Kodak Portra 400
Interview
TOTAL IMMERSION In conversation with artist Jim Holyoak
words by christina gray photography of jim holyoak’s work by tess roby colour again, or just look outside, it causes your perception to change a little bit. That sense of immersion is exactly what we’re going for.
Jim Holyoak draws on walls, leaving behind inky phantasmagorias of curious creatures in fantastical landscapes. Often working closely with his collaborative partner Matt Shane, Holyoak—raised in Aldergrove and currently residing in Montreal—regularly works at the scale of room-sized installation, sometimes completely papering over interior spaces or labyrinths. Here, he discusses how his drawings inhabit space.
In July [2016] we were at a cabin in the Laurentians at a sculpture garden in the forest. We spent the whole month there. We were burning lines onto the inside of the cabin, so the cabin was full of smoke as we were filling it with drawings. Now if you go into the cabin, it has all these burnt drawings on the wall.
christina gray: In some situations you create an installation piece onsite, and in others you create the work elsewhere and then install it in the exhibition space. Do you see the difference between these two processes as significant?
There we were, drawing more trees, but also little houses and lots of weird bugs we would find in the forest. Then on the exterior of the cabin, we hung 30-something birdhouses. So there are houses all over the house, and then on the inside of the house there are all these depictions of houses and non-humans. I’ve been thinking about the inside and outside a lot, because even the forest is, in a sense, architecture. You have to move through all these spaces in the forest, and then you go into this house in the forest, and then inside the house there are more things to go into. So it’s a journey between inside and outside, a sense of travel.
jim holyoak: When we can, we try to inhabit the space during the time that it is being installed. I think of that as almost environmental, that I live there while the work is coming out. Then it’s a double ecology of a physical space and a mental space, and how the two spaces combine. In Victoria from 2003 to 2004, we wrapped our apartment in paper and drew all over our walls for an entire year. Anybody who came into our house could draw on the walls too. It would collect all the residue—in the kitchen there would be dried spaghetti splatter, and around the doors there would be fingerprints. The paper in the bathroom was all wrinkled from the moisture in the shower; there would be places where it caught on fire because somebody left a cigarette next to the paper. It recorded not just what we intended to draw, but also the evidence of having been alive inside of it.
cg: You have done a lot of work that deals with interior spaces. Is considering exterior space a new concern for you, or has this always been embedded in your work in less literal ways? jh: It’s true, we haven’t often done exterior spaces. But in a less literal way, I like how these scale shifts happen, often within time scales that are too hard to actually envision. What will earth be like in a million years, or even two hundred years? It seems really hard to picture. And scale shifts, too. I like to think about the extremely small and the extremely big. Thinking about inside, outside is always environmental. That’s the key about ecology. It is how things are leaky and things move between other things. Even our brains, what we think about, what we wish for, what we envision, affects what we actually do and create, and our attitudes about it. So the imaginary has tangible effects, and of course the tangible world informs how we imagine.
Sometimes, however, that is not an option. Often times, I’ll have to make it in my studio, in which case I’ll usually have to make it piece by piece. Sometimes I won’t even know what it’s going to look like myself until it’s installed. Then it’s more like the exquisite corpse game and involves an element of surprise. cg: Do you think of your art pieces as spatially immersive environments? jh: Totally. It should be optically, physically, and psychologically immersive. You experience it best by moving, so you’re slipping in this thing. Even when your senses start to shift, when you leave the gallery and look at things in
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This interview has been edited and condensed.
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