VANESSA HOLYOAK

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in March 2023.

GM: You identify as an artist, writer, and curator – what was your path to this multidisciplinary career?

VH: I’ve always had a creative writing practice, mostly in experimental fiction. In college, I got exposed to my first studio [art] classes, and pairing my photography with my writing was my first foray into having a visual practice. That was the “gateway drug” to realizing that I could think of my practice in visual terms, and that my writing didn’t have to be limited to the formal structures established by literary traditions. I became really interested in the ways that language can be used within the space of the visual. I feel like those early investigations into intermediality between text and image were really what pushed me to pursue an ongoing creative practice. After college, I went to CalArts and got a dual MFA in Creative Writing and Photography & Media. I had these two paths, which at times would intersect but also became their own separate practices. […] I started working more with my partner, Antoine Chesnais, who is French and trained as a photographer. We became really invested in opening up the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional space, and creating these embodied installations that function almost as dream spaces for the viewer to slow down, wander through, and take in. […] Since finishing my MFA, I’ve also started working as an art writer. I think that my curiosity for both literature and art naturally brought me to a point where I was thinking and writing a lot about art, through intersections of art and language. I’ve also done two curatorial projects, the first while I was in my MFA program. My friend Ieva Raudsepa and I curated Seeing Words and Other Things, a show that brought objects and words together and looked at artists whose practices perform relationality between the two. Last summer, my friend Shay Myerson and I started a curatorial collective called Midnight's Watchtower. We organized a performance event at Commons, a space run by my friend, Claire Chambless, which took the form of a series of performances around the theme of prologues and false starts Coming out of the pandemic, [there were] all these repetitive questions – “Can we go out again, or are we locked down?”

GM: Your first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, will be released this May. What is your novel about, and what inspired you to write it?

VH: I See More Clearly in the Dark started as a short story and zine that later became the novel. The zine was available as a takeaway in a video installation of the same name Antoine and I built a black fabric structure with a mossy green carpet and printed the text onto transparency film. Inside the fabric structure, we used an analog slide projector to project these homemade slides, and layered the text over a projected video of long, static shots of a very dark, lush forest in the Pacific Northwest The novel is being published through an independent artist-run press in the Bay Area called Sming Sming Books. Vivian Sming, who runs the press, is incredible and it’s been so great working with her. The summer before I started writing the novel, I read this long-form essay by the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, “In Praise of Shadows” (1933/1977) (Continued)