Art blogger Jeff Hamada modernizes art classics with a contemporary twist

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Emily Carr grad, artist and popular art blogger Jeff Hamada knows the art world experience can feel exclusionary. "If you go to the art gallery, it's kind of a place where people who haven't studied art don't feel comfortable to even like art or enjoy it," he says. "So my goal with the site has really been to make art fun."

Hamada's website, Booooooom.com, features user-friendly work that he curates to appeal to audiences outside of in-the-know contemporary art circles. "The language I use, the way I try to talk about things, is always with that in mind," the Vancouverite says during a phone interview. "It's something my mom can enjoy, or people I grew up playing hockey with can enjoy."

Indeed, his mom was thrilled when she came across a write-up about her son, not in an art journal but in Reader's Digest. The article focused on the Booooooom project that would become Hamada's first book, out this week.

Remake: Master Works of Art Reimagined is art as Hamada likes it: smart but accessible, fun, even funny. And you don't need an art history degree to get the joke.

Further, the works are made by creative people who aren't necessarily professional artists.

The whimsical crowd-sourced project began on the blog with a challenge to Booooooom readers to remake a famous work of art as a photo. Hamada, 32, received "hundreds and hundreds" of submissions from around the world, nearly 70 of which were selected for the book.

There are down-to-the-tiny-details duplicates of works such as Whistler's Mother (Portrait of the Artist's Mother) and Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat. There are photos that replicate a classical masterpiece with a contemporary twist – Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Young Girl Reading with a phone or iPad in her hand instead of a little book; American Gothic's farmer's pitchfork is replaced with a dude's skateboard.

There's some gender-bending: Vermeer's The Milkmaid features a guy in a yellow T-shirt, and another man stands (or lies) in for Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's La Grande Odalisque, a piece of spherical fruit under his right arm replacing the original model's breast.

In a particularly imaginative twist, Joan Miro's Young Woman Escaping is represented by a woman dressed up like the sculpture, a red peppermill atop her head.

The Last Supper is given numerous treatments. In one, a group of hipsters restages the event, gesture for gesture, against a brick wall. Another appears to be a more impromptu photo shoot during a night out at a bar over popcorn and beer.

"There's something about [that submission] that I just find [so] interesting," Hamada says. "You can kind of see the timeline of what potentially happened that night, where the person's like 'Hey, I read this thing on this website, we should all just do this thing, it'll be funny.' And they sort of do it in a haphazard way, but there's an energy that exists in that that's completely different from if you built a whole set for it and really went in with the motivation from the beginning to exactly replicate the first one."

Hamada says he used his advance to pay for rights to reproduce the artworks, and his heart broke a few times when he simply couldn't afford to use a work that inspired a remarkable submission – such as the replication of a Piet Mondrian painting that used a suitcase and folded clothing in yellow, blue and red.

The creators were not paid (everyone whose work made it into Remake received two copies of the book).

The real payoff, says Hamada, is the creativity and the exchange.

"The [Booooooom] site is, I guess, technically about art, but the art for me is really about a means to get people to talk and share and do things," he says. "So I guess in a way it's not really about art; it's about connecting people."