Jonah Strub

Hopping the Fence Podcast Transcript - #3, Jonah Strub

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RC: Hello, I’m Rebecca Casalino, and this is Hopping the Fence, a podcast dedicated to talk to artists on the fringes on the Canadian art scene. Jonah Strub is a painter, sculptor, performance artist, and ceramicist based out of Toronto. He graduated from the University of Guelph in 2019, with a double major in Studio Art and Psychology. Jonah finished off his degree at the University of the Arts in Bremen. 

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Since experimenting with ceramics in Germany, Jonah’s practice has pivoted from painting to include sculptural forms. One of his more recent works being a larger than life bust titled “Mz. Velveeta Creamcheese.”

Our conversation was recorded in Tkaranto, on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations. 

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RC: Hello Jonah!

JS: Hi Rebecca! [Laughs].

RC: Do you want to tell everyone where you are right now?

JS: I am in my family’s home in picturesque North York, Ontario. 

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RC: Amazing. [Laughs].

JS: Yes. [Laughs].

RC: How would you categorize yourself as an artist, to give people an idea of like, what your work looks like?

JS: I really think of myself and of my work as painting. I think I would really define my practice as a painting practice that takes place in many kinds of materials. So I do have traditional painting practice, which I mostly focus on portraiture and figurative painting, and then I have a ceramics practice which I think of also as a form of painting because I use underglaze in all of my ceramics, so it’s really about texture design and decoration. And I also have a developing performance practice, which is very much influenced by drag and I think of that as painting as well because you have the element of makeup. The themes that I look into are mostly about gender and gayness and flamboyancy. There’s a real sense of humour and satirism that I use to analyze my relationship to gender as somebody who thinks of themselves as a man but kind of not really as a man. Just like flamboyant, hairy, Jewish being who loves wearing dresses and makeup and relates so strongly to women while still kind of being in this traditionally male body. And using elements of Jewish humour and musical theatre and costuming. My ultimate goal is to create a platform that I can have other little flamboyant little gay boys look and say, “Wow, it’s really fun to be yourself.” And that’s ultimately what I think of my practice as being. 

RC: Are you drawing from other artists within the Canadian art scene? Or are you drawing from outside, pop culture kind of sources?

JS: There’s a combination of both. Kent Monkman is a huge influence on my artwork. I really, really like that he uses drag and humour and figurative painting and sculpture and performance to bring attention to serious political issues while still kind of poking fun at masculinity and poking fun at the institution of gender and also Canadian politics and history. And I am really, really influenced by a lot of ceramic artists like Shary Boyle, who’s Canadian, and Panzy Ass Ceramics who are based out of Toronto. A lot of my peers really influence me, like Emily Reimer, and we work really closely together to do a lot of stuff that’s about drag and costuming and characters. A lot of musical theatre, I think that Hairspray truly is visually one of the biggest influences on my entire life. Big hair, big costumes, big people… it’s so vital to the way that I look at the world. A lot of drag queens… I am really, really inspired by drag. Miss Cracker, one of the only very Jewish drag queens that I had the opportunity of seeing live 3 times.

RC: Oh my god.

JS: Gigantic hair and loves making Jewish jokes, it was so close to my heart. 

RC: So good.

JS: Ben De La Crème, who is so vitally at her core theatre. And then there’s a lot of drag kings that actually influence my practice like ZacKey Lime, who’s a Toronto drag king and also Jewish, like does a lot of stuff based on musical theatre, based on puppets.

RC: Do you feel like… ‘cause drag is so anti-institutional and underground, do you subscribe to that? Or do you see your work fitting within a more polished institutional gallery kind of scene?

JS: I think that I’m really happy fitting in wherever will take me. [Both laugh]. I think It’s really important for queer narratives and Jewish narratives and narrative about gender exploration to be in the mainstream, and I really am very excited when I see artists who explore similar themes to me becoming really recognized and celebrated for what they do.

RC: Mhm.

JS: But I also find there’s a real beauty to the undergroundness of specifically queer art and the queer community because the people who need to see it most are the people who have access to it because you’re within that community. I hope to expand my practice past art and also find myself within theatre, and maybe do more conventional performance that’s not necessarily within an art context, or a fine art context I mean. 

RC: Mhm.

JS: There’s lots of stuff that I’m really drawn to that I don’t know how well it fits within fine art context just based on the fact that the access that people have to it… like, what I think is really spectacular about theatre is that anybody can buy a ticket and watch it and it’s made to be understood, whereas art, typically the environments that they’re in are a lot less accessible to people who don’t necessarily know how to find those spaces, how to take part in them and how to understand them. And even as a person who has an education in art, who has a lot of connections within the art world, it took me many, many, many years to feel really comfortable in gallery settings until I built a community and have now this vocabulary that I can use to describe and analyze art within that I wouldn’t have had unless I studied art for 5 years in a university setting. So I hope to expand past just the art world.

RC: How do you feel about your time within the university setting, because I know you focused on painting but I feel like everything you’re talking about, it’s kind of branching out from everything that you did at Guelph?

JS: Right. I loved Guelph. Guelph I thought was so spectacular. I thought the professors really pushed us, there was such a beautiful community of people. One criticism I do have of Guelph is that I had absolutely no queer professors, except for the Fastwürms who are spectacular but so kooky [both laugh] and thought really differently. So they were wonderful to have to kind of evolve and expand my ideas of art, but at the same time, I didn’t have any queer painting professors, I didn’t have any professors that were queer that made figurative art, and it was really challenging. Also being the only boy which –

RC: Yeah.

JS: - there’s privilege to that, but it’s really hard when people have trouble critiquing my art and giving me constructive criticism because they don’t know what angle I’m coming from. And I could see that with other people from marginalized groups where they were the only ones, I was the only gay man in the entire university of Guelph. And I was the only Jewish person in the entire program, and I was one of 3 boys. So I think it would’ve been really nice to have more queer people to gain inspiration from. I noticed leaving Guelph, my practice really changed because I was no longer restricted to making gay art necessarily for the audience of my peers and my professors. It was pretty much, I was making art for myself. I think the art I was making was a lot more personal and a lot more accessible to queer people.

RC: Was Chris Ironside there while you were there or you didn’t do photography at all?

JS: I’ve never taken a picture in my life. [Both laugh].

RC: He’s the only other gay man who works at U of G, and his practice is amazing. I’ll send you his drawings, you’ll really like them.

JS: Okay.

RC: But yeah, I definitely didn’t have queer professors besides the Fastwürms. And Guelph is really white – do you feel like you weren’t exposed to artists of colour while you were at Guelph?

JS: I actually feel like I had a lot of exposure to artists of colour, and when I was in specialized, which is like the final capstone course for art students, we were exposed to a lot of texts that made us critically think about an artist’s place for creating dialogue of art within the context of race. We did talk about cultural appropriation at lot. I thought that I had a really good exposure. I also took two Indigenous art history courses, so I was really, really well-exposed to Indigenous art. I think that even though the population of students was relatively white, I think that it was a very conscious community, and we were very careful to, at least in my year, we were very careful to talk about sensitivity when it came to talking about race. And the few students that we did have that were minorities really made a lot of art about their identities and we spoke openly about it and we had conversations about it. I think it would’ve been nice to actually have more diversity at school, but I’m so grateful for the people that were in my year because the conversations that we’ve had and even now during this time of social upheaval, the conversations that my peers are having who are white are so responsible in the way that they are giving way to Black voices instead of speaking from our own experiences as white people. So I think Guelph taught me really well even though there wasn’t a lot of diversity there.

RC: Do you feel like you got support from the institution itself, or your peers is really what made the experience?

JS: I think both. I think that the university really set us up to succeed. I think that the peers that I had there were just such… they’re some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met in my entire life, who make such wonderful art and are just such good people. I did find that I had some professors that kind of might’ve treated me a little differently because I was gay and making art about being gay. There was a little bit of harsh criticism that was unnecessary, but I think that could happen anywhere and I think that it was rare to have experiences like that. Most of the professors were really kind and wonderful. There was like a number of gay MFAs… they were like my go-to’s for getting information and criticism, and the Fastuwürms got me an internship at the Lesbian and Gay Archives which even further gave me insight into working within the gay community, specifically Toronto, specifically Canada. So I think that institutionally, I was given a lot of really great opportunities. Seeing that there were so few gay professors, [laughs]. I wish there were more obviously.

RC: [Laughs]. And how do you see your practice fitting within the larger art scene?

JS: Last year I lived in Germany for about 6 months, in a city called Bremen. And also a little town you may have heard of, Berlin. People always tell me that my art is very unique and very different from what a lot of people are making, which kind of surprised me because I feel like I gained such specific influence from artists all over the place. I have a hard time finding a lot of figurative sculpture when it comes to ceramics, so I think that I am specifically in like the Toronto community, I don’t know much about other communities, and specifically in Germany too, like I found almost no figurative ceramics.

RC: Mhm.

JS: So I think that I’m doing something there that not a lot of people are doing. But I’m also really new to ceramics so it might just be that I’m not exposed, so if you find any please send them my way. I always love learning new artists. Yeah, I think that I have a really unique art practice, but I don’t think that it’s hard to fit me in places.

RC: You could see yourself having your work in like, a regular group show that you see around the city?

JS: Um, actually now that you say that, no. [Both laugh]. I find that painting is kind of like an endangered species in the art world. Most shows… I think in a lot of student shows, yeah. But at a lot of kind of more formal gallery settings, I find very few painters. And there’s a couple artists that I think I really relate to, like artists that are getting really big like Rajini Perera and Ness Lee, they’re doing a lot of stuff that is about figuration and about character and about heritage and about colour and painting. I don’t know, Toronto’s a really interesting place because I think we have so much diversity but also we don’t have so much diversity at the same time. I think the majority of the artists that I see is very conceptual and very minimal.

RC: Mhm.

JS: But I think I do fit into the kind of flashierness, the small handful that I find I have a lot of access to here. 

RC: Do you see yourself reflected, because Rajini Perera and Ness Lee are both represented by Patel, do you see yourself – 

JS: Oh, my art’s so Patel. [Both laugh]. That’s the one gallery I walk in and I’m like, “Oh. Here’s my art!” [Laughs].

RC: How does seeing other artists kind of doing this figurative stuff, seeing that they have representation, does that give you hope for your career?

JS: It does give me hope for my career but then I also, every single time I go to openings, I realize more and more… there’s very few people that seem to be really successful in Toronto. I don’t know, I think it’s motivating. I LOVE networking, it’s my favourite thing in the entire world, and the more jobs I apply for, the more I’m realizing that it’s all about who you know. Like, you literally cannot get a job in the artworld unless you know people. So I was really working hard to get myself known by as many people as I possibly could.

RC: Mhm.

JS: And introduced myself to as many gallerists as I could and as any artists and make relationships with as many artists as I possibly could. And I think I was on my way there, and then little miss coronavirus stepped in and said, “Hey Jonah, let’s derail you for maybe a year [laughs] and put everything you did on hold.” I’ve started selling multiples, I’ve started making little earrings, and people want them which really shocked me. So obviously people want my art, but how to get people to want to pay a lot of money for my art…

RC: What’s a lot of money?

JS: Well what I’m finding is that the people who are asking to buy my art are my friends and my peers who are also young twenty-somethings who don’t have a lot of money. So I can’t ask them for … and I’ve been told over and over and over again that if you start your art out at a low price, it’s gonna be a low price forever. So I’m very wary of selling my art to people for a lower price than I think that is worth. But at the same time, people who have means don’t necessarily have access to my work yet because it’s not in spaces that art collectors and people with a little more expendable income are necessarily seeing them. Most of my stuff is shown on Instagram and most of my followers are also young people and young artists, so…

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RC: Hello folks! This week’s podcast recommendation is a trans history podcast titled One From The Vault. Specifically, episode 18, Stormy Weather. OFTV is created by Canadian writer, artist and activist Morgan M. Page, who is currently based out of London, England. 

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RC: There is this kind of divide between the art that you can sell to your friends and other artists who are usually lower-income, us being in our early mid-twenties, and then this kind of higher class of curators and gallerists. The issue that I’m finding is, for me personally, I don’t think that the gallerists necessarily have an interest in emerging queer people. 

JS: I don’t think that’s true. I know from the Toronto community, many galleries are kind of queer focused. Like I know Daniel Faria’s gallery represents almost exclusively gay artists. Paul Petro has a large number of gay artists that he represents. And there is a problem with diversity, like I remember when that statistic showed up, it’s mostly white and mostly male artists.

RC: Mhm.

JS: I recently became friendly with an artist named Stephen Andrews, who’s a really lovely person, was really prominent during the AIDS crisis in the 90s. And he was telling me stories of how, unless you wanted your art shown, you had to do it yourself. So it was a lot of queer artists supporting queer artists, which kind of turned into these networks of queer artists that include Daniel Faria, that included Paul Petro who showed artists like Will Munro. I think that there’s a lot of space for, at least for white male gay artists, which is a category I fit into but obviously everyone deserves to have as much representation as possible.

RC: Do you think it’s just a matter of our cohort growing up and… well, I don’t even know if our cohort will own galleries ‘cause we don’t own property, [laughs]. 

JS: Yeah, [laughs]. I think that gayness is becoming… especially with white male gayness, it’s becoming less and less on the kind of outside of mainstream culture.

RC: Mhm.

JS: And I think that there’s a lot of interest in gayness and gay culture, and there’s a lot of engagement from the greater community than there has been in the past. Obviously there’s still work that needs to be done but I think that the art community and the theatre community, which is also a part of my practice, has always been very open to gayness. 

RC: Do you think that you find support from these gay institutions like the archive that you worked with or from your fellow queers that you’re making work with?

JS: I think it’s a combination. I don’t think those can necessarily be separated because those people who work at those institutions have become part of my gay network and queer network. It’s good to have relationships all over the place, and I have people that started as friends and then they moved onto work at institutions who have given me opportunities because I’ve kept good relationships with those people. And I think that queer people like to support each other, so I think that if I was ever in a position of authority where I could choose artists to be represented and highlight artists on a bigger platform, I would choose from my network of queer people. 

RC: The network is what’s important and the institution is kind of like how you get in touch with other gay people, or how you put together shows?

JS: Yeah. I think institutions are made of people. And people at those institutions are part of your network, and you have to be able to think of everybody as a potential friend and a potential contact. So even if somebody isn’t necessarily part of an institution now, it doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t be part of an institution later. And if somebody’s part of an institution now, it doesn’t mean that they’re not gonna be your peer and your friend later. So I think it’s all connected to each other.

RS: That’s such a wholesome way of viewing the artworld, like, “We’re all connected so you might as well be nice to each other.”

JS: The more that I become a part of the art world, I’m just learning that everyone’s just friends with each other and that’s how you get opportunities. You don’t get opportunities from applying to things, you don’t get opportunities from applying to jobs. It’s all about being friendly, being generous, being a kind, likable person who likes to talk to people and likes giving opportunities to people who you think deserve it. Most of the people in the art community come from a very specific handful of schools, so they all have connections that way. 

RC: Yeah. Do you find that problematic though? Because I feel like when… I love the Guelph community, don’t get me wrong. But I would never want to be in an art show with only Guelph people, because I feel like we have so much in common and we come from the same theory, that it might all start to kind of blend, you know?

JS: I think it really depends. I love the art that’s coming out of what my friends are making after school and I’m finding that it is really, we all come from such unique backgrounds and we all have such different interests, and we… even talking to my friend, we’ve all had the same professors, we’ve all taken the same classes, but what we’ve gotten out of  each of those classes, the learning opportunities that we’ve gotten from each professor and which professor we’ve thought of as the most influential and the medium we’ve thought of as the most influential and the subject matter that we’ve thought of as the most influential, it’s all really different. I think during school it can all get a little muddy, but once you’re in your 4th year and once you’re in your 5th year, people usually find their stride. And once you graduate, everyone I know is making something different now than what they were making during their undergrad.

RC: I was just thinking also, as a person who’s obviously curating this podcast, I’ve had to really go outside my networks because they’re really white, just coming from Guelph, coming from Toronto, hanging out in the galleries that I do… I love the art obviously that I’m surrounded by, but I do feel like I’m in this kind of echo chamber and my community’s an echo chamber.

JS: Yeah.

RC: Do you feel like maybe your community, as tight-knit as it is, do you feel like it is connected to other little communities throughout Toronto? Or do you feel like you’re in that echo chamber a bit?

JS: I think that’s really challenging to answer because I’m one of the only people from my cohort that ended up in Toronto.

RC: True.

JS: Or, well I’m from here, so it is just I ended up here. But I kind of didn’t go anywhere after school, [laughs]. But I think because of that, I now have people who are in different art communities which do have different issues and interests in terms of research and curation, so I now have a connection to the Waterloo art world, I now have a connection to the Guelph art world, I now have a connection to the Bremen, Germany art world and the Berlin art world. I have had a really amazing opportunity of living in multiple places and being a part of multiple communities which not a lot of people have access to, so I think that there is restrictions when people kind of stay in the same place and don’t expand their network, don’t expand their relationships past what they know previously, don’t expand the things that they’re exposed to.

RC: Mhm.

JS: But I think social media as well has really changed that. I have access to so many more people than I would otherwise. There’s people that I met once who live in another city who were visiting Toronto once, who live in another province or country even, that I have kept in touch with. Yeah… I’ve got people everywhere. I got my art family all over the world, baby.

RC: That’s so lovely!

JS: Yeah.

RC: How do you feel your practice deviates from norms within the art world?

JS: If you’re looking at queer art in particular, the relationship that I have with queer art is that a lot of it’s very sexual, and a lot of it’s very based in being a man and your relationship to being queer as it comes to being a man and being a sexual being. So there’s a lot of sexual nudity, there’s a lot of imagery of sex toys and jock straps. And I felt that there wasn’t a lot of people celebrating femininity. Slowly, slowly, slowly I kind of found the aesthetics that I was most interested in were kitsch and camp and silliness and humour and theatre and puppetry and I think I filled that void for myself and now that I have kind of made that my brand, like celebrating femininity and making femininity really visible.

RC: Mhm.

JS:  I have been exposed to a lot more artists who explore those themes. But a lot of them, I call them “artists,” but they are kind of vilified as artists within the art world. There’s a lot of activists who use drag like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who is this band of nuns that started in… I don’t remember when they started, they might have started in the 70s, but these campy drag queen nuns that do charity for AIDS and other gay and queer things, [laughs]. And then drag and then kind of find itself and theatre, of find themselves in their own category and from what I’ve seen, don’t have a lot of overlap into traditional art, so I’m trying to bring that in for myself.

RC: Yeah. So many of the artists that I talk to don’t consider themselves artists because they aren’t included in this walled garden of the art world. 

JS: Yeah.

RC: How do you hope that fence? 

JS: The best advice that I’ve ever had was form my professor Kati Barath, who told me, she said that she used to be a very serious abstract painter who made big, abstract paintings. And her professor told her, “Kati, I don’t think abstract paintings that are genuine, like I look in your sketchbooks and they’re just full of cartoons of little people… why don’t you just do what you do, why do you have to pretend to be something you’re not?” And from then on, all of her paintings, Heike Kati Barath, she’s based in Berlin, she makes spectacular giant cartoons. That she’s very successful, and I think that what draws people into her artwork is that they are so authentic. So I think that it took me a really long time to realize I don’t need to be making the art that I’m seeing, I just need to be making the art that comes to me and that feels the most authentic. It took me many, many years, and this is kind of new to me, where I’m just kinda making whatever I want, whatever I like. And then realizing that there actually is, by doing that, there’s a reason I’m attracted to these themes, there’s a reason I’m attracted to this kind of imagery, and that’s my concept. That makes it conceptual art. It can be a giant paper mâché drag queen named Velveeta, and that is conceptual. 

RC: So do you think it’s this over-intellectualization that’s this barrier for artists that consider themselves outside the art world?

JS: I think it’s also a restriction to a lot of artists in the art world. For a lot of my fellow co-students, this was something that a lot of us really had trouble with. There was such a focus on conceptual art, and I think that’s a limitation of the institution. I think every school has one, and the limitation that Guelph had was that there was a huge focus on conceptualism. But for my own practice, there’s something about letting go and something about just making something for the sake of making something instead of thinking of the politics first and thinking of the concept first. I find the art that people are most drawn to and the art that I’m most drawn to is stuff that just looks fun and authentic. I just like happy art, so stuff that’s full of joy and humour. I think that conceptualization of art and the kind of intellectualization of art, for me personally, I have a lot of trouble enjoying those artworks. I’m not talking about the quality of art, I’m just talking about my own personal preferences.

RC: Mhm, your taste. Yeah.

JS: When art uses humour, when art uses representational imagery, colour, that’s when I feel most engaged. And I feel that there’s a lot of queer artists who do that because there is a really long history and vocabulary when it comes to imagery like that. And artists like Kent Monkman where there is so much colour and figuration in his exploration of being a 2-Spirited First Nations person. I think there’s a lot of it, I don’t think it’s restricted to the queer community. I don’t think queer artists exclusively use fun imagery. But there’s also a lot of like brooding, serious gay artists who make really serious, very simple art. And I think that’s valid. And I think that there’s a lot of that, [laughs]. I don’t think that queer artists necessarily are all making beautiful colourful stuff.

RC: I think I’m especially interested in the people that are. I feel like in 20 years we’re going to have a name for this kind of wave of queer artists, but I don’t have a name for it right now, and it’s just something I’m interested in personally.

JS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RC: How are you moving forward while you’re in lockdown for ‘rona?

JS: It was really disheartening at first because I think that I gain a lot of energy from people. 

RC: Mhm.

JS: I love, literally I drool at the idea of networking, it’s my favourite thing in the entire world. It was really hard for me when I graduated school and I didn’t have a social space where I could create art, so I was having a lot of trouble creating art at home. But I somehow have managed to be creative. Paper mâché has been such a huge part of my quarantine because it’s so easy. It’s so accessible. Everybody has the materials, all you literally need is paper, tape and glue. And paint. I was saying before there’s this idea of making what you think of art needing to be – 

RC: Mhm.

JS: - it’s given me kind of … while it’s still been hard, and it’s hard to get energy and it’s hard to create art in a vacuum outside of the community right now, it has given this kind of liberation where again, I’m just making art for my own sanity instead of making it for anybody else. And it’s helped me create some artwork that I feel really, really happy about. I think that I obviously would prefer if I wasn’t in lockdown, but [laughs] it’s really helped me realize what I really like doing. 

RC: Mhm.

JS: And if that means making earrings of hairy legs, it means making earring of hairy legs!

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RC: Thanks for listening to Hopping the Fence, a podcast dedicated to the fringes of the Canadian art scene. If you have an artist that you would like to hear interviewed, would like to correct / fact check a past episode, or would like to chat, feel free to send me a message on Instagram @hoppingthefence, or by email at rebeccaecasalino@gmail.com. Thanks to OCAD University for their financial support, my project supervisor Amish Morrell for his advice and guidance, and Claudia Slogar Rick for all of her extra help. Original artwork for Hopping the Fence by Alex Gregory, original music by Jessica Price Eisner. Thank you so much, bye!

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