Atmosphere interviews Justin Novak

Welcome to Atmosphere, a conversational interview magazine featuring past and present ECU community members.

Justin Novak joined the faculty of the Emily Carr University of Art & Design as an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the Fall of 2007, teaching in the areas of Ceramics and Illustration.

A: How would you describe your practice?

JN: Well it is certainly in a state of flux right now. The only way I can describe my practice is that it has come full circle. I started off in graphic arts and illustration, but after a twelve-year career as a freelance illustrator, I moved into doing ceramic sculpture. My graduate degree focused on ceramics, as did my first full time teaching job, and clay had become the core of my practice, so my artistic identity was pretty tied to it. In the past three years I’ve gravitated back towards drawing and illustrative practices while, rather coincidentally, Emily Carr was looking to build up its illustration program. This synchronicity has rekindled my love of working in two dimensions …possibly moving toward four dimensions, as well, as I am excited about the potential of the bridge to animation.

A: So when I ask you about your practice, you are describing initially your material practice but it sounds like for you teaching is a substantial part of your practice as much as making?

JN: Certainly it is. I do clearly separate the goals of my teaching from those of my creative practice. But at this point of transition, the University’s increased investment in illustration is mirroring my own artistic aspirations. In each capacity, I’m scrutinizing pictorial practices, studying how they acquire meaning, and trying to develop a strong discourse around them. The parallel makes it impossible not to get caught up in a similar analysis.

A: So you are making 2D narrative work?

JN: Yeah, I am, but how related or disconnected that is from the ceramic practice changes day to day, probably minute to minute.

A: Is this transition exciting for you?

JN: It is. It’s a little disconcerting how much the broadening of my focus has slowed down my productivity in the short term, but it is exciting that the territory is new, and yet it is in many ways a return to my original calling.

A: Does that surprise you to find yourself in this circle you have described?

JN: Yes, I’m delightfully surprised that at middle age I can suddenly perceive a clear arc in the trajectory of my creative life.

A: I think the next question builds on this. What kinds of risks do you take in your creative practice?

JN: I am not sure I would necessarily frame it as risk just because it’s been some time since I’ve relied on the commercial viability of my work. I think what I am doing now would be hugely risky if I depended solely on the sale of my work. I stepped back from all of the gallery relationships and exhibition patterns that I had built up.

A: Are you happy to have stepped away from that?

JN: Yes I am. It was a much needed re-imagining of my practice. It has been important to me at some stages of my career to maintain continuity, in theme, form, or craft. And there are other times when it is important to move into uncharted territory.

A: Do you ask different questions working with illustration instead of ceramics?

JN: With ceramics there is little opportunity to go into an in depth narrative. Just because in the realm of objects there is a limitation with how far you can extend that narrative. I guess the question is how to best harness the unique potential of each art form.

A: By narrative do you mean storytelling?

JN: Yes. There is a lot of implied storytelling in the ceramics that I have done but that is a little different from working with the sequential form of a comic, a book, or a film.

A: Are you interested in non- linear narratives?

JN: Well in a sense that is what I have been doing up until now. I have been working with the fragmentation of narrative as it might be expressed in a set of objects. Now I’m contemplating the context of popular culture, and different audiences, and delivery systems than the gallery or museum settings I’ve relied on.

A: So what are you working on now? And what is its form delivery and distribution?

JN: Well I think that the form delivery and distribution are all up in the air right now. It’s all going to settle out in the coming months, but I have been working on a set of allegories. The clearest reference for me is fables or parables that have a simple symbolic moral to them. Comics and animation are a logical starting point.

A: Are there animals in them?

JN: There are animals and there is at least one human character, Icarus Junior. He’s mythical, but I guess he fits into the humanoid category.

A: In light of what you are working on now what kind of impact would you like to have on others?

JN: It is hard to answer that without feeling presumptuous. I have a bit of skepticism and humility about presuming an impact as an artist. I suspect that one’s work has a relatively small chance of impacting people precisely as intended. But I certainly do feel there are some severe problems that we are facing as a culture that can be boiled down to a really simple set of choices or perspectives. And so I hope to offer something in the spirit of Aesop’s simple fables, prompting people to contemplate their own behavior, and the nature and effect of their impulses. Social behavior has changed a lot since Aesop, but there seem to be some central lessons that we still haven’t learned as a society. I’m hoping to update Aesop’s contemplation of human foibles as played out in the age of global impact.

A: Does this mean that part of what you are communicating is that each of us has some sort of agency?

JN: Yeah, very much so… as played out through seemingly small choices.

A: Can you define your principles and how are they manifest in your work and daily life?

JN: I guess the one principle that is constant in my life is a commitment to inquiry, and I think it’s manifested in my work. Not that I ever sat down and made it a conscious decision about it, but I ended up devoting a large portion of my life’s energies to being an educator. Since inquiry is such a strong guiding principle within the university, it’s not surprising that it’s insinuated itself in other aspects of my life. My work, especially now, very mindfully poses questions.

A: I like the process of asking questions and being in a state of unknowing and confusion. All those things are valuable.

JN: Hopefully that comes across in the stories I am working on -and again I am just starting the process of into moving into more specific narrative work – My hope is that these narratives will be the kinds of allegories that pose fundamental questions about living in this world and how we to contribute to it.

A: Is this shift from ceramics to drawing and illustration informed by this desire to communicate these particular qualities?

JN: Yes, it is… in an elemental and mechanical way. There are some serious limitations to creating environments when you are working sculpturally. You can suggest narratives on a localized level. But if you have an allegory that you want to expand in time, and shift from one context to another, you are rather limited by the realm of objects.

A: What is the best thing anyone ever taught you?

JN: Well, I spent my adolescent years in Rome, and the city itself taught me a great deal. But I was fortunate to have two great high school professors, one that taught me art history and the other literature. It was a blessing to have two incredibly sharp minds to help dissect the impossibly rich layers of beauty and allegory and the cultural ferment that spawned them.

A: So your consciousness popped at that time?

JN: My consciousness popped at that period of life when one’s consciousness typically does pop. But Rome is such a laboratory of living history, dense with examples of how ideologies, desires, power and beauty all intertwine. So it was perhaps more tripped-out (and more aesthetically intoxicating) than most pops. Baroque Italy is nearly hallucinogenic in feeling, composed of ideologies that were competing and hybridizing at the same time, in a way that defies any easy deconstruction.

As a young child, before my family moved to Rome, my principal influence was Marvel comics. I went from that to this landscape of Berninis, Michelangelos and Caravaggios. There are actually an awful lot of easy parallels I could draw between Bernini and Marvel comics. They are not so dissimilar, in their stylization, in their gestures, or in the sentiments that they evoke. They probably functioned in similar ways by communicating to a large audience using a strong sense of scale. …heroic figures getting caught up in epic ideological battles. Both delivered with elaborate, hypnotic rhetorical imagery and both dazzlingly well-crafted…You go to a church in Rome like San Luigi dei Francesi, which has the highest concentration of Caravaggio paintings, with the St Mathew series, it is rather like reading a comic across the church walls.

A: What three authors have most influenced your work?

JN: Certainly Dante is up there, both literally and in a more evocative way. In the realm of criticism, there’s Dave Hickey. And I’d have to give another nod to Marvel comics… Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.

A: What are you reading now?

JN: Marvel comics keeps coming up. The author Jonathon Lethem recently completed a collaboration with illustrator Farel Dalrymple, a retelling of ‘Omega the Unknown’, which had a very short run of ten issues in 1976. As a kid, Lethem was a big fan of the original, so he approached Marvel comics and proposed the idea. The project is brilliant.

A: This question takes things in another direction. Where do you stand on environmental impacts?

JN: Well I think it is a big question that we haven’t really begun to address in a lot of material practices in the fine arts. I think it is a luxurious position. The whole world of design has had to reexamine everything it does along those terms because the culture is tied to mass production. The contemporary arts realm acts like it’s exempted from that issue because it doesn’t produce on the same scale. But it is something we need to address. It does impact a lot of the decisions I am making right now. I am considering narratives that can exist simply on the screen. If a story can be animated for the screen that don’t have to be printed and distributed as material objects. The content does touch on it but I am thinking a lot about delivery systems. It is something that I just am starting to wrap my head around. I have been somebody very attached to objects and books in the past, so as the world changes it’s a fascinating thing to examine. What sort of phase are we moving into and is culture going to based as much on production of physical, tangible things? How much do we need to root our culture in artifacts anymore?

A: I would agree. Ok what one question could I ask you that would unravel your work?

JN: “How does the medium relate to the content?” Right now I am developing iconic characters in various ways, and some iterations are awkward. In a sense, I’m surrendering to the trial-and-error nature of the artist/audience relationship. It’s a bit unusual that characters destined to inhabit a two dimensional universe are actually born in three dimensions as ceramics sculptures. There is a fitful disjointed process through which the work is taking form and finding an outlet… I think I myself have been purposefully unraveling the logic that my whole practice had been founded upon, so I guess the work is pretty vulnerable to questioning.

A: That is very exciting! Is it the idea of a disassembly or deconstruction?

JN: Yes, I was concentrating on ceramic figurines for quite a number of years, and thinking about that whole history, and the varied cultural implications of figurines. And I had gotten settled into viewing my own work in relation or opposition to the history of the medium. But a fascination with vinyl figures had developed, and that whole universe of collectibles that is connected to animation, and toys and graphic arts. Out of convenience, I started to translate that genre of form into ceramic materials, as I didn’t have the means to produce works in plastics. And then this very odd thing happened in that I found the objects intriguing precisely because porcelain was such an incongruous material for that formal vocabulary. The uncharacteristically fragile material lends the figures vulnerability and a bit of nostalgia. I guess what has been unraveled was the comfort I had with a reasoned subversion of the traditional figurine. Once my affinities started to coalesce more randomly and organically I had no choice but to yield to a more intuitive process.

Interview conducted by Randy Lee Cutler November 2009. Coming soon: Atmosphere interviews Liz Magor!