Joy Tirade: Curiosity & Exploration
Joy Tirade approaches her work with a deep curiosity and passion for exploration. Joy works across a variety of mediums; from abstract painting, experimental video, intermedia and installation. No matter which medium she is utilizing, Joy’s mission as an artist remains consistent - to investigate a wide range of topics that both fascinate and intrigue her.
Tell me about your background and where your creative journey began.
I have to say that my first major introduction to Fine Art was in Houston. Before then I had had limited exposure to art and mainly grew up watching American movies on VHS tapes. I was in my early 20s and I was visiting a friend’s family for the holidays. I went to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and encountered the James Turrell piece called The Light Inside. I stood inside the installation for ages, watching the light ebb from magenta, to violet, to blue. It seemed to match my heartbeat and my breath.
After that experience, I became obsessed with art. It was like falling in love for the first time. I went on to study painting and drawing at the University of Virginia. I double-majored in Art History and Studio, which included a studio program but also a rigorous academic pathway. I had the experience of taking a graduate-level art history seminar that met at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC every Friday. Once a week we young scholars would all board the train and ride together to this small museum. Mark Rothko helped to design and curate with Duncan Phillips the Rothko Room. It is a uniquely special way to see his work. I spent many hours in that small room with Rothko’s four giant paintings. To me, they glowed like television sets or projected, emanating fields of color. Around this time, I was also taking this Film Noir class. This class would later influence my framing, my camera work. Also influencing the way I thought about the role of agency in my video art.
Both of these early experiences largely influence my work. I make paintings about things I feel have no verbal expression and I make video work that ruminates on these moments trapped in time. My paintings are more related to the physical body and my video work is about the lived body in time.
In graduate school for my MFA, I began to make experimental digital work and video. Now my practice is a combination of abstract painting, experimental video, intermedia and installation. This is also when I began to use the name Joy Tirade as my artist name.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
I love the word inspire. The root of this word, from Latin, means to breathe upon or to breathe in. I like to think about ideas bringing air to our deepest, creative longings. There are three main categories of ideas that bring life to my projects.
I am enchanted by the truth of the materials I use. One of my new series, Studies for Light, is made with watercolor, gouache, rose-water, ink, and salt on paper. I am considering light as a property of pictorial space. To explore how light can be a physical property of a piece and an implied aspect. I question how light can work as space, as heat, as an expanse, and as time? How all of this can affect feelings of longing.
I am compelled by the notion that to make work means that you are in conversation with anyone who has ever made art. I am inspired by Art History, especially by the histories not often told. I love to find obscure art stories in my research. I am intrigued by the idea that one moment leads to the next moment in art history. That all of this is building and growing as we evolve culturally. The question then isn’t what do you want to make, but rather, what do you want to say?
I am fascinated by the questions proposed by my work. I am a very research-driven artist. Right now, I am researching time-travel and theories about possible worlds. I am reading a ton of philosophy right now and speculative fiction. I just finished Jeff Vandermeer’s novels The Southern Reach trilogy. I am also reading Time Travel by James Gleick, Existentialists & Mystics by Iris Murdoch, David Lewis, On The Plurality of Worlds, and Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel. Also, I am currently watching Cosmos with Neil deGrass Tyson.
What led you to draw and paint digitally? How does this series differ from other work that you've created?
My twin obsessions of painting and video are rooted in my undergraduate years but didn’t start to become realized as part of one practice until my MFA work. During my first year in graduate school, I decided to break apart my artistic practice. I examined each part of my artistic practice to find the best way to say what I had to say.
I was questioning what role does video play - in my painting practice? Around this time, I got a tablet and began to draw on this as part of my daily morning routine. So I began to create these daily, digital pieces. At first, I just enjoyed them. If you have been to graduate school you know that it is a grueling, but wonderful, intense thing to go through and these digital paintings were just a point of daily pleasure for me.
I showed them to a few people who suggested that I print them for critique. I printed them and got some great feedback. I also entered them in a call for art with the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art that year. They have been in a few shows in LA now.
The digital work is painted with a highly saturated color palette which is like my material paintings. My current 100 Paintings Project reminds me of these digital paintings too - because of their daily, almost diaristic, qualities.
This series differs from the other work I have made in that its output is usually only digital. I mean that I don’t frequently show the printed objects. This work was vital for my development because it gave me the bridge for lens and screen-based work. It was an important initiation that led me to my piece Lavender Mystical, a 45-minute, endurance, performance-painting. This work is ongoing. Right now, I catalog it on an Instagram site @digital_joy.
How has your work shifted and evolved over time?
My work is primarily motivated by a question or an obsession. So naturally, these questions and fascinations shift and change throughout time.
My current intermedia practice operates at the nexus of painting, video, and light installation. I create connections between phenomenology, technology, ecology, and intersectional-feminist theory to explore aspects and properties of human emotion such as love and longing.
I have been an artist all of my life before I knew what that means. As a teenager, in the 1990s - I made zines and went to all-ages shows. In my twenties, I wrote essays and stories on my dad's old typewriter and made paintings with my roommates. During that time I also had a radio show called Starlight Motel on Radio 1190 AM in Boulder, Colorado. Where I played shoe-gaze and space-rock music. During that time I wrote an experimental novel, very slowly, one-page-at-at-time.
Later in my 20s, in college, I studied painting and drawing. I became obsessed with color and light. I started to think about love as a theme in my work and some early buddings of mysticism. In between college and grad school, I lived on a farm in Virginia. I painted out in the open in this old barn. I started to question the limits of painting. I became obsessed with the ontologies of painting. For instance, what are the properties and qualities of the medium of painting. How can we stretch this? What else can be a painting?
In my MFA program, I found Rosalind Krauss. Her essay on Sculpture in the Expanded Field became very important to me as I was stretching my painting practice to include digital art and video. I also went to Marfa, Texas on a research trip and the Dan Flavin installation at The Chinati Foundation blew my mind.
After graduate school, I produced a show called, The Lovers, which was thirteen channels of video and sound. The show included installations of vintage TVs, faux-fur rugs, neon, and fog. This show culminates a lot of what I have been thinking about for years now. This show was critical to my understanding of my work. Also, to how I want my work to look and operate in the future.
I moved to California in 2020. Under shelter-in-place, I began several projects. I have a 100 Painting in 100 Days project going. This work is to create a new painting vocabulary and to help me cope during this very stressful time in history. During this time, I founded an artist collective called, Community Painting Club. We are changing the name to Community Painting Collective soon. I am working on two major bodies of work. Some of this work is top-secret because I keep a closed studio while I am in the development stages. But I can reveal that these new paintings are a new style of art I am naming, "Techno-Mysticism." So stay tuned for more info. You can follow my journey on Instagram @joytirade or join our painting collective @community.painting.collective.
I feel like my work shifts over time but I also feel like I get better at expressing what I am trying to say. It's hard to see the shifts while you are in it. So it is nice to be able to have some time go by in order to see how everything fits.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
My studio habits are driven by ritual.
I wake up early, read with my coffee, meditate, and then write or draw. I need these quiet moments in the morning to reflect on the day’s work. Next, I make a list for the day. I will then do things that require my computer, emails or editing, until lunch. From lunch until early evening is when I can do most of my painting. I will make a matcha almond milk latte and head to my studio. I am very disciplined about studio habits and keep consistent hours.
I work from my home in Oakland, California. My studio is an astroturf covered rooftop porch that I have filled with succulent plants. I also have plants and crystals on my desk. I find it best to have my studio at home because I like to live with my work and to try to listen to it as I make it. The first thing I will do in the studio is warm up and play a podcast. Then when I dig into the bigger work, I listen to music. I like to play very ambient music that doesn't take too much mental space. I have been listening to this one Stars of The Lid record for several months now. But often a few hours into working, I will let Spotify decide. I work on multiple pieces and projects at once. This practice keeps my mind fresh. Also, I work this way to keep a consistent conversation between the pieces I am making.
What has changed about my practice is I am kinder to myself now. I have realized that creativity and inspiration are something we have to nurture through our daily habits like self-care, reading, research, walking in nature, and talking with interesting people. If I neglect these aspects of myself, I can still make work, but it is much more painful.
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
I am interested in time’s relationship to the body and memory. I am interested in the relationship between time and longing. I am interested in raising questions about knowledge and self-knowledge. How do we know what we know about ourselves or about the people we love? How is all of this complicated by technology? All of these considerations play out in my work in different ways.
I moved to rural Virginia when I was a young girl to live with my grandparents. Before then, I had only lived in cities. I remember my first impression of the region as being wild, lush, overgrown with trees and brush, and feral. Some places had old buildings overgrown with kudzu vines that appear to pull apart old boards and return the buildings to the earth. The night sky was so bright with stars it would make me ache while I stared up at it. The noises of the region are loud with birds and cicadas. The air in the summer smells of that metallic screen-door smell you sense right before a storm. This is the place, this county, is the location where I came of age, where I first found love and also lost love. When I returned to this region almost a decade later, I found the memories there waiting for me. They were there in the soil, in the trees, in the foliage, and the rain.
The fact that I moved a lot in my life has probably impacted my work the most. So site and geographical location are vital considerations for me for the meaning of the work. Even if this only hums in the background of the work. My video piece, The Wilderness, contains all of these meditations.
How has Instagram impacted your art career?
I have made a lot of friends and connections that I might not have made. For instance, I found Visionary Artist Collective on Instagram. I have followed the career of a lot of artists I admire. I love that you can see art, in artist studios, all over the world on your phone. It's amazing.
What are your future goals and aspirations?
Currently, I have three big projects I am working on right now. I am super-stoked about this work and I cannot wait to share it with people. Updates for projects happen periodically on my website www.joytirade.com
One project is a painting and video project building called, Implied and Actual Light. This work considers the relationship of space, time, and technology to the metaphysics of human love and longing. This project is currently in its research phase, which means I am reading, writing, and painting small studies. The studies are small works on paper and are called Studies for Light. This work will culminate in a show involving color-field, immersive, video projections. It will also include a new body of oil paintings and contemporary watercolor paintings.
I will show some of these paintings in a group show called Art Ritual. This show opens at Charlotte Russell Contemporary Art Gallery in Raleigh in April 2021. For updates or information about the opening, follow @charlotterussellcontemporary on Instagram.
I am also hoping to continue to expand the group Community Painting Collective. To follow us or become involved in group meetings or critiques, see @community.painting.collective on Instagram.
My dreams and aspirations also involve a plan to adopt a rescue pug. I am not allowed to have pets in my apartment, so until then, I will have to keep buying more and more plants. Also, I can’t wait until we can all see our friends again in person so I can invite everyone I know over for some pancakes.
Follow Joy on Instagram: @joytirade
@community.painting.collective
Visit Joy’s website: www.joytirade.com