Underwater with John Ancheta, or notes on an opening (TONIGHT!)

I’ve known John Ancheta for far too long. I’ve seen his hair grow, and then get cut, and then grow again. Like one of those Barbie head-dolls that everyone wanted as a kid. But that Barbie toy never grew up to become one of the most interesting and challenging contemporary painters in the Canadian/International art scene. John, on the other hand, did.

He’s been one of my absolute favourite painters, nay artists, for years. His dedication to his craft, understanding of place within a vast historical context, and unwillingness to settle for a certain set or style of aesthetics never ceases to astound me. The fact that I always, always want to take my clothes off and get it on with his canvases is just a bonus.

Tonight, from 6-8pm, he’ll unveil his new, distinctively different body of work, Aquacades, completed this past year at Battat Contemporary (7245 Rue Alexandra, Suite #101) It runs until April the 10th.

It’s a compelling, less accessible body of work than some of his previous stuff, and extremely rewarding - if you spend the time with it that it asks of you. Imagine someone you meet at a party who you’re not necessarily lusty after within the first 10 seconds, but who slowly grows on you until you can’t imagine your intimate landscape without their presence.

And landscape is a good word to use when talking about John’s work, as he infuses his pieces with a type of organic sensibility that defies or perhaps works in dissonant harmony with his meticulous execution and process. We’ve been talking about that process and the elements that inform it for some time now, so I present here one of our many conversations, this one concerning specifically the 2 shows he has up now.

If you’re blessed enough to find yourself in Montreal tonight, then go and see what I’m talking about. Well worth the movement towards, guaranteed.

You have 2 shows up in Montreal currently – one at the GAO and one at Battat. What’s it like to simultaneously present work in the same city?

The two shows are difficult to compare, really. The exhibition at the GAO is a retrospect of an older body of work while the pieces at the Battat Contemporary are from a completely new series.

My art practice has changed considerably over the past year. Installing the show at the GAO was really interesting. Seeing the old work again gave me a new perspective on that time. But ultimately, my thoughts are on my new direction.

I know that this body of work is quite a departure from your last series. Could you talk a bit about this transition and your new direction?

I see it as a departure, in several ways. What strikes me now about my older work is the focus I had at that time on a dynamic and painterly poetic. I think I was really concerned with proving to myself that I could really paint. The GAO show speaks to my roots as a painter - my education here in Montreal, my love for the painterly tradition…

However, that direction started to unravel towards the end of 2008. I think you can see it in a particular painting at GAO titled Camouflage. I included it in the exhibition purposefully as to me it signaled an end. I had worked that painting over and over trying to take it somewhere. To make it work, I had to retreat back to what I knew, what I had developed. It couldn’t go any further.

I quite like that painting, though it raised more than a few eyebrows at the show. It’s the most difficult piece in the exhibition. What came afterwards was a fairly clean break. I went to London, and came back knowing more or less what I wanted to do. I messed around for a few months and then put down my large bristle brushes, let go of thick painterly surfaces and started over again. I wanted to see what would happen if I took away all my tricks, what was left.

One of the things that struck me in your show at GAO was imagery (however abstracted) and I’d love you to talk about the process of how you go about defining or creating your visual landscape.

My painting process at that time was really intuitive and spontaneous. I was working very fast, finishing the paintings before they dried in order to build fluid image. Primarily I worked from found photographs, mainly of farmers working in fields, anything that put me back into the space of my early years growing up in rural Canada.

Once the motif was loosely developed I would abandon the photo and let the painting unfold. The narratives that emerged are largely based on formative experiences. As an American growing up in what I guess you could call a ‘subversive’ ex-pat community, I was isolated from the surrounding rural inhabitants. My relationship to the land was different as it was filtered through the eyes of my specific community that had this utopic dream of going back-to-the-land. The work speaks to my alien surroundings, to the sense of being in-between something indefinable. They’re cold war paintings as seen through the eyes of a child. The work is descriptive as much as it is dreamed and imagined.

Your latest series seems to have less definite imagery involved. Was the visual research process different?

In a sense, for me, the psychic space of my new work has not changed all that much. What has changed, (quite dramatically I suppose), is how I approach that space. In the older work I was after a sort of heightened yet suspended drama. My new work over the past year has been a process of emptying out all that felt comfortable, as I have said - my hand writing, my typical narratives and figures.

Formally speaking, what remains has become in some ways more clearly articulated through the use of stencils and flat color. At the same time, what can be sensed is admittedly more obscure. The new work is more a relationship between cartography and landscape.

Colour is such an integral part of your work. How does your relationship to colour function?

The sensation of colour is critical to my artistic practice. It’s similar to the sense of smell or taste. It’s immediate, visceral. I dwell less on an inherent attraction to certain colours and more on the relationship between colors.

Who are some of the artists you’re most moved by? Do you think their influences can be seen in your work at all?

Mmm. I always find that a really difficult question to answer. I recently saw a performance by Moheb Soliman that completely blew me away: http://www.habibalbi.blogspot.com/.

I would say music has the strongest and certainly the longest affect on me. Being moved always seems to be about a passing moment, so its difficult to talk about. I am not sure one could sense the painters I love in my newer work. Maybe Goya.

Recently I have been looking at the work of Julie Mehretu - it’s brilliant, what can I say? Who else? Jules De Balincourt. Cai Guo Chiang - I was able to see Head On being installed at the Guggenheim. I missed the show but got to watch the install, wolves being taken out of crates and shaped into flight up the winding staircase, it was unbelievable. I actually hung the show at Battat today and I could clearly see Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. I have no idea what comes across at this point, I guess I’ll see it more in hindsight.

What are some of the joys of painting for you? What are some of the parts that you painfully push through?

The isolation is sometimes difficult. My current process right now entails a lot of uncertainty until the very last stage, which I love. The feeling of peeling stencils to see what comes together is always amazing. I think that painting is a lot like any practice: you have to keep on going and not ask yourself the tough questions when you are feeling low. Enjoy it when it’s working, reflect upon it when reflection comes, and never forget to listen. I recently had an accident in the studio that destroyed a painting scheduled to be shipped to an upcoming show. Things like that are painful for sure.

All in all I love making images, it gives so much back to me.

There seems to be a highly evolved sensuality in your work. Is this something that you hope people pick up on?

Sensuality….mmm…..

I guess I often feel that the studio is the only place that I can really be decadent in my exaggerations, where I can embellish. I can relish in what I love and I hope to share that with a lot of people.

I find that the process of creation itself is so different to a finished work. A little death occurs when a work is done…

I think I used to agonize over the impact of each painting. Now I tend to focus more on a body of work, which makes each ‘death’ a little easier. Each piece becomes more of a single gesture towards a larger articulation. In this way, the peaks and valleys get smaller and easier to traverse. It’s a longer process, but challenging in an exciting way.

What you got coming up after these shows?

I have a show in Milan at the end of March. I just finished my website, and I am going to Madrid to see the Goya collection at the Prado. Things are good.

Filed under art shows, artists, interviews, local, painting | Tags: Battat Gallery, john ancheta, painting | Comment (0)

101 reasons to stay online…

For Art POP 2009, Michelle Lacombe and Sheena Hoszko, two dynamic Montréalers with a plethora of interesting relationships with the visual arts (as coordinators, outreach workers, educators, conceptual artists in their own rights and much more) came together to do a visually incredible, conceptually witty, poignant and wise piece for the first time as a collaborative pair.

Entitled 101 Song Scores, this interview with them about their project and process speaks enough for itself that my introduction can hererby be sent straight to the guillotines like so many other overly flowerly representations that the Jacques Louis Davids’ of the past have spout forth.

But! Just to highlight that as part of this years’ Atelier Portes Ouvertes, this fascinating duo will be giving an artist talk at Agence Topo at 2 p.m. this Sunday the 18th. More info to follow.

1. Could you explain a little about this project?

Sheena: 101 Song Scores is a project that stems from the 2009 Art Pop call for submissions, which really got us thinking about our art practices in relation to music. We decided to base our proposal on lyrics, and pull scores/text-based performance directions from songs.

The results of this ended up taking two specific forms: The first was a series of images or “ads” that list the score, song title, year, and length of the song (we did not include the band name to avoid any immediate associations with genres).

Pop Montréal graciously gave us access to the festival design files, so the scores themselves look like Pop content, despite the vague/oblique text. These scores were placed within the Art Pop and Pop Montreal websites/publications, in spaces usually reserved for advertising. We then began working with Agence TOPO, a Montreal-based new media artist-run-centre, and together created an amazing online database of all the 101 Song Scores content from our scrappy (but effective) google docs spreadsheet.

2. How did it come to light?

Michelle: Having followed each others’ practices since university, we had an interest in working together but lacked a context. Art Pop, an initiative we both wanted to submit work to, provided that context. Over yucca fries and beer we brainstormed areas in which music and art overlapped. We wanted to work within the content of the festival but in an indirect or conceptual fashion. Performance scores, text-based instructions developed through experimental music compositions but quickly adopted by visual artists, were selected as the starting point of our project.

Engaging with song lyrics as instructions seemed like a simple proposal to work with, but one that could shift away from the music towards larger issues such as the subjective interpretation of meaning, collective memory, and the role of music in social action/identity. There was also a playful “can-you-guess-that-song” element to the work that we felt would suit the diverse public of the festival.

3. Have you worked collaboratively before? What has the process been like?

Sheena: We’ve worked together on art-related coordination before, but this is our first time collaborating on a work. It went really well, especially for a process-based project that required many fast and on-the-fly decisions - always the ultimate test! I think it solidified the fact that certain elements of our practices - mainly the conceptual framing of our individual performance and intervention work, which often deals with the body, language, and emotion - overlap in ways that make collaboration quite seamless.

4. What are some of the thematics you are touching on the most with 101 song scores?

Michelle: The project is primarily about the subjective way in which we engage with “popular” western music. It is only through experience that we develop a relationship both individually and collectively with music, its lyrics and its meaning. Think of the way music often creates a brief intimate moment of connection to something also simultaneously being proposed to countless other anonymous listeners. The project however also became about how those experiences are mediated by language, action and time.

5. What do you think poses challenges for participants? I mean specifically around issues of engagement. If you could discuss this decision to make the website durational and what it represents for you that would be great.

Sheena: As we don’t have tons of experience in web-based work, we agreed keeping the site simple would be key. One thing we kept going back to was ensuring the site would highlight the, “I want all the info, and I want it all now” culture of the web. Thus the database was setup in a way that would provide access to only one score at a time, and each score would stay visible for the entire duration of the song. At the beginning the song title, artist, album, and year appears, and that info fades out about 10 seconds later. Besides that moment of contextual framing, there is no way to find more info, skip ahead, refresh, or see the database content as a whole.

Thus it sets up a decision making process for the viewer: to choose if they are going to engage, wait for the next score, or move to another site altogether. Some people have let us know that they access the work by keeping 101 Song Scores open in another tab and continuously checking back.

This is an unexpected but really interesting way of negotiating the idea of duration, as the project then exists in relation to all the other content being viewed at that moment. So the project asks if the audience will to give over their time in a way that is generally avoided online, and accept a certain lack of interactivity. I find this poignant if in relation to the minutes and hours spent tirelessly checking email, viewing status updates, searching for torrents online, etc.

6. Is this your first web-based project? What considerations did you have when constructing concepts and aesthetics within this site specific space and time?

Michelle: Yes this is the first web-based project for both of us. Sheena however, has integrated social media sites (myspace, email, etc) into previous projects.

The durational quality of the internet was something we wanted the web page to consider as it was the only space of the numerous sites 101 Song Scores occupied offering the possibility to play with time. Up until that point, the duration of the scores was proposed but never imposed. Because of the possibility of linking action to duration in a direct way, it was decided that the web page would host our database in its entirety (over 170 scores).

To keep with the conceptual concerns of the work, we wanted the database to be accessed only one action at a time, requiring that the visitor wait the time it takes to experience the proposed action before seeing the next one. To highlight this, the design was chosen to make the time-lapse or duration of each score a prominent element of the site. It was also a sort of shout out to the culture of webtime such as “death clocks”.

It was a logistical challenge to create a web space that required waiting, (ie. no refresh possibilities, no scrolling forward, no opening numerous pages to access more scores) as it goes against what the internet strives to be (interactive, immediate, controlled, etc.) We worked with Vincent Archambault who found a way to program a database of actions that are continually counting down, whether there is a public present or not.

Similar to how one might experience a video installation, the viewer comes in at a specific time but has no control (aside from waiting) as to what content they are accessing.  If someone else comes in, they see the same thing and are also faced with the choice to wait and see the content or leave. Although this element of the project can be overlooked, it is to us the most successful and exciting part of the work.

7. What are the plans for the website once Pop Montréal is over?

Michelle: The project will be presented as part of Agence Topo’s open studio on Sunday, October 18th at 2 p.m. There we will be giving an artist talk and discussing 101 Song Scores. Vincent, the programmer, will also be present to answer the more technical questions.

Although the web page will remain online forever, a very generous act on the part of Agence Topo, we have yet to decided if we will continue to promote it or further develop the databases’ content. We are giving ourselves the time to get some distance and get back to our respective practices before making any final decisions.

8. What next?

Sheena: I would suggest to anyone reading this to try out creating some song scores of their own, be it by listening to their music collection, via youtube, via the radio. The whole process has really changed how I engage with lyrics, and has setup an ongoing space where I reflect on what actions I focus on, and why.

Filed under artists, interviews, local, websites | Tags: 101 song scores, art pop, atelier portes ouvertes, Michelle Lacombe & Sheena Hoszko | Comment (0)

En Masse @ Art POP

One of the co-presentations of Art POP this year is a collaboration with En Masse, a pretty amazing troupe of over 40 artists that get together from time to time to do inspiring and fairly mind-blowing murals, collaboratively. For the entire month of October, they are going to be at the Red Bird Studio gallery for their latest project which combines 6 of their artists with a whole whackload of awesome artistic teenagers from various schools in the English Montreal School Board network. Together, they will create a mural the likes of which you’ve never seen, guaranteed.

The vernissage is this coming Sunday (the 4th) at 5pm, going until 9pm or even later, pretty crazy for a Sunday me thinks!! The gallery is at 135 rue Van Horne, and it’s going to be awesome. If you don’t get a chance to make it out, then swing by the studio every day from 12-6pm on weekdays to see what the gaggle of creative folks are doing there and watch their project develop.

One of the masterminds of the whole scenario and one of the Frozen Mammoth’s favourite people-of-this-fine-city, Jason Botkin, recently let us in on some of the deep dark secrets of his group. We can’t wait to see how this whole thing develops, and we’ll let you in on it all as it goes along….

1. Where did En Masse emerge? What was the impetus? If you could give a bit of background info on its initial coming together, that would be great.

En Masse was conceived one glorious evening in December of 2008, the ‘love-child’ of Tim Barnard and myself.

At the time, I was exhibiting a solo show at Galerie Pangee. As luck would have it, the gallery had an opening in their post-Christmas schedule, a little window that Tim and I eagerly imposed upon. Originally, our design was to ‘curate’ an enormous group show, packed mad salon style with everyone we knew and wanted to know. Seconds later, the idea was dashed upon the rocks, as we landed upon the En Masse concept, or specifically, the idea of gathering together those same cats to do a gigantic collaborative drawing of some sort. For both Tim and I, collaborative drawing/art making parties have been an important part of our practice, so the idea stuck!

En Masse was thus born in February of this year (2009), at the Galerie Pangee, with 28 artists engaged in 28 days of ecstatic mark making. We timed the ‘finissage’ to coincide with Montreal’s all-night Nuit Blanche festivities, thus inviting all to join us in celebration of one of the very biggest, most incredible drawing experiments most of us had ever seen in our tender young lives!

(Jason and Mural at Oshega Festival, Photo courtesy of Fred Caron’s awesome hands)

2. Has it changed much since you guys first began doing it? If so, how?

Tim, hot n’ heavy off on other projects, has been replaced by Rupert Bottenberg. Rupert brings an amazing skill set to the table, having established the Montreal Comix Jams, while juggling duties as the music editor at the Montreal Mirror newsweekly.

While the approach to the drawing itself is always the same at core—black and white, big, and involving as many artists as logistically possible (the more the merrier), our biggest step forward has been the creation of an ‘educational’ element to our project, through the introduction of a mentorship project involving local high school kids.

3. What is the creative process like in terms of choosing people to be involved? I know there are 28 members now, so are you guys officially a “team” or is the roster more fluid than that?

At this point, we’ve worked with nearly 40 artists on various projects, so in that sense, “Team EM” is better looked upon as a flexible and ever-changing ‘collective’ of emerging artists, whose work has been categorically defined as ‘underground’ and/or ‘lowbrow” art.

Refreshing and expanding the ranks is a key factor in breathing new and constant life into the project. Choosing the artists…that’s a tough question…SO MUCH amazing talent out there, so little time!

4. Many of the artists in En Masse work in somewhat alternative mediums (street art, grafitti). Was this a conscious decision, or organic? What does this type of background bring to the project?

This was a very conscious decision on our part. We wanted to include a wide range of artistic practices/pedigrees, especially exploring these cats whose voice has been largely excluded from the mainstream galleries and museums, institutions that seem to be somewhat unsure of the relationship between the fine and lowbrow arts.

We want a real grab-bag of styles, all flowing into one enormous web of ideas, thoughts, jokes, and general fun, one in which we can all freely participate in the chance to expand our potential as creators, while developing collective social and professional networks with each other.

5. How has doing this kind of massive collaborative work affected your own personal practice, if at all?

Collaborating with these incredible artists leaves me very inspired, and challenged to free up my own approach towards art making. Ego melts away during these events. So, my time in the studio, or at the sketchbook (when it comes), is now much more spontaneous, improvisational, playful. I like this.

6. Can you tell me a bit about why you guys have decided to do an educational thing? Is there a decisive angle to creating En Masse in a plethora of arenas, or does it happen more naturally than that?

The educational thing came as the natural ‘next’ step. I would have killed for a project like this as a kid, so now, with two wee ones of my own, and in working with Rupert who has produced many educationally directed events in the past, the mentoring program for kids came about very organically through personal interest.

This is a way for us to contribute socially, in a direction we feel good about. Artistic kids rarely get the chance to explore and express themselves within the school systems, as they exist, so if we can lend this hand to the schools, their teachers, and the teens, everybody gets happy. And perhaps the doors to heaven open a little wider.

7. What are some of the thrills and challenges with working with such a big group?

Cover your ears kids; this could get a little gory! I’ll spare the details, but suffice to say, it’s a bit of an administrative roller coaster at times…

With practice, the organizational drama gets a little more predictable, and easier to manage when it rears its ugly head. A steady diet of emails, ear often glued to phone, and a whole lotta labour of love keeps me going. Fortunately, I get more sleep in the weeks leading up to an event these days.

8. What most excites you about the project En Masse will be doing with ESBM, Redbird & art POP?

So many things excite me about this project! This particular avenue of the En Masse project has huge potential! I can’t wait to see what kind of work comes out of this thing, as we get this chance to collaborate directly with artists who are young in years and practice, but demonstrating real passion and huge talent in the crafting of their voice. What a mutual privilege and pleasure for us all!

For the kids, this is a great chance to gain practical tips about how to work in the mediums they are interested in, improve upon their own sense of self-worth as artists, and potentially form long-lasting creative partnerships they wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise.

9. What can you see in store for En Masse? If this goes really well, would you guys be into doing more educational/mentoring stuff?

Without question! We’re very excited with the educational stuff, and have received enormously positive response from everyone who has come into contact with the project. This event could be considered to be the pilot for many great things to come, especially as we gear into provincial, national, and international En Masse expansion in the coming year!

Filed under artists, festival, interviews, local, profiles | Tags: art pop, En Masse, jason botkin | Comment (0)

From across the sea…

Kim Kielhofner, video artist, drawer (ugh, what a horrifying word) and sketchbook virtuoso is an American living in Canada going to school at Central St Martins in London. She’s been there just a few weeks and is already grappling with what it’s like to have several shows happening at the same time in other places: the first, her ongoing show, In the Hall of Wonders, runs until October 16th at Centre Communautaire Elgar on Nun’s Island. It’s a show of drawings well worth the bike ride or ferry ride (apparently!) out there. As well, as part of the Art POP 2009 line-up, Kielhofner will be presenting a video installation at the Notman House registration venue.

I recently had the good fortune of discussing with her questions mainly concerning In the Hall of Wonders (although the drawings here are not the ones in that fantastic show) as well as other bits and ticks behind her practice.

1. What’s up with the title, In the Hall of Wonders? How do you create the links between your visual world and your written language of expression for it?

The titles are not so important to me in this case because for me the imagery in these pieces is very strong. Sometimes I use text in my work, but it’s much more integrated into the process of the work. Sometimes I will think about a certain phrase from literature or film and work with those ideas. In the case of this show, when I was creating these pieces I wasn’t using any text as a reference. The titles came after, almost as an afterthought.

2. You’re an artist that works primarily in 2 mediums. Could you give a bit of background about each medium and also how your relationships to them are similar, different, etc?

My work manifests itself most often in drawing and video. It all comes from the same process of collecting and working with a visual language. You know how I keep books of things I find, flyers, photos, sketches, even junk from the street. I think I arrange things visually so there is the hint of a narrative, but it’s not completely obvious what it is or I leave enough space for people to bring there own experience to the table. I draw figures but I don’t use any perspective so they all lie flat on a plane, kind of like a dreamscape. One action is not more obviously before another. The dreamscape along with my style of drawing gives a nice reference to a memory from the past.

Similarly with video I have begun to narrate my work but I don’t use a written text so I’m working from memory which creates these nice gaps in the speaking where one gets the sense that there’s something not being said. In my application proposal to Central Saint Martins I discussed these ideas and wanting to work in video installation, in actual space to create an experience.

There’s always an issue of presentation and I think video and drawing are the forms which are easiest to present my work. You know it’s like the question, “Where does the work lie? Is it in the process? Is it in the experience of it?” I’m interested in pushing these kind of questions.

3. Where did this work for In the Hall of Wonders come from?

These drawings are from the same project. It was over the last few years that I did these. They are all on mylar and all contain the same type of imagery which becomes kind of a mythology. These drawings are much more focused than other drawings which were simple, like a single figure. These drawings bring a lot together. When I was making them I was looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and a lot of pictures of old churchs, but also diverse things like Ian Curtis, Dolly Parton, and Kim Novak. And I also made a video using footage of Kim Novak from the TV show “What’s My Line?” I guess that’s a straight forward example of how my video and drawings fit together! But yes, this was a focused project that took a few years. I’ve done drawing series before but this is the most dedicated.

5. What are you hoping to focus on at Central St Martins?

I’m interested in interior space and memory. I’m thinking of a video following simple actions in house like drinking a coffee, or turning on a TV. Kind of creating a map of the house, but there’s obviously something missing, or something is lost… something you can’t quite put your finger on…I want to create something intimate, something vulnerable about the house. I want to bring this to the gallery into it’s own kind of “house”, to create and experience in the gallery where this space become palpable. Where you can feel it.

Filed under artists, illustration, interviews, local, video | Tags: Kim Kielhofner | Comment (1)

Weavings by Katie Jung and Elif Saydam

These self-portrait weavings that were completed last year as a collaboration between Katie Jung and Elif Saydam, two Montreal based artists, are now the cover of the latest Worn Fashion Journal. The two artists laboured away many hours on a Jacquard loom to create these amazing (and huge) pieces. You can read an interview with them about the process in the new issue and you can see more of their work here.

Filed under artists, installation, interviews, local, profiles | Tags: Elif Saydam, katie jung, publications, weavings, worn fashion journal | Comments (2)

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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