Bootlegging through the creative wilds with Visaya Hoffie

Visaya Hoffie graduated from Queensland College of Art, Brisbane in 2017, majoring in painting. Since then she has lived in London, New York and Australia, and worked for organisations including QAGOMA, Brisbane. In London, she worked at Frieze Masters, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Gallery of Everything. She has travelled extensively throughout her life, and draws from broad personal experiences to produce works that range across a number of disciplines. Her work aims to merge ‘high art’ with design, craft, streetwear, events and publishing. She was a finalist in the 2021 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, at IMA, Brisbane, where she was awarded both the Highly Commended and People’s Choice Award. Her art practice also straddles small business enterprises that take her imagery and ideas to diverse audiences.

This conversation took place in July 2022 on the occasion of Visaya Hoffies’s exhibition, The Enchanting Microplastics.

Interview by Brian Obiri-Asare, Co-Director, Firstdraft, 2022–23.

Brian Obiri-Asare: For those who don’t know you or your work, can you tell us about who you are? Can you talk a little about your artistic practice?

Visaya Hoffie: I live in Meanjin, Brisbane – I’ve used it as a base from which I’ve travelled all my life. Both my parents were artists, and spent a lot of time travelling on overseas residencies across the world, so I had the opportunity of growing up consuming all kinds of cultures and art.

I trained as a painter, but even for my graduate exhibition I was already experimenting with expanded painting and working with a whole range of materials – for this exhibition I have stuck to painting, clay work and leatherwork. My practice incorporates many other media forms, and I also see the work I do alongside ‘gallery work’ as important to feeding into my practice. I run a collaborative arts project called Lizandbetty with my best friend Wayan Preston, and we produce a range of outcomes from clothing to events. I also continue my practice through visual concepts for music production.

Some of my favourite art production would come under the banner of “outsider art” or “folk art”, and when I lived in London I worked for The Gallery of Everything, Frieze Masters, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. These experiences gave me a broad overview of what’s happening globally, and I also work at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) to help pay the bills, and that also keeps me in touch with a range of interesting exhibitions curating Australian artists and those from overseas.

Visaya Hoffie’s studio. Photo: Wayan Preston. Courtesy the artist.

Visaya Hoffie in her studio. Photo: Wayan Preston. Courtesy the artist.

“Both my parents were artists, and spent a lot of time travelling on overseas residencies across the world, so I had the opportunity of growing up consuming all kinds of cultures and art.”

BOA: This exhibition is titled The Enchanting Microplastics, as you no doubt are aware, are everywhere. Their contemporary prevalence and your choice of title calls to mind a Nina Simone quote: ‘how can you be an artist and not reflect the times.’ Can you talk us through the physical, conceptual, and emotional elements of this exhibition?

VH: Nina then went on to say ‘an artist’s duty is to reflect the times… that to me is the definition of an artist’ and yes – that’s a key point for me, too. My own work takes fragments from the everyday to set the scene or imagine what new conversations or revelations might emerge.

However, the context of the time when Nina Simone said that was very different to now. Lots of our current crises – like the state of the environment, global economic imbalances, gender politics and inequity, immigration, globalisation – are all-too-often reduced to “identity politics” where people have taken up more or less fixed positions. Art has to find a way of breaking into those enclaves – as a way of disarming the viewer I work with humour and also child-like elements that seem simple and inoffensive on the surface. For this show I’ve used a high-key colour palette and visually alluring surfaces to invite the viewer in to engage with the work.

Although the titles and the forms are all throw-away fragments from the edges of everyday culture, they nevertheless are little mirrors of the times we’re living in – and glimpses into my personal world. In that way, they’re not so different from the old Dutch Still Lives, where you can see the shells and tulips and all the exotic paraphernalia that had been collected at that time. The fragments and references in my paintings are kind of opposite to that – instead of alluding to wealth and privilege, they reflect aspects of popular culture, the production of which everyone takes part. So it’s not exclusive – there’s certain iconography of Australia and Australiana that makes it familiar; the TAB logo, references to pokies games (e.g. Dragonlink), Cash Converters and so on These are all symbols for the get-rich-quick schemes aimed to lure or exploit everyday Australians.

“Art has to find a way of breaking into those enclaves – as a way of disarming the viewer I work with humour and also child-like elements ”

Visaya Hoffie, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

BOA: Personally, stepping into your exhibition, I’m immediately hit by the colour. My eyes pick up small, uncanny details. And the more I look, the more it feels like I’m being led playfully, into a strange world. What are you trying to evoke through this presentation?

VH: The room is small, but it’s jam-packed, and it really needs a viewer or viewers to function fully. The edges of the work are also very important – they are all like shallow boxes, or windows, so they appear like objects alongside the 3D works and the bench. They all construct a material as well as an imaginative realm. And for that same reason, I dimmed the lighting of the room, so that there’s a more intimate experience.

Some of the other symbols and forms could be characterised by a kind of naivety and cutenesslike the characters. These include puppies, imaginary creatures and miscellaneous half-familiar beings – which appear cute, but also have a certain edge – like they’re capable of more than you might think.

It’s important for me to have a certain kind of freshness to the work. Today there’s a lot of work that seems driven by ideas rather than the actual process of painting or governed by photoshop – this often kills the work before it starts.

Humour is an important starting point for a lot of my work. ainting today seems contrary to the way we produce and absorb images; it would be much quicker to take a photo on your iPhone. There’s an absurd element to the act of producing painting. My choice of subject matter reflects this – if you think of a wheel-rim it should talk about efficiency speed and precision but when I’ve painted them they look dysfunctional, a child-like rendition. The humour lies in a kind of irony – the slow act of painting is almost the exact opposite of the speed efficiency and the association with brand culture that a wheel rim embodies.

Another thing that is important lies in the fact that the characters I use are not from the original characters. Instead I use bootleg and DIY versions that are cheap and mass produced for two dollar shops. I'm interested in how these bootleg forms introduce little differences that are cultural offshoots; it’s where they get it “wrong” that things start to become more interesting. Because that mistranslation can give you clues to how, where and who produced those objects. It’s almost like they’re a tribe of munted little survivors of difference in the middle of a sea of the cultural homogenisation brought by globalisation.

“ I’m interested in how these bootleg forms introduce little differences that are cultural offshoots; it’s where they get it “wrong” that things start to become more interesting. Because that mistranslation can give you clues to how, where and who produced those objects”

Visaya Hoffie, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

“These spaces of imaginative and creative wildness are rare in a world that wants to compartmentalise and control all forms of cultural production.”

Visaya Hoffie, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

BOA: Your paintings and sculptures are infused with the contemporary, but also, through their tone, allow space for delight and reflection. Can you speak to the paintings and ceramics? Specifically, are you able to talk about how you proceed with creating work in two distinct forms?

VH: I see the ceramics as a continuation of the paintings; in a sense they’re sort of expanded paintings but it was only until i finished this series that I realised that they all reminded me of The Little Prince that I read as a child – each character on their own isolated planet facing their own trials and tribulations. One of the key points at the beginning of The Little Prince is when both the narrator-explorer and the little prince see the drawing of the hat as a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. At this point they realise that they share an imaginative capacity that goes way beyond the limitations of the rational. I love this because art is not something that is solely about the concept nor is it strictly about what you see in front of you. Rather it’s about the magic that calls on the viewer to imagine new possibilities. Later on in the book the Fox tells the little prince“anything essential is invisible to the eye.”

Visaya Hoffie, SCREAM BENCH, 2022, bench customised with cowhide, leather, pine, 136 × 51 × 47 cm, installation view, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

BOA: Who are some other artists or even art movements that inspire you?

VH: Yoshitomo Nara – my love for Nara dates back to when I was a child and visited the Mori museum in Japan where I was first seduced by the cartoon-like quality of his work. I love the way he extends his doodles into more painterly approaches and then continues into sculpture. I’m also drawn to the way his characters subvert the Japanese idea of kawaii.

I also like Mike Kelley because of the dark humour in his work. And also particularly the physiological undertones.

Henry Taylor’s direct energy and confident immediacy in his paint application and compositional strength, teamed with his ability to incorporate iconography of popular culture.

But I’m also really influenced by music and what I’m consuming at that time through television, books or movies.

“Art is not something that is solely about the concept nor is it strictly about what you see in front of you. ”

Visaya Hoffie, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

BOA: In conversation you have spoken about drawing inspiration from the Museum of Everything and it’s platforming of undiscovered, unintentional, untrained, and unclassifiable artists. I remember seeing the Museum of Everything’s exhibition at MONA a few years back and being beguiled. Can you tell us about your relationship to the Museum of Everything and naïve/folk art forms?

VH: The thing I love about so-called “outsider” or “folk art” is that it doesn’t conform to the rules of the “art world”, and there’s a certain honesty, freshness and magic to the works that make it surprising and exciting. In the art world the wildness of making art goes through several processes that attempt to tame and control it. We put it in a frame and assign it a category, We give it a name and then we describe it – its height, width, price and time of production. And then we put it in a white-walled gallery. It’s hard for that “wildness” or energy to survive. It’s not only in the way you paint it’s also in the kind of ideas you’re putting forward as an artist.

These spaces of imaginative and creative wildness are rare in a world that wants to compartmentalise and control all forms of cultural production.

Visaya Hoffie, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

BOA: Where to next? What projects and plans are sitting on the near horizon?

VH: Well I have an exhibition later in the year with Incinerator in Melbourne and a small solo show planned for September in Brisbane with L00K collective focusing on ceramics, as well as a new launch of products planned to drop for my side project with LizandBetty. I’ve got a pretty good studio/work routine going at the moment where my production is pretty fluid and I’m keen to get the right kind of exposure where and when I can, so all offers of future exhibitions gratefully received. And also everything you see is for sale at bargain prices so, as they say, “everything must go”.

Visaya Hoffie, The Enchanting Microplastics, 2022, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

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