An Interview with Bridget A. Moser

Hey Bridget, you’ve been making show posters for people like NO SHAME and Pop Montreal for quite a while now, how did you get your start in that?

My friend Lauren Schreiber (of NO SHAME) had moved to Toronto and had begun promoting shows on a regular basis. She asked if I could help her out and I said I could give it a shot. It was never something I really planned on doing, since I have no design experience whatsoever and only a sort of trial-and-error knowledge of Photoshop. It was really great to work with Lauren because she made absolutely no demands, she just sort of said “I like your drawings so please do some and include these informational words.” So I pretty much had the freedom to try anything. She was also really helpful in promoting me and so a lot of the subsequent posters I did were a direct result of us working together.

Dance Off Poster for No Shame

Do you have any favorites?

This might sound stupid, but there are honestly only a handful that I even like. The Dance Off one was fun to make and maybe the very first time I thought I made text look neat. I like the one I made for the Shapes & Sizes show at Pomme Pomme, maybe because I find that thread really satisfying to look at. Most of the poster artists I like make things that are drastically different from the stuff I do so maybe that’s part of the reason I end up mostly unsatisfied. I really don’t mind not liking my own stuff, though. It makes me want to make more things (hopefully better things). At the end of the day, though, I don’t really think of myself as a poster artist.

Shapes and Sizes Poster for Pomme-Pomme

Your posters stand out as very clearly your own by the way you draw people, when did you start to develop this style?

It started out as a self portrait and then kind of slowly turned into this thing that for me is a genderless, apathetic, amorphous blob (it still generally has my nose) that I actually just could not stop drawing. It’s been in operation for about 3 years, and it’s changed only slightly in that time. I haven’t actually drawn anything in about 6 weeks because I’ve been trying to let that poor guy die, in some respects. I think I have a habit of re-using the same sorts of ideas or narrative constructs over and over because there always seems to be more possibilties or ways of looking at them. I would be thrilled, though, if I woke up tomorrow and knew how to draw people in a different way.

Other than posters you also work in many other mediums, do you think about the medium before the project or the project before the medium? Do you say ‘Hey I want to do a fibers project next” or “Hey I want to tell this story, I think video would be best”?

A lot of my projects start out as ideas that I just really want to see realized. I like to work based on impulses. Sometimes I get an idea based on an object I wish already existed just because I want to see what it would be like. Other times I just get to thinking of situations, like wouldn’t it be a great thing to do yoga on a bear skin rug while drinking one of those tiny champagne bottles? So I made the rug and put on fancy shoes and videotaped myself in my living room, trying to assimilate yoga poses based on instructional YouTube videos. Then a bigger, weirder, installation came out of that. It usually starts with a sort of stupid idea, and then builds from there to a more complicated thing that I get pretty personally invested in. Sometimes it ends up self-contained, like a video, while other times, it gets a bit more out of hand. I’ll try to use whatever means and media necessary to explore what I’m thinking about, and when it feels satisfactory (or more likely, whenI run out of time or money or both) I stop.

Obama Bags

In both “What I Will Make Of This When You Are Not Here” a collection of photos, small paintings and fibers pieces recounting your summer and “Like My Father Before Me” a multimedia presentation, you use yourself and your family as an inspiration. Do you prefer for your work to be autobiographical?

In those two cases, it was kind of important family-based events that set off certain ideas. Last summer I got a bit too loose during my parents’ anniversary party (but I think everyone was pretty hammed). My dad was playing guitar and singing with his Chilean best friend of 40 years, Rodrigo, and I just sort of got up and started demanding that they perform “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band. And then all of a sudden I was singing it with them, and I’m really quite tone deaf and have kind of an annoying, childlike singing voice… actually I’m pretty sure I shouted most of the words. In any case, the next day my dad told me it was the greatest father-daughter moment we ever shared and then he gave me this complete biography of The Band. A couple weeks after that, when I was gone, a weird thing happened and he ended up in the hospital and I sort of got really worried about that whole ordeal, and I just felt like I really needed to do something or make something out of it. From there, it became about drawing connections I hadn’t considered before and re-enacting my father’s life before me to create a hypothetical source of some of the mythic qualities of my dad. And then when I went back to B.C. this summer, I was given all these supplies that used to belong to my grandmothers (crochet hooks, knitting needles, pattern books, embroidery thread… all kinds of good stuff that they can’t really use anymore, what with the old hands) and I couldn’t resist using them. I spent a fair amount of time at the cabin my grandparents bought decades ago at 70 Mile House where most of the pictures were taken (and incidentally near the site where this woman asserts she was abducted by aliens in the 80’s. I heard her give a talk before I saw the new X-Files movie and anyway, I went to the abduction site and it was kind of boring. I worried about aliens a lot as a kid… this is a huge digression, though). I think a lot of the stuff I made came out of a worry about people dying and sort of a desire to make that worry smaller by making things with their unintentional material help and with my own hands. I find intensive manual labour strangely comforting.
I guess it doesn’t matter to me if what I make is really autobiographical or not, I just want it to meet my needs at the time of production, and sometimes those needs are more intimately tied to autobiography. I find it hard to get away from myself with a lot of what I do… maybe that just means I’m narcissistic.

Fabric Guitars

Another reoccurring reference that I notice is designer items such as your embroidery of the Balenciaga shoe or your recreation of designer handbags. Where does the interest in these items come from?

I don’t know what it is but lately I’ve been really interested luxury goods. The Balenciaga shoe seemed significant to me because, well (and this is really weird, I know) it was kind of a celebrity for me. Like I spent a lot of time looking at pictures of that shoe on the internet and I never thought I would ever see it in real life. It’s sort of like the Mary-Kate Olsen of shoes for me. But then on my birthday not only did I see the shoe, but I TRIED IT ON. Incredible! And then I found out after wards that at that exact same moment, my grandmother was undergoing emergency hip replacement surgery. Maybe that indicates my inability to prioritize what’s actually important in my life, but to me it was a more of a striking coincidence. It became an object I wanted to commemorate and the concentrated process of embroidery seemed to suit it.
As far as the handbags go… well, something I’m interested in is re-enactment and dressing up and how materiality and identity seem to be so intricately linked. Lately that’s led me to think about counterfeits a lot. I find counterfeit handbags strangely alluring and sometimes funny, like they have a lot more to say than the genuine article. I like the idea of making something out of cheap materials that is supposed to stand in for something authentic, whether it’s a weird costume, or a stuffed guitar, or my homemade skills as a manicurist, or crappily hand-printed bags. I also just really needed to see what would happen if Barrack Obama’s face appeared sporadically in a Louis Vuitton print (it turns out it makes me feel pretty good about life).

Balenciaga Shoe embroidery

What are you working on now?

I have an upcoming performance/installation in the VAV where I’m going to live in the gallery over two weeks and build a clone of myself mostly out of papier mache (with the help of anyone who cares to stop by). When the clone is done, it will take my place and I will come in every day to take care of it and help it out a bit (wake it up, get it dressed, set up movies for it to watch, put it to bed at night). Although it should be noted that recently my friend Monique Mathieu and I had this video in the VAV and we put fake blood on the walls which incidentally CANNOT BE REMOVED. Like, seriously, it seeps through paint and stain-blocking sealant and cannot be removed by paint thinner or bleach. So if they still let me have a show there, it’s a real testament to their belief in human redemption, and it will be during the first weeks of January. And if anyone has any suggestions about how to get blood out of a wall, please let me know.

If you would like to hire Bridget to design you an amazing poster (or send her love letters, nothing creepy please) write to her at childhands@gmail.com.

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