“Matt Shane and I have been drawing together for over a decade. Our current project, Quagmire, is on exhibition at the Triennale québécoise, in the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Unlike our previous collaborative installations, Quagmire features work made only by the two of us. As such it speaks much about our relationship as friends and collaborators. It also represents a place where our interests intersect. Matt’s solo work is primarily focused on urban / industrial encroachment and ghost towns, while my work is concerned with paleoecology and monsters. Our shared world is one at the borderlands of wilderness and civilization, the real and the imaginary, deep time and the present. Quagmire is informed by our entire history of collaborative drawing experience and will take our shared practice into a new, shared dimension. We are intrigued by collaborative art because of the twists it throws into individual patterns of art making, and for its visual documentation of relationships, blurring together the seams between art and life. Our way of drawing parallels music, in how musicians improvise, and instruments harmonize to play the same song. For the show’s entire three-month duration we are drawing on-site in a specially constructed room with curved walls, covered floor to ceiling in paper. The show will culminate with a finissage. A camera has been set up to take photos at various intervals while we draw, and the resultant stop-motion animation plays in a loop on a monitor positioned at the entrance to our drawing room. We began drawing in advance of the installation, at our Mile End studio. Those drawings were then installed in the MACM gallery along with bare white paper for us to continue to draw onto. Our plan is to draw as much as we can, hopefully 6 days a week, leading up to a finissage at the exhibition’s finale. We have been granted after-hours access to the museum, and expect to do most of our work at night. The video footage will document our nocturnal activities, and stand in for us during the day. In Quagmire, we are representing the swamp as a metaphorical site of disintegration and formlessness, but also of abundant life and regeneration. A swamp is in a constant state of digesting itself. So far, our mire-home depicts mangrove roots, vines, mud, bulrushes and lilies, as well as entire cities growing on the skin of a dead sperm whale. A ‘quagmire’ can also refer to a difficult or precarious situation. It is an apt metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in as a species, dependent on the fossilized remains of an unfathomable, ancient, swamp world. This swamp-world was the Carboniferous period of geologic time, 354 million – 286 million years ago. On land, the Carboniferous was the age of insects, ferns, and amphibians. Although trees had yet to evolve, there was 40% more oxygen than today. The swamp forests consisted of giant ferns, where dragonflies flew on meter-wide wingspans. The coal we now burn is the fossilized remains of these forests. In the ocean, coral reefs thrived, and much of the Earth’s oil is what remains of the Carboniferous plankton. Carbon, after which the period was named, constitutes both the material we use to draw (ink, graphite, and charcoal) and the basis of all living organisms.”

- Jim Holyoak