Thank you to all those who made it out to the opening reception of Sarah Joncas and Kelly Vivanco’s latest body of work Betwixt and Between and Scott Listfied’s solo exhibition 1984 in the project room. The gallery was filled throughout the evening with fans, friends, and family all excited for Thinkspace Projects first show of 2018. There are still a few pieces available from each artist, but not many, so check them out soon!
The exhibitions are on view now through January 27th.
Thinkspace Projects is pleased to present Betwixt and Between featuring new works new works by Canadian artist Sarah Joncas and Southern Californian artist Kelly Vivanco. Both artists are known for their narrative-based works that embrace the imaginative potential of the subconscious and creatively play with elements of the surreal drawings on feelings of nostalgia whether it be hopeful or melancholy. In anticipation of the exhibition opening, Saturday, January 6th, our interview with Sarah Joncas shares her love for the anti-hero, dream collaboration, and favorite fable.
Opening reception, Saturday, January 6th from 6 pm to 9 pm.
SH: How long have you been working on this latest body of work? What themes were you exploring?
SJ: I started working on the pieces for this show last winter. I like two-person shows because I don’t necessarily focus on one specific theme for the body, but feel out ideas as they come, connecting things here or there, but also just welcoming works to being their own thing entirely. I was exploring more of an aesthetic with this work through – more subtle, dreamy backgrounds that further push the graphic elements I’ve slowly been including in my paintings the last few years. I still have imagery focusing around cityscapes, water, animals, and flowers though, touching on urbanism and environmentalist concerns.
SH: The key to a fable is that it teaches you a lesson. What is one of your favorite fables, and have you been able to master the lesson it taught you or do you still struggle?
SJ: I haven’t thought much about fables since I was a kid, to be honest, but I do like ‘The Tortoise and The Hare’. Not just for the obvious cliché of ‘slow and steady wins the race’, but for that arrogance was the hare’s true flaw… Never expect the world will work it’s way out for you simply because you think you’re fabulous and deserving. Expect an unfiltered reality, that often things often won’t be optimal, but give it your best anyhow! Despite the anxiety of challenges, my life has been much greater because in the end I went for it, even if I wasn’t the best.
SH: What is your favorite part of the creative process? What is your least favorite part?
SJ: My favorite part is painting the face, haha. Too obvious? I don’t know what it is, I love seeing the features come to life and look back at me. Lately, I’ve been really enjoying painting ears as well, strange folds and turns. Everyone’s ears are so unique, you hardly notice until you start painting them. My least favorite is titling the work. I’m just unconfident with words most of the time!
SH: What inspires the environment that you end up building around your composition? Does the subject come first, or the environment that the subject inhabits?
SJ: It differs, though often the figures come first. With the background, I’m usually inspired by my own surroundings. I like painting suburbia and the city, with animal and plant life creeping in, adding surreal touches. One of the works from the show, ‘Sakura’, was inspired by a trip I recently took to Japan. I ended up using photos of buildings and signs I took in Tokyo as refs for the BG. I’d like to do more paintings inspired by my travels to other places as well.
SH: The women you paint have a heroic and cinematic quality to them, what are the values your ideal heroine would possess?
SJ: Heroes generally have the values of being moral, courageous, determined and selfless. These are all great things anyone would like to see in those they look up to, they’d be qualities I’d want in my heroines too. I think the most inspirational quality for me to see in other real-life women is intelligence and kindness though. And when it comes to cinema, gotta admit I love a great anti-heroine! Someone like Lizbeth Salander or Arya Stark, not the typical crowd pleaser type.
SH: When in the studio are you listening to music or podcasts? Can you share what you’ve been listening too?
SJ: I listen to music most of the time, especially film scores. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Max Richter compositions, kind of dramatic and moving. I love all the scores created by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for David Fincher’s films, Alexander Desplat, Clint Mansell, Johan Johansson etc. I recently stumbled into music by bands like ‘Cigarettes after Sex’, ‘Rhye’ and ‘Tame Impala’ and find them really great to paint or chill to as well. But no podcasts actually! I should try them out sometime.
SH: How do you continue to challenge yourself as an artist and remain excited about the work you produce, without alienating your collectors and followers?
SJ: I try to change my work slightly with time, follow my heart without jumping too far from my own style. Something gradual and fluid that feels right to me! I also satisfy other painting vibes for myself by doing side work that I’ll put on my shop from time to time. Usually cute things, sometimes more grotesque, but light-hearted and not as serious in time and theme as my gallery works.
SH: Who would you want to collaborate with, dead or alive? The person can be in any area of the arts; film, dance, music, etc.
SJ: Ugh, I’m just in love with director Denis Villeneuve lately. He’s Canadian to boot, and every Canadian loves to see another doing well and creating genuinely great stuff. I couldn’t even see myself doing anything related to his films, but he’s incredible and all of his movies have been inspiring to me.
SH: When not in the studio, what would an ideal day look like?
SJ: I like getting days alone with just my guy, maybe going somewhere out of town for the day, enjoying nature and some good food/drink! Something peaceful and relaxing.
SH: What do you think the role of art / the artist is in society?
SJ: I’m not sure there is one solid role or objective as an artist. A lot of us are just following our hearts and putting it out there, hoping others might connect with it too. We’re trying to put our thoughts, feelings, and sense of beauty into the world, reflect upon it and find catharsis in the process, I think. But also being apart of the audience and enjoying the art that others make – whether it’s music, films, books or visuals – is one of the greatest parts of life, right?
SH: Kicking off the new year with an exhibition is a great way to start 2018! What are your artistic plans for the rest of the year?
SJ: I have a bunch of group shows I’m contributing to throughout the year, and then a larger, 3 person show at Haven Gallery in the Fall. Will probably have about 8 pieces for that and will start them as soon as I’m home from this show’s opening ~
Thinkspace Projects is pleased to present Betwixt and Between featuring new works new works by Canadian artist Sarah Joncas and Southern Californian artist Kelly Vivanco. Both artists are known for their narrative-based works that embrace the imaginative potential of the subconscious and creatively play with elements of the surreal drawings on feelings of nostalgia whether it be hopeful or melancholy. In anticipation of the exhibition opening, Saturday, January 6th, our interview with Kelly Vivanco shares her insight about growing as an artist, favorite fable, and plans for 2018.
Opening reception, Saturday, January 6th from 6 pm to 9 pm.
SH: How long have you been working on this latest body of work? What themes were you exploring?
KV: It’s hard to tell if themes come before a show or emerge during sketching and painting the pieces. Months before, I look through my collection of old photographs, random art-crafts-animal-birds-picture books and an ever-growing mass of odd bits I’ve dredged from the internet. It sits up in my noggin’ and slowly tangles, making connections and snarls like a hoarder’s dreamcatcher until I start to paint. Atmosphere, feeling and theme comes out then. Like I said, I can’t tell if it comes before or during — it’s very chicken and egg.
SH: The key to a fable is that it teaches you a lesson. What is one of your favorite fables, and have you been able to master the lesson it taught you or do you still struggle?
KV: A lot of my favorite fables teach you things like — all stepmothers are evil, grandmothers should shave lest they be confused with wolves, or a prince’s kiss is an approved method of CPR. Others teach a more general — treat people how you’d want to be treated, which is a great message. I don’t try to add any story or message to my paintings, even though my pieces can appear illustrative, it’s up to the viewer to add their own interpretation.
SH: What is your favorite part of the creative process? What is your least favorite part?
KV: The best part — getting totally lost in creating, losing track of time and space and everything. Losing who I am and all my fears and worries. The worst part — letting my fears and worries get to me afterward, second-guessing everything I’ve done, looking at other peoples’ work and success and judging myself in comparison. I guess that’s not strictly part of the creative process, but it is part of the process of putting something out there.
SH: What inspires the environment that you end up building around your composition? Does the subject come first, or the environment that the subject inhabits?
KV: Where the subject is situated is important to the whole painting, whether she is at a Dodger’s game or in a box comforting Schrodinger’s cat or in a lush garden, it changes the view of who she is. But it goes both ways, she is viewed in the context of where she is, but also her environment is viewed in the context of who she is.
SH: The girls in your paintings have a very wide-eyed childlike quality to them, what are the values and ideals they’d carry by the time they grew to be women?
SL: I just hope that they keep their wonder even through everything it takes to grow into a woman these days.
SH: When painting are you listening to music or podcasts? Can you share what you’ve been listening too?
SL: At the beginning, at the critical stage, when I am trying to get totally lost in the pieces, I listen to music, like — Boards of Canada, Yppah, Tycho. I also listen to movie soundtracks, like — Thomas Newman, The Neon Demon by Cliff Martinez or Ramin Djawadi’s Game of Thrones. Or whatever random music pops up on YouTube. When I’m finishing off the paintings, during the less creative stages, I listen to podcasts like The Bugle and TV shows that I can follow along without having to watch the screen. For me, some of these pieces will be inexplicably linked to The Office and Toast of London.
SH: How do you continue to challenge yourself as an artist and remain excited about the work you produce, without alienating your collectors and followers?
SL: I think staying the same can alienate collectors and followers as much as changing too much. I’d like to grow as much as I can, evolving in a natural way. It’s easy to paint the same thing again and again and get into that kind of pattern, it’s a lot harder to push yourself beyond that. I guess that’s why they refer to it as “push yourself” and not “laze yourself” or “drool-on-your-snuggies-while-watching-repeats-of-storage-wars yourself”. I despair sometimes when I look at my body of work that I’m repeating myself — same girls and birds and orangutang, like everyone, is doing — but despairing is part of what pushes you to do something newer and better.
SH: Who would you want to collaborate with, dead or alive? The person can be in any area of the arts; film, dance, music, etc.
KV: I always thought it would be cool to collaborate with a costume maker. I would like to see some of the clothing my characters wear come to life.
SH: You sometimes create works with wood carvings or pieces that have a more sculptural element. Do you cut those pieces yourself or do you collaborate with someone to help create that vision?
KV: I collaborate with my husband, Peter, on those pieces. He makes such wonderful panels for me to paint on and frames to finish some work off. He always does something that is complementary to the piece or something that inspires me.
SH: When not in the studio, what would an ideal day look like?
SL: A civilized day of croissants, coffee, reading or walking and exploring someplace new.
SH: What do you think the role of art / the artist is in society?
SL: It goes from the gamut of a pretty thing that matches the couch to a mirror that really makes us look at how society is acting. There are artists like Josh Keyes doing that for the environment, or writers like Margaret Atwood that have been doing it for years — or the show based off her show — The Handmaid’s Tale. I think as people, not just artists we all want to change things for the better. Anything that makes us feel something or use our brains is a good thing.
SH: Kicking off the new year with an exhibition is a great way to start 2018! What are your artistic plans for the rest of the year?
SL: I am curating an eight-by-eight show at Distinction art gallery in February and I have a solo show this November at Rotofugi in Chicago. Other than that I plan to play around with my grown-up version of a box of crayons and a pad of paper as much as I possibly can.
SARAH JONCAS & KELLY VIVANCO
BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
January 6, 2018 – January 27, 2018
Opening reception Saturday, January 6th from 6 to 9 pm.
Thinkspace is pleased to present new works by Canadian artist Sarah Joncas and Southern Californian artist Kelly Vivanco in Betwixt and Between. An exhibition about the creative potential of unscripted spaces and the generative possibility of in-betweens, Joncas and Vivanco, forego the limits of the aphoristic for the contiguous freedom of the fable. Both create narrative-based works that embrace the ambiguity and imaginative potential of the subconscious. Creatively playful with elements of the surreal, they capture a feeling of melancholia and aesthetic nostalgia in their styles, Joncas with her cinematic invocation of neo-noir film and Vivanco with imagery influenced by classic fairytales and vintage illustration. Fundamentally, both artists’ work offers an intrinsic pleasure in viewing and the kind of escapism possible only in worlds that lie beyond rationally dictated limits.
Toronto-based Sarah Joncas first exhibited with the gallery in 2009 when only 19 years old. Since then, her accomplished work has developed technically and conceptually, garnering international attention for its moody stylization and emotive impact. Her portrait-based paintings focus primarily on female subjects that function as alter egos or symbolic avatars for social, psychological, and personal themes. The figurative becomes a vehicle for more existential and constructivist emphases, an armature around which to posit narrative suggestions and symbolic inferences. Always striving to create a moment of discomposure or tension in her works, Joncas aestheticizes with melancholy and melodrama, tapping into an emotionally charged visual spectrum.
Joncas began her art career intending to pursue illustration and animation, directions that clearly still inform the visual diction of her current work. Highly refined areas of figurative rendering, like the lush skin tones she achieves with oils, are combined with elements of a more graphic sensibility, executed in acrylics, to establish compelling visual tensions between realistic dimensional space and flattened stylization. An early interest in animé and manga, as well as in those neo-noir cinematic references aforementioned, helped to galvanize Joncas’ interest in character-based works. Often posited in heightened emotional contexts, her protagonists are framed by suspenseful allusions to an overarching story or caught in the midst of ambiguous or invisible unfolding scenes. This penchant for plot, mystery, and symbolism is captured in moments of dynamic stillness in which action is both suggested and seized. The surrounding elements in her works, whether animals, objects or patterns, take on concomitant meanings, further reinforcing the larger thematic intimations of her works.
Based in Escondido, California, Kelly Vivanco’s depicted world is one of fantastical tall tales and mysterious encounters. Not unlike the magical wardrobe of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia or Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her rabbit hole or fugitive fleet through the looking glass, Vivanco’s paintings themselves are thresholds. Each is an aperture into an alternate world of enigmatic episodes and apocryphal creatures, at times beatific and at others unsettlingly sinister; these storied landscapes and characters are more brooding and mysterious than flippantly whimsical. Playful and nostalgic, however, her works are far from sentimental or honeyed. Like the best fairy tales and all of their allegorical apologues, a darkness lurks in the beauty of their imaginative distortions and hyperboles.
The subconscious undeniably shapes Vivanco’s images. By exploring her figurative subjects through surreal shifts in scale and shadowy casts of mood and light, her paintings feel like their drawn from the recesses of dream. Psychologically inflected, the depictions of her characters range from the lighthearted to the more somber and foreboding. Vivanco works primarily in acrylic on panel and canvas, and her stylized hand is immediately recognizable, as is her signature palette of muted and darkened vintage-inspired colors. The speculative scenes she stages remain slightly intangible; we are given moments from a more substantial story that is then left to our imaginative work to unfold. The mystery lingers in these captures, as little is explicitly unraveled but rather implied. In addition to her fine art practice, Vivanco has been commissioned to illustrate children’s books, including Snow White and the Red Rose in 2014 and her second, Thumbelina, in 2016.
Both Joncas and Vivanco, though distinctly different in their unique styles, share an interest in the tangential work of the subconscious and all of its surreal textures and, potential, looking to the symbolism of the strange and relinquishing control of these mysterious spaces to the unscripted nature of its “in-betweens.” The ambiguity of their worlds is one in which enigmatic encounters remain partially unseen, and the suspenseful irresolution of the unknown lingers; whether through allegory or avatar, both Joncas and Vivanco look to the openings rather than the seams.
