A Life in Dogs: An interview with Kiki Ivanovsky

Gretchen Marquette: The title of the show is Nancy’s Dogs. Where did the title come from?

Kiki Ivanovsky: Nancy’s Dogs came from Nancy – the comic by Ernie Bushmiller. I discovered it two years ago right after I graduated from MCAD. It was so funny that I couldn’t stop reading it. It made me want to make something of my own, just to make myself laugh.

 

Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller

 

I was working at a dog day care at the time, and obsessed with dogs. I started to see how each dog’s personality was expressed, and when they were quiet, I wondered what they were thinking. I wanted to explore their goofiness but also those quiet moments, and I was drawing and painting dogs in my notebooks all the time. These particular characters came to me when my friend Xochi de la Luna commissioned me to create a flyer for QDP, a queer dance party.

 

 

Part of my dog obsession involved watching videos on Youtube. After seeing one with pit bulls chasing a balloon around a backyard, booping it with their noses, I made a comic with two dogs playing that way.  My friend Peter Faecke, who is also a comic artist, and who originally showed me Nancy, noticed that the dogs from the flyer and in the comics I was drawing resembled Ernie Bushmiller’s dogs, so I started calling them Nancy’s dogs. They don’t have names beyond that.

The first painting I did that featured them had them looking up at the sky, and it was quieter. I started to make paintings of them to capture the colors I had in mind, because I couldn’t do that in a black and white comic. It felt pretty natural to bring them into paintings.

GM: In terms of the work you’re hanging for the show, some of the paintings are really large, and they all use the same palette. How did you make decisions around the color and the scale?

KI: I’ve always done big paintings. I feel like Nancy’s dogs were so active in the pieces that they needed big canvases. I actually want them to be even larger. Ideally a viewer would have to walk around to view the entire thing, because Nancy’s dogs, as characters, are always zigzagging around. Ideally, I want a viewer to have to be active in experiencing them.

 

 

As for color, I wanted it to be like another character in the paintings — the orange specifically. As a painter, I’ve always been obsessed with light — it’s always been a prominent concern in my paintings. When I was a little girl, my mom was always photographing my sister and I, and she often used the flash or some sort of intense lighting set up, often obscuring our faces with both light and shadows. She worked at Ritz Camera and always had cameras around, specifically the cheap ones. She had a nice camera too, but everyone loves disposable cameras, right? I have a box of photos that my mom took.  I can see how she’s experimenting with technique and ideas on my sister and I — we almost look bored in some of the photos. I remember being bored. But she was obsessed, excited with her ideas. She’d interrupt us watching cartoons because she wanted to take a photo. I lost my mom when I was young, and I’m left with these photos to remind me of her and of my childhood, and I look at them a lot. So it seemed really natural to have the light in these paintings appearing almost like the light from a camera’s flash. In that way, Nancy’s Dogs is loosely autobiographical.

GM: That’s interesting to me. Can you talk more about that?

KI: Well first, my mom loved dogs. We always had a pair of dogs. Inevitably she would become overwhelmed by the responsibility (especially of preventing them from escaping our yard) and take one of our dogs to the shelter. The same day, she’d come home with a different dog! So we always had two. Zig-Zag and Malkovich. Malkovich and Margot. Margot and Memento. My mom was childlike in many ways — in the same way the Bushmiller’s Nancy is forever a child.

 

Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller

 

I also see Nancy’s dogs as living in a dream world — the backyard of my favorite childhood home in Woodbury. We had a white fence around a big yard. The yard Nancy’s dogs live in is bright and full of light, but something dark is there, looming. Not really as a threatening thing — it’s integrated into what’s light. It’s just part of it. That’s true in general emotionally, but also technically, as a painter. When you’re painting, and want to draw out the lightest lights, you have to add the darkest darks. I remember learning that in class and it became one of my favorite tools. The lightest light and the darkest dark are almost always right next to each other too. If you want to make a viewer feel like they can walk into a painting, you have to get that right — the mid-tones can’t overpower it. Your memories are sort of like that too. You remember the best things and the worst things.

GM: That’s so true. You and I have talked at length about that part of life, and I can see your understanding of it here. I’m wondering if you think there’s something important about how the picket fence is so present in the comics but absent in the paintings?

KI: I think it’s interesting the way our memories work. When I think back to that yard I have a tangible feeling. My memory is probably not “accurate,” but it’s emotionally real. In the first painting I made, the dogs are looking up, but you can’t see the sky. The dogs are in close proximity to one another, and the viewer is also situated close to their faces. It’s intimate in that way.

When you’re little, your focus is about three feet in front of you. You’re not thinking about what’s happening outside of your world, and your world is your house and yard. The world of the paintings also feels small. Familiar. And so the dogs are large in their space. In the comics, I’m paying much more attention to the comic structure. For example, you’re supposed to draw feet in one panel on at least every page, to ground the reader. I feel the fence also did that work in the comics I was drawing. The paintings didn’t require grounding. I wasn’t trying to tell a story, just to convey a feeling. And the fence wasn’t part of that feeling.

 

 

GM: Can you talk about how the project has changed or evolved since you started working on it?

KI: When I first started, I didn’t realize it was autobiographical. I was just playing around. I’m recognizing more and more how my subconscious is making decisions. And sometimes it’s so obvious! Like my sister and I are twins, and there are two dogs that look alike, and I never thought “This is me and Sasha?” It’s powerful to realize that there’s a reason that something you’ve been making feels good to make, that it’s fun to make. This is the first project I started after I left social media, which also might be part of why I’ve enjoyed it.

GM: Why did you make that decision?

KI:  I left because I was thinking too much about what other people wanted, and about how they were seeing my work. Things I was making became “finished” when I posted them on Instagram, even if it was just a process shot. Why do we show our work, even in galleries? To interact. To gain a response. But we also do it to see everything in a body of work together, in a cohesive way. The immediacy of getting a response on social media diffused the tension, and made the work feel finished even if it wasn’t. There wasn’t an opportunity for cohesion or tension. The work I’m making now is for me — the decisions I’m making are only to make myself happy. Which feels right because that’s why I started drawing the comics in the first place. To make myself laugh.

GM: Are the comics going to be included in the show?

KI: Yes, I’ll have them available for purchase on the opening night, and afterwards there will be a copy there to page through.

GM: Here’s my last question! I’m always curious about what artists or writers are preoccupied with. There has to be that force, even if it’s something strange or silly. I guess I’m obsessed with other people’s obsessions? What are a few of yours right now?

KI: So many things! The color orange. Magick. Dogs. ‘80s music and fashion. The moon.  Joan of Arc. Tasche De La Rocha’s album Gold Rose. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I’ve been reading books about love — vulnerability and intimacy and adult attachment theory. I want to teach a class about love. Powderhorn, especially my apartment, which is the first one I’ve had to myself.  And my old obsessions never go away — Japanese animation, especially Sailor Moon and Naruto. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My childhood — especially the books and movies from that time.

 

 

Nancy’s Dogs opens at The Hive Salon Saturday, October 6th from 7-9pm.

All images courtesy of the artist.