JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
BRYCE KANBARA: I just installed my portion of a two-person exhibition with Lillian Michiko Blakey who is a Japanese Canadian sansei (third generation), as I am. Lillian’s work is about her JC identity and the impact of the World War 2 internment of Japanese Canadians on their families and community. My part of the exhibition is a companion to her’s; it’s comprised of three community art projects I organized from 2011-2017 which aimed to reach out and involve diverse ethnic communities in Hamilton. They were an attempt to chip away at the insularity which, it seems to me, thwarts interaction and mutual understanding. I am not a photographer. I worked with photographers, Jim Chambers, Masoud Eskandari and Mina Ao. The first, titled 55/58, was comprised of faces of 55 Hamilton artists (a community I know well) on one side, and 58 Hamilton Muslims on the other. The visual separation underlined the fact that the artists (including me) had little or no contact with the Muslims in our city. The second project, Our Place, began with an overly-ambitious plan to photograph a wide range of ethnically diverse families seated around their dining tables at dinner-time. In the end, we documented 19 families (Muslim, Hindu, and one Chinese senior couple) and learned a lot about the importance of relationship-building, patience, and trust. And the third project (which also, coincidentally, included 19 photos) was with urban Indigenous people in their homes. It was called, Tesatawiyat which in Mohawk means, “Come in”, as when someone knocks on your door. Community Art projects such as these, emphasize that process is as valuable as product.
JS: How did doing these projects change you as a person and as a creator?
BK: Cumulatively, these community art projects made me think more deeply about who I am and gave greater context to what I do. They expanded my art practice by taking me out of the of the studio and into the collective fray of the outside world. I’ve been involved in “activist activity” in the Arts community and the Japanese Canadian community for decades, and when “community art” became recognized as an art practice in itself, it presented an effective way to give voice to community issues through collaboration and creative participation with others.
JS: What might others not understand or appreciate about the work you produce or do?
BK: One of my favourite quotes is from painter, Ad Reinhardt: “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.”
JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work?
BK: My scrap-yard sense of aesthetics, my experiences, my evolving perceptions of those experiences, and imagination. I think imagination is an under-used, under-valued component in art these days.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
BK: Finding balance between solitude necessary to think and work, and stepping up to the urgent responsibilities of harmonizing our relationships with family, society and planet.
JS: Imagine that you are meeting two or three people, living or dead, whom you admire because of their work in your form of artistic expression. What would you say to them and what would they say to you?
BK: I would prefer to watch them work – sort of like that well-known film of Picasso seen painting on a transparent panel from the back side so we can watch his intent look and how he changes colours and shapes, directs brush-strokes, hesitates, ponders his next move. I love printmaking. I’d like to sit in the corner of William Blake’s studio as he prints Songs of Innocence and Experience, or watch Goya working on his Disasters of War etchings, or Degas making monotypes of ballet dancers and brothels. I would say thank-you and hope that they found my presence unobtrusive and pleasant enough to be invited to go for a drink.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that helped to make you who you are as a creative artist.
BK: Being fired as curator from the Burlington Art Centre in1993 was a useful revelation to me that institutional attitudes and priorities may not be in alignment with mine, and that I may be better off working from the margins. Mind you, I ploughed through a number of subsequent institutional jobs (and terminations) since then, because they afforded opportunities to do things I could not have done otherwise – such as advocate for artists and promote and write about their work. In 2002 I bought a small storefront building on James St. North and started you me gallery which has allowed me to do what I want, and what I think is best.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?
BK: Art is art, and everything else is everything else.
JS: Please tell us what you haven’t attempted as yet that you would like to do in the arts? Why the delay so far?
BK: Performance art. But that’s rooted in the tendency of post-WW2 born Japanese Canadians like me to want to assimilate and disappear into the mainstream. It’s no accident that until more recent years, Japanese Canadians were not disposed to engage in solo sports or performance careers. We were negatively self-conscious, which mitigates against the confidence necessary to be a good singles performer… tennis player, actor, dancer, singer, musician, magician…
JS: If you could re-live your life in the arts, how would you change it and why?
BK: I am 72 years old, and have neither vision for the future nor the unlived past. Sometimes I’ve wondered if there ought to be more attention to spirituality in my work – but I never saw angels perched in the backyard tree, like Blake did when he was a boy. I think there are discernible rhythms of gesture and thought that run through what I reflect on and produce. I’m grateful that they’ve had time to shape themselves. I like to think my work is an intuitive response to my lived and thinking experience up to now.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
BK: It gives me hope that there are artists around me who continue to make art despite years of under-recognition, who maintain values and lifestyles that require a healthy sense of unconventionality, and either obliviousness or courage. I’m glad I know them. It gives me hope that members of younger generations want to find ways to make art and art-making central to their lives. I’m dismayed by the limitation many people impose on their definitions and appreciation of culture. Raising awareness of the value of art and artists is a challenge that shouldn’t be as hard as it is.
JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create and/or do?
BK: I like that when I’m working mostly from my right brain, time is meaningless, and materials, ideas, techniques flow towards creating something fresh and new — whether it’s visual art, a text, or the coordination of a project. It’s deeply satisfying. I still look forward to waking up the next day to see if what I was working on the night before is as good as it seemed.
JS: In your creative life thus far, what have been the most helpful comments you have heard about your work?
BK: Feed-back from the general public in comments books from various exhibitions over the years. They’re humbling in both positive and negative ways. In 1994, at the invitation of Paul Lisson at Hamilton Central Public Library, I installed a small show of my abstract drywall wall-reliefs in the third-floor gallery area. I hung each of the eight or so works on individual 8×4 ft. sheets of drywall leaning against the wall. I figured it was a pretty smart solution for separating my work from the library’s surrounding visual distraction. Here are some of the written comments in the book: “if someone was paid for that, we are in trouble!” (unsigned); “I think it’s stupid. A toddler could do that garbage. Can’t you do any better than that?” (Rachel); “I hope to see the cluttered leftovers of your recent renovations cleaned up soon. A blank wall would do more for the imagination than this stuff.” (Arlene); “What a chunk of crud, Go back to the shell game in the subway.” (R. Geiger); “GET A LIFE! I could do better while I’m grossly intoxicated.” (M. Gemmell); “By the length of your resume, one would think you had something to say. There should be a camp for phoney’s like you. Stay the f___ away from me.” (G.P. Young); “It is embarrassing to see the lows an artist will sink to achieve commonality with the working man. BRYCE, TRY AND GET A REAL JOB.” (From a real artist).
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising things about you?
BK: a) How patient I can be. b) How impatient I can be.