Jake Joy Mulyk and Vicki Myers
Jake Joy and Vicki Myers both work in different mediums and subject matter from each other, yet when they come together to collaborate, it all works! They expand each other’s ways of thinking and expression. They often work outdoors creating things together with natural material. For this collaboration they will be creating a sculpture with natural and recycled materials and anything could happen. They are interested in exploring the relationship between art and waste / art and climate change / artists and answers.
Jake Joy Mulyk
I get my inspiration from ‘place’. What I choose to focus on and what projects are conjured up, reflect how I am experiencing my current environment.
In the city I paint bright, vibrant cityscapes. This is reflected in my Big City Living Series that uses vibrant colour and resin for effect. I choose busy, layered intersections vs. a quiet back alley. When I lived in a small town, I saw how history and tradition ran as a quiet brook through everything. This is reflected in my Small-Town Living Series that combine old photos with paint and ink drawing.
During my residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, I worked with local natural material such as corn husks and bamboo to make a costume and a created a street performance that was filmed. The Oaxacan people love their large audacious sculptures which they dance through the streets in parades for special occasions of all sorts.
When I was living next to a graveyard and doing gorilla gardening, I built sculptures out of branches and grass in the likeness of abstracted body parts and placed them around the site. Taking a natural site and growing things, plus this contrast of graves and a focus of death, which did not disturb me.
Today, I am immersed in the studies of my master’s in psychology. I have been exploring with more abstracted imagery. I am in the process of studying mark-making, layering and textures with encaustic and other mixed media to communicate my emotions and thoughts in abstracted form.
In the residency I will be further exploring mark-making through journaling. I am combining my physical experience of being in the city along with a layer of abstracted emotions and thoughts that interplay with my physical world.
King Eddie
Mixed Media, 11”x14”, 2021
I Saw it Coming
Encaustic/Mixed media, 9”x12”, 2020
Urban Forest
Mixed Media, 20”x30”, 2021
Vicki Myers
As a teacher, I feel my role in the community is to set a space for people to come together and create without fear. As an artist, my interest is in exploring the imagination and all areas of surrealism. To make art is to be able to express yourself without explaining or answering to anyone but yourself. What happens when we share our art is also part of the process.
People, environment and the situation of how they relate interest me. Taking a surrealist approach in my work I like to play in an imaginative world. This allows me to create uninhibited. I work with any material I can … wood, paint, bones, fibre, landscapes. In the land art, I use rock, sticks, sand, coal, and whatever else I find in the area I’m working. This process is very site determined unless I’m doing and installation. “Sticks, Stones,& Bones” was an installation done in 2017.
In other projects have used bones to build animals, people (boneheads), or just the painted bones. They have the most beautiful shapes to work with. Entangling these elements is the direction my work is taking.
Art takes all forms.
Moon Bunnie
felt painting, 5”x7”, March 2021
Ka Ka
Bones, clay, stones, 10”x8”, 2018
Scream Creativity
Acrylic on Canvas, 36”x36”