ZANDI DANDIZETTE

 Zandi Dandizette is a nonbinary interdisciplinary New Media installation artist and cultural worker living and practicing in Vancouver, BC who originates from Portland, OR. They graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design with a Bachelor of Media Arts in Animation (2014). Demonstrating unwavering support for nonprofit arts in British Columbia, Zandi is the Founder and Director of The James Black Gallery (2014-2021), a founding member of Vancouver Artists' Labour Union Co-operative (VALUCO-OP 2019), Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU 2020), and current President of Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC 2020).

Their curatorial projects have included shows with more than thirty artists from nine different countries, ranging from emerging, local to international. Zandi Dandizette likens their medium as space whether 2D or 3D. They use colour, queerness, gender, shape, and line to explore discourse around identity, through immersive interactions via the binary, liminality, communication, and fractal existence. They view it as a base code, and every medium that they learn is a tool to explore this identity-centric world building.

Hi Zandi! Thanks for joining me for Mint Tea. To begin, what’s your favorite tea? If you don’t drink tea, what kind of coffee or drink do you enjoy the most?

The funny thing is, I've actually been drinking a lot of mint tea recently. I reorganized the giant pile of teas that we have at the James Black Gallery and found some really nice mint that's in there. But actually, my favorite is Earl Grey cream.

Could you tell me about your background and your practice?

So, I grew up in Portland, Oregon, I currently live in Vancouver, British Columbia. I grew up very isolated with my father, who was a pastor, and my mother, trying to replicate the nuclear family they never had. So there were no other kids to really interact with. So I think I was very much built into an imaginative spirit, or thinking process. As soon as I got a little bit older and I had access to chat rooms and public school, I got deeply obsessed with how other people work and think, and how to connect and feel a sense of belonging. And I think that's kind of infiltrated in a lot of the ways I do my practice.

Honestly, I refer to myself as like, 4-D, or multi-dimensional, because I like to work in so many different mediums. And if anything, I like to learn a new medium, which will then reinforce the other ones and see if I can do more like interdisciplinary type works. I view myself as an interdisciplinary, new media artist. I went to school for animation, which is why I came up here, and I think that movement, or love and study of people's movements, influences all of my work in that regard. I'd say I make mostly large installations and illustrations.  I'm reconnecting with animation, which has been really nice.

What projects are you working on right now?

I recently made my first wearable arts via VALU CO-OP, which is the Vancouver Arts Labor Union cooperative. It was a face mask with my work on it. That's been really neat. I kind of like to challenge myself and build on my current skills, so seeing how my work can be like seen and read from an outfit standpoint is kind of neat. That particular organization uses ethically re-sourced materials and supports unionized artists being paid fair wages, so it aligns with my values in many ways. Last summer, I made a mural that was 30 feet by 15 feet, and that was an entirely new endeavor for me. And right now I'm building this projection mapping setup on an installation. I'm also doing some risograph drawings, also through VALU CO-OP. We're going to be doing a set of postcards. And it's great because it's in a fluorescent pink and a blue, which is exciting. It's a very particular print process where it's like each color is individually done and overlays over the top of each other, kind of like screen printing.

I am the most familiar with your drawings and installation works, but I know that you also work with many different media. Can you talk about how and why you choose to work with the media that you do?

Some of it has to do with an outlet, like, emotional processing, art therapy, just getting certain ideas down. I think the illustration work is mostly that. And then it's like the illustration work then informs my installation work in some regards. I don't actually know what I'm trying to discuss in the illustration, when I first make it, and then I am able to like step back from it and go, “Oh, whoa, this work means this to me.” And then it informs my other work. As far as the conceptual basis of the other mediums that I work in, those I really like to interplay between digital and physical mediums. So, I've done projections onto paintings, and finding that that balance where the painting can stand alone without the projection, but the projection also doesn't feel like a gimmick on top of it was an interesting process for me. I've also done performance work. I did a DJ set last summer, and I'm not really a very, like, musically inclined or sounds-based person, but it was neat to be like, okay, I can take what I like in this realm and then relate it to this. And then it's like another medium, right? So you can create like a whole world in some regards. And so that's been kind of neat too.

How does working in multiple media affect your practice?

I think it's like each medium gives me a tool in my toolbox to explore the idea further. It's kind of similar to when people are collaging, and creating the same idea multiple times, but with different reference points. And so I have very particular characters that I tend to draw. I’m like, okay, that's what it looks like on a 2d forum, what does it look like in digital space? What does it look like if we could be present around it? What is its presence when you're around it? What is your interaction with it? And so, knowing multiple mediums allows me to find different ways that I can also reflect it to a viewer.  I think, like, my work is best when it is surrounding you, I'm very much into the idea of space. However, it's not necessarily the most saleable or accessible, because you have to be present for it. I don't think I photograph my work very well. But it's neat to be like, okay, here's this installation, how can I distill it into the risograph postcards? How can I speak to this work in this work? So that’s been neat.

Can you talk about any imagery or symbols that you like to work with? I always notice the squiggly lines or spirals that you like to draw.

The spiral character is really interesting because it showed up in my work around 2015, so quite a while ago, and I feel sheepish about it in some regards. I tried to move away from it at one point because I was like, that was my young art, I'm an adult now. And I actually couldn't create, I just lost momentum – that was when I first came up here to go to school for animation – I found myself not really having this creative spirit, and I also left all my old art behind. So I didn't have all the references of like referencing my old work and then like building upon it, right. And I find that it's very important for me to be surrounded by my work to then like, reinforce it in some regards. I found that the meditative quality of drawing spirals over and over again was something that I think was important for that therapeutic element or processing element. But then it also has this Rorschach inkblot sort of feeling to it, where you can't just choose what its facial expression is right? I'm not choosing it, the viewer is choosing it in some regards, based on the way the bodies are posed, and such. Then, the fractal quality of it, I don't know, it feels like it's just like the breaking down into the different possibilities and elements of a being – the multiplicity of “us” in one character.

As far as the consistency of really thinking about, like, geometric versus organic, there's this interplay that's consistently happening. Part of myself wonders if I'm reinforcing the gender binary, in some regards, because it feels like this interplay of gender pushing on itself, with myself connecting to being non-binary. I think there's a lot of reference points with the color, and the back and forth of the societal element that we currently are in. It's this, like, really strong sharp cubes, and then you've got cliffs, and you've got caves, and you've got, like, organic fingers and stuff like that. That's kind of what's showing up there, it's like, the relationships that are forming between us all.

Who is the figure that often shows up on your illustrations? Do your illustrations function as self-portraits, or are they something else?

I think that it depends on each piece. When I'm referring to like some that are more therapeutic, versus thought out concepts, they probably are more self-referential. And sometimes it's almost like, in order to talk about particular struggles or situations, I need to obscure it more from the self in order to be able to share it with others, instead of directly saying this thing has impacted me and who I am. In the past, I would have looked at it in a more logical perspective, but I've recently started to value my feelings and intuition more than maybe I did in the past. I see how important it is to have that vulnerability. There was a particular show that I did called “Considering Constraints” where I was in a suit, and then the suit was also hung up, and the projections of all of these different community participants and their faces became the character of the suit. So it was kind of like, this is all of us, in some regards. I think that internal struggles aren't just our own. We can all relate. We're a collective consciousness in some regards. And so by sharing it, it's like we're all getting to process together.

What do you feel when you’re in the suit? Can you even see through it?

t's a weird experience. Because it's a zentai suit, so it covers my face, it does allow me some separation from the intimate truth that I'm sharing. I wore it in an art fair that I participated in, in New York City. But, all my artwork, the things that I planned on showing, had burnt in a fire that happened in my workshop. I had nothing to show and it was like, why not show up? I really focused also on trying to express the emotions or anguish I'd experienced in that loss. And also by showing up and participating in that fair still, even though, in many ways, no one could communicate with me, and I wasn't necessarily going to be gaining any sort of relationships or contacts from it, but at the very least, I was still holding space for myself in that regard.

What are your favorite colors? Do they make their way into your artworks?

Do they ever? I like to say that there's three parts to my favorite colors. So my favorite color is actually purple, and then I think of pink and blue as two halves to that whole in some regard. I think I like hot pink the most, but as far as different shades of blue, that gets into the fractalling. Actually, I was doing some color research in the past and, and there is like a fractal link of binary relationships to a girl blue, a boy blue, or, what is considered a regal blue and what's considered a tropical blue. So actually, when I think of working and being in these hues, there's still so much to tease apart of them. It doesn't actually feel like I'm constrained, if anything I would say that I possibly had this feeling or need for a sense of control in my life, like, my childhood was very chaotic. I remember going through a goth/emo phase, and it just felt like that was like a sense of insecurity, like, I couldn't really connect to wearing color at all, even though I loved all colors. And then one day, I was like, noticing how people use all these signifiers for their identity around bands and brands and all that kind of stuff, and I didn't feel comfortable taking on those motifs because there's just so much meaning wrapped up in any brands that you put on. Or if you decide to wear flowers, like there's just like too much conceptual heaviness to all that for me. And so I decided as almost my form of subculture to wear purple only. And that was I was like committing to wearing my favorite color and that was it. So I was purple, and then I decided pink and blue were two halves of the whole. And so that's where the colors first started is that they created a sense of like control and safety for me, and maybe an OCD sort of way. And then they started filtering into my artwork, too. I think I found two that related to the different ways in which you've got cool tones and warm tones. And it's still within the same within both colored realms, right? Because you can have a very flashy, bright neon blue, and a very muted pink.  I found that those constraints allowed me to be more playful with it all. And I think, as I moved to university, I theorized it more. So yeah, some OCD, some luck, the system and some art school theorizing. But now it's been about 15 years, and I kind of only own pink, blue and purple things.

An interesting element is that it ended up becoming almost a brand, like I created my own brand. I didn't even think of myself in that way, but quite a few people say that they connect those hues to me, so I've like, embedded myself into their consciousness in that way. It does allow me a lot of freedom to be able to be myself no matter what kind of event I attend or participate in. Some folks, they like to wear really grungy clothes, and then they have to go to a dress up thing and they feel uncomfortable, they're disconnected from themselves, they don't know what to wear. By me not sticking to a particular style, I'm able to flip between them. So it's a constraint, but it also creates more space for comfort, too.

Is there a new medium that you would like to try, or would like to work in more?

I want to get back into the digital realm a bit more. Unfortunately, I smashed my laptop last week. What the heck, what the heck. I had just cleared off all of my files from all of my digital assets, which is really great, because it made it so that wasn't such a loss to do that. I'm hoping to find ways in which to create a world within a world. Like, imagine being an installation in a space, you know, the sounds are composed, smells are composed, and then you also are going into another world within a world. And what if you go in another world in that world? So that layering of realms really excites me.

What do you think is the role of an artist?

Hm, that's a really hard question. I think I touched on it earlier, slightly. That all of our internal struggles are not unique to ourselves, and by sharing them, it creates like an understanding and an inter-relational element of dialogue, and all of us co-processing together, which I think is a really healthy way for us to navigate. I think that the artist, in many regards, is helping support that output of processing because it's not just our individual experience. And politically, like, you have these really intense political times and the artist can be a very political entity to showcase or share that. So I think, in many ways, we're like these nodes in the network that is providing another source of co-processing together.

How do you stay connected to your community?

So I live inside the James Black Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. It's an artist-run center with 17 studio spaces. We have a whole ceramics space, we have our gallery space, and then we have a guest residency room that, pre-pandemic, was used to have other artists from out of town come and visit and connect with the community. So my lived experience, as far as the pandemic goes, in some ways, I'm more isolated than most because I cannot pod with other folks. But in other ways, I'm less isolated, because the artists who come here to use their studios are continuously engaging me. And the work that I do is always about bridging connections and creating partnerships and relationships.

Beyond my work at the JBG, and running it, I'm also the president of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centers. So that is another network. What that means is that all of the artist-run centers in British Columbia have a group together where they have a member from their organization attend. And they together choose ways in which they advocate for artists rights, and look for ways in which we can share resources and build better relationships between each other. So the JBG is like a small community within Vancouver, and then PAARC is a provincial relationship.

And VALU CO-OP, as I said, is a group that does a lot of printmaking, and specifically screen printing, and t shirts, and masks, and buttons, and also stickers. And then, they also do have some graphic design and video services as well. But the idea is to support artists between their other things. With CO-OP, where we all collectively own the organization together, we all have a say in its, its creation and being. For example, I'm about to take three month leave from CO-OP, and I'm not going to lose my job by stepping back because there are other people to fill that space. No one person is the sole important aspect of that, and that's a really great way to form, I think, an anti-capitalist business model that supports all the workers first instead of the business. VALU CO-OP also cofounded something called the Arts and Cultural Workers Union. So it's a union for artists specifically, and so we're bridging that out as well. It's all these ways of supporting artists and building their ways of connecting to each other. By participating in all that I'm just fully always in community.

Can you tell me more about James Black Gallery, and how it started?

Actually, there was a collective before the James Black Gallery, called Gropp’s Gallery. This building was a boarded up building at that time, and they got the owners to agree to let them use it, and that they would fix it up, and they kind of turned it into a pretty functional space. I moved into that collective when it was falling apart, and I never meant to take up any sort of leadership position.  If anything, when it fell apart, I just wanted to throw one show because I thought we were all getting evicted. And that show was called Polyphonics and it happened in 2014. The idea was really about seeing if we could infuse this energy into the space. I think we had 60 or 100 applications to the show. This is my very first time throwing something and, and I did a lot of like really creative advertising for it. We had 35 artists participate, people mailed work from other countries. We filled the whole space, we had installations, I wanted it to be not just a 2-D experience, making sure that there were multiple reasons to get people who wouldn't usually engage art to actually come and burst their bubble. I do like the chaos of that, and all eight of us who lived here at the time even opened up our bedrooms and had installations in our rooms. That was my very first time doing something, and I thought that was it, and then we got a lease and it kind of took off from there.

The reason we named it the James Black Gallery was actually to pay homage to the previous collective and all the archival work that they had done about the location, because the building is from 1889. James Black is actually the builder of the house, he was a carpenter who built the house back in 1889. He never lived in it, but is also paying homage to the people who were here before us, thinking about the ways in which we all are building on top of each other. In some regards, we're supporting each other, and it's like all of these people's experiences in the past make what we have today. It also is like a stuffy white man name, and people love having it on their resumes because it sounds really fancy. And then also it tricks people who would never come to a space like this to come to a space like this.

How does your curatorial work influence your artistic practice?

I get to learn about new mediums through folks in the guest residencies. I got to learn about a particular material that is used to make the reflective surfaces on roads, and I was able to replace the sugar that I was using in my installations before with that material instead. I learned from different thought processes, different material choices. I also get to show work of artists that I really love. It was very exciting to have Ruby Gloom, from Hong Kong, come and stay here for two weeks and show the game that she had made, which was very interesting. It was about the attachment of fans, and fandom, and being overwhelmed, and them always just surrounding you and taking pictures of you, because that was her experience with her internet fame. Then she had her fans attending her show about how the fans were too intense. I was like, galaxy brain. So I get to have experiences like those, where people whose work that I admire and their thought process, I get to witness them working, and the idea that I can get to support them in their path in their career as well as is really, really neat. And I get to explore maybe topics that I don't think I myself want to touch or engage in, by being able to curate them

What’s your favorite tool?

I really like Micron pens. The ink that's used in them, you can actually still draw and paint on top of them, and then you can draw on top of that again, so it's not like you use like a watercolor or gouache, and it'll spread. Another thing is, when I found gouache, I was really happy. Because it was that in-between paint and watercolor, and I wanted that flat color. I also like this fabric dye that I use in my paintings, because it's such specific hues that I don't really get otherwise. There's this dayglo pink, I actually used it in a resin once. And I guess my iPad right now is doing nice things, because I can be messy when I art, and having the ability to just put it all away, it's a great travel situation, right?

What is the space where you do your work?

One thing about me that drives anyone who gets close to me nuts is that I have terrible work-life boundaries. Because I live in a space that as soon as I leave my bedroom, people are going to try to have a mini meeting in the hallway. I almost have like a brain where there's like a display set that comes up, maybe it's because I'm a Virgo. I walk down the hall, like, this thing needs to be done, this thing needs to be done, this thing needs to be done. I kind of get a little overwhelmed, I'm not gonna lie. Specifically during the pandemic and scatterbrained I leave my bedroom at night to go get a glass of water, and I come back an hour later, because I would have done six other random tasks, or half-done them. So yeah, I'd say my favorite workplace is actually my bed, because otherwise it's like, “Oh, there's all these other things to do.” But it's also so comfortable. I have this big, round bed, giant windows that are north facing, and a heating pad on the bed, plus a bubbly water machine. Like where am I going to go? A coffee house? No. So there's that, I’ve made it too comfortable.

Do you listen to music or podcasts when you work? What do you like to listen to?

I don't listen to podcasts. Most recently, I do seem to put Star Trek on in the background. As of January I have gotten into Star Trek, which anytime that was on TV as a kid I would like be like, this is so terrible, and I love it now. I just was just immature, I wasn't ready for it. Anyway, Star Trek, or I really like the background sounds of the Legend of Zelda series. Sometimes techno, sometimes chiptunes, sometimes ambient, DJ sets, soulful music. It's like whatever I accidentally tap into, and then I deep dive it. But I'd say like Zelda and Star Trek have this like core comfort. The great thing about Star Trek is that it ends within that episode. I find with any series, let's say I start a series that's provocative, I will probably spend that entire day watching it, and I will not do anything else.

Do you have any ritual that helps you get into the zone?

I have never been a good habit maker. The only good habit that I've built is wearing pink, blue, and purple. It is a ritual, but it's so built in that it’s just second nature. I've been trying to make sure that I leave my room and have breakfast downstairs. Like, this is work mode, you've left your space, maybe you go back to your space, but at least you've started your day. When you're self-directed in your life, and you're the leader of everything, it can be very dangerous, because no one can tell you to have a schedule. And I like to have like multiple beverages. Here's a juice, and here's the water.

How do you know when you are finished with your artwork or a body of work?

Sometimes, when the deadline is there.  In the past, I would prioritize everyone else's stuff before my own, so I was finding that the only time I would make like a large piece of work, like an installation type thing was with a show at the end of it. I would apply to shows so that then there was a deadline for me to actually achieve it. I don't think I'm very good without deadlines on things. How do I know how it's done? I think it's just like, you look at it and you know.

Who are your favorite practicing artists?

There's Connor Catalano in New York City, who is like really playing with hyper-masculinization, but then also the queerness of femininity with that, and doing projections and installation space type things as well as a digital work. And then Bex Ilsley in the UK, always love her work, the interplay of multiple mediums. I think whenever someone has like a strong visual style, and is trying to figure out how to use each element to develop the concept even stronger, that's when I start to be more attuned with it. And then for installations, Pip & Pop, from Australia.

What gives you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach?

New ideas, collaborative spirit, being inspired by others. I really recognized this hard when I went somewhere called Lobe Studio. Lobe is a 35 channel, multi-speaker room. It has speakers in the floors and all the walls and the ceiling. And it has a whole system where it can play a sound piece throughout all of them. So you feel it and you hear it all the different directions. You wouldn't think that's like, this masterful experience, but oh my goodness, it was something. It was very mind-blowing. The way that they treat it is very focused on the sound – they dim the lights, and you can either lie down and listen, or you can sit in chairs, they have three different little seating areas, and you can have a glass of wine. And the room is quite large, it could fit like 30 people if you wanted to. That blew my mind, the idea of sound in that way. Actually, the JBG is partnering with them on a project right now.

https://www.bluep.ink | @zandidandizette