Collective Storytelling Q & A

The upcoming show, Collective Storytelling, taking place at Hashtag Gallery explores the connection between collector and object, and the way in which collected objects speak of their collector. I was asked a few questions by curator, Erika Balint, in order to give further context to my collection of matches which she is curating as part of the show.

Erika Balint: Which was the first object in the collection?

Krystina Plante: My collection didn't start out with just one set of matches, but rather a round white cookie tin filled with about thirty vintage matchbooks and matchboxes. My mother had bought them for me at a garage sale one summer, knowing that I would find them interesting.

EB: What are the governing factors of the collection? What makes the cut?

KP: Volume is the governing factor which has taken over this collection, rather than any sort of strict specificity. Any set of matches which are bought, found, or given to me make the cut, regardless of whether they be damaged, plain, empty, or a duplicate.

EB: Do you have a favourite?

KP: I find the matchboxes most favourable. I enjoy the bulkiness of them, and the way they rattle around loudly inside. I like that when you slide open the box the heavy smell of sulfur that has been trapped inside quickly bursts out. I like that the matchsticks are made from wood rather than paper, sometimes with an exciting warp to them, and that you can take each one out and lay them on the table, making shapes and spelling out words and building little stick huts and towers, before dutifully putting each one back into their little box, back to bed.
Of all of them, my absolute favourite is my "Scottish Bluebell" matchbox. An immensely tight halftone illustrates large Bluebell flowers dancing around a scroll containing the name, and a lush Scottish mountainside smothered in blue and violet flowers adorns the background. The striker on the side of the box has been applied by hand rather than machine, with an imperfect brushstroke of coarse sand. The match-heads have been dipped in the brightest shade of indigo, and the box oddly notes "average contents 43". The back of the box illustrates a game: "Match Play. No. 3 In A Series of Eighteen. Using 8 matches make 2 squares and four triangles".
I desperately wish that I had all eighteen matchboxes in the series.

EB: Over what period of time have they been collected?

KP: I have been collecting matches for seven years now. In the beginning I wasn't in the pursuit of adding to the collection of matches that I had been given. I was satisfied in simply coveting the ones that I had. It wasn't until four years later that I started avidly expanding my collection; first by accident when a discarded matchbook on the sidewalk caught my eye, then occasionally when I bought cigarettes at the dépanneur, and now habitually seeking them out.

EB: What types of feelings or memories do the objects evoke?

KP: Some matches in my collection evoke great feelings of nostalgia. I remember the person who have them to me, the events of that particular day, or the significant things that were going on in my life during that period.
Others, mainly the vintage matches, evoke my own fabricated narrative surrounding their origin, previous owner, the countries, states or provinces that they travelled through in somebody else's coat pocket.
The one that provokes my imagination the most is the wide white matchbook with a silver embossment that reads, "Lori and Mike. June 21, 1986". I often wonder who this couple is that was married two years prior to my birth? Are they still together? Have I unknowingly interacted with either of them at some point in my life? At the library? On the bus? Do they live in one of the houses that I repeatedly pass on my bicycle? Did they die in an awful car wreck years ago? Did Lori have a scandalous affair with another man and later divorce Mike? Do any of their wedding guests still have this keepsake? Will I ever know?

EB: How would it feel to lose or part with them?

KP: To part with this collection would be to part with the most loved paintings hung in a salon. They have each taken on a role as art piece rather than object. I appreciate each one for it's unique weight, smell, imagery, font, dimension, colour choice, the quality of halftone when looked upon closely, and the stories that they seem to evoke. I gaze upon them with the same wonderment and adorn-full eye as I do the artwork hung about my home.

EB: How/where do you house or store the objects?

KP: My matches are housed in a large hurricane glass, placed atop my work desk in my bedroom. Here they serve as constant visual inspiration. As I collect new matches I drop them into the hurricane glass, always leaving my favourite ones on top for my enjoyment.

XPACE Summer Resident - Krystina Plante - Interview

XPACE Summer Resident - Krystina Plante

Thursday, 2 August 2012

Krystina Plante’s experience completing a 4 year art program at Central Technical School helped to give her a head start for her printmaking career at OCAD U.  She enjoys photography and sculpture, but printmaking is the one thing she “craves doing.”  I was fortunate enough to witness her passion for print while she completed her residency here at XPACE.

 Jessica Cappuccitti:  What about printmaking do you love the most?

 Krystina Plante:  I think it’s a little bit of a couple of things – the fact that it is so technical, it’s a skill that you have to learn – there’re so many steps and there’s a lot of chemistry, you have to follow things like a recipe.  I like that it’s not just something you do on a whim; you really have to study and practice at it and then you become good and then it’s easy. But I like that it challenges you. There are so many things you can do in printmaking – you can combine it with so many other art forms, so it’s very versatile. 

 JC:  What method of printmaking do you use most often?

 KP:  My favourite printmaking mediums are lithography and intaglio and most recently I got into book-binding which was something new for me that I learned at OCAD.  My entire thesis was miniature books filled with prints.  There were over 400 prints in all these books and it was on hoarding and collecting.  Something else that I only learned recently that draws me to printmaking is the multiple.  The fact that you can have so many of one thing... I think as my practice continues that is something that is recurring in my work.  For example, in my thesis it was about excess and bulk.  Now with the project that I am working on here I am realizing that it is about multiples again.  A single thing takes on a whole new meaning when it is multiplied.

 JC:  Tell me more about the project that you are working on here at XPACE.

 KP:  I brought my blue print to show you (see photo).  I am mapping my genealogy – it’s like a family tree.  The reason I’m doing it is because a lot of my family has been adopted or displaced so most of them I haven’t met, or I know very little about them.  For example, I just found out that my grandfather has 4 siblings and I just found out his mother’s name... Because he fled Latvia because of the war when he was 9 and he hasn’t seen his family since so it’s not something he ever wants to talk about.  There’s so much I don’t know... my grandmother has 15 brothers and sisters who all live in England, most of whom I haven’t even seen photos of...  My mom, my uncle and my aunt were all adopted from different families... There’s just a lot of unknowns so that’s why I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while.

KP:  So the work is going to have lighting around the core.  That will be my immediate family unit which is small. This part which will be a combination of portraits and text for the names and is going to be backlit so it will be brighter. It will recede to darkness for the people that I don’t know. Because I am left in the dark with the rest of it...

JC:  How long has this been something that you have wanted to do?

KP:  I’ve wanted to touch on the subject matter for a while, but I only really thought of this idea after I got this residency which gave me the opportunity to make this big body of work that is funded and exhibited.  By the time I came to my orientation for the residency I had this idea in mind and got started on it.  I’ve been really strapped for time though because it’s been a lot of trouble-shooting.  For example, I started making all of the boxes in wood and had completed 14 of them before realizing that it wasn’t going to work because I was using 1 x 6’s which people usually buy for making fences and don’t care if the wood is warped.  I went through the entire bin and their new shipment - they were all warped, so unless I wanted to spend about 20.00 on one plank of pine (which I wouldn’t have been able to afford) I had to change my materials.

JC:  Did you construct each of the 14 wooden boxes yourself?

KP:  Yes, I made them at my dad’s house and used his tools... he hovered for a bit just to make sure I wasn’t going to break anything!  So the construction of those really set me back in my timeline.  I think I’ve tried to tackle something pretty big and budgeting time is always kind of hard.

 JC:  I think it’s almost poetic that the project you are working on is about family and here are your mom and dad, helping you put it together.  Does that make it mean more to you?

 KP:  I think it does because as much as it disappoints me that there’s so much about my family that I don’t know, I’m really lucky with the central core group that I have because we’re so close.  So I think it does reinforce that even more – having that help and knowing that these people are there for me.

 JC:  How do you see this residency affecting your future work?  Is this a project that you plan on building on? 

 KP:  I think that it might be a project that I will revisit down the road when I have unlimited time to maybe do some tweaks just to further it even more and maybe contacting those people that I don’t know and building those relationships and including that in the body of work.  But I think for now, this is a good opportunity for me to gain some exposure and interact with the people here at XPACE who are such an asset to me because they are trying to help out.  As opposed to a lot of other places that don’t see students as artists but as “artists in training,” which is really frustrating.  I think it’s great to have people that are supporting those of us that other people don’t want to.  It’s a really great opportunity to network and explore new things.

JC:  What are you going to take away from this residency?

 KP:  This residency has really acted as a learning curve for me. Learning how to think on my feet and how to quickly recover when something doesn't work as planned (it's been trial and error almost every step of the way for me so I've gotten better at troubleshooting), budget money, and more importantly budgetting time! One month is not a long time at all if you have ambitious plans and I know now more than ever that if you give yourself one day to do something it's going to take two!

 JC:  Any future plans or projects?

 K:  Yes, I do have a project that I am going to be starting soon.  It’s stemming from my thesis body of work which was, Life In Bulk.  At our thesis show and at the grad show I had a tall drawer unit where people could add to my collection by leaving whatever they wanted.  Some people would come back with something to leave; some people would just leave whatever they had in their pockets.  It is completely full now.  I am going to be working on a really long body of work which is a book and it’s going to be binding the narratives in all of those objects – my own narrative about who each of the objects came from and what purpose it served... So it’s going to be a long, ongoing body of work.

http://xpaceculturalcentre.blogspot.ca/2012/08/xpace-summer-resident-krystina-plante.html

A very special thank you to XPACE for this opportunity, and to Jessica Cappuccitti for the wonderful interview and documentation.