Ranging from Abstraction to Realism, Fiona Ackerman pursues a highly diversified and methodical painting practice.  An inventor of new realities, Ackerman’s work investigates her own painting history, as well as those of others. Experimental yet deeply philosophical, Ackerman’s paintings blur our understandings of reality and challenge how we perceive space.

I first became enamoured with Ackerman’s work after viewing her paintings in person at Winsor Gallery in East Vancouver. I was struck by the playfulness and tender compositional balance, yet I also felt engaged by the complex investigational process employed within the works. An investigator of the artist studio space, Ackerman recently invited me to her studio to do some research of my own. On a sunny fall afternoon at the vast 1000 Parker St. Studios, Ackerman served me mint tea and began my lesson on her world.

SAD MAG: What are you currently working on?

FIONA ACKERMAN: I’m creating work for my next show at Winsor Gallery. It’s much like the work I’ve been doing over the past couple of years, which involves investigations into other people’s studio spaces. That’s what all the paintings here are for. I’m reluctant to say whose studio spaces they are, as I haven’t completely rounded out exactly what the exhibit will be. But for example, this long one [Ackerman points out a painting of an abstracted studio space roughly 6ft x 4ft] is for a gallery I work with in Germany and is from the studio space of this printmaker who lives in Berlin named Fritz Mitsaper. As well, this portrait [Ackerman points out a smaller realistic portrait painting] is of him. Some of the other paintings here are from a visit to Laurnence Paul Yuxweleptun’s studio. So I’ll be continuing these types of investigations into studio spaces.

SM: So you’ve been visiting other artist’s studios for a while and continue to do so. What do you achieve through these visits? What’s available at another artists’ studio that may not be available at your own?

FA: Well it started in my own studio a few years ago; I started a project where I was doing all these abstract paintings and I decided to pull out different reoccurring symbols in the paintings and put them on their own sheets. I’d been sitting in my studio with all this work that I’d been staring at for months and months, and I felt tired of looking at it. I didn’t particularly want to talk about it either. I had this big blank wall and I just started to put up all these sheets that I’d collected to just see how they looked. That kind of launched me into this whole idea of painting my environment as I build it, in my studio. So, then I took those sheets and ended up going into this whole series of paintings based on painting those sheets which led me into painting my studio, because I moved away from the wall and looked at the whole environment. Then I really started to use that up a lot, where I felt I was kind of wringing it out where it was saturating itself.

At this point I went to Germany to visit my father who’s also a painter. I visited his studio and took some photos of his space, which grew into more paintings of his space. Then it became an interesting challenge. Going into others spaces, it’s not always obvious what I can bring into their world that is of my world. So I go in and see what I can find, then I bring it back to my studio and work it out and transform it into something of my own.

SM: So the starting point for you with these studio investigations was your own past abstract works. What comes first for you generally? Abstraction or Representation?

FA: It depends on what I’m working on. The next show that I’m putting together, which I’ve already started on, won’t be studio paintings. It will be more abstract. I don’t know exactly what it will look like in the end. But that’s the difference, because it will be a much more abstract approach. It’s all painting. It’s all organizing. It’s all bringing in and putting out. But it exercises two very different ways of painting for me that I think go hand in hand. So, for that process it will be very much just diving in and making critical choices everyday. Whereas with the more representational works, a lot of the decisions are made at the beginning and then they’re tweaked, which comes together as it goes along. So it’s a different process.

SM: Are the abstract works more experimental?

FA: I would say the spontaneity is there right through to the end of the painting. Whereas with the studio paintings, I’m already starting with parameters, which is the interesting point to it for me. It’s almost the limitation that makes the challenge that I’m drawn to. Going in and taking photos and bringing them back and trying to build something familiar to me out of that.

SM: Is there a challenge in balancing these two approaches?

FA: I think they go together in a sense. With the studio paintings I’m using representational environments very abstractly. So rather than laying a canvas on the floor and reaching for blue and green and yellow or whatever I decide to do at that moment I’m reaching into somebody’s room and grabbing for their elements and using them in often very abstract compositions. So for me there’s not a huge difference to these practices. I think they go together. That’s why I’m excited to do two different shows in one year, because I don’t want to do the same thing all the time. So they both offset each other.

SM: Returning to the self-referential elements of your work, how does this shape your process? For example A Vocation By the Sea is a painting that builds on 4 or 5 other paintings. When did this research into your own painting history become important for you?

FA: I think the more you work the more it’s going to happen and you can either pay attention to it or ignore it. If you decide every single day that you go into your studio that you’re going to do something different than anything you’ve tried before, which I have often tried to do because that’s how you stretch yourself out, you inevitably build up a language that is yours that looks like all these things. So the sum of all these things together is who you are as an artist. You’re constantly referencing yourself whether you want to or not.

With the painting “Vocation By the Sea”, that’s very much doing it on purpose. It’s looking it right in the face. It’s saying, ‘okay what can we do if I just take what I have here and turn it into something?’ Those paintings were also from when I was working in the Downtown Eastside, at Pigeon Park Savings. I did art groups for the Portland Hotel Society and after that worked at Pigeon Park for about five years. After all that, what I took from my experience, or my artistic reaction to working in the Downtown Eastside ended up being “paint what you know”, and I painted other bank tellers. That’s why it turned into “Vocation by the Sea” because it was my studio work life and my day job working at the bank all intermingling into this fantasyland that was that painting.

SM: Much of your studio investigation works start with a photograph. How does photography play into your work? What do you achieve through painting that you can’t through photography?

FA: In a painting you can break all the rules of reality. For example in that “Vocation by the Sea” painting, you wouldn’t be able to make an arrangement like that in a photograph. Unless you had some see through strings, or something gimmicky.

SM: What about Photoshop?

FA: Well if you go into Photoshop you’re essentially painting on the computer. I have no problem with that. But I appreciate painting with paint too, so I take it to another step, which I guess is more final for me. It’s the tool I’ve always used.

SM: When did you really start to identify as a painter?

FA: Probably when I was about 18. My father lives in Germany, and I didn’t know him growing up, and I was invited to go to one of his summer school courses that he teaches. And there my eyes were really opened to painting. He said right at the beginning, “we’re not here to make pictures, we’re here to learn a few fundamental things about painting” and understanding the structures and how to put together a painting really caught my attention. So I came back after that and decided to begin painting. Well it just presented itself. I started treading water and have been doing it ever since.

It takes a long time. It’s like learning an instrument. It takes a long time to get to know yourself or at least get to the point where you can at least play with enough ease that you don’t have to think about it all the time when you’re doing it. I think that’s one of the gifts that my father gave me with these classes. He said, “ten years you have to paint for”. I didn’t even think about having a painting career for years. I just worked my jobs, paid for my supplies, and didn’t worry about where I was getting. When I graduated from art school I just put my head down. I went underground. And I think mentally knowing that I had a journey to go through before I could start to have any semblance of confidence was liberating in a way.

SM: Let’s discuss your philosophical foundations and your interest in Michel Foucault’s writings on heterotopic space. You’ve explained heterotopias as “a place that reflects someplace real but at the same time inverts it or shows it in a completely other way”. How is this philosophical cornerstone impacting your work?

FA: The interest in Foucault actually came after I started doing all these paintings. And probably after I was working on the “Vocation by the Sea” painting.  I just happened to be reading on the Internet and came across someone else’s’ essay about heterotopic space. I had read Foucault in university and had been a fan, but I didn’t know anything about heterotopias or anything he’d written about “Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe”. Then I read this essay and it just seemed so obvious. I thought, “I don’t even have to write my own artist statement, this is exactly what I’m on about”. It was great. And then that just opened a door. It seemed like everywhere I turned I could relate it to this concept. It’s not limited to that, but it’s one way of describing basically what we do when we write or when we use any part of our life or experience or environment in a new way.

SM: What I find confusing about the concept of heterotopias is how to define what qualifies as one. Foucault provides a lot of descriptions, such as Graveyards and Psych Wards, but I have trouble distinguishing what is or isn’t a heterotopia. Is it a real space that exists outside of mainstream society?

FA: I think the mirror is the closest example because it looks so much like what we do, or what we are. But it’s literally backwards and it’s a space that you know that you can’t go to. It’s reality inverted.

SM: Do you think the studio is a heterotopic space?

FA: It functions on a number of levels. One way to think about it is that the studio is a heterotopia for my work life. The studio is an environment that has all the normal functions of daily work; I show up at nine, I work until 4 or 5, I make coffee, and I break for lunch. But yet, my job is to break all the rules of the convention of the workday. To end up at the end of the day having wrecked what you started is not necessarily a bad day. So it shows all the realities of work, it’s a work environment; it’s my office or studio. But it’s also inverted. What we know is there and the opposite is also present. Then inside my heterotopia studio is the painting which reflects my studio but at the same time reflects it in an inverted or jumbled up or upside down way.

SM: How do you balance the seriousness of your theoretical foundations with your sense of humour? A lot of your paintings use cheeky titles, such as Fresh Taint. Is humour an important element in your work as well?

FA: Well I’ve never really started with a title and tried to illustrate it with a painting, it’s usually something that happens after. But humor is a way to really boil everything down to its essence. So say with the Foucault idea, it is a big idea. And it was a big idea that I wanted to do my last show on. Because it still made sense to me, it still applied to what I was doing in studios. I wanted to talk about it and open a conversation about it.  But with the next show at Winsor I feel like I’ve gotten to know it really well and I’ve decided, good idea or not, to just boil down the next show and call it “Its Not You It’s Me”. In essence it’s a bit of a punch line, but I go into other peoples studios and turn them into my world, my heterotopia. “Its Not You It’s Me” is the humorous approach to a larger conceptual idea.

SM: When do you know that an idea is complete? At what point do you drop one line of investigation and begin another?

FA: I don’t think I have. With the next show at Winsor, I’m picking up on the last show. That had paintings of my studio and a couple of other artists. Then when I was last in Germany I got to go into some other artists studios. I didn’t have my own proper studio, so my own studio wasn’t necessarily a big part of it. It was more of a traveling expedition through the mirror. The whole idea was being a naive explorer and going into somebody else’s environment and deciding “well in this world they only eat red paint”, or that kind of thing, and recording it in my log and making my own stories about their worlds.

Coming back to Vancouver, I was still really interested in studios. I was a Canadian in Germany asking people “who are the painters here? What are people doing?” And people would ask me “what are people in Canada doing?” I would think; “oh god I have to name names and I don’t know anybody”.  So for me to look at other people’s work here, doing these paintings is the best way for me. It gives me a way to dissect things that I’m interested in, through my own practice. It’s basically just another exploration for me.

SM: So in these explorations you acquire parts of other artists’ worlds, making them yours. Is that what you feel about the final painting? Does it still possess the essence of the other artist?

FA: I’m not sure and I guess that’s why I haven’t shown the work to any of the artists whose studios I visited for this show. There is a sculptor named Alexander Syler in Berlin, and I painted his studio. I showed him some of the work and he said in broken English “oh, I never saw myself that way”. That’s when I realized “That’s because it’s not you its me”. This is my world that I’ve brought you into. So that’s the question; how much is it about you?

Fiona Ackerman’s new exhibit, “Its Not You It’s Me”, will be presented in February 2014 at Winsor Gallery, Vancouver, BC.