Almost twenty years since being introduced to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a few of its pages still regularly come to mind. One panel in particular, in which a face is progressively whittled down to its simplest graphic form, two dots and a line, has really stuck with me. The narrator asks, “WHAT IS THE SECRET OF THE ICON WE CALL – THE CARTOON?” And in the next panel, “WHY - ARE - WE - SO - INVOLVED?” McCloud poses a question to the reader about why this brutally diminished form is still so “acceptable” to us – why, rather than estranging, it can open up a space for identification more immediate and reliable than one highly realized. 

For those more widely read in the genre than I am, it might feel a bit reductive to open an interview with Walter Scott, the Kahnawà:ke-born, Tiohtià:ke (Montréal)-based interdisciplinary artist and author of the much-loved Wendy comics, with reference to McCloud’s classic introduction. But I thought about these panels while preparing to interview Scott, not just because he makes comics, but because his work foregrounds the genuinely mysterious capacity of caricature to both reduce and elaborate character. Scott’s figures and their attendant objects (or his objects and their attendant figures) capture simple being – for instance, the plainly apparent experience of misery, that infinitely non-universal universal. Simultaneously, they offer us characters nobody could fail to recognize as vitally specific, differentiated, subtly or not, by their particular features. I mean class, race, gender, but also eyebrows, shoes, or types of ambition. 

Caricature in Scott’s work somehow functions as insistence on the irreducibility of the subject. There’s a continuous world across the work, whether drawing, comics, sculpture, video, performance, or more recently, painting. Languid hands reach for overfull wine glasses, people wake up hungover, they try to make art, talk about making art, people sit on couches, they lie inert, they have delusions and are confronted by the reality that the delusions of others have material consequence. Money and meaning, affluence and integrity align or misalign in individual lives and social circles. The body disintegrates. The anxious voice of the self hovers insistently in the frame. The work is leaky satire – full of affection, or at least understanding, even if also disgust. Scott doesn’t hesitate to make a joke at his own expense, and much of the work’s power is that it satirizes what is intimately familiar to its author. In the emotive domain of Scott’s work contempt and compassion rub shoulders, trading positions so quickly and slyly they’re often difficult to distinguish. 

During the interview we talk about the Nicole Eisenman painting (actually one half of Tail End) on the cover of Eileen Myles’ 2022 anthology, Pathetic Literature. The anthology means to “frame a counter-tradition of literature,” one in which “pathetic” is allowed the full range of its meaning. Scott’s work, and I mean this as an accolade, seems to me to fit the description for Myles’ organizing genre. The book comes up because the three figures in Eisenman’s painting remind me of those in Scott’s work: stretched out, ambivalent, boneless. Like those in the cover image, his figures often fail to be properly restrained by their internal structure. They’re limp in a way that is pathetic in all senses of the word. I’d almost say his work suggests a pathetic metaphysics. There’s a slipperiness. Nothing gets fixed by its cataloguing or clarified by its enlargement. This might be closer to what I mean by saying its satire leaks. It doesn’t terminally refuse these (pathetic) characters, but it also doesn’t redeem them. Their redemption seems in fact an irrelevant aside to the realism of their pitiability. They are what they are and the world is what it is – and the world is what cannot be said of it, and we are what can’t ever be articulated of us. Pathetic characters and figures, whose relationship to language is about its failure, straining – eyeballs bulging – towards expression, which remains always out of reach. 

I interviewed Scott on the occasion of his solo show with Hunt Gallery in Toronto (February 2025). More than twenty years into his career, having exhibited internationally and published widely (and to great acclaim), this is a new venture: a solo show of only paintings. Our conversation begins with friendship and ends with taxes, which feels right. Scott first shares the origins of the new body of work, a little history that has to do with old friends and the importance of being lovingly told hard truths, and we wrap things up with our agreement that the tax filing system in Canada is fucked (this part of the conversation has been redacted). It’s funny, grim, incisive, generous – much like his work. 

 

 

 

 

If Wendy is a satire of the art world, something I make in a space is a satire of its own existence, or its an anxiety of presentation imbued in the work, or a self awareness of the work existing in relation to the viewer. 

 

 

 

 

The impetus for this conversation is your recent show, A Shape in the Living World—and your first time showing only paintings in a solo show. How did this show first start to take shape (no pun intended)? 

It’s a bit of a longer story, starting with me moving back to Montréal and getting a studio space at the Darling Foundry, where space-wise I finally had an opportunity to do some things that were a little more ambitious in scale. I knew I wanted to make large-format paintings for a while, and having a studio space at the Darling gave me an opportunity to do that. So that’s what I started to do. It started with colours, using acrylic, I tried some oil, oil sticks, trying to hone in on a visual language on canvas. Very not familiar with that at all. I’m usually more into printed ephemera, printmaking, digital, things that are more graphic. And so I found myself sort of at odds with the medium at first, and I just assumed that it was, you know, part of the learning curve. I do have a drawing practice that’s a little bit more meandering, a bit more expressive, that I thought I could find a way to translate onto a canvas. I found that difficult, and then I think I was trying to offset it (my lack of interest in it, maybe) by adding some sculptural elements to the canvases, and then some collage … I was basically throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. And I think that’s a productive thing to do, but I’m not sure anything really came out of that – anything that I’d be willing to present now. But what came out of it was what I knew I didn’t want to do. But I didn’t come to that conclusion alone. I needed the support of someone else telling me straight-up whether what I was doing was working or not. Of course, I’ve had studio visits, mostly gallerists come in, and those kinds of conversations are specific. They’re never gonna tell you whether what you’re doing is interesting or not. They’re just gonna see what you’re doing and decide privately whether they feel like it’s viable for them commercially. So, I  received a lot of blank stares and half comments about what was happening in the studio. But it was only when Dan Griffin, who runs Hunt Gallery, came in, that I had someone tell me straight-up how they felt about what they were seeing. And he did not like any of it. 

His expertise in that regard is that we went to grad school together, at the University of Guelph in 2016, graduated in 2018, and you know – living and working in the same little tiny town we got really close, and began understanding each other’s processes intimately, had a lot of really intense conversations about art in seminar and with each other privately. MFAs can be a bit of a scam, but there is something worthwhile about living closely with someone else’s art practice, or with other people’s art practices. Especially in a small town with nothing else to do, nothing else to look at. So his opinion was basically: nothing that I was doing in my studio at the time was playing up to any of the strengths he knew I had as an artist. Which was valuable, because it is sometimes important for somebody to look at you and tell you who you are when you stop being able to see it, if you’re too close to yourself, or too close to the process. You occasionally need somebody to reflect back to you some of the things about you that are working. [Laughs]. In this case, he said that I already had a language, a pre-existing language and lexicon that was effective. He was like, sorry if I was being harsh. I said no, you’re not being harsh at all – I’m relieved that someone can be honest with me. I’m glad it was him, because I trusted him, because of the time we spent in Guelph together. So the show feels almost co-authored in a way. Obviously it’s my work and my aesthetic, but it was almost a collaboration. I haven’t had that before with a commercial gallery. I think it’s because of the familiarity we had with each other. It was this ongoing conversation. 

He had his priorities too – he wanted to put on a show that was appealing, he wanted to showcase what he saw as the best representation of what my work could be in a commercial gallery, in a white cube. Before this a lot of my projects were site-specific, or published, so this felt like a specific opportunity. I’ve shown in white cubes before but it was a vein of sculptural work that I don’t do as often right now, or put aside temporarily. I understand that there’s an element of personality. The little kid that wants to put their work on the refrigerator to be admired. And it was useful to have Dan in my phone, because I could text him like, “what do you think of this? What about this?” And he has no problem saying “that’s not good” or “this needs to be better” or “this is great.” Even down to specifics. Another aspect is that I’m always doubtful. So I’d say like, “does this need a colour halftone? Should this be black? Should this be white?” I was constantly asking his opinion. And he would say yes to the black, no to the – you know? 

Ultimately it’s the choice that I make, but it was really useful to have someone invested, for many reasons, in the works being the best they can be. In general, that’s sort of what gave me the bravery to finally just translate my visual style onto a canvas in the simplest way possible. Which was: come up with the design beforehand, as I would if I were drawing at the scale I usually do, and then project that onto a canvas and sort of trace it, so it blows up an image that already exists. Something we talked about that I was really grateful to have someone remind me of is that the scale that I work at right now, in my comics and stuff, creates a quality of line and clarity of the language that I’ve developed, that, for better or for worse, is not easy to translate onto a canvas in a gestural way, in direct relationship to the surface. Because so much of my work has been about printing, reproduction, and publishing – projecting a small image, making it bigger and transferring it that way, is more in line with the way that I’ve already been working, and is more technically and within the philosophy of the way that I’ve always made things. So I had a lot of help having the show come together. I think it is important to be honest with people if something isn’t working. It gave me the confidence to do something that was. 

That’s a dream collaboration – someone you can ask: should I? Shouldn’t I? And they’ll be like, yep, yep, nope, yep. 

Yeah! And honestly, because he was invested in selling the work he had no problem in being completely honest either. If it was some kind of like frenemy colleague they could be like “maybe you should do this for a while??” 

Sabotage?

Yeah, and lowkey just wanted to see if it would fail. But he had none of that. He wanted to make sure that these things were something people wanted to buy. 

He’s materially invested in the work as well as you. 

I was thinking a lot as I was preparing these questions about the way that a graphic novel or a serial comic, much of what it does relies on accumulation and repetition. Which is at the scale of publishing but also just the panels – a series of panels accumulate meaning, and the characters or gestures, their symbolic resonance is clarified and deepened over the course of many frames. That’s a narrative development, but it’s also a gestural education for the reader. I was wondering about what happens for you when that visual language, and its symbolic associations, gets transferred over into the single frame of a painting or a drawing? Or even the scene of a sculpture? There’s less of a guarantee when someone comes to the work that they’ll have an experience of its symbolic charge over time, because, for instance, they read the last Wendy or they’re on page 30 and so they’re in it. How were you thinking about that for this collection of paintings? The person who enters the space and it’s their first encounter – what did you imagine that experience might be like for them? Did you have any anxieties related to it? 

So you’re asking, would the paintings make sense to somebody who didn’t read the books? 

Not exactly – sorry, it was a convoluted question. I mean how do you feel about that shift from a serial, narrative space, to this more succinct visual space? 

I think it offered an opportunity to create images that had more mystery, while simultaneously being embedded in a succinct visual language that already existed. A very clear mystery. [Laughs.] When I began the series, because I didn’t know quite how to begin, I went through previous Wendy books and found panels to isolate and then changed them a little bit and turned those into an image. My intervention on the image was symbolic and conceptual, for me. For instance, one of the paintings is taken from a panel of Wendy sort of just lying in bed surrounded by all of her writing material and empty wine bottles and coffee cups. So in Photoshop I removed her so the bed was just empty. I knew that there was a figure there before, but now the figure was absent and all that was left was ephemera of the neurotic life of a writer. I thought the empty bed was more poetic and maybe more engaging, ironically, as a painting. Another reason I did that is I didn’t want the paintings to just become part of “the Wendy Show.” I didn’t want it to be – here are all these paintings of Wendy you could buy now. It would just feel like merch. It was an opportunity to get a little more abstract with the compositions, so it was two-fold. 

What you get is an original image, a little more speculative because the figure is missing, and it’s reminiscent of an interior, which is a classic subject of painting. In that way the paintings are an opportunity to expand and contract at the same time. I shouldn’t say contract. I might get a little cloudy here, because I’m still working through how these images work in relation to the comics. But I think what’s useful about working on canvas is it’s this thing that’s in space, this thing on the wall, and it has a scale in relation to a person, the person who’s looking at it. Differently than when you have a book in front of you. You’re immersed more in a narrative, compared to being in a room with a canvas where you’re confronting an object, basically. It was an opportunity to think about scale, to think about the size of text, and to even think about the size of the objects represented in the paintings. Like having a pair of eyes be almost looking at you and confronting you and reminding you that you’re looking back at something. Those are things that I was able to explore. Another example is a painting called “The Feel of Being Seen.” A pair of eyes is looking down and it says “the feel of being” and then “seen” is backwards – so it’s a pair of eyes looking at the word “seen”. The word “seen” is kind of facing them. I was thinking about when you’re being left on read and you’ve been seen but you haven’t been responded to. It creates an anxiety. But looking at the painting it’s almost like you’re the one inside of the phone, because you’re the person behind the word seen. Almost you’re the one behind the glass. So it’s a way to make a visual pun about being the person leaving the person on read. The canvas becomes the iPhone. There are ways that working with objects in space like that I can create these visual and spatial gags. In Wendy comics I’ll write jokes that involve these characters, but in a gallery I can write jokes that involve the viewers. 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s really nice. There’s a lot to think about there with the conversation between different iterations of your work. That self-referential habit is really interesting. 

Thank you for saying that, because I feel like that’s sort of the core of what I try to do. If Wendy is a satire of the art world, something I make in a space is a satire of its own existence, or its an anxiety of presentation imbued in the work, or a self awareness of the work existing in relation to the viewer. 

An unending back and forth between: becomes public, is received, is sent back, and is received and is sent back, and anxiety at every part of that process. 

I think ultimately, if I were in a therapist’s chair, it kind of comes from imposter syndrome. It comes from a surprise that I even have the privilege to be in a space like that at all, or intervene in a space like that at all. There’s a certain self awareness that needs to be embedded in that. It’s absurd that any of us are in that room. I didn’t grow up thinking I’d ever have those privileges, I grew up in Kahnawà:ke. I didn’t even have a truck! [Laughs.] So to just always feel outside of mainstream culture, to be in it ... it’s not something to take for granted. It’s something to continually interrogate. 

And you’re always in that double posture, or double body. You’re in the work, and you’re cataloguing it, and cataloguing its reception, and thinking about what it means to be cataloguing its reception. So, a month into the show, how are you feeling about the body of work and how it exists in the space? 

I only saw it that one night! I think they work effectively as pictures of paintings in a gallery. [Laughs.] I think they might be deceptively simple. But I do think there is value in seeing them in real life, because of the scale, and what I said before – the spatial relationship to them. Going forward, I want to continue with this series as soon as possible, maybe this summer. And to continue to lean into those compositions that the viewer is in a relationship to. I still have a rolling list of compositional ideas that have popped up since the show, and I’m gonna sketch those out eventually and they just have to be executed – I think a language is gonna continue to develop. I look forward to doing that I guess – that’s how I feel.

 [Laughs.] 

I feel like anytime the show is still up and you’re having ideas for iterations it’s a good sign. 

There’s one painting I want to make specifically that’s based in real life. I was lying on my bed in my studio and a mouse was running across my field of vision, like through my feet. I took a video of this mouse, and it was just my feet and this mouse right in the centre, and it felt like a distillation of ennui or something. An artist framing something while in repose. Now that I’m talking about it I’m not gonna do it. 

I’d love to see that painting. 

Yeah, it’ll be one of the bigger ones, when I get around to it. 

I was thinking a lot about the ambiguity of the characters in your world – their selfhood is full of ambiguous feeling. Even their subjectivity is ambiguous. But also the relationship of the reader, or in this case of the viewer, to that subjecthood is full of unclear feeling. And I like that you mention the mouse, because I kept thinking about this new anthology that Eileen Myles published, I think three years ago, an anthology of a new genre they’ve called “Pathetic Literature” – and the mouse is such a pathetic creature. It’s full of pathos and is deeply pitiable, and as I was looking at your work across its genres, this sort of pathetic figure appears. Actually on the cover of the anthology is a Nicole Eisenman painting, with three figures, one is reclining in the background– 

I’m looking at it–

and then a stretchy cream figure in the front, holding a cat. It has a resonance for me with your drawings. 

She’s a genius. 

They’re weird, elongated forms not strictly bound by the laws of physics. And that’s a figure that’s in a lot of your work, in moments of distress or self-hatred or anxiety. My question is something about the pitiability of a subject we also hate. Which I think is a deeply realist approach to the subject. [Laughs.] And I’m wondering what your relationship is to the characters in your world? Does it run the gamut of feeling? Do your feelings about the characters tend some way? 

Are you asking if I like my characters or hate them? 

Yeah, or both. 

Well, it’s fun to torture them and then it’s fun to express the torture I feel through them. So they’re both me and not me. I think that’s about the simplest answer I can give. 

Do you think of the space that your work occupies as speculative in some way, or realist? Or between the two? 

I have had people call my work “too real” – [laughs] – I don’t know if that would be realist. There are moments of realism, especially if I’m trying to express something very abject about reality that we all encounter, and display it in an unvarnished way. I would say that realism exists in my work in that sense. I don’t know if it exists visually, aesthetically. And then speculative, I think … speculating about how other people might be existing, but from a place of experience, is like an applied realism. 

I mean that’s fiction I guess. [Laughs.]

Yeah, I know – I feel like I do a lot of more mainstream interviews and I’m often asked a question where the answer is to describe what fiction is. So I’m glad you’re not really doing that right now. 

Trying not to. I’m jumping around a bit, and maybe this runs the risk a bit of being a question like that. But I’m wondering about sincerity in your work. The Wendy character is embarrassing because she sort of tries unsuccessfully to disguise her ambition, even tries to disguise it to herself, which is deeply relatable – this kind of conflicted relationship to her own artistic practice. 

It’s like that New Yorker cartoon where the therapist tells the mouse, “I’m more interested in the cheese that you’re hiding from yourself.” 

Yes, exactly. But then Gimley Bunning, for Frieze, is a new kind of character I think. 

Yeah, and they’ve already been decommissioned. 

Oh damn! I was going to ask you how it’s going – I guess that’s how it’s going. 

Well, if you want the gossip … I have no problem having this published. Gimley was originally slated to be the back page of the print issues, but I think by the third one – although they had plenty of time to send me notes – about a week before it was to be printed they said they can’t run it because it could be construed as offensive to women. And when I had a look at it, I told them, I could very easily change the genders of a few people, because it’s ultimately not a story about gender, it’s a story about something else, you know. And they said well, we’re just gonna pull it, we won’t run it, we’ll still pay you and we’ll start fresh next month. I was like, you know … you could have looked at this earlier, there could have been more of a dialogue. I felt a little bit left out in the cold editorially. Because of that, they decided, going forward they were gonna pull it from the print edition and move me to online instead. And although that still had a publishing schedule, I found they weren’t concerned about me even supplying it on time. I would, and then they didn’t put it online, so I’d email them a one sentence email saying are you gonna publish these works? And then they said, oh yes, we’ve put them up and this is the schedule. But I feel like they’re just burning off my contract now. I have a couple more of them that are due that I’m gonna try to get to them before I go to Europe in a couple weeks. 

The point of the story is I liked the idea of Gimley as this kind of controversial figure that existed in the print edition. But then once I was moved to online and it didn’t seem to really matter what I drew as long as it wasn’t offensive I didn’t have the same desire. Gimley can come back in some other way. I decided that since I didn’t need to stick to a theme anymore because they put them on a part of the website no one's gonna look at anyway, I’d go with what I really wanted to do, which are just these sort of lists of things. Maybe this is a really boring story. 

No, it’s making me think about how comedy exists in the art world. That feels related to sincerity to me, because there’s a really complicated relationship between presumed sincerity and what is allowable or not in comedy. 

I think the question more, or something I was mulling over after this incident is, what level of satire or opinion do art magazines allow themselves? Because I think a reviewer can write something about a controversial work of art, but a comic sits somewhere between writing and art so if you’re publishing a comic and it’s controversial – does that seem to reflect the opinion of the magazine? It can be construed as the opinion of the magazine, and I think that’s something they wanted to avoid. But then that made me wonder, what is the value or purpose of an art magazine, and what level of expression are they comfortable with? Where does the controversy get to sit in a publication nowadays? It’s almost like it’s an affront to their sense of objectivity. That’s how it feels. But why is an art magazine objective? Is that where we’re at now? I think that ties into this conversation people are having right now about the failure of art criticism. Is it because people don’t care, or are burnt out, or both? Or maybe afraid? 

I think afraid. And if you can’t face the satire that is the material reality of the art world, in terms of its relationship to money and weapons, for example, well, if you have to at all costs avoid that, then there are all kinds of things you have to have blinders on about, or that become dangerous to admit to yourself. And maybe non-objectivity and insincerity is one of those risky places. 

Which is why I think maybe me writing comics about the art world gets a pass, because comics historically have been the medium of satire. Or if you’re making contemporary art about weapons and they’re actually being sponsored by people who sell weapons, and then sold to people … different media are attached to different concerns and hypocrisies. I’m not saying comics aren’t, but I think it ties into something instinctively that I feel about why Frieze decided to – freeze me out. I don’t know if they expected the comic to be anything except ineffectual. If they had viewed it as equally worthy of editorial review as one of their written pieces, I probably would have gotten feedback early enough to change it. But my impression is that they viewed it as this feature on the back page not requiring the same kind of attention as a written piece. Because it sits somewhere between. If you care about comics you do, and if you don’t you don’t. But I also think that’s what gives comics their power. They have this sort of hybrid quality. That they could be potentially overlooked and then be published and say something offensive. 

Another quality I enjoy about making comics that has this satirical or social commentary quality is they take longer to make, and if they’re in a book they take longer to publish, so where something might burn bright and quickly and destroy someone’s career, like an editorial piece of writing let’s say, and the response to it is lightning fast too, and everything goes fast, fast, fast on the internet in terms of people reacting … instead, writing a book is a slow burn. Almost a form of self preservation for me as an artist. If everyone wants to know what I think about the world – I’m not out here keyboard warrioring it. You’re just gonna have to wait to see how I feel about things in this book that took forever to draw. It feels more mindful or something. 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the human drama or comedy that’s the important thing. That’s what I try to focus on when I’m making work. I set it in the art world and I don’t try to dumb down the boring specifics of the art world, because people will figure it out or they won’t. It’s about creating stories where it’s the people that are interesting.

 

 

 

 

It’s on a different timeline, and the relationship to its readership is maybe more protected, sheltered in a useful way. That feels true to me, the idea that comics can evade censorship to a greater degree. 

Because no one’s paying attention. 

Yeah – they’re decoration, or they’re supposed to just be what they signify, which is satire, without having content. It’s just a sign of comedy. 

Decoration is a good word, I did feel I was just decoration for the back page and Frieze was like, we don’t like the drape colour. At the same time it was an opportunity to make it work for me. Another reason why it’s not Gimley anymore is the panel sizes were different – it was more time-based when it was on a page. But being moved online it’s actually hard to publish on my Instagram panels of different sizes. So now it’s just nine square panels because that’s easier to publish on Instagram, which is the only place where people are gonna see it now. So I made it work for me. You gotta hustle in this world. 

I think the most recent one is, what is it – “Why make art anymore?” “Can we make art anymore?” Oh – “Why bother making art anymore?” 

I mean, it’s the first thing people ask in our circles. How is this helping anything? My sort of shit-head answer is (because I think people are like, especially my work, my work is the most useless out of all the work): everyone feels like that, especially about their own work, in times of crisis, and war, and just our reality now. But I’ve had to decide that making art is ultimately about human survival, and whatever art helps your spirit survive, I think that has value. 

I’m gonna be like the art boyfriend in the strip who says “that humour based anecdote reminds me” but–

“reminds me of a public intervention I witnessed in Turkey.” [Laughs.] 

Yes, precisely–I recently read a conversation between Laurent Berlant, Sianne Ngai, and Alenka Zupančič, from 2021. It’s about “comedy and representation”, but it ends up reading more like a conversation about comedy and crisis – the relationship between comedy and the terrible world that we live in. The publication called the conversation “Sustaining Alternative Worlds,” which feels to me like a bit of a misnomer, because it presumes something that they’re calling an alternative world, which I don’t think the three of them would necessarily all want presumed. But the conversation felt relevant to your work, and maybe to this conversation, because at its most interesting, to me, it’s about comedy inside of the continual crisis that is this world – so, rather than the invention of another world, the intervention that comedy can make in this one. 

This fucked up world that we already have. 

Exactly, that we already have, the one that is largely non-negotiable. 

And requires attention. 

Exactly. And my sense is that’s the approach in your work, it’s not utopic, it’s not to invent a new world, it’s kind of – the world askance. 

I love that there’s a prestigious residency in Wendy on “Flojo Island.” Everyone knows that this is the world we’re in, even if one letter has been changed. In some ways I feel like you’ve already answered it in this idea of survivability and comedy, but what do you feel like is the relationship between your work and the world? 

I think I’d just have to describe what fiction is again, and I don’t want to do that. Or describe what satire is, and I don’t want to do that either. 

True. [Laughs.] 

But I would say it’s fiction and satire. In terms of its impact on the world – that’s something I think about, but I am appreciative to know it has impacts on individuals at least. From what I hear, what people tell me. 

I mean, from what I hear too. Do you think that the work is an “in-joke”? 

I do think it started out as very niche and specific. Wendy at least started out as from within the post-BFA, punk, art school scene, but I was never attempting to make an in-joke that only certain people would get. My main goal was to create a story about a deeply humiliated person. The art world is seen as sort of niche, but it’s no more niche than a drama set in a hospital, or any matter of TV show, like legal procedurals. I didn’t know what a “DA” meant forever, I was watching Law & Order, but I would just take it for granted that they were talking about some legal thing. The specifics of the fictional world don’t seem to matter to people, unless it’s the art world. That’s the place where people go “I don’t get it.” I didn’t know what a DA was until like a week ago. Why does it matter now, if it doesn’t matter when we watch Law & Order? I never felt like they were that important. It’s the human drama or comedy that’s the important thing. That’s what I try to focus on when I’m making work. I set it in the art world and I don’t try to dumb down the boring specifics of the art world, because people will figure it out or they won’t. It’s about creating stories where it’s the people that are interesting. Like Kelly Reichardt, she made that really quiet – well they’re all quiet, but that movie recently, Showing Up. The main character is a deeply miserable, not totally successful artist, the one that needs to take an admin job. And then Hong Chau plays the successful Portland artist. They just mumble about MFAs and theses and stuff. When I was watching the movie I was like oh, I know everything that they’re saying, but someone else wouldn’t. But the story was captivating enough, and the characters, that it kind of didn’t matter. Maybe I have faith that people could reach across the aisle to relate to people in fictional stories of the art world. But it seems like society is not totally down. 

 

 

 

 

 

Wendy’s success seems to suggest that that’s happening. The characters (not just the characters but the figures) they’re kind of uncannily recognizable. They’re types, and they have tastes and habits and there’s a set of personality genres – they work the way caricature works. We know Wendy and Winona and Tina and Jeff, or we locate ourselves in them in some way, but their specificity bleeds out into the great universal, which is misery and humiliation. And that I think is extremely accessible. That’s a language we all speak, arguably. But there’s also this way that, not only in your novels or comics but in other work, sculpture, installation, this kind of dismemberment becomes more literal. Like the holey pants, the floating figures. There’s a set of drawings I really love that was part of Happy Medium at Centre Clark, and the text is kind of hovering the image, almost like it’s goading the figure. And the figure is in total disarray. Eyes bulging, bloodshot. This leaky, generalized, dismembered body against the specificity of the character and of the world that they happen to be in, which happens to be the art world, is really interesting to me – that movement back and forth between highly specific and, well, broadly true I guess I’d say. 

I have a question about the representation of the body in your work. It loops back to what you were saying earlier about the new paintings. Is the body itself the essential thing in your work, or are other objects equally important? Like the wine glass, or the bits of texts. I’m thinking about the painting you described where the body is absent. 

I do feel like a bit of a cave man in the sense that I’m drawn to drawing the figure at all times. The first thing that I doodle is a figure. So it’s more of an insecurity, where I’m trying to remove the figure as much as possible when I’m making work, or, how do I allude to a figure without just making another figure. Because if I allowed myself to, I could get lazy and just draw figures all day. Drawing comics is an opportunity to draw a figure every single panel, which is why writing comics comes easy to me. It’s easier to draw a figure than not, I think. We’re drawn to representing other humans, our own bodies, all we do is think about people all day, right? It’s like rolling a rock up a hill for me because my biggest challenge to myself at all times is, how do I make works that don’t involve a figure, or if they have to, how do I abstract that figure to where they become more of a symbol or a shape? And how can I use language and composition even to allude to the figurelessness of the figure, and in that way move into a visual representation of a psychological state. There’s a lot of like – just black with eyes, or, there’s a pair of knees in a bathtub. There are two of them, and I was thinking, those look like a pair of eyes if you step back. There are bodily, geometric considerations. Two of anything can be two eyes, two arms, two legs. So thinking about shapes and how we recognize the general shape of the figure, how many number of things a figure has … I think that’s my challenge as an artist is to figure out how to not just draw pictures of drunk blondes all the time. [Laughs.] I think every cartoonist is a fetishist in that way, where they just want to draw the same thing over and over. Which is actually why I’m not as drawn to comics as people might think. I’m always trying to challenge myself to look at something different. Too much of one thing is not my jam I guess. 

I was gonna ask you about early formative influences, were some of those comic influences? What were they? 

This is a canned response but my biggest influence was Life in Hell by Matt Groening, which was featured in a bunch of American Weekly magazines, in the very late 70s, in the 80s, 90s, and some of the 2000s. My initial encounter with it was, my sister had a Life in Hell calendar in her apartment in the 90s in Kahnawà:ke. He did the Simpsons of course, but before that he had this very stark, dry comic starring these rabbits. I was drawn to the way he used repetition conceptually. He’ll have someone say something in one panel and then the rest of the panel is the figure just standing there saying nothing. And then he’ll say the last thing he has to say in the last panel. So it becomes a visual proposition as much as it is time-based, and also deeply absurd, because there’s no reason to have twenty panels of silence. Except to do it. So I think I was drawn to that kind of dry sense of humour, that absurd quality, of making an image in a story. 

I think one of the paintings in this new show is almost an homage to Matt Groening and Life in Hell. It’s the painting that’s actually called A Shape in the Living World, and it’s just a pair of eyes in the dark. In the third panel the darkness disappears so only the irises are left, and in the last panel it goes back to being in the dark. It talks about being inseparable from darkness. It’s very emo. It was just a way for me to do an homage to those formal qualities of Life in Hell. I’d say he’s something I return to. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to sue me. He also did things like just pages of books in books. I’m giving away all my secrets, because I feel like my work looks so much like this book, but … just playing with formats. I love how these book pages exist in space on the page, too. Visual gags like that. My other influences I guess are … I forget. I think he’s my only influence in the world basically. 

That feels like a true answer. Maybe most of us just have one influence, and that’s what we make, and we pretend there are others. 

Yeah, maybe it’s okay to admit that there’s only one. Oh, Gary Larson’s The Far Side, obviously. But maybe to a lesser degree. 

I have a last question for you since our time is running out. What are you reading right now? 

Like everybody, I just finished reading Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. 

I haven’t read it. 

But have you heard of it? 

No, but now I feel like I should have. I’m writing it down. Do you recommend? 

Yeah, it’s the buzzy “it book” of 2024, all the celebrities are reading it. Pedro Pascal was reading it on the beach the other day. 

Hot.