In anticipation of Kat Honey's upcoming exhibition, "Fashion: Reconstructed Identities," the artist sat down with Quest to share the inspiration behind this latest body of work, intimate details about the creative process, artistic influences, and much more!
"Fashion: Reconstructed Identities" will be on display at Quest Art School + Gallery from Friday, August 23rd until Friday, October 4th, 2024, and you don't want to miss it!
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background in the arts. I was artistic from an early age — drawing, building models, embroidery, photography. My parents guided me towards “commercial art” out of concern for my future financial well-being, so at Toronto’s Northern Secondary, I learned design and Illustration and continued these studies at OCA, graduating in Editorial Design. I worked first at Key Publishers as a magazine designer and art director and then with my partner in life and design, Kim-Lee Kho, at our boutique firm, Eye-to-Eye Design, specializing in magazine design and circulation promotion. After a 2009 travel sabbatical from my 20-year graphic design career, I re-focussed my career on art and art instruction.
I have explored painting, signage and collage in my art career to date. Common to all of these pursuits are my delight in good design, colour and typography. Recurring themes encompass subverting restrictive authority and supporting individual and community growth and empowerment through positive messaging — ideally with some wit, beauty and insight.
What was the inspiration behind your current exhibition and the themes that you explored in your artwork?
My recent obsession for the past few years has been collage and decollage using mainstream fashion magazine imagery as my starting point. We are inundated with images of jaw-dropping, flawless beauty. And of course it is as seductive as it is unattainable.
There’s a kind of satisfaction — of relief — in seeing these images of feminine perfection disrupted. We see them everywhere, and they cost us as humans and society — a lot. They create and sustain a narrative of boring but unattainable flawlessness that feeds billion-dollar industries built on the backs of patriarchal views of a woman’s worth and the insecurities that living in such a society engenders in women.
As a newly-minted transwoman, I feel its bite keenly but simultaneously feel blessed to have not grown up under its spectre. Women are infinitely stronger, more intelligent, more interesting — and therefore more beautiful than societies’ narrow confines.
In messing with these images, I have little desire to make images that feel painful or ugly. Rather, I strive to break the spell of that flawlessness that we all see everywhere — and in that visual snap of the fingers or whiff of smelling salts — create openings for more expansive ideas — for dialogue, for interpretation.
How do you approach the creative process when developing a body of work for an exhibition?
Like most artists, my work evolves and progresses based on my interests, observations and lived experience. My new bodies of work usually stand on the shoulders of my previous work. I ask myself, “Where can I take this next that excites me?” Any exhibition is a marriage of the current trajectory of the artist’s work and the opportunities and limitations afforded by the exhibition space. I love looking at a space and imagining how I could use it in interesting, unexpected ways that support my work.
Are there any specific techniques or mediums you employed in this exhibition, and how do they contribute to the overall artistic expression? Last year, a breakthrough came in the form of the realization that my small original collages could be enlarged to create prints with an exponentially greater impact. A real “Aha!” moment followed when I realized that the original collage was just a stepping stone: the real work was the enlargement — scanned or photographed at very high resolution and carefully optimized digitally. This also neatly sidesteps any issues with non-archival materials used in the originals, making almost anything I can collage with fair game.
I have always admired artists like Banksy and Barbara Kruger, who have appropriated ideas from the advertising world to create impact — visually, conceptually or both. So a primary goal for my exhibition at Quest was to explore MUCH larger options: what would my work look like 8’ tall?? What about a more immersive experience?
To achieve this, I’ve had some collages printed on removable adhesive film applied directly to the walls of the gallery, so it feels more like advertising in a public space.
Are there any recurring motifs or symbols in your artwork that hold personal significance to you, and if so, how do they manifest in this exhibition? Ever since I was directed to buy fashion and bodybuilding magazines to draw from as a student at OCA, I have been smitten by both the beauty and drama of fashionable women and the impressive physiques of women lifters and athletes. While the athletes will no doubt find their way into future works, my recent collages have revolved around fashion. As a new and unsteady transwoman, there is so much terra incognita to navigate – and that processing cannot help but manifest itself in my work. I honestly think it is too early for me to fully apprehend what the work is about, but others have pointed to excavating layers of identity, of reinvention, of grappling with falling short of both desired and imposed appearance standards…
How did you navigate the balance between artistic freedom and conveying a specific message or narrative in your work for this exhibition? I know there are other artists who understand their messaging and narratives from the get-go, but for me — especially with this work, I am simply making the work I am driven to make, and I think the clarity of just what it’s all about will come later. Unlike a painter or draughtswoman, as a collage artist, I needn’t stare down the blank canvas. Rather, I hunt for interesting or compelling images and attempt to transform them into something new.
As far as my artistic freedom goes, I feel quite unfettered. Collage with contemporary imagery presents certain challenges regarding rights, but I welcome those restraints as opportunities for creative invention.
Were there any challenges you faced during the creation of this exhibition, and how did you overcome them? No brand-new work was created for this exhibition, although many recent works are included. As such, the challenges were the universals of time (my schedule has been packed), budget (printing) and logistics. That and figuring out how to best use the space within those constraints.
In what ways do you hope your audience will engage with and interpret your artwork within the context of this exhibition? “As an artist, you’re looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deeper meanings as well.”
- Damien Hirst
Due to my design background, I really value the immediate rush of visual impact. And it’s hard not to be compelled by fashion imagery — it’s all about provoking a response.
But It’s my hope that in transforming the pristine perfection of these images into something more raw, layered, flawed and nuanced, my audience will find something more sustaining, more interesting, more accessible and relatable — less othering — that nevertheless gives them a blast of visual pleasure. Keep the passion — ditch the baggage.
Can you share any memorable moments or experiences from the process of bringing this exhibition to life?
As I am writing this prior to mapping out the exhibition — not yet, lol. But I’m sure there will have been by the time it's up!
Are there particular artists, movements, or historical influences that have informed your creative approach for this exhibition?
Of course! Teaching collage: I am always seeking out collage artists to share with my classes.
I have long admired the 20th-century collage masters such as Matisse (his late work), Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as learning about the artists who pioneered decollage in 1960’s Paris: Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains, to name but a couple. And discovering Mary Delany’s ground-breaking botanical collages from the late 1700s was a huge revelation.
There are too many amazing contemporary collage artists to name here, but a few personal favourites include Mark Bradford for his epic scale, Anthony Zinonos for his delightful minimalist wit, Holly Chastain for her beautiful and emotive compositions with vintage materials, Andrea D’Aquino for her fresh, whip-smart illustrations, Patrick Bremer for his jaw-dropping portraits and figures, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby for her masterful mixed media narratives.
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