Interview with Joani Tremblay

Questions by Marcus Civin

Hi Joani!
Hi Marcus!

Can you tell me some of what comes to mind when you think about plants? I just moved to Las Vegas and I want to get a spider plant. I hear they would filter the air in my office and my apartment. And, when I went to see the Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at the Phoenix Art Museum, I drove into Saguaro National Park. I came up over a hill into a valley covered in Saguaro cacti. They looked like happy hands, funny, prickly spears reaching and solidly in charge of their land. I felt real joy in their presence. I laughed and laughed.
You are so lucky! I dream of moving to the desert! It makes me think about the Joshua trees at the Joshua Tree National Park, I love these fun characters, they are quite otherworldly. I discovered Agnes Pelton in the last few years, she is so magical, can't wait until the exhibition comes to New York.

The plants in my work operate on a few levels. I use plants often as shapes or kind of a shorthand to introduce a form, a color or to construct space in the painting, bringing different grounds quickly like Japanese Ukiyo-e's flat perspective. Besides for forms or colors, plants are also sometimes stand-in characters in the work, some cacti are particularly funny to me as well or some other plants have a darker side. Some plants are also recurring forms in different paintings as I do all my drafting digitally, testing hundreds of possibilities in digital collage before sketching onto the material. I have been trying to put this process a bit more at the forefront of the work recently and one of the ways I am trying is to reuse the same collage elements in different paintings.

In a more general sense, my work is about our ideas around place as a whole and the sense of multiple and yet simultaneously layered experiences of landscape we all have. We all have false memories of places we have never been to, may that be the rock formations of Arizona, Niagara Falls or the idea of the California sun washing colors. We are in an age where nature is pictured in everything from films and photographs to theme park attractions, computer games, and advertisements, from pages to screens to physical spaces and back again. These simulations and reproductions of diverse landscapes get combined with our own memory of places and create these vaguely familiar places we have never been too, or an odd feeling of knowing somewhere when it is our first time setting foot there.

I recently interviewed the artist Patty Chang, and she talked about her anxiety about the environment. I wonder what you think will happen to the human species, the air, and the water around us, and if you think about this at all when you’re working?
The environment is important in our everyday life and our future, and it is important to me personally, but it was not really at the center of my work, my practice being more about simulations, reproductions and memories and false memories. But I actually was recently asked to think about our particular environment and sea level risings for an upcoming group exhibition at Interstate Projects. It made the work really different for this exhibit, more than I expected, which was really fun to try out.

You live and work in Montreal, but your work has taken you around the world. How do you think specific places, and travel between destinations, have impacted your work?
Heavily. I have been lucky to do research on foot in diverse places that I felt were important in the moment. I fell in love with the American desert and I am always trying to get back there any chance I get. There is something with the vastness, the expansion of the skies, the harsh contradictions of the land, full of life silence and the midday sun that flattens everything compared to the golden hours which gives high relief to every crevice and fold. I am really interested in doing research about specific places and how they are simulated and reproduced in other forms or in other media. I just came back from Arizona and New Mexico and it was interesting to recognize the rock formations as the set of the Indiana Jones slides in Walt Disney.

Everyone I know always complains they work too much, but I don’t think I do. I love working. It occurs to me that I learned this when I learned to paint in college. I couldn’t imagine doing anything but paint. I would eat while the gesso was drying, paint nights, weekends, holidays. We had beautiful studios. I felt so lucky. And all of the possible permutations possible (brush size, hues and shades, cover or uncover). Can you describe your work regimen (or not-work regimen)?
Your description sounds very familiar, I just work all the time. I am a morning person, thus I usually wake up early and try to use the morning to make decisions. It's when I have the most will. Then I usually mix colors for a long while before starting painting. I drink a lot of green tea/ginseng-based drink to stay awake and paint until late. In the morning when making decisions, I usually listen to silence or ambient or classical music. Then when I am started, I listen to a lot of podcasts or radio to not let my head be in the way of the paint. It also helps me to be focused and to not Google every idea that pops into my head.
 When I co-directed Projet Pangée it was fun to get out and go help artists and be at the gallery chatting about art to the passer-by. Since then I try to keep on doing this in other ways, through a painter's group we started or a beer with women artists, or teaching, different ways to participate in the community.

I work at UNLV with a couple of phenomenal painters, Tim Bavington and Sean Slattery, who are discovering with their students what it means to paint now, these days, and imagining what it might mean in the next century. To my surprise and delight, figure drawing and still-life painting persist in the proclivities and enterprises of the students, even when they have access to Photoshop, eye trackers, and laser printers. Why do you think representational painting has meaning for you as a way of working?
To me painting is really about the material, the butteriness of oil paint, the magic of blending and of making that perfect dark burgundy. I work between representation and abstraction, tangling here and there between the two. To me they bring different associations to place and our sense of place in different levels of elusiveness. 

I wonder about relationships too. How your paintings relate to one another, to the spaces where you exhibit them, and then your work also moves to abstract sculptures. How does this happen for you? What is it like moving between canvases, spaces, and between multiple ways of working?
For me, sculpture emphasizes a sensitivity towards place and makes the viewer feel his body in the space of the gallery. The sculptures usually come at the end of the exhibition preparation. I think about the sculptures while painting, often stopping sketching some ideas in my sketchbook. As my sculptures move a lot quicker than the paintings, it is really a pleasure with sculptures to be able to switch tempo and to play with different materials thinking through an idea. It also often helps me see the ideas in the paintings in different ways.