Dave and Jenn

Another World

One might feel alternately mystified and enthralled when first viewing the work of Calgary artists David Foy and Jennifer Saleik. This odd sensation is curbed slightly when the Alberta duo explain how they craft their complex, vibrant paintings.

Operating together as Dave and Jenn, the artists work in tandem. Ostensibly painters of urban and rural landscapes, they have slowly permitted their inner landscapes to occupy greater space in their work. Images born of personal thoughts, impressions and remembrances have been allowed to enter the mix. They consult each other while they work, often producing paintings with two sides.

While it may be uncommon to find two artists working together so closely, this is not the most provocative aspect of their approach. Most surprising is that they are intent on generating a whole world unto itself in their art, an intricate environment into which the artists have placed their own alter egos, ‘Dave and Jenn’, characters that act effectively as shadows of Foy and Saleik. Initially the idea of building a world for invented alter egos to occupy might seem puzzling, but it grants viewers – and the artists – an entry point into the wild, layered imagery of the landscapes.

Foy and Saleik went to the same Edmonton high school but their lives did not intersect there. They met later in the Alberta capital while studying at Grant MacEwan College. In 2003 each earned a Fine Arts diploma, and the following year they agreed to work in formal partnership as Dave and Jenn. It is an arrangement that involved some compromise but mostly came about naturally, according to Saleik. “We had to learn how to work together because we came from really separate ways of building images,” she recalls. “I was a lot more abstract and free flow and expressionist, and Dave did more hard edge painting. It started off because we kept kind of getting into each other’s business all the time with other projects, and we just figured that we would make it official.”

They moved on to the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, graduating in 2006 with Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees. From that point they have worked steadily, mounting solo exhibitions and participating in art fairs and group showcases. Their work has attracted significant media attention, particularly because their two-sided paintings encourage unusual placement in galleries and other settings. Confirmation of the rising profile of Dave and Jenn came just recently when they were awarded the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award for 2010!


Dave and Jenn. 'The Old Cartographer’s Swansong’, 2008. Side One.


Dave and Jenn. 'The Old Cartographer’s Swansong’, 2008. Side Two.

In their studio in Calgary, Foy and Saleik took a break to talk about the origins of their distinctive approach. The artists discuss how they communicate while working together on a painting, and why it is best to consider their body of work as a continual flow rather than as segmented pieces.

Most significant is the explanation the pair gives concerning the evolution of their method of gathering ideas, which indicates how their peculiar landscapes have developed. “The way we approached it at first was that we would go hiking or travelling, and then just make our paintings off whatever we saw,” explains Saleik. “The crazy things ended up weaving themselves more and more into those landscapes. When you start building a landscape and you’ve got this set idea of what a world looks like, then you can start layering all sorts of different meanings into it, just all the other things that have happened to you in your life. You end up building more of an inner landscape. That’s what our art is more about in the long run.”

As David Foy and Jennifer Saleik continue to build the world within their paintings, it will be interesting to discover the next phase in the evolution of their alter egos, ‘Dave and Jenn’. Moving around their doubles in an invented world no doubt serves as a distancing device for the artists, perhaps designed to provide some space between their authorship and their audience. It would appear, however, that this distance between the artists and their audience might be narrowing.

Saleik maintains that, in an upcoming project, the characters of ‘Dave and Jenn’ will acquire greater depth, a consequence of the artists conducting research for their work more as ‘Dave and Jenn’ and less as themselves. “Our next project is going to entail a series of dowsing rods that we’re going to cast out of resins and then go and use,” she relates. “We’ve always liked the idea of performance, but we’re also too shy to do it! We thought we could perform for each other and then take evidence of that and build the paintings off that, and then build the stories. That way it would sort of build the characters of Dave and Jenn a little bit more too, and that’s important for the next stage – just to give them a little bit more reason to exist.”



In the above photo, it is clear that Foy and Saleik are starting to integrate performance into their work, moving toward a fresh fusion of life and art. Saleik explains the photo by stating that “the characters of Dave and Jenn are busy trying to fend off the worst parts of the cosmic apocalypse that is befalling their world, with all sorts of scratched together rituals and hopeless magic.” This has led Foy and Saleik to put on animal masks, walk through parks in Calgary and draw circles in the dirt with dowsing rods. It is thoroughly intriguing to think of the artists acting in real life as their imagined alter egos in order to develop something for those alter egos to do in a new series of paintings!

CI: In 2004 the two of you agreed to work in partnership as ‘Dave and Jenn’ and have operated together ever since. Any time that one enters a partnership – political, personal, business, or whatever it may be – there is bound to be a little trepidation about how it’s going to work out. How would you characterize those initial discussions between the two of you when you decided to work together as artists in a formal way?

JS: We had to learn how to work together because we came from really separate ways of building images. I was a lot more abstract and free flow and expressionist, and Dave did more hard edge painting. It started off because we kept kind of getting into each other’s business all the time with other projects, and we just figured that we would make it official. Then the first thing that we did was set up a really large project. That was how we learned to work together, just by these set projects that we would complete together. They were like our own little hallmark expeditions.

DF: We worked within those guidelines, and that’s how we figured out how to work together. And we’ve spent a lot of time together, just as friends.

JS: The way it works now is basically that each of us has the right to veto something if we really think it’s a bad idea, but we have to make our cases for and against. If the one person is really against it, that’s it, that makes it null and void. I think we kind of ended up tempering our own individual egos, but we managed to build quite a decent joint one. There’s a little give-and-take.

CI: A lot of your work is very distinctive, especially the two-sided pieces. I think most people have the image of the artist in society as a solitary figure, but obviously as the two of you work together, that’s not really the case. What is the communication like when you are actually at work? Are you constantly talking? Is it silent?

DF: We used to talk back-and-forth a lot more, I think. Now we can get through a lot more of it without talking. We do discuss, obviously, as we’re working.

JS: We have a set plan, but we’re comfortable enough with each other in the vision that we’ve built for ourselves that we can also say ‘okay, I’m going to paint a pelican’ – and then we don’t have to discuss all the colours that we’re going to use because we have a sense of what we’re going for together. At first it was pretty methodical, and now it’s nice because it doesn’t have to be anymore.


Dave and Jenn. 'This is where this begins (with hints for travellers)’, 2006.

CI: Let me ask you a little bit about the way this has developed over time. Looking at some of your earlier pieces from 2006, like ‘This is where this begins (with hints for travellers)’ – if one sets that next to a work from the 2008 series called ‘In Which They Find Themselves Here and There’, there seems to have been, in those two years, a real quick development in terms of the intricacy of what the two of you are doing. Is it fair to think of your work as a gradual, year-to-year building of a story, or do you prefer people to look at it piece by piece? Is the continual flow of your work most important?

DF: Definitely a continual flow …

JS: We see it kind of like world-building, and the titles are more like chapters. It’s storytelling, right? I guess we look to books and novels for a structure, but the nice thing about images is that they have this ‘neither here nor there’ quality, whereas words have this finality. So we never have to tie ourselves completely to a narrative, but it’s more world-building. That’s why the name of the website is ‘The World of Dave and Jenn’. Also because Dave and Jenn dot org, dot com and dot ca have all been taken! So it was a good compromise.


Dave and Jenn. 'You’re A Long Way From Sea’. 2008. Side One.


Dave and Jenn. 'You’re A Long Way From Sea’. 2008. Side Two.

CI: As you say, with the idea of world-building, you are able to use novels as something comparative. Are there certain authors or novels that you drew on for that idea of building up a complex world over time?

JS: Well, we’re both really interested in magic realism and storytelling, and the obvious ones that come up are Latin writers like Marquez. There is also a Japanese writer that has been really, really popular over the past few years that I’ve become particularly obsessed with, and that’s Haruki Murakami. He wrote Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I think I’ve got more than ten of his books! Just this idea of being able to look really analytically at life but still be able to entertain the idea of the grotesque or the absurd happening – that appeals to me. We were talking about how, in those books, what is great is that everything seems so normal, and then something out of the ordinary happens and it is perfectly okay within that universe. I think that’s a nice way to look at life, or to expect life to be, even just within our everyday existence.

That’s something that we really like to entertain. The paintings started off being more a visual journey. We were really interested in landscapes and how they play into people’s identity and sense of place, and then also just the visual history that we’ve amassed over the past few years. The way we approached it at first was that we would go hiking or travelling, and then just make our paintings off whatever we saw. The crazy things ended up weaving themselves more and more into those landscapes. When you start building a landscape and you’ve got this set idea of what a world looks like, then you can start layering all sorts of different meanings into it, just all the other things that have happened to you in your life. You end up building more of an inner landscape. That’s what our art is more about in the long run.

CI: It’s more about the inner landscape than the actual travelling.

JS: Yeah, and just the inner landscape, the sense of place that people carry around inside themselves. That sounds maybe far-reaching, but it’s something nice to entertain when you think of all the things that bombard you during the day. It’s nice to think that there is something that you carry inside you that is just your own, be it calm or crazy or violent or whatever. It’s just your own. We like the idea of building that and then letting it escape somehow.

CI: Would you go so far as to say that that is something similar to the religious idea of a soul, something that you live with depending on what you have done in your life?

JS: I guess so – maybe. We’re not religious types, neither of us, but I think there is something really human in that idea. There is a reason that we have that, as people. I think it has something to do with that, for sure.

CI: As you say, in the earlier stages, your work was built off little journeys, hikes and things, but at this point, has the inner landscape taken on its own momentum, or is it still driven by those trips?

JS: I think it’s more equal now. Everything we paint is based on a real place, and then it starts being infected with certain things.

DF: It’s becoming more and more infected.

JS: We’re quite fond of painting the apocalypse in one way or another, be it incredibly colourful and amazing or kind of weird! I think that’s preoccupying a lot of artists right now, this whole idea of excess coming to a point and just fizzling out. We’re prone to do that as well. So I would say that the two things are at an equal standpoint, with maybe the more fantastical things starting to overtake. One painting that’s in progress is a double-sided piece that’s actually of our backyard, and our backyard is now in the process of being taken over by some form of mystical space disaster! And on the other side, there’s a whole bunch of squirrels running around with yellow string desperately trying to tie everything back together again, so there’s a hope of some kind of salvation. We’ll see where that goes. We never really know what we’re going to end up with in a year or so. We’ve got a lot of nutty ideas, but the narrative keeps slowly building.

CI: I’m interested by what you just said about many artists playing on the idea of our excesses getting to a point where there feels like there may be a breaking point. This is something that is really present in a lot of modern philosophy, like Nietzsche or Heidegger; in Heidegger especially, there is the idea that we will come to such extremity with our technological achievements that there will be some sort of break. Is that something that is present in what you are doing at this point, that sense of almost a chaotic result of our excess?

JS: Sure, yeah, that’s fair to say. A lot of it too is from postmodern writers like Baudrillard, or anything on semantics, or ideas revolving around hyper-reality, and what is real and what is not. Who says what is reality? My truth is different from your truth. The idea of there not being an absolute truth is something that we’re obsessed about, too. It’s something that has become quite popular. A few people have stepped up and said, ‘no, this isn’t right – human beings have absolutes’. But what are those absolutes?

The thing is that it’s really important for us that none of our work ever feels like an illustration of those ideas, or whatever it is that we’re obsessed with at the time. We like the idea of it being accessible to a lot of people. Approaching it just as ‘world-building’ is something that I think is more accessible to more people.

CI: That’s interesting because I was going to ask you, when you are painting, when you have something in progress, do you have an audience in mind for that particular work? Are you thinking whether your work might appeal to a particular type of person?

JS: I think that we never try to illustrate anything too fully, or say this is this, for a fact – I think that opens it up to more people. It’s fun. We see kids go up to our work. They’re really attracted to the colours and the little animals that they see. Older people are just amazed by all the little hidden things that are happening and the overall composition. We also try to make weird objects, which is just another thing that might appeal to other people. In the end we make these things for ourselves more than anything. I think that’s a real strength. If you obsess too much about what other people expect of you, I worry about the sincerity of that.

CI: So you make it from your own vision and hope that it finds an audience, because who knows who that might be?

JS: Exactly. And we believe in what we’re doing. We think that there’s a reason that we’re doing it. With us it’s always good because we can always critique each other, throw something back and forth until we feel like it’s ready for other people to see it. That really helps. We’re represented by a commercial gallery but it’s not like we sit here and say, ‘are we going to be able to sell these things?’ It’s nice to be able to support yourself – and we do fine with that – but in the end that’s not really what it’s about. I’m not sure how our dealers feel about that all the time, but it’s true!

CI: In January 2010 your work was included in the ‘Snap, Crackle, Pop’ exhibition at the University of Lethbridge. A lot of different artists were represented there. In the introduction to the collection, the curator, Josephine Mills, wrote that ‘Dave and Jenn draw on the quintessentially Canadian imagery of the Group of Seven in their colourful, layered landscapes’. Is that accurate? How would you measure the impact of the Group of Seven on your work?

DF: I think as a Canadian painter it’s hard to ignore the Group of Seven in general, and we’re landscape painters too. They are definitely an influence, but I don’t know if they’re a direct influence on us right now. We’ve been looking more at works by Greg Curnoe and stuff like that.

JS: It’s hard not to somehow respond. It’s like an über-myth, a meta-narrative that you have to be aware of, and there’s a beautiful history there, just the way that people wanted to see the landscape of Canada and how that was supposed to define our identities. That’s something fun to respond to in this day and age when things are a bit different. We’ve explored those territories. Now they are national parks. Now they get lots of tourists. And now you can get lots of calendars with those images on them! It’s something different now, but we were pretty obsessed for a while with that kind of thing.

CI: With the Group of Seven?

JS: Just the idea of exploration, and that’s why we love hiking, that’s why we like going out there. And ‘Dave and Jenn’, the characters, are supposed to be explorers and adventurers lost in this world.

CI: Let me ask you about that. You have ‘The World of Dave and Jenn’ and the characters ‘Dave and Jenn’ in it. It seemed to me that, in the paintings, as time went along, there was a shrinking space for human figures in the work. Is that accurate? What would you say has prompted that?

JS: Yeah, the land is the protagonist, the main protagonist, and ‘Dave and Jenn’ are just the entry points for the viewer, a way to see your self in that space. In the end, could it just be that we’re really shy, too? People are frightening!

DF: We’re getting pushed out, it seems.

JS: So we need more space. It could just be something like that! But landscape is a proxy for people and expectations that we have. Any landscape is a reflection of the person by whom it was painted, or the society for whom it was painted. I don’t think that you can look at any landscape and say that there are no people in it. There are people in it, even if they’re not right there.

Sometimes you get kind of ill about people a bit. There are lots of images of people out there. There’s lots of stuff going on like that.

CI: It is an interesting idea to think about. As you said earlier about painting the apocalypse, and having those feelings about the extremity of society, especially on the environmental angle, it seems quite possible that the land will remain the protagonist here on earth when we are gone. That’s a narrative that’s building in environmental studies and in climate change research. Are you drawing much on the environmental problems that we all seem to be facing?

DF: Yeah, it’s definitely something on our minds …

JS: We think about humanity in terms of geological time. We’re just this blip on a map. That’s an idea that obsesses us too. Are we actually going to be here in ten thousand years? What’s going to be here in ten thousand years? The dinosaurs were here for a really long time. They probably thought they had it going!

DF: I don’t know if I’m optimistic for the future.

JS: Oh we’re such pessimists, but we really like rainbows! Really though, how can we ignore it? Ever since we were kids, we grew up with the idea that we have to save the planet. That’s the generation that we grew up with. Nothing seems really to have been saved at this point yet. We’re still holding our breath.

CI: With your work often having two sides, some of the stuff – like the 2009 work ‘All points lead to this’ or ‘But we were watching’ – I would say that these pieces encourage unique placement in a room. This gets to the idea that you are trying to find a place for painting somewhere between the traditional place on the wall and in the centre of a room, where sculpture normally takes over. Ideally, how would you like to see your work placed in a room or gallery?

DF: Ideally with our work I think we are even slowly moving more towards trying to create entire installations through the use of our paintings and other objects, where we create an environment for the work to exist in. Definitely for the double-sided paintings you need to be able to move around them in order to experience the work and see how it shifts as the light changes.


Dave and Jenn. 'All Points Lead To This’, 2009. Front View.


Dave and Jenn. 'All Points Lead To This’, 2009. Side View.

CI: Have you had much feedback from people who have bought your work? Where do they put it?

JS: We’ve had some feedback from people who accept it as painting, and some people who think that it is not painting. There are purists out there who think that paintings should be on canvas or board or paper and hang on the wall, and anything besides that is really stepping into sculpture too much.

DF: I see them as paintings. We’re bridging that gap more and more. It’s a slow process.

JS: I remember when we were going through the early stages of college and people would say, ‘painting is dead’. That’s so freeing! Great – it’s dead! Now I can do whatever I want with it. That’s a falsity, anyway. It comes and goes. I’m sure it’ll die again when we’re in our later years. So there has been some confusion, but what are we supposed to do? Why worry about that so much?

Date of Interview: 03/18/2010
Location: Calgary, AB
Link: www.theworldofdaveandjenn.com