Dusty Peas, blowing your mind from deep in Ontario
The drawing-printmaking-rabble-rousing duo Jamie Q and James Kirkpatrick have been jammin’ on collaborative works together for some time now, but not forever. From the bowels of London, Ontario, their minds seem to mesh in the most cohesive ways, explaining how they are able to present such a playful and consistent body of work as a duo so early on in their practice together.
They recently completed an artist residency and will be unfurling and folding the fruits of their labour at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore tonight at 7 p.m., right here in Montreal, 211 Rue Bernard…
It looks like pretty mind-blowing work. They’ve even silkscreened a spaceship folks can assemble themselves. I am a little too excited to get down to the Bookstore tonight and see their finished product in all its glory…
I sat down with them over space, time & the internet recently to ask some questions about their artistic process and to find out, for once and for all, what is the what. The answers are pretty friggin’ illuminating, so I hope you enjoy their notions and all as much as I have.
1. could you describe for all the folks out there who’s in your collective and what your deal is? ie if you have a mandate, if you even consider yourselves a collective…just some basics.
Dusty Peas is James Kirkpatrick and Jamie Q.. we think of ourselves as a collaborative art team more than a collective. But we also feel like we are part of a larger community of people doing creative stuff, one without a name or mandate. We don’t have a mandate as Dusty Peas either… we’d rather not be tied down to a formal set of rules. Maybe that is a sort of mandate… that whatever we make will be pretty unconstrained and open to possibility.
2. does “dusty peas” come from a specific idea or theme? where did you come up with it?
When we make stuff it always ends up being something that neither one of us would have made individually, so in a way we see Dusty as a third person who is creating this work. But also it is a nonsensical name that doesn’t mean anything.. words we would always say to each other as a silly thing that was totally removed from any original meaning.
3. when did the collaborative thing start and how?
We met through Peter Thompson last summer and started doing collab drawings in November to make zines for Expozine. We felt that it worked well and was fun so we kept doing it.
4. is this something you’re both familiar with, drawing ensemble, or is it a totally new way of doing illustrative work?
JK – Being involved in graffiti at an early stage of making art I got used to the idea of having things I created being painted over and marked on by others. Also seeing the work of Marc Bell and Peter Thompson at a younger age sort of showed me how two people could really melt their minds together to create one final piece of art. When I look back on it I realize I have been making collaborative art for years without even thinking of it as that.
JQ – I come from more of a sculpture background, so doing collaborative drawings is a pretty new thing for me. I did that guest artist project with you, Kit, at silence is not (always) a good medicine, and I’ve done drawings with other people where it’s more like a game in which everyone passes drawings around. But this is the first time I’ve been making drawings collaboratively as a regular part of what I do.
5. what are some of the main differences for you between drawing with someone and drawing alone?
When working with someone you have to be ok with letting things happen that you have no control over. You have to be able to work without having a preconceived idea of what the art is going to look like in the end because of that. In that sense it has more freedom to develop spontaneously, but on the other hand it also gives you the structure of the other person’s marks to work from, rather than facing a blank page with total individual freedom.
6. how has this pushed or challenged your individual practices, if it has at all?
We’ve been really focused on the Journey Through Time & Shapes project for quite awhile now, so seeing this new book and sculpture finally finished we’re really excited about how it turned out, and we’re both feeling like this collaborative work is better than our individual work at this point. But also our solo work is really important to us, so the collab stuff just motivates us to push our own work further.
7. do you think this could expand to go beyond drawing? if so, how?
Actually, we started doing sculpture together back in February, and have since also started doing stop-motion animation and all kinds of other stuff. The silkscreened prints in the Journey Through Time & Shapes book are all based on paper collages and paintings, and the project also includes a print that can be cut out and assembled into a sculpture.
8. is this very similar or very different than the stuff you do as solo-flyers?
The way of working is similar since both of us make stuff in all sorts of media. We’ve both done work with installation, found objects, sculpture, graffiti, painting, drawing, self-published zines, sound, film, animation… But the art itself looks pretty distinct from our solo work. People often can’t tell what we added to the work as individuals. That’s a good combination.. to have a similarly versatile way of working while doing something different than we would by ourselves.
Now go check it out for yourself. It’s going to be a very special show made by two very special people.
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I like the interview. Artisit interviews are always interesting. I hope to see more in the future.
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