Interview with Jo-Z
Josephine Joy Garoufalis
Wanda: So, usually we ask a little bit about your background with arts…how did you start making art?
William: Yeah, introduce yourself, basically.
Jo-Z: Okay, I am Jo-Z or Josie or Josephine, or Josephine Joy, many names…I started making art…well, for me it was weird because you know how when you are a kid and you paint, and you draw, and I just never stopped doing that. I realized I could just spend my life doing that. It always feels like it’s playing.
Wanda: So, you started drawing when you were younger?
Jo-Z: I remember I had this plastic easel, watercolors and shitty printing paper and I would work on that. I had this funny crochet beret that I would wear too, and I would say “I am an artist!” and yeah, I just kept painting. I used to write stories. I grew up religious so I’d write Jesus songs. I feel like painting was my first medium though, that I took serious anyway.
Wanda: Did you have a designated space where you’d paint?
Jo-Z: When I was very little it was my kitchen table. When I was twelve I started going through a lot of issues and my parents didn’t really know what to do, so my mom took me to the dollar store and she got me all of this paint and she was like “just paint your walls” so I painted my walls. Whenever people would come over we would all paint on my walls together so my bedroom was an intimate safe space where I could not only make other art but make my space that as well.
Wanda: At that time, did you start organizing your space around the idea of making art?
Jo-Z: I feel like that was always in me, the idea of curating. I always liked hanging things up on my wall or having my ceramics placed a certain way, or even before my mom let me do that [painting on walls] I wrote on my last wall Beatles’ lyrics in sharpie. She was not happy about that. I always liked being alone in my room and making it a very a magical place, and that was always a very artistic place to be in.
Wanda: How do you organize your space in order to accommodate that nowadays?
Jo-Z: It’s funny cause I sort of noticed when I was working in the studio at school, that I need to feel a certain flow around me. I feel like wherever I’m working I have to be conscious of the vibes that are working there. I like to work in my bed a lot because it’s comfortable. If I’m working in the studio, I have to organize all of the furniture around me so I can feel like energy is flowing a certain way. I like to have a few tables set up where I can have my paint, or on the floor, I just dump out all of the colors that I like..I guess really messy. There are some things that goes in certain boxes and what not, but when it comes to the material I use, it gets very abstract in this layout. But it just feels very comfortable for me, however things are placed.
Wanda: When you were looking for your current studio space, what were your considerations?
Jo-Z: Somewhere that it was big enough to work and live in. This is the biggest room I’ve ever had and for me to have a bedroom where I can also have as a space…floorspace mostly, is really important to me. When I look at a space I think about where the shelves are gonna go, where is my alter going to go, and where my music stuff is going to go, and I feel like this room worked out really well. Just the amount of space and what kind of charm the room has too. I pulled an all-nighter at school a few weeks ago for a painting and I was in that studio all night working for like 10 hours and I feel now that when I go to that room, like me and that room have a special connection, we know each other very intimately and have a different relationship which is kind of weird. But yes, I can feel that way about a space.
Wanda: How long does it take you to start feeling some sort of connection to the space that you are making art?
Jo-Z: I feel like it is really easy because I get into my own kind of flow. I feel like things have to be set-up for me [so] I can access all of the tools that I need. My paper needs to be laid out, all of my pencil crayons can be all around it, I don’t know, but as long as my working space feels comfortable enough for me to be there for a while, I get really into my own space so it doesn’t take too long.
Wanda: Having been through the experience of building a studio space for yourself and building these different connections with different studio spaces, do you have any advice or warnings to help artists who are starting to create their own space?
Jo-Z: A lot of comments I get about when I make art is that people comment that my work is very free, especially while I am making it, but when I make art I feel really safe, so I think that people should install [create] a place that is literally safe, with proper ventilation and what not, but a place where you feel like you can play and be a kid again. I once had a painting teacher and I heard him critique another student’s work and he said “if this paint is about love then you need to surround yourself with all the things you love, you need to embody that emotion!” and for me, my studio feels like a safe space.
William: How does that differ from the studio at school? Do you feel safe there or would you have to make it feel like that?
Jo-Z: I have to customize my area but I feel like I carry a confidence whenever I go into other places while making art, like I take my safe space with me, but I feel like a lot of it grew while being alone in my room.
William: So, do you think you can work in like a multitude of spaces and not just your one singular space here?
Jo-Z: Oh yeah, I can work anywhere. Also because I’m not really afraid of people watching me do things. I’m really not intimidated by that. In fact, sometimes I become aware of myself and I just like what is happening and if people see me working I don’t mind because I like working.
William: Would you say that it is maybe because if you are in the zone and it is a feeling of “I don’t really care about what is going on- [around me]”
Jo-Z: Yeah, yeah, I am in an absolute flow. My roommates were hanging out with me the other day when I was making wands and I had a whole conversation with them. The whole time I was pretty much dissociated. The whole time we were talking; you got the best of me. I was still there conversing, but I was not actually there.
William: Right.
Jo-Z: I was in a flow.
William: It is interesting that you can multi-task that, anyways though.
Jo-Z: Yeah.
William: Most people can’t have a conversation and disassociate like that.
Jo-Z: It has taken me a lifetime of practice in disassociation!
Wanda: That’s actually pretty cool that you can carry your space, that your space can be a state of mind.
William: Do you think that maybe, another way to phrase this is, do you need a recurring space to ground yourself so that you can always come back to it and then feed off the energy?
Jo-Z: That is definitely nice to have, I feel like I’ve built that relationship with my house and with my room and with that studio space, but I do not feel like it is necessary. It is like when you make a friend with someone, it is nice to have that friendship to go back to, but you do not need just that one friend for everything.
William: Right, makes sense.
Wanda: Did you have any inspirations while you were building your studio?
Jo-Z: Yeah-
Wanda: Tell us!
Jo-Z: I really like colorful things, I don’t like wearing a lot of colors but I like having it around me. I like having posters, a lot more of other artists’ works like local artists, but I have some other posters like Chagall over there. I have my own paintings which feels narcissistic…
William: That’s fine.
Jo-Z: I have a lot of pornography that I like to put around my room, or like erotic photos. I like things that have their own stories to them, I collect a lot of creepy dolls, or things from anywhere that I find them, or cool rocks, and I feel like they all bring their character to this space, so it is really nice working with them here.
Wanda: If you could change one thing about your space, what would it be?
William: If you had full omniscient power.
Jo-Z: Definitely would be nice to have a sink in here and more wall space. Wall space would be great to work with, so I can hang up big paintings or more work in the process.
Wanda: How do you accommodate your performance art practices with the space?
Jo-Z: When it comes to my musical performance; I really just practice in this corner right here. I have a little ritual where I will plug in everything there and I’ll have all of my pedals on the floor, or I’ll sit on my chair and just be facing this corner. When it came to the work that I did for the Boundaries show: “Where is the line?”. I didn’t really practice. I just made up a concept of what is going to happen, because you can’t really practice how to have an interactive piece and I think that was also something that made it way more vulnerable, that people were able to feel during the performance.
Wanda: Do you feel as though you work better in a situation of controlled chaos or neat tidiness in your space?
Jo-Z: A little bit of both. Even when things are messy they are messy in a way that I understand them…it’s kind of like when you have clothing all over your floor and you are like “this is the dirty clothing and this in the clean clothing” even though to anyone else it looks like total mess. I really love having a clean space but I kind of the whole Yin and Yang relationship, things getting misplaced and things getting put back together, doesn’t really bother me. Just in terms of feeling that I have enough space. Usually I like cleaning up after an art project but that’s usually after art is made. I guess it doesn’t really affect me as much, as long as the mess is contained in a way that I can understand it.
Wanda: What is the prevailing emotion you experience when you are here? If you had to sum it up to one emotion.
Jo-Z: Connected. I feel like things in my space know me and I know them and I don’t really feel afraid or misplaced, I feel like it is a very hopeful space to be in and it never gets boring
I don’t get bored because I have my instruments, I have my art, I have my bed, I have my laptop, and I have all of my witchcraft stuff. It is like having my own playbox. It feels fulfilling.
Wanda: What do you use the most in your space?
Jo-Z: Like object wise?
William: Yeah.
Jo-Z: I’d say I use this corner a lot. I use those shelves because that’s where all of my stones and tarots are, so I either use my musical instruments, my witchcraft stuff or really since this is also my bedroom and I feel like getting dressed, I feel like everything is play, making art and getting dressed. I don’t realize at all that I will put something on then I’ll think that is not me enough and then I’ll put on everything I own. I will leave the house looking totally ridiculous to other people but it feels right, so I would say that because of that my most attended to area is over there where I keep my earrings because I wear different plugs, which are usually stone every day, those are also colorful and I like that.
Wanda: Universally, what do you think is a must for any studio space?
Jo-Z: Hmm…Could you rephrase it, perhaps?
William: What do you think for any form of discipline, or even throughout all of your disciplines, what do you think is essential to art making in general rather than a specific discipline. What would you recommend to other artists? Like you need this quality in your space?
Jo-Z: I think that’s really hard to say because I don’t think it is about necessarily the space that you are in or if you have pencils, if you have sticks that you can burn and turn it into charcoal. I think that creativity and making a space to make art in is really about invention. I feel like anyone can have those capabilities if they want to make art. They can turn any space into their studio. You know when stoners turn into engineers the moment that they need to find a way to smoke? ‘We have this apple’, you know?! Same thing with art. If you are determined enough you are going to customize things to make them work.
William: So I guess not being afraid.
Jo-Z: Being boundless. I know people who will take a book from a thrift shop and they will dress out the pages and suddenly it’s a sketchbook. There’s really no limits to making art and when you realize that; you can work with anything, anywhere. And that’s the thing that I keep learning through different ways, throughout time and it is super exciting. Seeing other artists make use of creative spaces, creative tools, and inventions; seeing how boundless they can be is absolutely inspiring.
I guess it is about allowing yourself to do things, because people might be like “Oh yes, just let go” and that’s hard to make yourself let go. For me I consider it more like giving yourself permission to explore and break rules that people have told us. “You can’t use a paint brush like that!”, “You can’t use the back of it to scratch on the canvas!”, “You can’t make your studio a space that is tiny”. None of that is really real.
