Walter Scott, “A Somatic Conversion”, 2013 – photo by Barb Choit
I try to be really opaque about my use of camouflage now; I don’t really like to talk about it. It can mean a lot of things. People have approached me about the camo with different readings, about class, allocation of resources, complex narratives, institutional critique, all of that. And I guess my not talking about it is a part of it existing now. I’ve given people a hard read of why I used it in the first place, and it mostly alienates people. I feel like I’m just gonna sit back and let the camouflage do the work it wants to do, rather than me force a reading onto it. I think that’s what it wanted to do the whole time.
Walter Scott is really great. I appreciate reading him speak at length about Wendy and his artistic practice.
I actually try to keep the crux of Wendy’s work really ambiguous. I like the idea of her shape-shifting practice – one day she’s a writer, the next she’s a sculpture artist. Her practice is hard to pin down, so it keeps the focus on the personal. It also opens up a chance to create narratives and make connections between different practices, like, painters who think they don’t have anything in common with video artists. More generally, and especially since moving to Vancouver, I see people from a lot of different mediums who feel this pressure of creating work with an undercurrent of academia, or at least, work that can be framed in that context. And so, Wendy constantly having these methodological conversations with herself, her medium could still be anything.
<3 <3 WALTER <3 <3