Artist Statement

This text, “Artist Statement”, is excerpted from my thesis qualifying paper written in May of 2024. Beginning with a reference to a pedagogical document (Life Drawing Notes) written by my high school art teacher Tim desClouds, this text is written as a stream-of-consciousness monologue, and is an expanded version of the voiceover that accompanies the animation Finding another entrance, trying the same door.

“Artist Statement” consists of 3 sections, and considers drawing, perception, and loss.

I.

I’ve been looking around with a searching line [1]. This is to say I’ve been hesitant, unwilling to draw a conclusion or be too definitive. When you name something you dictate its whole being, and if you do this too quickly it’s like cold-water shock, a foreseeable consequence of jumping in on the count of three.

When you draw things you have to keep looking at them. This can be disorienting. If I look at things too long I lose focus – it’s sort of predictable, its own pattern of negation, like when you see black spots after looking at the sun. I can’t look at bright things too long without getting a migraine. When I get migraines, I have to stop. When I look away from things I often lose them. I find this very frustrating – I am always losing my glasses this way.

Every drawing is a series of problems that get resolved over the making of the work, but every finished drawing creates a problem that gets carried over to the next surface. Every analogy is a line between one thing and something else; this makes comparison a kind of drawing. Every drawing is sort of like magic, but real magic is very expensive, and drawing is often very cheap. Illusion is also pretty cheap if you know where to find the right ingredients. You can illustrate any theory of the world with dollar store materials.

There’s an apple pie recipe from the 1930s where you substitute the apples with ritz crackers, cream of tartar, and lemon zest. It makes a surprising approximation – the type of thing that could only ever be figured out in a pinch. I heard that my studio used to be a kitchen. I am always trying to be a better cook. This helps me make art about nature in a room without windows [2].

I am always flirting with and falling out with god, and I’m worried that everything I make is religious when I refuse to be. My reaching for belief in a vulnerable moment has always been like inviting a ghost to fill a vacancy, a papered-over hole in the wall. The original landlord special had been the installation of you in a body with the thinnest of barriers between the you and the not-you. My landlord is a real magician – I keep hearing my neighbours through this pretense of a wall.

When I react against the work of others it is usually because I am jealous of their sense of certainty and sense of their own place. I am often doubtful of where I’m supposed to be. In the absence of a sense of direction or a more established structure, I sometimes believe that everything is everything. If everything is everything then anything can be anything. The problem with this system is that it bends in every direction, alternating between the beautiful and the paranoid, making a string and pushpin network between photographs and maps, falsely reconciling opposites before the thing is actually revealed. Everything is everything is a theology, a conspiracy, its own kind of drawing.

Open questions are very uncomfortable. I would like the security of an enclosed logic. I would like for things to be the way that they are because that’s the way that things are meant to be. I want very badly to be rational; I behave like a scared animal all the time.

Impossibility is a static position, but difficulty moves. I have been thrashing under the pressure of many personal contradictions. I don’t want to do what I’m doing; I don’t know what to do instead. I want to be known; I behave evasively. I swore off doctors for political reasons, but I keep getting sick anyways. Whenever I’m between a rock and a hard place I put my ear to the wall and I keep my eye on the ground. For my senses to be useful they have to be compromised.

I think that in heaven they drop you off at Staples and let you scribble-test all the different pens all day. In heaven you are allowed to do this without ever having to write anything. I think this feeling might be better than sex. I don’t actually mean this, but I hope you still know what I mean.

ii.

Everything is like something else. This is something that I learned from the poet John Ashbery [3]. Everything can also briefly become something else. This is something that I learned from self-checkout. If done with discretion a surprising number of things can turn into bananas, but knowing this is not my best quality. Pushing past what you should do is one way of finding out what you can do. This is what I learned from stealing, but misbehaviour furnishes a tricky definition of what you are.

The best kind of theft is time theft. I say this because I think it’s hopeful – that slowing down or non-compliance with an instruction could create a kind of double time. I used to play a game at my old job that I would call ‘thesaurus game’. It was a kind of self-hypnosis for the idle. The game amounted to opening a word processor, typing in a word, and then using the in-software thesaurus to make lists of branching synonyms. I played this game like solitaire, like I was laying out different meanings in neat stacks and sequences, as if I was hoping that they would burst into some on-screen display once the right connections were made.

When I learned the spelling of words, I felt like the project of an expanded vocabulary was a way to learn the connection between things, to participate in a webbed intelligence of shared meanings. There’s this urban legend that you swallow 3 spiders in your sleep every year. You could construct a whole mythology of dreaming from this idea - that spiders could weave unconscious fabrics of words and images, and that by ingestion you’d receive an animal intelligence in dream landscape. I wonder why the story doesn’t just have the spiders crawl directly in your ear – it seems so much more obvious, more expansive, more beneficial to the spider, but I guess sounds are harder to pin down. I’ve always liked that radiotelephony uses an acrostic alphabet, and that radio transmissions are confirmed in Alpha Bravo Charlie.

My favourite kinds of words sound like what they are, like a kind of onomatopoeic lesson in form and content. The word ‘whisper’ is like this – the verb is locked onto its action. It would be weird to say it loudly. Speaking ‘whisper’ like a command would be a paradox. Whispering is one way of making a word dissolve into phonetics – like in the game of telephone when kids sit in a circle and pass a phrase around until it disintegrates and reassembles into a new phrase. I used to think that working in abstraction was like this – that you could take a reference, pass it around a circle, and have it come back to you as poetics, as if it were a process of form and following.

I’ve had these moments where I wonder if I’ve split away from myself, like when you hear yourself speak and you wonder who said the thing that just slipped out of you. I used to get this feeling when I closed my eyes that my body was shrinking and expanding, like I was experiencing a vertigo of scales. In an IMAX movie I saw as a kid the opening credits advised the audience to close our eyes if we started to feel nauseous. Closing your eyes was a way to return to yourself and remind yourself of your own perspective. I imagine myself in this theatre, disappearing into the movie for a while. Then I imagine myself with my eyes closed, expanding and shrinking between voice and vision.

iii.

I can see that I haven’t been explaining myself well. Let me start again.

Whenever I think I am doing research, I am only really responding to parental figures. I have acquired many of their habits without realising. I am telling you everything I know to be true, I will say. It will be true because I said so.

I read, as research. I read without attention, preoccupied with my own concerns. I read theory with a sense of self-congratulation, thinking, this theory will surely come in handy. I stuff quotations in my pockets to save for later, thinking up ways to wear the borrowed intelligence, to gracefully accept compliments on how I style it. Thank you, I will say, It’s French. I underline passages, recopy them by hand in private notebooks. I make booklists of things I’ve already read with the intention to read them again, thinking, I will learn it better this time. I will memorize it this time. I set holds at the library and when the book comes available, I forget what had ever been so interesting. I toss books in my bag with optimism, believing I’ll read them on the train. I spend the hours looking out the window instead.

I return home, as research. I stay at my mother’s house, sifting through 100 years of clutter. I find newspapers, old shoes, dresses that haven’t fit me in 10 years. I pick out furniture with resignation from the down-sized collections of everyone in our family. I walk old routes hoping to remember an older purpose. I walk through a clearcut lot with mountains of dirt that get piled and re-piled as the houses get built in increments. I walk past whole neighbourhoods, dodging streets but hearing the road everywhere. I take pictures of trails, noticing how I edit out the suburbs and the developments almost unconsciously, as if I were wanting to keep to green things, and branching things, subtracting everything else.

I draw, as research. I draw the view from the window in the living room of my mother’s house. I become impatient with my lack of skill, abandon the drawing, turn to the next page. I swap the subject of the window for a glass vase with a crystalline pattern, observing the refraction make a new thing. I dip in and out of attention, I drift. I stare at the page with other images in mind, pulled to distraction. I keep returning to the same kinds of images, as if I were trying to make them open up by doubling back, like finding another entrance by trying the same door. As I say this, I realise that this hoped-for transformation might also be the same experience as dying, of being engaged in some daily repetition until it finally expands. I imagine a cycle that would erode with its reiteration, like some small friction wearing down a turning wheel. I imagine my great-grandmother calling her own phone line when the house was on fire,[5] drawing a loop that would break itself, like pulling on a knot too hard and breaking the string at the join.

I experience migraines, I claim it as research. I show up to the studio on a Sunday and feel immediately knocked out. I lie on the floor, trying to retrieve the day by finding a way to work somehow, looking for audiobooks in a haze. I listen to the introduction of The Body in Pain (1985) in the dark. I pause the audiobook thinking, I am being ridiculous. I think of how in the movie Contact (1997) when Jodie Foster is in the pod of the transporter, the translucence of the bottom of her pod looks like a migraine aura, like a gasoline spill on a field of vision, and how her singular witnessing of her travels is only corroborated by radio static. On her return home she is taken to be untrustworthy, unbelievable. If “to have pain is to have certainty, to hear about pain is to have doubt “[4], then maybe the same is true of experience, and of vision, how something real could greet you with such intensity that it would swallow you in its dimension, make you incoherent, subtract you from your credibility, leave you with observations of the world that could have no audience. In moments of pain or loss or even discovery I lose the ability to speak, become overwhelmed, blurred, confused. I find my way back in the waiting. I continue to wait, as research.

The best thing I have hoped to be is a witness, but everything I keep is an abbreviation. My mother has often told me about a scar I have on my bottom lip, which she says that I acquired as a toddler. She will also mention the fact that only she can notice it, which is true. I can never find what she’s referring to- it seems to exist outside of my own knowledge of my own body. I have generally taken my mother’s recognition to mean that the early part of my life exists entirely in what my parents remember of it, like before I developed the capacity to remember, my existence was distributed between my smaller self and whoever was watching me. I imagine this observation to be reciprocal. I had this feeling when my father died that I was tasked with remembering as much as I could, like something inarticulable but necessary could be found and kept if I paid enough attention. This was a response to loss, of course, like developing a fear of forgetting, but in some ways, it was the same sensation as reading a book that was too dense for you in the moment, like skating on the surface of the grammar without being able to take in the meaning.

I’ve been trying to write a theory of form and finding. Finding what is sort of the problem, let alone finding the why. I press on this problem until it becomes a bruise. The bruise is its own security, the proof of having tried, but as I go on I lose track of my intention, become caught up in the impulse. I find my way back in the looking, but even then I’m turned back at the entrance. I looked at someone’s ear once and got startled because I couldn’t tell where the hole ended. I also couldn’t figure out the way in.

Notes

1. Tim desClouds, “Life Drawing Notes”, instruction 8.

2. This text was written in my windowless graduate studio at the University of Toronto.

3. John Ashbery, "No Longer Very Clear," poem in Something Close to Music (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2022), pg 85.

4. Marie-Therese McGuinness, Across More M T Spaces on an Even Faster Fate Trainnnnnnnn (Toronto: Back of the Bike Publishing), 1991, pg 3.

5. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York; Oxford University Press, 1985), pg 13.