Instant Coffee: Interview
I recently returned from the
San Juan Trienal de Poli/Graphica in San Juan Puerto
Rico. While there I had the chance to meet with and interview several
artists about the work they exhibited at the Trienal.
Perry: What are your names?
Instant Coffee: Jon Sasaki, Emily Hogg, Jenifer
Papararo, Jinhan Ko, Cecilia Berkovik, Kate Monroe and Darren O’Donnell.
Perry: Where are you from?
Jon: Toronto and Vancouver, Canada
Perry: What is the title of your project?
Emily: The Year of Love
Perry: How is narrative space built into your
work (i.e. story, history, character, past, present or future)?
Jon: For a long time we tried to remove ourselves
from historical issues. We aren’t trying to be avant-garde.
In other words we aren’t trying to do things that have never
been done before. In fact, we want to do things that have been done
before, but perhaps with a different spin and for a different audience.
Emily: We like to steal from everybody…ha-ha!
We work more with museums now. And that’s a new experience
for us because up to now our work has been very ephemeral. Now we
have to think, “Is the conservator going to be able to work
with this?”
Jon: The idea of flux guides us in the way we
construct narrative space and environment. Nothing is really fixed.
We don’t always know what we are going to do before we do
it. Since we travel to a lot of place to do events, we try to riff
off of the environment and the local artists we work with. As the
show progresses the work evolves. In three months from now, this
installation will have evolved thanks to the contribution of audience
members.
We do events that encompass a wide range of techniques, operations,
situations and narratives; installation, graphics, assemblage, sound
and video. As I said before, when we do an event, we don’t
know what the themes will be but they end up evolving very organically.
Out of the flow of events. One of our collective members had been
doing a series of Spin the Bottle parties. So when we were asked
to do a party in Toronto in the basement of a club we decided to
incorporate it and people liked it. It was a make out party and
we made these forts where you could go inside and make out if you
wanted to.
Jinhan: We think of what we do as providing a
service and service lends itself to having events, one-off events.
Emily: And a place for people to show their work…
Jinhan: According to Hans Holbrook, galleries
are good places to show art. That may be true…but not the
best place to have a party or have a certain kinds of work…we
want to create a live working space.
Jenifer: It’s about creating a party culture
and relating it to a sense of now. It’s also about consumerism
and how so many activities are organized around consumption and
buying stuff...We are trying to find an antidote to that by pushing
ideas and space to an extreme.
Jinhan: The whole idea of service comes from Andrea
Frazer. In the early 90s she organized an exhibition and wrote about
service-oriented art practices. What is it and how do you account
for that kind of labor? We don’t buy wholly into that but
we use it as a tool to construct a narrative that incorporates the
language, culture and imagery of service. All in the name of having
fun! On a more serious note, we are earnest about forming relationships
and having dialog with other artists. Here at the San Juan Triennial
we have been able to make one on one relationships with other artists.
We hope we can build on those for the future.
Jenifer: What’s great about being here is
that we can present work and take ideas back with us. Then we’ll
try and blend those ideas back into our own work. We have listserve.
It started out as a way to get the word out about own events. We
wanted to get people to come out and participate. Now we list two
hundred some events a week for other people besides our own. It
takes a lot of time, but we share that work through the collective.
Perry: How do you describe the use of non-objective
space in your work (i.e. balance, visual weight, emphasis, composition,
etc)?
Jenifer: We try to be intuitive and organic in
the way we assemble everything from the events to the flyers to
the installations. We acquire lots of stuff and then we start the
process of editing out what doesn’t go. Which might not also
be the best decision…ha-ha! When there is a lot of you to
share the load, you have more time and freedom to explore ideas
and decide if you really like what you have got. Also, we try and
keep the emphasis on the message. As you can see we do a lot of
stencils, graphics and posters and those also have to be simple
and bold to be effective.
Perry: What is your pet peeve in art?
Emily: I hate it when I say I am an artist and
people respond with “Oh, are you a painter?”
Jon: Explaining your art to customs agents…I
once spent 45 minutes explaining installation and performance art
to a customs agent. He was trying really hard to understand. In
the end it was a good experience. I guess you could say he took
a professional interest in what we do!‡
Links:
Instant
Coffee webpage
The
Year of Love
Interview
with Instant Coffee
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