I recently bought a paper jogger from marketplace, and have been playing around with it in the studio. It’s a machine that uses high-speed vibration to align stacks of paper for punching, binding, folding, and cutting. It’s extremely heavy and loud, and I love that such an imposing machine exists for something as delicate as aligning sheets of paper.

I grew up in suburban Calgary in the 90’s, so I didn’t have exposure to the arts or professional artists. After I moved to Montréal, but before I went to art school, I spent a lot of time at the university studios with new friends who were finishing their BFA’s. I started taking being an artist seriously when I met other people who were taking being an artist seriously.

My Boston Model 18 electric pencil sharpener. Perfect machine to get your pencil crayon sharp without eating it whole.

Usually in the morning I’ll have the studio to myself, and I’ll listen to something quiet and contemplative. I don’t want to have to make choices so I’ll put on the NTS early bird show. The hosts are mostly silent, but when they do talk it’s in a near whisper, which allows me to float through the first few hours of studio time.

Later in the day when my mind is more active I’ll queue up songs and follow threads of whatever mood I’m in.

Always music though, I can't do podcasts in the studio.

That artists thrive in precarity. People outside of the art world perk up when I tell them I’m an artist, and then slowly deflate when I tell them what it is I actually do day to day. There’s a lot of cultural imagination projected onto artists. The public assumes we all live outsider lifestyles, or they see our lives as a surrogate for something more adventurous. That can be true in some cases, and successful artists will have lots of opportunities to travel, but the notion is dated. A majority of the artists I know are motivated more by a desire for stability than adventure.

Do the next right thing.

I Remember by Joe Brainard (1970).

Pragmatism.

YouTube.

Getting eight hours of sleep.

I love driving, and a lot of my non-art related jobs have involved driving. I can imagine myself as a long-haul truck driver. Realistically, if I didn't make some of the big life decisions that led me towards an artistic vocation, I'd be working in corporate Calgary.

I started reading comics and graphic novels before studying to be an artist. My art historical references were largely informed by this interest, which I used to be insecure about, especially in school. In hindsight, I can see how the work I’m making now is indebted to this framework. Understanding the formal qualities of the medium (grid, narrative, composition, sequencing, seriality) has allowed me to set my own parameters and visual language, and this translates to both my drawing and sculpture output.

I like to work with simple motifs because they are easy to identify. I gravitate towards supports that already have a layer of information, and when I intervene on these supports it’s important for me to create visual harmony between what was already there and what I am adding. By adding something universal (a flower, a circle, a house, an arch), there is a directness and simplicity to the image. You’re able to choose and alternate how you engage.

With the Encyclopédie series, if you want to see a flower, that’s in the image. If you want to look past the flower and engage with the embossed text on the book itself, then the universality of the flower symbol allows for that. You’re also able to take my intervention and the pre-existing image together, which is where the conceptual reading of the image emerges. It’s an approach to image making where elements can share a surface without competing or asserting dominance, so that people can choose their engagement.

The grid is a non-hierarchical structure and most that I work with are designed around the imperial system. So for example, one inch square on the grid is one entry. The objects and tools that I am surrounded by are also designed with these same standardized imperial units of measurement. This means I can situate disparate one inch elements on the grid (a button, a felt pad, a sticker, a stencil) and it becomes about the formal rather than functional similarities between objects.

Again, striving towards harmony and balance in an image, I've found that these structures are effective.

We often think about technology as a byproduct of the digital age, and this has created a sort of ahistorical cultural understanding that positions technology, “tech”, as something futuristic, rather than something foundational.

Paper is technology, language is technology, and there is a physical and material universe that supports these early technologies. I’m interested in how these analog materials act as the scaffolding that the digital age was structured around. For example, the grid is something that you’ll find in most purpose built paper materials (ledger papers, maps, calendars) and this structure was co-opted by social media, becoming the interface through which we access and organize digital content. The paper scroll was invented as a means to condense long messages for easier travel across physical space, and now we scroll through condensed information in digital space on our devices.

There is a shared language between the analog and the digital that allows me to understand these obsolete materials outside of nostalgia.