Our partnership with James Nizam has us working at his studio, mostly doing things like sorting material that he’ll be using in the future. Because James is working on an exhibition in Germany for the end of October, he is extremely busy so we started a bit later than we expected. Our meetups are flexible, depending on James and our availability. We did expect set meeting times at the beginning but realized that due to how busy he is, that most likely wouldn’t be possible. We usually send our availabilities by email to him and he gets back to us about the dates that work for him. Communication is in email and James replies to emails fairly quickly. We transit to and work at his studio in New Westminster, usually for 4-5 hours each session.

We were both nervous to be working with James because we were worried that he would be intimidating but he is friendly and very easy going. He likes to get to know us and asks lots of questions. He is open to sharing information about himself as well which is a contrast to that stereotype of a reserved and mysterious artist. James is also fairly straightforward with what he expects every session, so it is easy to stay on track and get our work done. There’s definitely no stress when we’re at his studio.

Working with James is very spontaneous. The atmosphere of his studio is very relaxing. James is usually busy at work with his installation while we’ve been sorting things on the side. Given the complexity of his installation, we don’t expect to be helping directly with it because it requires technical skills. Currently, we are sorting and taking apart used film canisters for a sculpture he wants to create in the future. Initially, we expected to be doing some kind of grunt work for him, which is what we ended up doing. But in addition to that, James has said that we will be the ones creating an object out of the film pieces that we’ve sorted. We will be gluing (or using some other method of attachment) the pieces together to create a sculpture. The project seems to be very open with James wanting us to explore and see what we can come up with. He’s mentioned that memory is topic that he thinks of with the project because we’re working with used film canisters that used to contain the photos and memories of strangers. James hasn’t set a concrete deadline for the project and has told us to take things at our own pace and there isn’t a rush.

Since this project doesn’t have a strict guideline, there are a lot of possibilities for us to explore. Being university students who are used to working within guidelines, whether it’s word count or the required size of canvases, it will almost be a challenge for us to have so much openness. We hope that it will help us become better with independent, self-directed work, as this openness leaves much of the responsibility to us. Although James will be present to supervise us and our progress, the process will be mostly self-driven and based around how far we get each week. James himself is experimental during the process of creating his work; he changed his idea and process for one of his pieces because what he had envisioned did not work out as expected during our tests. Flexibility is important to him and thus, will be pertinent in how we go about doing our project as well.