Who are you, and what do you do?
Howdy, I'm Zandi Dandizette! I am an interdisciplinary artist at bluep.ink and one of the founders of The James Black Gallery collective of which I curate and have ran since 2014 in Vancouver, BC.
Before that I was at Emily Carr University of Art + Design for animation which likely informs a bit of my artwork. I love movement, and although enjoy painting and illustrating, if something isn't moving, I find it not up to snuff in my own practice. I've projected my digital work on water and painting to help bring to life the concept. I'm also obsessive with making my entire world and works pink, purple, and blue. In general I aim to explore discourse around identity in relationship to colour, gender, shape, and line in accordance with immersive interactions. As an interdisciplinary artist, I try to embody my work in everything that I do including performative elements. My previous animations, illustrations, installations, and curations can be found on my site.
The James Black Gallery is dedicated to artists showing their work without having to pay a percentage out to the gallery. Artists-in-residence show their work, curate, and run the space. The JBG is located in a heritage building in Mount Pleasant (est. 1889). Our focus is to provide emerging artists a location in which they can practice presentation and experiment with ideas. Some of the rad things we've seen in our space is a ball pit bus, live self-cover tattoo performance, naked puppet show, a bug-themed room performance, BSDM pandrogenous musical performance, glitching gameplay with a fruit and veggie controller, drills with nipple tassels on their ends, a giant cardboard dinosaur, food sculpture, and more. You never know what you are going to get when you walk into our space. And I love it that way.
I'm currently participating in the curation of three shows, ROVE x JBG, LIMINAL CONFINES at the JBG and HALO, WORLD at VIVO in Vancouver.
What hardware do you use?
I have a dual-monitor i7 computer with an NVIDIA video card and 16GB of RAM, and the OS on an SSD. It's in a blue led and pink tower. I use a Bamboo tablet and an NEC projector. I'm fortunate to have lots of studio space, and a green screen basic lighting set up as well.
And what software?
I use Maya, V-Ray, ZBrush, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Flash, Illustrator, Autodesk Sketchbook, and OpenOffice, for the most part.
What would be your dream setup?
Oh golly, a better projector with higher lumens would really help me out a lot. Also a nice camera for shooting performance footage to meld in with my animation as well as better documentation. Dream world I'd also have a variety of colour lighting tools (1ks lighting with gels and LED strips) for the shoots, a fancy Wacom tablet, and better access to transportation with my big installations, hah.