Member Spotlight: Justin Siji Waddell

For our next NMC Member Spotlight JLS Gangwisch interviewed Justin Siji Waddell, read or hear the conversation below!

Gangwisch, JLS
I’m here today with Justin Seiji Waddell. Would you tell us a bit about yourself, who you are, where are you and what you’re doing these days?

Justin Waddell
I’m an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts here in Mohkínstsis, collonially known as Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I’ve been at the Alberta University Arts, formerly known as Alberta College of Art Design; this is my 17th year. I moved here from Toronto, or Tkaronto, Ontario, where I was born and raised. I went to the Ontario College of Art and Design, York University, and the University of Windsor. How else can I describe myself? I’m Japanese Canadian Nikkei, third generation, which has a lot of influence in my work as well, as Scottish and French Canadian.  That side of my family Is also very much involved in the labor movement in Canada, so a lot of my work deals with working within the labor movement being active within my own unions, also within larger regional and national organizations, towards social justice and equity work.

Gangwisch, JLS
Would you tell us a little bit more about your evolution as an artist,  about your individual practice?

Justin Waddell
I mean, it’s interesting, my parents are, as one might imagine, as a Union person, a bit of socialists. They met in commune, they met at Rochdale College, which was a free school based in the University of Toronto. My mother was a runaway, my father was a university student at Carleton University at the time, and for those who might not be familiar with Rochdale College, I would definitely encourage you to take a look at the history of Rochdale. A lot of really interesting artists and organizations and groups and individuals came out of that experience. Thinking about communities, thinking about communes, my father worked in unions and my mother was an artist.  My father worked for the Screen Actors Guild and ACTRA pretty much my entire life. We did spend some time in Los Angeles when he was working at the Screen Actors Guild, so part of my youth was in the San Fernando Valley in California. 

I grew up around artists in movies, films, and my mom was a mature student so I grew up with her at the Ontario College of Art and Design.   When we moved to LA, she was also going to Cal Arts and UCLA and Pasadena City College. My interest in the arts started around that time, just kind of immersed in it. We moved back to Canada in the mid 90s. I went to the Ontario College of Art and Design like I said, and I became involved with artists run centers.

 In Canada, we have enough profit sector of artist run centers, it’s very extensive, and I became involved in that. I’ve been on dozens of boards, I’ve been the director of a number of galleries, and that kind of came through skateboarding, punk, rock culture DIY, and it’s kind of carried forward to this day. My artistic practice has been heavily influenced by building community.  I think there’s a lot of critique of institutions thinking a lot about structural issues, thinking through systemic change, and I know that that’s language that’s relatively popular now, but I guess it’s just thinking through processes, thinking through evolution, thinking through dynamics and my artistic practice, I think is an expression of that, or at least a sort of investigation of that.

I currently teach drawing, but I’ve also taught across the university.  I teach media art classes, obviously my degrees are in media arts, but the drawing program that we have at the university here is quite interdisciplinary, so it includes things like performance and installation.   We think of drawing more as a sort of a practice, a kind of rapid expression, thinking through line and writing and that could take any number of forms.

Gangwisch, JLS
What does new media art mean to you, and how does that attach to your work?

Justin Waddell
I mean new media is definitely a loaded term, you know, what is what is new? In my undergrad I went through a program called Integrated Media which used to be called PhotoElectric Arts, which I always kind of liked that term, in fact, I almost prefer it.  Integrated media for me was film, video, electronics, we still had robotics, we had holography, which is probably the carryover from photoelectric arts.

This was makes me feel old, I believe I started at the Ontario College of Art in about ‘96 and we were transitioning to digital editing and so we had analog editing as well as digital editing. There was a lot of talk at that time about electricity flow, analog, and really trying to make a differentiation between analog and digital and I think that’s something that has really sat with me for a long time.

When I think of new media, it’s always avant-garde, cutting edge technologies, but it’s always with a certain sort of criticality, a certain sort of thinking, through what these tools might be able to do, what the implications of these tools are. Obviously AI, but I also think about that through labor, I think about robotics through labor, I think about what does it mean to have certain tasks that are automated or become automated and how can we adapt to that and in some ways possibly even resist it if it’s necessary. But new media- I guess it’s just the newness, you know, constantly changing, constantly evolving and constantly trying to respond to that.

Gangwisch, JLS
What current or upcoming projects would you like to tell us about?

Justin Waddell
I’ve actually really slowed down my art practice in the last couple of years.  I had a couple exhibitions, obviously, just before the pandemic and I was coming out of a sabbatical that I had in Japan and a few exhibitions in Japan and when the lockdowns occurred, a lot of that was put on hold or paused or cancelled entirely.

Prior to that, I was definitely thinking a lot about my relationship to Japan, my family, thinking through diasporas. Even just thinking about scale, I was really interested in the Earth, which sounds kind of cheesy, but light hitting the earth. I was working on a number of different projects that I wanted to have in remote locations, thinking through time zones and the rotation of the earth and scales much larger than ours, feeling the earth moving, listening deeply, these sorts of things. I was very interested in moments where the sun might be hitting where I am here, but also hitting another place on Earth, thinking through sunsets and time. I think I got lost in that during the pandemic, as one does, but you’re self-isolating, so there’s that. 

Somewhat jokingly, but it’s quite serious thinking about inventors who were killed by their own inventions, was something that I had been thinking about for a long time. Again, sort of through a joke, I think it’s a funny one liner, but it’s also thinking through these ideas of progress, thinking through accidents, thinking through histories, things that we build for ourselves, monuments or the anti-monument, et cetera.     At the time I was doing a lot of work with the history of the atomic bomb and the people who are working on that and people who were affected by that in Turtle Island here, but also what happened when the bombs were dropped. I think through that quite a bit, through science and war- It’s kind of getting dark now, I apologize, but those are the things I’ve been working on. 

So, through the pandemic, as there’s a bit of a pause for me in my practice and research, it was just a lot more reading, I was doing a lot more community work, and I started just doing more work with examining phenomena. I was watching a lot of science experiments on YouTube, things about gravity, things about how sunsets work, and then kind of building models of some of those as well and being very excited about that again. So, thinking about mathematics and sound and music, thinking about chords and harmony and disharmony, and, you know, building little sunsets out of milk, fat and water with some light bulbs to try to think about interference. Just working through that kind of stuff and so they might manifest into a larger project, but that’s in development.

Gangwisch, JLS
Where can we follow your work, any online platforms do you share your work on?

Justin Waddell
Yeah, actually, no, any of my new media friends always have an issue with me. I’ve built a number of websites, I used to work building websites, and then I just at one point deleted my entire online profile or at least gated it. So, for a while I was really into Tumblr, and I just had Tumblr feeds, I had multiple Twitter accounts and really, just basking in the anonymity of the internet, same thing with Instagram accounts. You can follow me on Instagram, you can send me an email at justinwodell.ca and I’ll give you access to the website.

I think part of that was also just teaching, of course having a website is really great for students and other people to see your work. I think I work on a scale where I’m interested in having relationships with people and having conversations with people.  So yeah, send me an email and I’ll send you some stuff. It felt really one-   way before and it felt very difficult to see myself in such a singular way online, it just didn’t seem appropriate, so long-winded answer- I’m on Instagram.

Gangwisch, JLS
Thank you so much for being here with us today.