Bucko Art Machine
Bucko (aka Chris Binkowski), an Ottawa-based artist, musician, and performer, is the subject of a twenty-six year survey exhibition on display at SAW until May 10. Akimblog spoke with him about his work.
The exhibition at SAW starts my last year of high school. I had just got my first Mac for my 18th birthday. That opened the doors for me creatively with Photoshop and InDesign. I made zines where I did the layout, the graphics, and the writing. I would write every day like a madman. I never really knew what to do with the writing. I didn’t have the patience to edit a book, so I ended up creating three zines titled Reason Why I’m Shy, Lifelike 1, and Lifelike 2. That’s where the exhibition starts. There are many photography projects that I did in those years too. A few years after that is when I started painting, which goes from when I was twenty-nine until now.
Installation view of Bucko Art Machine at SAW (photo: Rémi Thériault)
I’ve always been doing art. It started with doing simple stuff on my Mac, but about fifteen years ago I got frustrated with making art on the computer. It would come down to making choices. You could create hundreds of different variations of something so quickly that it was often hard to tell when to finish a piece. With acrylic painting, what you make is what you make, right? It’s a singular piece. I like that limitation, and I like the challenge – seeing what I could do physically. That pushed me to create two of my biggest works: Mountain I and Mountain II.
When I got an iPhone I found a bunch of music apps, and that opened up doors for me creatively as a musician. That’s when I really started to try my hand at music. I got a portable amp and lights. A friend helped me create a mounting system on my wheelchair so I could go downtown with my iPhone and this mobile sound system, and busk for people. This was around 2013. I pretty much stopped painting for those years and focused a lot more on busking. I would get invited to gigs every once in a while or be part of a music festival.
Opening weekend of Bucko Art Machine at SAW (photo: Jason St-Laurent)
Then in 2018, I was no longer living downtown, so busking wasn’t as easy. I would just do gigs here and there, and I started to use my phone to play around with painting software. I’m not a patient artist. Pretty much all my paintings are created in one night. I post them right away on Instagram. I’m not someone who works on a piece for weeks or months. I like things quick and dirty.
A lot of my painting is connected to the tools I’m using and the apps I’m using on the phone. I’m just trying out the brushes that each app has to see what it allows me to do expression wise, to see what fits my aesthetic sensibilities. I like the way they mimic paint and the blending effects they have. It’s frustrating though, because I’ve had apps where I’ve created paintings that I really like, then they update themselves and change the user-interface, or they update the brushes in a way that I no longer can get back to that same style.
Opening weekend of Bucko Art Machine at SAW (photo: Jason St-Laurent)
Sometimes I’m expressing my inner feelings, other times I’m inspired by movies or stories about people I know. Interpersonal relationships or even societal relationships. I’m interested in humanity and frustrated by the state of the world. As a child I was interested in all sorts of ideas. And then as an adult, I thought the world would keep on moving towards those things. And yet it doesn’t feel that way anymore, that we can continue to progress towards good things. I was born in the eighties, so I grew up being taught environmental messages by David Suzuki, and every year we seem to have more and more reasons why we should be doing something about climate change. And yet we keep steamrolling ahead, extracting as much oil as possible and clear cutting. On top of that, ideas of community have changed. Everybody’s out for themselves and individualistic. With social media everybody is trying to have their own voice and their own spotlight.
The titles for my paintings come from various angles. I feel frustrated sometimes because, while they can be personal sounding, they’re not always about me. I write them in a first-person voice, but they can reflect a universal sort of human experience. Or something somebody else went through. But people often think they’re all about me and they’re not.
(photo courtesy of Debaser)
There are also five videos in the exhibition. Two are from a performance art music piece I did called Personal Performance. In that piece I had someone sit in front of me and I would improvise a piece of music as I’d be making eye contact with them. And then there are two that are me and a keyboardist named Nick Schofield. (They can be seen here and here.) Another is me and a musician named Eliza Niemi playing an improvised piece. She was on cello and I was on my phone.
There’s a photography project called Snap Thoughts. That’s basically me doing my own version of a project by Gillian Wearing where she would ask random people on the street to write anything that they wanted on a piece of paper and photograph it. I did that here in Ottawa and also in New York and Toronto. And then the gallery set up one humongous wall with projections of 260 paintings that I posted on Instagram and Facebook. It takes about two hours to watch it. And my huge acrylic paintings, Mountain I and Mountain II, are on display vertically for the first time.
So, it’s a retrospective of twenty-six years of creativity.
Chris Binkowski (aka Buck Art Machine) portrait from Instagram @buckoart
There’s a little part of the show that is devoted to my activism, possibly more so because the curators are interested in that. I’m not that interested in it, but my activism comes from necessity. In my case, the greatest artistic activism I’ve done is on two levels. On a practical level, for a few years I was a board member of an arts organization called BEING Studio. While I was there, there was a major rebranding upheaval and I was involved with having them change their policies around giving the artists more ownership over their own art. That was something I did behind the scenes, but it’s very important.
And then as a disabled artist in general, every time I did busking and anything where I’m appearing in the same space as, let’s say, able-bodied artists, that’s a form of activism itself, of just being visible. I can’t deny that my disability is a part of my art work. Obviously it has a huge effect on me. It shapes how I can create music. It shapes how I paint, the choices I’m making. On my phone I don’t have to have someone else opening tubes of paint and cleaning brushes for me, and be dependent on a physical assistant to make my canvases accessible to me. But I don’t know if I could ever fully be into being like a “crip artist” or something like that. I just want to be an artist, and not defined by my disability so much.