Lance Blomgren: Your individual parts of this exhibition seem quite unified and self-contained—two complete bodies. How did these projects come about? Are they part of a larger body of work, or an ongoing process, or are they the results of a specific project or idea? How would you introduce your current projects?

Robert Niven: Bewilderness is an ongoing group of sculptural collages that attempt to make visible conjunctions between memory, misrecognition and metamorphosis. Usually I begin a work in a very pragmatic, sometimes haphazard manner by collecting and experimenting with diverse material. I try to find materials in a state of functional limbo and reconstruct them using assimilation and mimicry to give them an absurd, imitative gist. Odd encounters with familiar objects bring you into confrontation with perceptions and preconceptions of materials, objects and forms. Another inherent issue at play in my work is the frustration of having an awful memory. The disparities I experience between remembering and forgetting coalesce into a kind of sculptural dyslexia, with synthetic and natural materials merging to create mongrel forms.

James Whitman: Livestock and Outbuildings are an attempt to present something like a coherent fiction, which isn’t really something I’ve done before. This is also the first group of work I’ve done which is really depictive, in the sense that I have these creatures and they’re in realistic settings. They’re like exercises in building pictures. I tend to draw in series, and each usually has parameters that define it. There are rules with the way I use face and the kind of social space I’m depicting or the social space that can exist between the creatures and the viewer. I want the creatures to be deadpan or standing off, not to belong to any idea of society. The pictures don’t have any explicit narrative or events or jokes and there aren’t any ‘people.’ These sorts of parameters are what makes the drawings what they are, but of course when you break them that’s when you find new things. The series isn’t really finished. I will keep making more of them, adding more ideas.

LB: Both of you, in quite different ways, deal with concepts of transformation in your work. Robert, your sculptures share a quality of seeking to find the metaphoric, or even psychoanalytic, connotations from everyday objects, while James, your drawings seem to deal with transformed landscapes—a blending of the arboreal with the primordial, the picturesque with the grotesque. How does this idea of transformation influence or guide
your work?

JW: I like how you can build an image arbitrarily, and as long as the space is coherent it’ll still be convincing as a ‘real’ picture. It’s a very different type of drawing than, say, the narrative form typical to comics, where you have to draw things over and over again, and you come up with these iconic ways of depicting things. When you’re making pictures, in the sense of single images that stand alone you can let things develop more out of a process of graphic elaboration and play than narrative necessity. It’s a luxury just to be able to put things in without worrying about their reason to be there, and see what they add up to. I draw collaboratively a lot; we constantly are putting a gloss on each other’s work. We take what each other have drawn and transform it to new purpose. Through that process of extrapolation and unlikely revision we get to the images we can’t imagine in one step.

RN: I’m fascinated with transformation and metamorphosis, be it premeditated, accidental, natural or unnatural. During moments of change, several things surface that are not normally so obvious; entropy would be a good example of this. Entropy measures the disorder of a system. I use discarded material, which is high in entropic content, and transform it in order to make the entropy visible. I utilize a bricolage approach as a means of rousing the latent memory of discarded material and probing the paradoxes behind why objects are rendered surplus. Often the reason revolves around issues of taste and so I employ materials that are vehicles for taste (teeth, spectacles, teaspoons, drinking straws) to develop a dialogue around nourishment and sustenance. Psychoanalysis does not play an important role for me. In a way these works address a frustration I have with certain presumptions of psychoanalysis.

LB: One interesting connection between your work is its sly referentiality to art history—found objects, minimalism, illustration and the genres of fiction. For both of you this element is certainly there, yet it seems subtle. Is this something you think about? Do you see yourselves as working out of any specific tradition, or is this something you resist?

RN: For me its not a question of what to resist but what to embrace, and how to do so in a way that is subtle enough to allow people to project their own personal references upon a piece. Puking Poodle and Pepto Passion are a parody of Dada and Surrealist sculptures. They specifically address a frustration I have with presumptions of fetishization around found objects and ready-mades. These works try to navigate the discrepancies between the two movements, using the colour pink to orchestrate a conversation around desire, confused innuendos and issues of indigestion. Prescription to Spectacle is a parody of Minimalism and the title is a pun on the pretense of autonomous experience. In effect the domes are dysfunctional display cases that entice an intimate viewing experience yet leave you feeling a bit off balance, queasy.

JW: Some of the drawings could be a sort of science fiction, though not in the sense that I’m trying to illustrate the kinds of ideas you find in sci-fi novels. I’m not making 2001 camp. If they are a kind of science fiction, it’s more in the sense of trying to depict a possible environment or a way things could look, an atmosphere perhaps. I use memories of wandering around in the woods when I was a kid in the interior of British Columbia—all the old machines, decrepit buildings and over-grown logging roads you find. You’re away from people but nothing’s been untouched.

There’s a lot of stylishness in drawing, especially cartoon-based drawing. It’s hard to get away from. The popularity of drawing also lies in its connection to design, fashion and illustration. The line between graphic illustration and making pictures gets blurry, which sometimes bugs me. There’s a kind of graphic arts coherence that leaks into a lot of drawing that can hurt it or make it boring, so I try to work against that. It’s like it’s there to make people feeal comfortable, to make it so it’s easy to tell that something’s good or competent. ‘Signs of quality’ so to speak. I try to resist these things slipping into my own work, though they do.

LB: This show is part of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s year-long inquiry into ideas of the public, a loose thematic framework which addresses notions of art and audience, popular assumption and consumption of art, as well as the larger sociological construction of our ideas of our collective state—the multitude. To what degree does your perception of your audience come into play in your work? How do you see your work engaging with the public sphere, and what role, if any, do you see your work taking within the social body?

JW: I think a lot about how the different contexts in which artists exhibit affects the production of work. I imagine that it must be a lot different to show in commercial galleries. The needs of the gallery can seem to become part of the work sometimes. It feels like it’s assumed that if you make drawings or paintings that you’ll naturally gravitate towards commercial venues, since if you can sell something and make a bit of money why wouldn’t you? And then people end up exporting their work, mostly showing in cities elsewhere, so that the unknown audience becomes who they’re speaking to, rather than to our little intense regional scene we have here. I like making books from the drawings. They lend the work some autonomy. People can own them easily and look at them privately, at their leisure. When something is a part of a person’s collection it can develop into a kind of landmark of their thought, an object to which they return to repeatedly. It allows the opportunity for people to develop a richer relationship with the work.

RN: I think the issue of misrecognition has many social implications. It can develop from a simple bamboozlement or it can come from more sinister angles. Socializing (Sucking and Blowing) is a direct, yet absurd, reference to social systems. I combined two materials that reference social structures, a wasp’s nest and pink drinking straws, to create the form of a jellyfish, then I introduced glossy black paint to act as a kind of social lubricant or deterrent. It’s subtle, obvious, rational and absurd all at the same time—that’s how I like to work.