Kelly Jazvac has the North Campus Building under surveillance.
She thinks it’s only a matter of time now before she captures the perpetrator on tape. In her office she has a camera mounted on a four-foot high tripod aimed at a softball sized hole in the NCB’s second-storey façade.
“I have been trying to catch a video of this amazing woodpecker burrowing out a nest for itself,” says Jazvac.
The small bird can break through the building’s wall because the North Campus Building contains a Styrofoam façade that is sprayed with a thin layer of concrete for aesthetics – a construction technique Jazvac finds highly unusual.
Jazvac is a Canadian artist and sculptor. She teaches sculpture, installation and performance in the Visual Arts department at the University of Western Ontario. In addition, she is researching the surface quality of just about anything.
“I do a lot of looking in the world at where surface treatment hasn’t been applied to things … and I try and figure out what that means and why,” she says.
Born and raised in Hamilton, Ont., Jazvac has always considered herself a ‘maker’.
“My family liked to make things, whether it be a shed for the garden or a painting for the wall. I think I was always really intrigued by that.”
Her earliest encounter with art, as she remembers it, was a painting by her grandfather. It hung in her family’s dining room, and it would often capture her imagination in passing. “It was a woman on a swing,” she says.
“It was this really enigmatic object for me as a kid.”
Jazvac used to wonder what her grandfather was thinking while he was painting the young woman.
In her late teens she said goodbye to Hamilton and took her curiosity for art and enrolled at the University of Guelph, from which she graduated with a BA in studio art and art history in 2003.
With a degree under her belt, and a newfound confidence to work as an artist in a big city, Jazvac headed east on Highway 401 toward Toronto. There she made a name for herself in the city’s art scene before heading west in 2004 to pursue her MFA at the University of Victoria.
Upon completing graduate school in 2006, Jazvac found herself back in Toronto where she embarked on an art project – commissioned by the Toronto Sculpture Garden – that seemed impossible to build.
In her Toronto-based studio Jazvac pulled off the unthinkable: she turned a 1998 Pontiac Sunfire into a 2007 Porsche 911 without even going under the hood.
Using printed pieces of adhesive vinyl, Jazvac turned the tired looking North American compact into a sleek cherry red mock-up of the German-engineered sports car.
She aptly named her creation Upgrade.
“I was skeptical at first,” says Patrick Howlett, Jazvac’s partner of nearly three years.
“But one thing I did appreciate was that she took a low-end car and attempted to upgrade it … I really like that aspect of it.”
With one more piece to add to her expanding portfolio, Jazvac applied to the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency program in 2008. Her application was accepted and she was offered a six-month working stint at London, England’s SPACE – a program designed to engage, develop and support creativity among artists worldwide.
“It was a fantastic opportunity,” says Jazvac. “It came with a project grant, a place to live in London and a big, gorgeous studio.”
Now, back in Canada and easing into her first full-time teaching gig, what does the future hold for Jazvac? Perhaps an exploration into the artistic qualities of Styrofoam and cement? Or, what about a possible move into ornithology?
“I am going to continue working on my art practice,” says Jazvac. “I know that’s probably the only definite answer.”
The writer is a master’s student studying journalism.
Biography
* If Jazvac wasn’t an artist, she would probably have been an architect or fire fighter
* Jazvac enjoys baking, camping and hiking
* Jazvac’s partner, Patrick Howlett, is a working artist. They met in Victoria, B.C. while she was working on her MFA.
* When not in the classroom, Jazvac spends all her free time in her studio