Featured MFA: Takashi Hilferink
We are excited to present our next 2nd year MFA with an art practice in painting: Takashi Hilferink!!!!
As the son of a master carpenter and two dancers with the National Ballet of Canada, I am a beneficiary of creative traditions of exactitude. These demanding artistic inheritances were confounded by an adversarial childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. Watching friends and neighbors uphold the violence and bigotry so central to the economic and political paralysis of Lower Price Hill interested me in ideology, and representation – both in the sense of depicting the observable, and of sincerely accounting for lived realities.
In 2003 I began a BFA with Honours at York University. There I met Catherine Toth, who became my life partner and with whom I collaborated until her death in 2010. In years following I reckoned with this loss, my work tending towards nostalgia and archive. I thereafter centered my work in the aspirational elements of these themes, mindful of their convalescent potential.
At the end of the summer last year, my partner and I moved into a haunted house, and a month later our son Wylee was born! These two events have led me to notice a few things: that every house (or body) is haunted – or, we house ghosts, if not zombies; another way of saying this might be that we each inherit decisions, beliefs and habits that are not necessarily our own. Another thing I’ve been noticing is that becoming a (better) parent makes me a better painter, and visa versa!
If you want to know more about Takashi and his work, check out this blog or his website http://www.takashi-hilferink.com/ and his Instagram @tacklbox
We visited Takashi in his studio at Fountain Campus and ask him to tell us about his art practice.
As a painter I'm curious about realism. In one way, realism is perceptive as it denotes verisimilitude in the portrayal of the appearances of things. However, it is apperceptive in that it hinges on shared and coherent understandings. Contemporary reality is one of appearances and digital integration, seemingly filtered through smartphones and cloud-based computing. Yet these are extensions of earlier media like videotape and film, themselves heirs to the representational traditions of painting and drawing.
What form of realism does technological documentation uphold? I feel this is poignant for an era in which the Internet reconfigures our experiences of images, memory and history. What ‘past’ exists in the continual present tense of the Internet? As shared histories become more contestable, outdated formats present a kind of consensus in hindsight. In other words, generational memory has become codified in visual media. In order to intensify our present subjectivities with the past, I develop paintings from outmoded visual technologies, studying the materiality of film and videotape. Such differences as those between the rich contrast of Kodachrome, the garish fluorescence of VHS or the decay of phosphors in a cathode ray tube have led me to develop unique rendering approaches and colour palettes.
Recalling tangible, hardcopy media and the unhurried, early days online, I seek ways to join the evanescence of the Internet with the haptic sensibilities of painting. The epochal relationship painting has with duration and history is evident in its material presence. Do paintings harness representational concerns in a flat, pictorial space similar to the television or cellphone screen? Can paintings exist as a middle ground to register and collate realisms?
Do you keep a special object in your studio?
As a sentimental person who has often lived in the past, the task for me in my second year has been in fact to set aside special objects, of which I have perhaps too many already. I'd like to think that the most special things in my studio are the works I'm creating.
