Janice Wong

STATEMENT

I chose this particular piece, titled “Land:Listen” as one that clearly reflects my nature, my habits, predilections, loves and nuances. It not only reflects who I am today, but, who I hope I’ve always been.

This piece references many things: sound, musical scores, landscape, textiles, random pattern, code, spontaneity, distillation, repetition, subtlety, contingency and pragmatism.

Land:Listen was created during a residency in Iceland, when I travelled with a limited supply of materials, a pragmatic decision for everything to be portable, light and easily rolled for transport. It is comprised of two sheets of Japanese Gampi paper, one as the substrate and the other which I cut and twisted into one long, continuous string. The paper string was stitched to the substrate using the needle and thread in my traveller’s mending kit.

Creating and stitching this piece was an extension of a craft that I grew up with, as my mother was a seamstress. Defining her creativity and expression via her seamwork, she was a consummate maker, always using her hands to transform materials, always balancing creativity and pragmatism. This particular piece has a direct reference to textiles, texture and stitching, and textile references are always an underlying element in my work.

I studied music as a youth, and debated whether music or visual arts would be my longterm field of study. I’ve always been struck by the similarity in the language used to describe art-making and the formal language used to describe music; words like tone, balance, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, repetition, depth. “Harmony” derives from the Greek language, from “harmos,” that literally means “join, fitting together,” and from the noun “harmonia" meaning “agreement, concord of sounds.” I like this idea of “fitting together,” of a set of actions and construction, all moving towards concord and visual problem-solving.

I think the ability to read the abstract code that constitutes written music scores gives us the ability to see or imagine what sound looks like, where a particular note sits in space.

I think of this piece as a sort of visual score, musing on the idea of what the experience of a new and particular landscape, in this case, Iceland, might sound like. Whenever I find myself out of place and out of time (away from the landscapes and habits that I know and take for granted), I am much more aware of who I am and how I relate to all that is around me. (And, here, I note, that we are all traversing a new metaphoric “landscape,” space and time as we communally and individually navigate the changes wrought by the current pandemic and consider, as you asked, how it shifts our awareness of who we are and how we relate to all that is around us).

For a time, after art school, I worked as a map-maker, mainly in geologic, topographical mapping, and this experience, working with maps, graphs, charts, visual keys and code, threads its way through many of my works. I also spent my formative years in the prairie provinces and I feel that experience instilled a very specific relationship to landscape and space. That, too, threads its way through many of my works.

Through my experience with music and maps, I’m drawn to abstract forms that configure space, and also—taken out of context—can simply be seen as abstract pattern, and I’m even more drawn to forms that convey randomness and the distillation of such random forms to a balanced and subtle visual conclusion.

Much of my work comes together in an improvisational way. I may have a general trajectory but everything is built, layered upon contingency, one thing leading to another.

Land:Listen was created at a very introspective time, spontaneously stitched by the light of the midnight sun, at a time when I contemplated the changes that were coming into my life. The piece has a “front” and a “back,” something I only fully recognized after it was finished: the back side, which appears looser, even more random and linear, is a by-product of the work done on the front. As such, this piece is both exterior and interior, there's a contingency, and a metaphor for the face we present to the world and the internal network that underpins the order, distillation or calm of that exterior. When I stitched this piece, I knew I would soon take responsibility for the care of my elder Mom. Many life changes were afoot, and this piece reflects who I was then, who I would become and who I’ve always been.

BIO

Janice Mar Wong is a multi-disciplinary visual artist whose mediums include painting, printmaking, drawing, textiles, ceramics and photography.

Janice studied Fine Art at the University of Saskatchewan and received her BFA with Distinction, Honours Painting from the Alberta University of the Arts.

Project and travel support includes awards from the Canada Council, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and British Columbia Arts Council.

Her work is exhibited and collected in Canada, Europe, Asia and the United States.

Janice’s family roots trace back through British Columbia history to the mid-1800’s.

Born in Saskatchewan, she has resided in Vancouver since 1986.