Somewhere during the latter half of this past spring, while perusing through Midwest America, I made my way through the Detroit area and then into bordering Canadian city Windsor, Ontario. For no particular reason, I've always wanted to visit that place. I didn't really have any imagination of the place. In my mind, it was just another place that exists in Canada. When friends relocated there, it became a reason to trip. For the first while there, I had to keep reminding myself I was back in Canada after crossing over. Not because it reminded me of the towns and cities I just journeyed through[maybe it did], but I suppose I thought I had a developed outlook of what the rest of Canada looked like from living and visiting different spots of Ontario and the country. In an unexpected way, Windsor allowed me to reconsider the geography of the country.

I met up with multi-disciplinary artist, Luke Maddaford, while there and he would concur with his assessment of the city having lived there for the last two years. “Windsor is a very strange place to live because of how close it is to the border, it has a really strong American influence. It kind of has its own weird bubble that it’s in; it’s economically strange and so is its climate” Maddaford notes.

Maddaford is still reeling from recently completing his graduate studies in fine arts from the city’s university. The work he has been developing and evaluating over his time there as become –in reduced terms—about his relationship with this place that he currently resides. Our dialogue together traveled further into Maddaford’s rich practice, his disposition on making work post-grad school, and how he came to a sudden realization mid way through our chat that he just might have a bit of an elitist bent.

Luther Konadu: What have you been up to as of late, now that you are done with your studies?

 

Luke Maddaford: I’ve been trying to get my life together as an adult, so I haven’t been in the studio as much lately. I’ve been looking for a job, that kind of stuff.

 

LK: What kind of job are you looking for? Are you pretty much willing to take anything at this point?

 

LM: Yeah. Actually, I just got a job doing custodial work for Dollarama. I’m gonna be working with this company that has a contract with Dollarama so I’ll be waxing and cleaning all of the floors of their locations in Southwestern Ontario.

 

LK: No way!

 

[Laughs]

 

LM: I know, it’s like, the most random job ever. But it pays. I get to take the work van and go from town to town for work each day.

 

LK: I feel like that could be an interesting job.

 

LM: I’ve worked one shift already in the middle of the night just cleaning the floor by myself. It’s very, very strange. Being in an empty store filled with cheap over-produced things.

 

 

"Usually, I have an idea, and then I say to myself; “okay, let’s do that idea” and I have to figure out what I’m doing as I go. Sometimes that’s not the best, sometimes dumb things come out of that."

 

 

LK: What’s it like being out of art school?

 

LM: I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit actually. It hasn’t quite set in yet, I guess. I do notice when I’m working on stuff I have a different attitude, since the past two years have just been me working on my thesis essentially. Now I’m at a point where I can make anything I want. It’s weird to have that freedom. It’s just really setting in. It’s like “oh yeah, I can make really dumb things if I want to.” But yeah, that’s the biggest thing for me, having that freedom and being like “this doesn’t have to be related to this other thing I’m making.” I mean it never did, but it's nice to be out of just having that strict focus on only one body of work.

It’s not like I didn’t have freedom before. I totally did, but I had to justify everything.

A lot of the work I do is a response to the things around me so it’s very instinctual and based a lot on my everyday actions. I start engaging with something, and then I do it again, again, again; all in slightly different ways to get the outcome I want–and I have the freedom to change it however I want to. That all came very naturally, and the only difference now is I can abandon all of it for a few months if I want to. I’m less focused and not nearly as strict.

In school, I had support documents for all my work, I was contextualizing it, I was relating it to theory, I was relating it to other contemporary and historical works–now I can just be in the studio and I don’t have to write about all that stuff anymore.

As much I try not to think about the writing when making work, you do tend to enter a very different mindset when you work knowing you have to write about it and justify it, and contextualize it, and you have to meet a deadline, so you have to do those things quickly as opposed to making something and then leaving it and thinking about it for a year. Without a deadline, there's definitely an opportunity to evolve the idea, to keep working on contextualizing it, to figure it out.

Usually, I have an idea, and then I say to myself; “okay, let’s do that idea” and I have to figure out what I’m doing as I go. Sometimes that’s not the best, sometimes dumb things come out of that. A lot of times I’ll make something and figure out it’s not what I wanted to do, but I’ll take something from what I did and work off of that. The work is coming out of work. It’s never really coming out of this big concept that I have, or this grand narrative that I want to portray for the world–not that there’s anything wrong with making work that way, I know people who do it. It really just comes down to process. My process is very physical; I’ll start making things and I’ll think: “okay this isn't working; This is kind of what This is saying, is That what I want it to say? Maybe I should change it around” etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does the cold dissolve your fingers? (2015), Documentation of performance, video stills from the series Grey

 

 

LK: Is that where lots of your time-based/body-based performances come from?

 

LM: Yes, that’s where a lot of that work is coming from. It’s my desire to put myself in the work and be present in it–getting that physical satisfaction.

 

 

"I’ve lived in the prairies my whole life. Landscape has been a really important part of my work and being in Windsor, both the landscape and the culture are very different to what I’m used to. It makes me question a lot of the things that I assumed were the norm, or I took for granted."

 

 

 

LK: Is that something you discovered earlier, or later on in figuring out how you work?

 

LM: In my undergrad, I had this one course where the instructor made us have a crit every week, so our six hour class would become six hours of crit every week. It was super intense. We would make new work every week for crits. In that semester alone I must have made hundreds of pieces because of how demanding of a class it was. Through that process, I realized the work that I was most satisfied with were the ones I was most physically involved in. I did some work with found objects were I had to sit with it for months because I didn’t feel like it was mine, I didn’t feel like I was part of it, so I had to spend a lot of time with them in my possession before I felt satisfied presenting them. So yeah, working with that one instructor got me tuned into the kind of process that works best for me.

 

LK: How do you find Windsor having lived here for over two years now?

 

LM: I’ve lived in the prairies my whole life. Landscape has been a really important part of my work and being in Windsor, both the landscape and the culture are very different to what I’m used to. It makes me question a lot of the things that I assumed were the norm, or I took for granted. Windsor is a very strange place to live because of how close it is to the border, it has a really strong American influence. It kind of has its own weird bubble that it’s in; it’s economically strange and so is its climate. But that’s what I like about it too. It’s always an experience living here. It’s so cheap to live here too compared to any major city this size. As an artist, it is nice to not struggle to pay your rent. Windsor has been good to me all around, so far.

 

LK: So it’s been an influence in the work as well…

 

LM: Yes, it definitely has. A lot of the work I’ve been doing–I’ve come to realize–has been me familiarizing myself with this place and kind of figuring out what it means to call somewhere home. Therefore it's sort of tracking this relationship as it moves from being this completely alienating place to something that I’m more familiar with. I do a lot of walking and a lot of the works have become based in this exploratory practice and that’s influenced by being in a new place and trying to figure out what it’s all about and being able to build an emotional connection with the place.

 

LK: What were your first impressions of the place when you first moved here?

 

LM: I was very naïve and adventurous. It was in August. I drove across Canada with all my stuff to get here. I drove for days and days and I finally got to southern Ontario and I was like “I’m really close.” I would see signs for Windsor on the 401 and it would say however many kilometres to go and I’d be like “I’m really really close” and all of a sudden I was in the city. It was in the afternoon and I realized I had no idea what to do. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I think I went to a Subway or something.

 

One thing that struck me was the lack of rural area. I grew up in Saskatchewan on a farm. I had a very strict idea of what a rural community was like. When I was living in Calgary there were the mountains and this idea of the untouched wilderness. 

 

 

 

Video Still from 3 Fathoms (2015) documentation of performance, from series; These Mountains Made By Men

 

 

But when I came here, there’s not one place that I’ve been where I can’t see a house or building. That was something that was very strange to me. It made me consider what I felt natural space was. It made me more aware of how present the human hand is all those environments. Also, there’s a lot of garbage here. There’s stuff everywhere. One of the major projects I was doing was collecting objects that I found when I was walking through the city. Another thing that influenced my work was the abandoned spaces around. Many of them are not really abandoned; they are just not really being used by anyone but they still have a clear ownership and it’s still being maintained. There are these empty lots that have their lawns mowed on a regular basis. Some have no trespassing signs on them. I’m really interested in those transitional spaces; they have this kinetic energy to them. There’s potential for them and they could be used, they aren't being used but they're also not technically abandoned. They're just in this weird in-between space.

I use to live in an isolated place like that. I lived in Fort McMurray. It’s like 5 hours from anything. So being in Windsor, I’m more free to go places. 

 

LK: You seem to use a lot of moving blankets in some of your work and you have some lying around here… 

 

 

LM: This is a U-haul one, I don’t think they are supposed to sell them but I got it from this weird grocery store and they had a U-haul rental and asked them if they had any moving blankets and the guy gave it to me for like five bucks. But yeah, I’ve been interested in working with them for a while and on other projects. I like the idea of them being like a constant in a transitory way. They are only ever used for moving things which is very impermanent, but there’s this constant within it too because that’s what they are always used for. I like the idea of them symbolizing this constant within an impermanent thing. They are also really beautiful objects and they are also very warm; they work quite well as real blankets.

 

 

When the Land is Flat, I Bring My Own Mountains (2015), concrete rubble, moving blanket

 

LK: I don’t quite know how to describe your Instagram, but it looks well put together and I like looking at it…

 

LM: I have very strict Instagram rules. I have everything in a series of three and there are no images of people. I started Instagram when I use to be a window washer. I’d go to all these people’s houses and they had all these weird fake plants so then I started taking pictures of all these fake plants. Then I started developing this series of things. I would do images of walls, walls with plants, plants through windows, interiors of houses, chairs, hand painted signs, piles of things, stacks of things all in series of three. They started to become more and more focused. And they are from all over where I’ve been, some from Calgary, Fort McMurray, Windsor, some from Detroit and Toronto.

 

LK: What interests you in those images? Are they very particular or are they just things that happen to be there?

 

LM: I just like capturing banal boring things and reframing those things. One of the benefits of having it in a consistent series is that it gives it power in a way, so it’s not just one banal object. I don’t really consider my Instagram as an art project. It’s just something I do, but it’s influenced by the way I do other things.

 

LK: Why don’t you consider it as part of your practice?

 

LM: I guess because again, I don't have that physicality involved in the making of it. I don’t get the same satisfaction from it.

 

LK: Would you view it differently if you collected those images and just had it on the side and never posted them and instead presented them printed in a different setting?

 

LM: Yeah, it I think so. I think I would consider it more of...[pauses] wow...   

 

LK: What?

 

LM: I am an elitist!

 

[laughing erupts]

 

LM: I just realized I wouldn’t consider it art unless it’s in a gallery. That’s shitty. I guess I should start considering my Instagram as art.

 

LK: Well I thought it was some kind of an offshoot of what you already do, and like you said, you make work to make other work, so that’s how I saw it.

 

LM: Yeah, I guess it could be seen as bits of research towards other projects. A lot of the things on there are what I’m into when I’m exploring spaces for what I want to do. But Wow, I can’t believe I thought it wasn’t art if it wasn’t in a gallery.

 

LK: What do you think of when people say "you’d like this person’s work if you didn’t know the person"? I feel like that can be said for every piece of work, but I feel like somehow I gravitated towards your work before knowing you and I don’t know where that came from. How do you feel about how we generally accept or decide whether we like or don’t like a piece of work in instances like going into a gallery show?

 

 

LM: I think it’s a very different experience with each one. I think context will always have a big influence on the work; knowing the context of the work and understanding where its coming from will give you more of an appreciation—an intellectual appreciation. I think seeing something and either liking it or disliking it without any of the context is much more of an emotional response or an aesthetic response. There are some things I might see and really like it and when I read about it; I hate it. It just gets ruined for me. Other things it’s the opposite. I don’t think either of them are bad or wrong but I think they each have their place. I think a lot of what I struggle with in my work is the way it might only communicate to other artists. It’s not like you need to have this critical or historical background to understand it, but I think that it helps a lot. I had my exhibition in the engineering building and there was this big window and people kept passing by and I don’t think many of them would’ve known I was installing art. And that is another weird thing. I don’t really care if it’s being read as art or not.

 

 

 

 

 

Windsor (2014-15), ongoing collection of objects found on walks in the Windsor region. Images courtesy of artist.

 

 

LK: But the way you arrange and organize has a lot of intention to it,

 

LM: Yeah, there’s a very deliberate way I install but I don’t think it will come off that way without it being in an art context like a gallery or something.

 

LK: Why did you choose to set up there?

 

 

LM: The space there had a nice floor which becomes very important for the work. It’s also an in-between space. It’s not really allocated to anything yet, it’s been empty for a while. It’s kind of sometimes used for storage. And it can be rented out too. I rented it out and cleared it out. I was mainly interested in it because it had this kinetic energy to it. It was designed for something but it wasn’t being used for anything in particular. I also like the idea of having the work in a non-gallery space. I didn’t want to give the work that authority. The work is based on everyday objects and kind of reinterpretating that everyday thing so it just made sense to have the work in an ordinary space and not a gallery necessarily.

 

 

 

LK: When you are gathering these objects and presenting them, what is it that you are really interested in?

 

LM: I’m interested in reconsidering how I interact with spaces and my relationship with them. How I move through and operate with them. I made a windsock and the work I’ve done with the windsock piece was dependent on taking this familiar object and defamiliarized it.

 

 

March 1 (2016), Documentation of performance, video stills from the series Is this the same wind I’ve always known?

 

 

I took it outside of its normal function and place like an airport or something, and taking it off of a pole and bringing it to the ground and then used that defamiliarization as an entrance point. When you're familiar with something you have certain expectations of it so when that familiar thing doesn’t meet those expectations, there’s a certain slippage that makes you reconsider why it doesn’t meet those expectations. It makes me engage with the thing differently and in a way become more familiar with it. I gain a different awareness.

 

LK: Nicely thought out.

 

LM: Yeah its super convoluted but that’s what happens if you’ve been thinking about something for way too long and you get people asking you questions about it all the time. You and everyone are in your head. That’s what happens. Grad school will fuck you up that way.

 

[Laughs]

 

  

LK: Tell me about your “Weight” performance

 

LM: Well okay, I’ll give you the long story. Last year January, I banned images from my studio; I decided I was going to stop making images just to see what my work would look like without them. It led me to making more performance work and I was doing work with my body and doing these things that referred to certain measurements but it’s not anything specific so I would do some with my own height or weight.

 

There’s something about that piece that I don’t understand, but I really love that piece. It was a very simple, absurd action–but I can pinpoint it. A lot of people have talked to me about it. The documentation is very strange and I’ve been thinking about it for over a year now.

 

 

Weight (2015), documentation of performance, video stills from the series Measurements

 

 

 

 

LK: What’s your earliest memory of making something creative

 

LM: I feel like my whole childhood was me making things. Whether it being making forts or drawings; we use to have one of those dot matrix printers and me and my siblings would make chains out of them. We would also use cardboard boxes to make slides to go down the stairs. We always tried to find ways to entertain ourselves. 

 

 

 

 

Find Maddaford: Here and Here and Here