Public Parking Publication | Manitoba

We asked Scott Kemp how often he raises his voice and he tells us: "not often. I speak softly." We only asked because of how seemingly passive and visually subdued Kemp’s art objects are in first view. It got us wondering how much of one’s personality shows up in their art and, like in Kemp’s work, where the logic of a piece starts and where personal tastes come in.

The Vancouver-based artist recently exhibited Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf at the artist run centre Duplex. The show takes an ostensibly nonlinear route to talk about complex ideas of social structures as they relate to his personal experience and upbringing. We talk to Kemp about the show and among other topics, his experience at Emily Carr, Ira Glass, Corn Pops, and how he's been financing his creative pursuits thus far.

LK: How are you doing these days?

SK: I’m all over the map but I’ve been feeling excited about a few projects I’m working on/thinking about, and I’m interested in the direction my art practice has been going recently. So generally I’ve been feeling optimistic.

LK: Congrats on Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf ! How do you feel it turned out? What kind of feedback have your received?

SK: Thanks! I’m happy with the way that show turned out. I’ve been working on the body of work for close to a year, slowly thinking through it’s content, presentation, the reasoning behind it etc. It’s nice to see that effort realized.

Immediate feedback I’ve gotten on the show has been positive overall but it’s only been up for about two weeks and good critical reflection usually takes time so we’ll see! I have had one conversation about whether exhibiting the work as it is declares the collection a finished thought or a finished product or something like that. I don’t think it does, or at least I hope it doesn’t. I would really like the opportunity to continue developing the work, to see how it evolves and how my ideas about it evolve, or whether they do.

LK: Great show title by the way. Where did it come from?

SK: The title came from a short text I wrote. If you visit the exhibition, that text is sitting on a table in the middle of the space and is free to take as a handout. For me it’s the most important part of the show, I wrote it before I made any of the stuff that ended up in the show. The body of work is kind of built around it.

Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf focuses on imagery of lobsters and of weed leaves as they exist apart from the actual biological species they represent. I chose the two subjects because of their histories, because they are both well known and easy to engage with. I wanted to treat the representations as real entities autonomous from their biological sources, and in that vein I brought the two together in the hopes that they would communicate to learn from and grow with one another. In the context of the exhibition the “lobster” is characterized as being older and maybe wiser than the “leaf” because it’s been distributed as a representation for longer. Master and apprentice: lobster and leaf.

Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf (2016) Installation Views

LK: Also that press release though...nice alternative take on the idea behind press releases...tell me where this format came from...

SK: Over the past little while I’ve been feeling curious about the decisions I make and the way I think and about how much of all that is dictated by things I’ve been taught and the social structures I was raised in. Master and Apprentice came from that curiosity, and my desire to consider those social structures. While representations of lobsters and of weed leaves aren’t exactly the same as something like…gender…they seem to me to exist in a similar way, and they’re a bit easier to visualise.

With the press release I wanted to bring up the sentiments that led me to producing the work being presented in the exhibition, but I didn’t want the release to be too didactic. I was actually thinking about it as being a type of set or a backdrop for the work in the exhibition to perform against, if that makes sense. That’s where the decision to write that dialogue came from. I used the two characters in it to hint towards the things I’ve been thinking about. The format of the dialogue as a type of script came from me thinking about backdrops and sets.

Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf (2016) Press Release

LK: Your website is insanely minimal. scale of 1-10 how quiet of a person are you? how often does your voice raise?

SK: [Laughs] Not often. I speak softly. I’ve been told I mumble. One being quiet, ten being loud I’d rate myself three and a half or four.

LK: How do you think innate personality attributes to creative work? I ask because having only been familiar with your work through your site, your work seem visually quiet, noise free and hush...I think crying and agitated babies will feel calm in the middle of your installed work...particularly Major Appliance. Where do you think the way your work ends up appearing comes from?

SK: Major Appliance came off as a pretty visually subdued show for sure. I think that was partially because of the subject I was working with but my own sensibilities came into it too. I feel most comfortable working within frameworks of logic that I build up around the projects I take on. Decisions about how things look, how they are presented, stuff like that have to make sense to the project for me to feel alright going ahead with them. But yea, my personal taste definitely plays a large role in the way the things I make look, and that taste is probably tied to how I am as a person.

LK: Since I brought up Major Appliance why don't your talk a bit about what's at play in that work...the materials used, how its installed, etc.

SK: I produced Major Appliance about two years ago and since then my practice and interests have changed, which I think is positive. When I was working on that show I was into exploring the space between designed objects and what I felt were their idealized platonic forms. With Major Appliance I decided to work with refrigerators, objects that can be found in almost every North American home and would be extremely familiar to the show’s presumed audience. I made each object in the installation in reference to different sections of different fridges I had looked through. I installed them dispersed throughout the exhibition space, with the goal of conjuring up the essence of the chosen subject without directly referencing it. At the time of the show I was working as a Plastics Fabricator, so a number of the pieces are made from different types of plastic. One of them, the one that looks the most like a handle, I made out of mdf. Mdf is gross to work with but I’ve used it a lot in the past because it’s cheap and easy to carve into.

Major Appliance (2015) Installation Views

LK: I quite like your thinking behind lobster and leaf and the roles you give them to play and how they relate to more complex social structures. To me, they seem like two completely random and disparate objects to use as stand-ins for master and apprentice. You mention you chose them because of their histories...I might be missing something here but what histories are you referring to? And if you are treating them apart from their biological contexts how are you presenting them as just autonomous and yet referring to a history they have?

SK: Good question, I should explain why I chose those two. The number of stores selling cannabis in Vancouver rose dramatically over the past three or four years. I found a decent article about the situation by the Globe and Mail which claims there were only 14 weed dispensaries in the city in 2013. This number is a bit insane because another, more recent article I found by the CBC reported that 176 dispensaries applied for business licenses in the city this past year. This means that around 162 new dispensaries opened in the city in a space of less than four years. I lived here while this change took place. Many of those 176 dispensaries have store fronts and one of the results of their incredible growth in numbers has been a massive change in visibility for marijuana and, because it is a prominent part of advertisement for most of these dispensaries, for the symbol of the marijuana leaf. Watching this growth got me thinking about how that massive change, how the different aesthetics of all the different dispensaries–some look like coffee shops, some look like hair salons, some like massage parlours, some like they sell candy–would affect the image of the weed leaf itself. Would it confuse it? Change it? Would it mature? Become arrogant? Through that line of thinking the weed leaf slowly blended with my other thoughts about information, how it’s formed, all these things, and became a type of mascot or something for information in general. That’s why I used the weed leaf.

The lobster was chosen as a companion to the weed leaf for a few reasons. Both are biological species that were turned into commodities by humans. Lobsters were originally a peasant food eaten only by the poorest people. Apparently there was actually a law made in Massachusetts in the 1600’s that forbade people from feeding their servants lobster meat more than three times a week. More recently the lobster has come to represent things quite removed from poverty, things like tourism and luxury. The lobster rose from general disdain to general celebration in the public eye over a period of time, and the weed leaf appears to be going along a similar course. The lobster is also associated mostly with Canada’s east coast while weed is associated with Canada’s west coast so they seemed like a good pairing considering the context.

When I referred to the history of the two subjects I was speaking from the narcissistic perspective of a human. I meant the histories of the two things as they have related to people, their histories as commodities representing poverty, prosperity, spiritualism, debauchery, whatever.

LK: What would you say is an example of the choices you've made in recent memory that you've become conscious of as attributed to the social structures in which you grew up in?

SK: This might not answer your question exactly but I just listened to a podcast about the origins of the clothing sizes “small” “medium” and “large”. The podcast claimed that those sizes were originally based off median body sizes of recruits from the American army, and that the idea of normalized sizing is a newer thing in human history. There is no such thing as a “medium” size shirt, it’s made up. I mean there is such a thing as a medium size shirt, obviously, but it’s just a shirt that says “medium size” on it–there are no “medium” people out there. “small” “medium” and “large” are examples of some of the structures I was talking about.

LK: It looks to me that producing work takes a gradual and an elongated period of time for you and a lot of your process involves idea generation, evolving it, fine tuning the idea, the making it physical...would you say that's close to accurate?

SK: I make things quickly sometimes too. I don’t usually feel as satisfied/happy with things I make quickly as I do with things I spend time thinking about though.

LK: What do you get up to when you are not actively making work? what kind of non-art things do you do? or maybe art adjacent things you do?

SK: I co-organize an exhibition space called Duplex, which is the space where I showed Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf, with a few friends/peers. I go to openings and talks. I work so I can pay for rent and food and things to make art with. I don’t regularly do many non-art things at the moment.

LK: Has it been difficult to be independent after being out of art school in terms of creating work and structuring yourself as someone who works for yourself?

SK: I started trying to make art for things that weren’t connected to art school before I left art school, and many of my friends since leaving have been working seriously towards being artists/arts professionals, so the transition has seemed smooth so far. I do sometimes miss the feeling of security making art within the structure of an institution (art school) used to give me.

LK: You mentioned your ideas, interests have moved and changed since major appliance, how do you measure that change...how do you see interests being different from two years ago?

SK: Two years ago I was excited about exploring objects and design and my work was pretty focused on three-dimensional form. Right now I’m less into physical things and more open with what I let myself make. For a group show I was in a year and a half or so ago I made a series of small sculptures based on coat hook designs. There were about ten identical pieces, all stained wood, hung in a line on the wall. Quite minimal. Compared to that kind of thing producing a show that revolves around such specific, popular subjects as lobsters and weed leaves was a bit of a jump.

"There are a lot of different ways of thinking about art. Planning to attain a reasonable, sustainable income solely by being an artist is like planning to win the lottery."

LK: How do you balance making work that is led throughout by a certain logic but at the same time your personality or tastes peaks it's head in the middle of it...you mentioned how everything about a piece of work has to make sense to the work in order to be content with it so how do you negotiate that...

SK: There’s usually enough wiggle room in the logics I use for things like my personal taste to seep through.

LK: How have you been financing your work/practice so far...

SK: I work. Right now I have a job and I sometimes take on small contracts and projects for money.

LK: Looking back, what were some of your high points at Emily Carr...in terms of your creative development...

SK: I transferred into the school planning to do illustration but changed my mind after taking a really fantastic sculpture class with the artist Liz Magor. Maybe that was a high point? Being an illustrator would be less stimulating than being an artist I think.

LK: What are some takeaways from art school that you still keep in mind?

SK: There are a lot of different ways of thinking about art. Planning to attain a reasonable, sustainable income solely by being an artist is like planning to win the lottery.

LK: How did you choose to do your BFA there?

SK: Emily Carr has a reputation in Vancouver as being a good art school. I grew up in Vancouver and when I decided to pursue art I wanted to try going to a “good art school”.

LK: Who's a new-ish creative you are currently excited about?

SK: Ira Glass. Maybe not as a singular person, more as a representative for podcasts in general. Podcasts like This American Life have had a definite effect on the way I think about things, people, art, etc. I know Ira Glass isn’t a “new” creative but I’ve only known of him for one or two years so I think of him as new.

LK: Would you rather, if given the chance, participate in space exploration or undersea exploration?

SK: Space

LK: What's the dumbest purchase you think you've made in recent memory?

SK: I signed up for Netflix. It’s a huge time suck, I am canceling it at the end of the month.

Hounds of Love

LK: What's a favourite YouTube channel of yours ?

SK: Don’t think I have one atm. I have been listening to a lot of Kate Bush on YouTube though. Hounds of Love. One of my studio mates was listening to her and got me hooked.

LK: Any favourite cereal you liked growing up?

SK: I remember liking Corn Pops. They had a fun texture when they’d soaked up enough milk and were sweet, which was a cool.

LK: Alright finish this: it's never too late to...

SK: Rethink an idea, or change an opinion