爆料黑社

Visual Arts students Bethany D鈥橲ouza and Ana Luiza Strazzi Nogueria interviewed artist Kim Vose Jones.

Alumna聽 Kim Vose Jones (Class of 1992) has created a rich multimedia installation exploring the dichotomies and paradoxes of migrant life, past and present, which is currently exhibited at the Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery at 爆料黑社 until Oct. 17.

1. The exhibition features allegorical animal forms that feel both personal and symbolic. How does the presence of animals help tell the stories illustrated across your installations?

KVJ: For the past few years, I have been utilizing anthropomorphism to address some of my concerns. This is when human characteristics, behaviors, and emotions are attributed to non-living objects or non-human things. I place them in the midst of historical, allegorical, sometimes relatable, deeply human activities. These animals are silently displayed and affected. There is a sense of the burden of humanity forced upon them, because in general we have sympathy for the plight of animals, we relate to them.聽 Addressing the idea of human footprint on the planet, and how we as a species (as we are animals as well) continue to control and place ourselves above and beyond question, is problematic. But when the animals stand in for human behaviour, I hope it also gives pause and reflection. I think the animals are a way of drawing people into more complex ideas.

2. How could you describe your research process to make this project? Did you meet any obstacles or surprises while researching your family history and historical background?

KVJ: When I begin a project, I begin by allowing time for research, reflection, contemplation and exploration. I call it going down the rabbit hole of inquiry. I think about definitions of terminology, my preconceived ideas, gaps in my knowledge. For this project, I read contemporary scholarship on the filles du roi and delved into governmental archives. I read many fiction accounts of the young, orphaned women. I pulled inspiration from the pages of art history texts. For example, while researching, I stumbled upon the fragment of a triptych, know as “The Hell and the Flood” by Hieronymus Bosch, which depicts the chaotic aftermath of the biblical flood with demonic figures, ruins, and Noah’s Ark in the distance. On the right, Noah鈥檚 ark has stranded on Mount Ararat and Noah and his family open the hatch, allowing the animals to leave the ship in pairs. In the foreground we see the drowned. The left wing is considered to be a depiction of Hell. All figures are demons. In the background there is a burning city. This story of a stranded Noah鈥檚 Ark, fleeing a dangerous land, resonated with me.

I also dog-eared many seventeenth-century illustrated animal catalogues and visited natural history museum displays of animals in fight or flight mode.

I think for me, the biggest surprise was my connection to the filles du roi and how it is believed that an estimated two-thirds of French Canadians are descendants of those 800 women sponsored by France to marry settlers in New France. This of course created many complications arising from European settlement. Primarily the devastating and ongoing negative impacts on Indigenous peoples, including the聽forced dispossession of lands, cultural alienation, intergenerational trauma, systemic discrimination, and socio-economic marginalization.聽 Going backward in time and tracing a line that goes back over 400 years, digging into archives, keeping track of timelines was only a first step. For although this work is in conversation with a historical moment, my project took further turns as I reflected on injustices facing all human populations who are forced to move, as refugees and seekers of better lives, as well as on those who they may threaten to displace.

3. What drew you to the medium and materials you used, and how did working with them challenge or expand your skills as an artist?

KVJ: I have been working with the colour white for many years. I am attracted to its sense of otherworldliness, its connection to the ethereal and its sense of the spiritual. I also like the fact it can get dirty, polluted. It is this sense of taboo and tension with the viewer I like to engage with.

I use a lot of textiles in my work and enjoy learning new techniques, and experimenting with materials to see what is possible, thinking outside the traditional material toolbox. There is a bit of a mad scientist within me, and I do spend hours- once I learn a technique, once I understand the process of making- trying to experiment with new ways of manipulating the material.

I love to use materials that are contrasting. Hard and soft, expensive and cheap, permanent and ephemeral. I spend a great deal of time thinking about materials and selecting the ones that reflect the concepts I am exploring for each project. It is important to me that the materials speak to the ideas of the piece. I have worked in a variety of materials for decades, from blown glass to silk. I love combining them together, allowing their distinct attributes to surprise and delight the viewer.

For this project I further expanded my use of film. I have used road trip films in the past, projecting a geographic location on an object I have made, and using the art as a screen. But for this work I experimented and explored a different surface to project the video onto, as well as using a life size projection into the entirety of the space. I often ask myself a lot of 鈥渨hat if鈥� questions while I set up material studies labs in my studio. While I was contemplating the creation of the porcupine, I thought; 鈥淲hat if I use fibre optic filament as her quills? What will happen to the video?鈥� 鈥淲hat will video look like projected on flat opaque felt, on resin, on salt?鈥� 聽And then I try.

The messages in the bottle idea came to me during the pandemic. I began thinking about what happened to all of the migrants and refugees who were on boats crossing dangerous waters when the whole world shut down. Communication shut down to a great extent, were they safe? Did they have refuge somewhere? How do you communicate when you are lost, perhaps at sea? I began researching transportation methods, and part of my research led me to the use of discarded water bottles to construct rafts.

I set myself the challenge of combining the concept of a life boat with the idea of messages in a bottle. What if I added a community component, and invited people to write their own private messages, and I would integrate these somehow into the work? 聽The precarious yet hopeful idea of throwing a message out to sea and hoping it will be found, combined with the concept of a cathartic release of personal burden and perhaps healing. I never dreamed so many people would also be attracted to the idea. I have been collecting these messages since 2022 while I was in residency at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton NB and now include the 爆料黑社 community in the project. I have hundreds of private messages now. I have never opened the messages. Perhaps I never will, and they will become a time capsule. Perhaps they will become part of a new project, maybe a public reading on the anniversary of the pandemic. But for now, I hold them in great respect as private.

I love installation art, and view the space the work occupies as a material of sorts to form. I am drawn to the possibility of setting up an experience for the viewer, perhaps offering a sample of the location, the feelings, the moments of transition.

Working primarily in installation sculpture, I find the space the sculptures occupy equally important to the physical objects. While I am creating the sculptures, I am also imagining the environment the work is inspired by, and the place it will occupy. Therefore, there are always two makings in my work. The stuff that gets made in the studio, and then the actual bringing into being of the work in the space. As I work on each piece, this final making is always in my head, I am making each piece to reflect the mood of the space. I like to imbue the space with enough room for quiet contemplation, and try to offer space for moments of reflection.

4. Your background is fascinating, with extensive travel and a successful academic career alongside your art practice, in what ways have such diverse life experiences influenced your artistic expression and worldview?

KVJ: I have always been driven to explore, learn, listen and experiment. I am a bit of a sponge, excited and curious about the complex, messy world around me. My artwork strives to present complexities and multiple points of view.

After high school I was part of a program sponsored by the Canadian Government called Canada World Youth. This now defunct international non-profit organization paired Canadian youth with youth from developing countries. Together with a counterpart, participants would volunteer in either the fields of social work or agriculture in a small village in Canada and then a village in the exchange country. To participate at such a young age and spend the better half of a year with someone from a different culture was life changing. I went to Pakistan, lived in a small village on the Afghan border and worked in a small clinic in the desert that served a 200 km radius of the area. It was right after the Afghan war and there were about 3 million refugees in Pakistan at the time. Pakistan also had been under martial law for over a decade and I was there during the first democratic elections when Benazir Bhutto became leader. One of my strongest memories from that period is visiting the Red Cross refugee camp during the monsoon and being surrounded by water in a jeep as hundreds of tents washed away.聽 A large majority of the world鈥檚 82 million forcibly displaced people reside in poorer countries.

We also gave out International Aid. Giving out 陆 a cup of ghee to a women with 4 children once a month really woke me up to the complexities of aid, politics, poverty and injustice. But I was also introduced to new concepts of community, beauty, friendship and hope. When I came back home, I began volunteering in women shelters, community kitchens and I still do. Maybe in some way my daily life is part of my art practice as I believe I need to try and make a positive impact on the lives of others, in any small way I can.

Art is my way of struggling through some big, complex questions. Because the issues I grapple with are complex, I try to present work that can be read and experienced in many ways. This work isn鈥檛 meant to be didactic, it presents meditations on social, humanitarian and environmental issues that I struggle to unpack- but I also want to present hope, humour and beauty to hopefully seduce the viewer into thinking, in their own way and in their own time, about uncomfortable aspects of life and our footprint thus far.

From another perspective my research trips have allowed me to immerse myself in location. Travelling to Ile de Re in France, really gave me a physical body memory of a place that I tried to transfuse into the work LifeBoat: an Unnatural History. Riding around the island on a bicycle, exploring the salt gardens, the church where my ancestor was baptized, the rough and wild shore gave me a connection to my subject. Having travelled the great distance, listened to the local accent, ate the local food, touched the soil, noted the tonal colours and unique palette of the area, listening to the landscape- all these things helped me create.

My life experiences have shown me my insignificance in a way, my connection, my responsibility.

5. How do you imagine your experience with making聽Lifeboat: An Unnatural Historywill shape the direction of your future work?

KVJ: Artmaking is a transformative experience for the maker. It is a shedding, and a letting go, but we always tend to carry the residuals of the experience and thematics through to other project as well. I am currently interested in furthering my exploration of video projection on sculptural objects as I did with Lifeboat, and engaging deeper with environmental issues. Hence, I see a shift coming from animals to plants, and a reengagement with biomorphic and surrealistic forms. Further textile experiments, new explorations in casting, and time- lapse video making are in my future!