| THE OPENING is all about delving into the fascinating, quirky and wonderful visual arts in Vancouver. Each week we’ll feature an artist, cover an exhibition, discuss a lecture and everything else in-between to delve deep into who and what makes art happen! |
Painter, collage artist, curator, bookmaker and young artist extraordinaire, recent Emily Carr graduate Jessie McNeil’s practice revolves around books and paper media. Co-coordinator of artist run festivals like the annual Yellow Crane Festival on Granville Island and CanZine West (in town this weekend), Jessie’s practice bridges the gap between art-making and curation. Her most recent solo show Reading People at Project Space on East Georgia (October 16th - 26th) featured several collaged portraits of people browsing through publications at art book fairs, bookstores and publication spaces.
We met up at Lost and Found on Hastings to talk books, art and Vancouver.
EA: Where does the influence of books and printed matter in your practice originate?
JM: Printed matter has always been a part of my life. I’ve always done collage. I recently discovered a box of art from when I was a kid, and realized that I did a lot of it when I was young. Book media is more of a recent thing; I took a course called The Democratic Multiple with Aimée Brown at Emily Carr and she introduced me to the form. Which media I’ll use depends on the subject matter; if a certain topic doesn’t make sense in a collage or painting, it might make sense in a book.
EA: How many multiples of a book do you make?
JM: It depends. I made a zine called Vancouver Treasure Map, and it’s kind of an unlimited edition; I make them whenever I need them. When I make an artist book, perhaps something that costs more money to produce, it’s usually an edition of five to twenty.
Jessie McNeil, PS Show, 2013
EA: Do you think there are enough accessible outlets in Vancouver for young artists to sell their books?
JM: Yes and no. At the beginning I thought there was nothing (apart from READ Books), but while interning at Project Space I was introduced to fairs, festivals, and publication or project spaces not only in Vancouver, but also in Seattle, Portland and other cities along the coast. Also, the internet is our friend, it’s not smart for us [printed matter folk] to battle against the medium. It’s another great way to distribute work. But I hope more permanent shops are able to sustain themselves in Vancouver, in the future.
Jessie McNei, Or, 2013
EA: Is all of the material in your collages found?
JM: Mostly. Magazines are my main thing, and stuff I find on the street. I find that after it rains and the sun comes out, a lot of the paper on the street dries really fast and sort of picks up texture from below. It’s really fun to work with. For my collage portraits I look for colours and photographed textures to represent the body. I think it’s interesting and rather funny, when using pieces of a photograph of say, a pie crust to represent a bald spot or a close-up of a lady’s eyebrow for a beard. In the show at Project Space, all the printed material making up the forms of people reading was from Project Space & OCW Arts & Publishing Foundation publications. It was a way to connect the past with the present. This is usually something I think about when I collage. I feel like I’m archiving for the future, yet rewriting and questioning the past in some way. So, for Reading People, whether it was posters or actual zines, Project Space allowed me to cut them up and use them. I felt really conflicted doing that actually, like, “I can’t cut someones book!”
EA: I feel the same way. My books are holy, I have them colour coordinated. What’s your favourite book?
JM: Probably the one that really inspires me the most these days: Hannah Höch’s Bilderbuch. It’s a picture book and is just so beautiful. It was pretty expensive, but I bought it anyway. I’d studied her in the past and I think she’s amazing. It was sort of catered to kids but also to adults like me. There’s poetry translated from German to English and collage work side by side. Each poem has to do with a little creature that she’s created in the picture. It’s really lovely and one that I look back to every now and again. I’ve been reading a lot of theory lately, so it’s nice to sit and just look once in a while, you know?
EA: Tell me about the Yellow Crane Festival.
JM: I participated in YCF as an artist in 2012, the year that Angela Smailes started the festival. It was an opportunity for Emily Carr students to exhibit their work and make art in a public setting on Granville Island. This past summer, I was the co-coordinator along with Illustrator Joni Cooper and did everything from fundraising, to social media, to coordinating participants. And I got to act as more of a curator, which is kind of a direction I want to take with my practice. I arranged each section of the festival; if I thought that two artists might work well together or maybe they’d want to collaborate in the future, I put them together. In the future I’ll probably just be involved in YCF’s fundraising though. It was a lot of work but it opened a lot of doors for me and for the artists as well.
EA: How so?
JM: Just by the public coming through. You never know who’s going to come to these kind of things: people willing to fund commissions, curators, or other people organizing other festivals. It was interesting to see how some participants took it as an opportunity to sell their work and some as a place to just exhibit and make their stuff. I’d like to make the Yellow Crane Festival more of an interactive, performance-based festival as opposed to just selling work. But we’ll see who wants to do what.
EA: How does curating come in to your practice? What does it mean to you?
JM: I still haven’t figured out how my visual practice coincides with curation, and I think I’m still trying to figure out what being a curator means. I always think back to this really weird part of my childhood: my mom was a registrar at the Vancouver Art Gallery and always brought home fun office supplies that they didn’t need anymore. There were always “Do Not Touch” signs around. Anyone who knew me when I was a kid remembered my room because everything had its place: little displays of dolls or Playmobil or whatever. I had these signs up and my friends would be like “Can't we play with this?” and I’d be like, “No, it’s on display.” I think I always had the the desire to create exhibitions. I’m interested in arranging things that make sense together or that maybe pose interesting questions for the viewer. I put together a show in January in the Concourse Gallery at Emily Carr called Libro: The Liberation of the Book. That was a really interesting challenge - in many ways. There were 30 students, alumni and teachers involved. Everyone’s work (whether zines or artist editions) dealt with different things, but I was really interested in how one experienced a book in a gallery setting. Most of the time books are shown locked on a plinth or in a vitrine where you can't access or touch it. I wanted to change that. Obviously I didn't want anyone's work to get stolen, but I wanted us to trust people. Sure enough, nothing got taken.
EA: There was a couch right?
JM: Yep, there was a little seating area that we put in the gallery next to Randy Lee Culter’s, Cathy Busby’s and Garry Neill Kennedy’s work. A student named Adria Leduc also made a little nest installation under the stairs. I think that’s really cool. I feel like there should be less of a window separating you from art - especially book art.
Jessie at Libro: The Liberation of the Book
EA: Does most of your curatorial interest lie in the realm of books?
JM: Currently yeah, within the last year for sure. I don’t know what will happen. It’s something that I’m interested in now and makes sense as a medium for topics I’d like to examine.
EA: What are you doing for CanZine West?
JM: It’s Vancouver's largest annual zine and indie culture festival and a lot of preliminary work goes into it. I’m a co-coordinator, so I’m helping out with coordinating volunteers, vendors, setting up, securing sponsors and organizing programming. That was a new thing: saying “I want so and so to speak at this event,” and making it happen was really exciting. It makes up for the +25 emails I reply to per day.
EA: You’re so busy! It’s inspiring to see a young artist taking so much initiative to make things happen in the arts community. I also heard that you’re doing a residency in Estonia next year.
JM: I had three month period this year where I was like, “I want to do a residency, I’m going to apply for everything I want!” And I did. I was on the computer way too much. The residency takes place in May and June in the town of Tartu, which is known as the “City of Good Thoughts”. It’s a university city, and the intellectual capital of the country. The printing museum is having me come and make work. They’re really open to what I want to do. They also have close connections with the paper museum, so a lot of people who do residencies there can experiment with paper and incorporate that into their project. It’s really exciting, not only for the chance to travel and make art but to pay homage to my maternal grandfather Arved Viirlaid in a small way. He is a writer and poet who fled the country during Soviet occupation and worked as a typesetter in Canada to support his family.
EA: You were born and raised here in Vancouver and it seems like you really identify with the city. Do you think you’ll ever move away permanently?
JM: Good question. I was watching a movie last night that was set in Strasbourg, France. It looked amazing. (sighs). There are so many places that I’d love to live in for a few years, but I think I’ll always come back to Vancouver. There’s something about the ocean being right there... I get super claustrophobic if I’m surrounded by land. I also can’t stand the idea of being car-dependant.
Jessie McNeil, Vancouver Treasure Map, Issue no.1, 2012
EA: What do you hope for for the Vancouver arts community in the future?
JM: I just hope people don’t get bored. Vancouver is changing so quickly. It’s all becoming super shiny. Boredom... I’m worried about that. And the usual, lack of affordable housing and studio or gallery space. People can be so connected now, but Canada is still so large and we’re so far from the Montreal and Toronto cultural hub. I’m afraid all my creative friends will make the move there and stay.
EA: Favourite place in the city?
JM: My house.
View Jessie's work and follow her blog at: www.jessiemcneil.ca
