina. During his stay in Buenos Aires, Jas was able to work in a digital photo lab, sorting his new In Situ digital images and selecting 15 for his first large format prints, which were then printed in the lab in Buenos Aires. In the Fall of 2003 Jas journeyed to Cambodia and Vietnam to visit Angkor Wat and document discarded cigarette packs in that part of the word. |