Jana Astanov interviews Kim Doan Quoc and Jamie Emerson
Featured image Trash Forest, GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE.
CREATRIX Magazine: Tell me about your show Trash Forest, the immersive installation presented at the Grace Exhibition Space? Can you talk a bit about your process, challenges and execution?
Kim Doan Quoc: Trash Forest is an immersive environment made out of garbage and found material. We took inspiration from the native flora biodiversity of the New York City area to create giant cardboard sculptures and projection altars made of branches. We grew sprouts in the altars with sodium lamps. I think of the installation as a post-nature capsule, as if all nature had disappeared around us and this piece was all we could remember and grow from it. Cities can feel like this. The installation is supported by the Forest Embassy, who provided the NYC area with biodiversity, represented by Alan Tod, who helped us to think about our relationship to nature within an urban environment.
Jamie Emerson: Yes I think the idea grew out of Kim’s and my respective practices, and represents a sort of symbiosis between our interests in ecology, technology, and trash as material. I think one approach that Kim and I shared here is a sort of larger-than-life amplification of the environment. In New York the environment is both challenging and rewarding; and it is extremely conducive to creativity. I hope that is something that our collaboration was able to give voice to.
CXM: How did you construct the environment of oversized plants growing alongside actual plants? And in this context what are the defining elements of your aesthetic?
Jamie: We constructed the environment mostly from cardboard and fabric, again with an eye to native biodiversity within this region. All our materials came from the streets. I was particularly struck by a garden + VR environment Kim has been building in France, wherein the relationship of scale between the flora and the visitor it surrounds is drastically altered. This play with scale, trash, rough sculptures made of any and everything, unusual environments that contemplate beauty and degradation; these are elements present in our aesthetic.
Kim: We really wanted to give the feeling that the plants made out of trash mixed with the actual plants in the window, and as you go deeper in the room the plants made out of trash are more dense and become more invasive. The actual plants we grew in the installation may look like a spark of hope within the detritus and pixel jungle but none of these plants are edible or medicinal, they’re poisonous. The hologram projections are the digital ghosts of existing plants that are medicinal: they are 3d scans of actual plants from my garden in France. There are three levels of reality within this piece, actual vegetation, our cardboard interpretation of it and digital data, merging into a relaxing but political landscape.
CXM: What are some of your biggest influences, early and current? How do you think it has affected your work?
Kim: Louise Bourgeois was one of my earliest significant influences. Her capacity to create safe spaces for herself in order to deal with her personal traumas is something I still get inspiration from. Currently, I am amazed by the aesthetic and concepts of the Black Power Naps, an installation work by Fannie Sosa and Navild Acosta. They built a very needed resting space to address social issues, placing their work at the intersection of art and politics. My practice has also been deeply affected by the art collective Le Wonder, in Paris, meeting artists like Pierre Gaignard and Thomas Teurlai. They are a strong inspiration to me in the way they use video projection, photogrammetry but also in the way they collaborate in order to elevate each other personally and professionally.
Jamie: In my interests there has always been this dichotomy between the visual arts of drawing, painting, sculpture etc. and the world of performance, dadaism, and avant-garde. I am most energized when these two meet. In short, my development has been informed by a melange of classical and modern masters paired with living in the NY performance art community, and the dadaist anarcho-nihilism of my friends and collaborators in the Cart Dept. and beyond. It has led me to make work concerned with the living moment of here and now, rather than the artifact and concept.
CXM: In your practice, how does the installation work tie up with the medium of performance art?
Kim: In the last years, I was working on installations that are activated by performances: each piece has a passive and active state. It started with Vague Haven at the Wild Embeddings Gallery in 2019, in collaboration with Oya Damla, Kira DesCoudres and M.A.K.S., where we conceived an immersive projected and sonic forest with which performers and the audience could interact. During the same year, Jamie and I collaborated on a project named Submarine Substances at XI Box in France, that we also built from trash and found materials. It was an immersive installation involving video animations, paintings and sculptures that could be triggered both by the performers and the audience. Inviting performers to activate visual arts allows us to create total art pieces that can only exist when we are all present together.
Jamie: I completely agree with Kim, to me performance is a way of activating the 3 dimensions of space within the 4th dimension of time. I feel that this was the biggest success with what we have put together during this residency. The subject matter, focus and overall aesthetic of the artists who performed within the installation was a perfect call and response between the performer and the environment. The works presented were like different faces of the same thing: the experience of life in an environment which is both beautiful and hostile.
CXM: How important is the collaborative process in your art practice?
Jamie: I don’t know if important is the word I would use, but as a part of my practice it is a fascinating and rewarding one. It is an interesting thing to exercise having flexibility. To be able to adapt, change and accept in concert with the flow of another’s thoughts. It can be a challenge for me, but afterwards I am deeply satisfied when together we have reached a place that I know could never have come to be without the collaboration.
Kim: I see collaboration as a way for artists to support each other. Collaboration is a consequent part of my process, I collaborate with other artists but also with scientists on some projects. Recently, I have been working on a VR environment in collaboration with Thierry Cornier and Thibault Pauwels, who are botanists from the Conservatoire National Botanique of Bailleul in France. It allows me to integrate the perspective of scientific truth in the digital garden that I build. Collaborating with others means mainly being able to multiply points of view and resources, which is a great asset.
CXM: How would you like to see your practice develop?
Kim: This past year I have been working on a number of pieces that involve video, VR environment and sculptures with elements to rest and lay on. I would love to be able to create a large scale installation that combines these sculptural and digital elements. I like to think about it as a performance space but also to invite scientifics to present conferences, have open discussion panels, workshops and collective meditations. I would like to make a piece that is an active place for collective thinking and exists both inside and outside of the art sphere.
Jamie: Always more living art, greater in scope and scale, and constantly responsive to the world in which it exists. I’d like to further refine a tone that is brutally honest but ultimately hopeful in its outlook.
CXM: How does it feel to be creating in post Covid New York?
Jamie: I am reminded that the only constant is change. It is everything all at once to be doing this now, from confusing to exhilarating. I think we have all felt art’s absence in our lives during the pandemic, and I am thankful to be here as a part of it all now.
Kim: Yes, it felt like all emotions at the same time. What stays is very much that it feels amazing to be able to spend time together at an art event.
CXM: What’s next for your duo Kim Doan Quoc and Jamie Emerson?
Kim: Jamie is going on tour with Pinc Louds throughout the country this summer. I have a solo show in September at Yotta Iota Gallery in Lille, France this September. We don’t have anything planned as a further collaboration. We’re not always a duo, we just really like each other and collaborating together.
Jamie: Lunch!
About Kim Doan Quoc & Jamie Emerson
photo by Paul Ralu
Kim Doan Quoc is a multi-disciplinary artist from Lille, France, where she graduated with an MFA of visual arts in 2016. Her work ranges from photography, video, immersive installation and projection mapping to writing and performance. Since 2015, her work as a visual artist and a performer has been shown internationally in cities like Budapest (Trafo theater), Paris (Les Ateliers du Wonder), Mexico City (TTT 2018), Berlin (Fashion Week SS2018), New York City (Queens Museum).
Her body of work uses various representations of the body, gender and landscape to question the relationship between mxnkind, technology and the non-human. She often collaborates with other artists to explore these notions.
photo by Lucas Kane
Jamie Emerson was born in 1991 to a family of artists. At age 19 he moved to New York City and attended classes at the Art Students League of NY where he learned to employ elements of drawing, painting, sculpture, video and performance.
His work is drawn from life, and has included the practices of public sculpture, mural painting, puppetry, street and performance art. He likes interactivity as a means of producing platforms upon which others can create. Jamie has shown work internationally in Mexico City, France, UK, Belgium and throughout NY, including Grace Exhibition Space and the Queens Museum. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
