In Conversation

Debrief Interview by Dara Vandor

Adam and Yasmine were interviewed after the project’s completion and the final submission of their work. The interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

RULES OF PLAY:

Six artists of varying experience and background, working across diverse media, were blind paired into three teams of two. Their brief was to take either eight days each–or sixteen days per team–to collaborate, conceptualize and create work based on a theme dictated by the DEALR. The materials and time they invested were supported by the project. Their project’s progress was charted and aided along the way by the DEALR, via Zoom. What they came up with? Call it chance, call it luck, or call it art. 

DARA: Let's start by discussing the finished projects, and what they signify.

ADAM: The finished project for me is an exploration of time, more specifically through the lens of the past two to three years of the pandemic. We've also asked questions about time as a unit of measurement—an empirical thing—versus how we perceive it and how we experience it. Yasmine explored the specific experience of what the daily lockdown experience was. I think I started to explore time as it passes, as it builds up, and how we count and record it. A mix of the personal daily grind with how it passes over larger spans over logic.

YASMINE: I agree. I looked at time more on the day-by-day. It's almost like a journal of a certain period of time during the pandemic. My work is often based on what I'm experiencing in the present, so, yeah, mine was more literal.

DARA: Tell me a little bit more about the process. What did the arc of the project look like? How did you make it happen?

YASMINE: Well, we had an initial meeting because we didn't know each other. So, we talked more about our lives and realized a lot of the similarities: the way we approach things or the way we view the world. I don’t even think we spoke about the art. Adam was more intuitive in terms of working, you know, playing and experimenting. Little by little we figured out what we were working on.

ADAM: Initially, the project might have gone into an identity politics direction. But we agreed to keep it open and explore, and so it went into a record keeping/time keeping direction. Then we did a lot of reacting to what experiments we had made. The second half was more about making, testing and committing to where it would go.

YASMINE: We would go back and forth, sending each other pictures. My work was very much driven by what Adam was doing. The end result wouldn’t have happened without each other. But we really followed each other’s paths as we went. I really enjoyed this kind of collaboration.

DARA: What were those commonalities that brought you together? You mentioned that the arcs of your life had some similar shapes.

YASMINE: I am not sure they necessarily came into the work, because we made work about time. But we are both queer, we came from somewhere else, and our view of politics is quite similar.

ADAM: We’re both in long-term relationships too. Yasmine’s use of language drew me to her work. We could have decided to explore words and meanings instead of time. I'm attracted to that kind of work, perhaps because I'm somewhat terrified of using words mixed in with visual arts. It's a direction that I think I will continue to test.

DARA: What made you want to do this project when Ingrid approached you? Because it's not a normal thing, it’s a real opportunity to stretch yourself.  

YASMINE: When she first approached me, I was so overwhelmed by the pandemic and things being cancelled. My first thought was that I didn’t know if I could commit to it, even back when the project was just a proposal. There was a lot happening my own life, and I just felt like, this might be a bit much. But then I said yeah, put my name in. And then the project was approved, and I was really excited. Suddenly there was something kind of concrete in my life, and there were rules that went along with it. There was an aspect of control, like, “okay, someone is taking charge of this project, let me see what I can do.” I really also liked that Ingrid structured the project around BIPOC and queer artists—I wanted to be part of it.

ADAM: I have long wanted to work with a curator. I won the lottery when Ingrid reached out to me and asked if I wanted to be included. Though it was a mix of excitement and terror when she explained the concept of pairing up. But I lucked out by getting Yasmine as a partner. We worked really well together. But a project like this can be a bit like being home alone—you wake up when you want, sleep when you want, eat when you want—but when they are gone, you realize how much of your mental space is used to working in tandem. You have to check in. It was challenging to pause, to check in with your partner and make sure everything fits together. That was both exciting and challenging, but I'm very glad I did it.

YASMINE: It's a bit nerve-wracking to work with someone else, especially someone you don't know. You're navigating together with this person, you're sending them pictures of your work in progress, but you're not sure if they are good pictures. You also want to make sure that you are making good work, make sure that you're doing your part. Because you’re meeting in the middle rather than working on something by yourself, where the entire burden of failure is on you.

DARA: The way we're taught to make art in a contemporary context is about building a sort of singular voice and aesthetic, you know, building, for lack of a better word, “the brand.” As you said Yasmine, there is this idea of the lone artist. What's so interesting to me about this project is that in a way it asks you to put those ideas aside and focus on collaboration and interdependence. It's more of a three-legged race, more like being in a band. Was this natural? Was it comfortable?

ADAM: A few years ago, I finally wrote my artist statement. This was after years of making art, but never actually articulating what it was, and what it was about. It can be restrictive and limiting, but the exercise also sets you free, because now you have put your brand into words. Suddenly you have some parameters to work with. But it can make things difficult when you want to press the refresh button, because maybe you don’t want to discuss those things every time you make art. You feel like you need to justify how things relate to everything else that you've done. At some point you need to write a new statement or pitch. This project did feel like a refresh button. If we felt like starting from zero, we could start afresh. I feel it's kind of given me new ideas. I will continue to work on stuff that I've started here and it feels like a nice departure from everything else I was doing.

YASMINE:  I feel that in a way, we stayed on brand, but in a way that worked together. We still made work that was very similar to what we do, even if they're new pieces. I had never done a ceramic piece before. But it works with all the other stuff I have done.

DARA: Can you describe your style, both aesthetic and the way that you work and then describe your partner's style?

YASMINE: Because I'm a screen printer and Adam is a ceramic artist, it works quite differently. With screen printing, you have to visualize every step in your head, the entire sequence before you make it. For Adam, his process is more intuitive, where you build things, and then it begins to take form directly with the clay. I plan more, I visualize the ending, which can be problematic. This project actually makes me want to do less of that. Adam, you were going one step at a time, and ideas would lead you. With me, I already kind of knew what I wanted, because all of my work is text-based. Maybe I need to allow some opportunity somewhere to change the project. Though both of us do a lot of repetition, so that is similar.

ADAM: You said your work is less intuitive, but I would say it actually is quite intuitive. I can think of an idea and then shoot it down, whereas you think of an idea and you make it.

This is something I need to do more of—to just act on those intuitions. I think by nature, I'm more abstract expressionist, like Jackson Pollock, just playing. And while it's fun, it's not the kind of art that interests me. It's just what comes naturally to me. I balance it with things that are more technical, let’s call it virtuosic and construction. But back to Yasmine’s style, there is a precision and a cleanness and a confidence. When I think about text, it feels like live spoken word. But Yasmine just writes it and presents it which is amazing.

DARA: That's very interesting. You just described in a way the two styles of creation, tight and loose, and you both see each other’s style as the better one.

YASMINE: It’s amazing to see him building towards something. Years and years of doing screen printing really forms you in a different way. If you asked me to do a painting, I’d be lost. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I'm so trained, you know. I think it’s time for me to de-train a bit. I feel that in a way I did that with one of the sculptures, the paper one. I really tried to figure out okay, how am I going to actually do this like this. I was very much experimenting once I printed on the papers. And that was fun, actually because I usually don't do that.

DARA: What are some of the biggest obstacles to working so closely with another artist? You’re asking someone to step into what is usually a very private world.

ADAM: Time management. This is just the nature of project work: it has a beginning and then you actually have to finish and deliver. You're right about the three-legged race, you are tied to that person. I'm a bit of a fraud when it comes to practicing contemporary art in that I prefer to just make. With time, I can look back at what's been made and am able to see what the work is about. I can then make it more about that theme. I would guess that the majority of contemporary art practices are more about identifying what's interesting and then asking “how do we say this? What do we make to match that idea?” This was tricky for this project, as we were given the direction first. I said to Yasmine, let's play first, let's just make and then see what happens. I would say that the biggest obstacle for me about collaboration is working backwards from the idea.

YASMINE: For me, the biggest obstacle was not knowing Adam, and because of the pandemic, not getting the time to get to know each other. I think if it wasn’t during the pandemic, and we weren’t busy with other projects, we could have gotten to go for a drink, met each other’s partners, we would have got to know each other better outside and become more relaxed. I think we are both a bit reserved, so a glass of wine and a few more evenings would have made things just a bit easier. It would have been great to be able to actually meet you in another context. Eat, laugh, get to know each other, and then begin working. It would have been easier. It would have been nice to spend an afternoon working in your studio and really work together. The only time I would see your face was on Zoom, which is a weird thing when you don’t know someone.

DARA: What do you think is the biggest thing that you learned from each other?

YASMINE: For me it would be the building. Adam is literally building, but it taught me to approach things a bit differently. I've been wanting to do that for a while, but to see him do it was quite interesting.

 ADAM: Yasmine is the more responsible of the two of us, so I was trying really hard not to be a total slacker. I was able to carve out time to meet moving deadlines. The peer pressure from both Ingrid and Yasmine was very important. When you have your job, your home chores, and the studio chores, sometimes you look at your schedule, and there's zero time. It was a mini-miracle that the work got made. What I learned from Yasmine was that the pressure was necessary, and I'm grateful for it.

YASMINE: I think it's come from the different way of working. Because my process has already begun in my head, I start to see the timeframe. I know how long it takes to make something and meet a deadline. That's kind of it's a control thing, obviously. But that’s more relaxing. But with you, because you make things little by little, you actually don't know when the project will finish. I think it added a lot of stress for you, too, because of the way you work.

 DARA: Let’s talk more about time. A lot of your work is about time and control. Have your conceptions of time changed over the last couple of years during the pandemic?

ADAM: I think there is a shared experience globally. Everything just got compressed—2019 felt like last year. You can sit and record 10 days, 11 days, but it felt like nothing went by. Yasmine's life and schedule were just turned upside down. We lost our jobs. Thankfully, my studio was starting at the same time. So that worked out. In trying to look for ideas for this project, one of the things I was doing was a lot of classical philosophy for dummies. A concept that stuck out was about how time is something we've constructed. It's a notion, it's our way of measuring changes. I just found that so useful, because if nothing changes, then how much of it has actually happened or how much has passed? I wanted to ask all of these big questions, but was not sure what we could do in a few months working on this project. It became a matter of asking the little questions. I like the intimacy of counting days.

An idea I pitched to Yasmine was about 2016, the November when Trump got elected, an idea about counting those days post-election. To do a single month of November which lasted for four years. I wanted to do a calendar like this, which we did a screen print of—a kind of endless, never-ending month. The extension of that was an organic take on layers. On a trip to Calgary last year, I could see the mountains and the strata within. The Earth would bend these layers, which would become contorted and twisted. It is a powerful metaphor for how things build, but then there is fluidity. I think about keeping track and losing track and then mixing that with daily record keeping. Mixing the very specific and the very general.

YASMINE: The pandemic affected both Adam and I in very specific ways. Adam opened his gallery during the first month of the pandemic, and I was supposed to go on a sabbatical April 1, 2020. I had planned this whole thing and then the pandemic happened two weeks before. I had rented my place. I had rented everything, even my studio. That's why the ceramic piece I did was hundreds of days—Stay at Home/Not at Home Order–because I had to leave my place but there was no place to go. The pandemic was very much about that and about counting. Overwhelmed/Underwhelmed is 600 pieces, it's every day of the pandemic. I was really counting time. It was going so fast but it's so slow. I really wanted to capture that feeling. It took me forever to do those pieces—they were very slow to do. There was also the rush to finish the pieces that were taking a long time. I really liked all that. Because time had been so overwhelming/underwhelming for me. It was a nightmare year. There's definitely this feeling that time is going very fast since the pandemic, I feel I need to accomplish stuff. But there's a feeling of not being able to accomplish anything. A lot of anxiety, anxiety around time.

DARA: If I gave you a personal do-over of 2020, would you change anything? If so, what would you change?

YASMINE: I think I was so overwhelmed that I don't think I could have changed anything. I think I was kind of paralyzed. There was just so much stuff that happened during that year that was so difficult on so many levels, that I don't think I could have done it better or differently. There were just too many bad things happening at the same time that I was just coping. Working on this piece really helped to calm me down. That’s why I chose this piece. It was really like, “okay, for three hours, I'm just going to cut paper,” and that is amazing.

ADAM: I don't think I would change anything. I say that out of a position of privilege, as many people have had a very difficult time. The timing of opening my studio and the beginning of the pandemic meant I had something to work on. If I had to redo, I would have loved to add an endless moving deadline for this project, one where Ingrid would say, “have another month!” But I even think the fact that there was a deadline accelerated the production.

YASMINE: It worked well with the concept: time was always there.

DARA: With most creative endeavours, there's often a large deviation from the original idea to the finished project. Was there something you envisioned that didn't happen or something that materialized that you hadn't expected?

YASMINE: We were talking about having audience participation, or using water to dissolve things. If it hadn’t been the pandemic, I think I would have liked to have done something more installation-based, to have the audience interact with the work. We were talking about having the audience write down a date that was very specific for them, days they didn’t want, and they could put it into water and they (the dates) disappear.

ADAM: I wanted to mix plastic flowers and real flowers. The day after you make the work, the cut flowers would be wilted, but the plastic ones would have survived. There were a couple of other related things that just got edited out. We are probably going to continue individually exploring what we've started here. Maybe together. Everything that got edited out can be used for new things as well. Which is the reward for this, we both have new material that's up for grabs that we can spend longer on.

DARA: Was the project successful?

YASMINE: For me, it was very successful. I loved it.

ADAM: Me as well, but for slightly different reasons than I thought. I think I had envisioned something more complex, bigger, and grander, because at the beginning of the project you think, oh, wow, four months. But what came out of it was something much smaller and much more intimate, and very personal, which definitely was not what I expected the end product to be. But as we came around, I realized this is actually something I love and I'm very proud of.

Whereas around the three-quarter mark I was starting to panic as the end was in sight. Four months ago, I don't think the final display would have looked like this. But it surprised me, I really do like it.

YASMINE: Me too. At some point we were thinking maybe we would exhibit it, but when we realized it's not going to happen, we had to work with things that would photograph well and would work within a digital project. It was so nice to meet Adam, and to be paired with him. To get to know him better.