WORDS & PHOTOS by AIDAN MATTHEWS
Grace Kalyta is a painter and sculptor from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She came to Montreal to study Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. During her undergrad, she spent her nights working in Concordia’s studios and working as a server at a couple of Montreal’s best restaurants. “When I was at Concordia, I was known for sleeping on the couch or just not sleeping at all. A lot of Monster energy drinks.” Now she’s in her third year of Master’s candidature at Concordia and she still prefers to work at night, except now she’s in a new studio and she’s represented by Pangée, a contemporary gallery based in Montreal directed by founder Julie Côté.
I spoke to Grace in July. She had just come off a string of group shows and fairs in Montreal, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Most notably, Kalyta showed at NADA Miami and New York and at Praz-Delavallade in Los Angeles through the Creative Content Accelerator in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada. In March, Kalyta opened a solo show, Hall of Mirrors, at Pangée, prior to the public announcement of her representation.
When I visited Grace, she was working on the underpainting for four large canvases, hand carving wood supports for an installation, and testing stains for the aforementioned wood. These pieces were part of Pangée’s booth at Art Toronto this past October. Her studio is near St-Hubert Plaza, which is a culturally rich and eccentric strip of Montreal. Kalyta often rides her scooter to the plaza and thrifts for materials that she could incorporate into her sculptures or installations, or that she could study for her paintings. Her studio is brimming with trinkets, beads, fabric scraps, tools of varying caliber and usefulness, past works, and belts of varying vintages, quality, and brands.
Grace Kalyta is a painter and sculptor from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She came to Montreal to study Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. During her undergrad, she spent her nights working in Concordia’s studios and working as a server at a couple of Montreal’s best restaurants. “When I was at Concordia, I was known for sleeping on the couch or just not sleeping at all. A lot of Monster energy drinks.” Now she’s in her third year of Master’s candidature at Concordia and she still prefers to work at night, except now she’s in a new studio and she’s represented by Pangée, a contemporary gallery based in Montreal directed by founder Julie Côté.
I spoke to Grace in July. She had just come off a string of group shows and fairs in Montreal, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Most notably, Kalyta showed at NADA Miami and New York and at Praz-Delavallade in Los Angeles through the Creative Content Accelerator in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada. In March, Kalyta opened a solo show, Hall of Mirrors, at Pangée, prior to the public announcement of her representation.
When I visited Grace, she was working on the underpainting for four large canvases, hand carving wood supports for an installation, and testing stains for the aforementioned wood. These pieces were part of Pangée’s booth at Art Toronto this past October. Her studio is near St-Hubert Plaza, which is a culturally rich and eccentric strip of Montreal. Kalyta often rides her scooter to the plaza and thrifts for materials that she could incorporate into her sculptures or installations, or that she could study for her paintings. Her studio is brimming with trinkets, beads, fabric scraps, tools of varying caliber and usefulness, past works, and belts of varying vintages, quality, and brands.
AIDAN MATTHEWS - What’s your day-to-day like right now? Are you in the studio all day every day?
GRACE KALYTA - Well this summer I’ve been trying to go to the pool. I’m a night worker so even if I try to get here early, I’ll just do nothing for the first three or four hours and then I get into work. But I feel like doing nothing is a part of the work itself. Just being here and staring at the wall or staring at your phone and fucking around will eventually get you into something. I also like having the productive procrastination of working with my beads and things. I could paint but I could also come here and do dumb stuff that turns into something later.
AM - When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
GK - Super young. I was really lucky. My family was super supportive of it and always had me in art programs. My grandpa worked with his hands a lot; he worked in construction but also would always just tinker. He would fix violins. We bought this 100 year-old piano in pieces and he put it back together and re-did some of the woodworking. I was always around that when I was younger. He would let us use the drill press and we’d build little furniture things together. I just kept going. I was always doodling in the back of the class. I didn’t consider other things when I was looking for a university.
AM - What was it like growing up in Winnipeg?
GK - I haven’t spent much time there as an adult but I liked growing up in Winnipeg. It was a nice place to live. I really love Winnipeg. There’s a ton going on there culturally; lots of freaky film happening there.
AM - Did you feel like you had to leave Winnipeg to continue developing as an artist?
GK - I don’t even think that I was thinking that thoroughly about my choice to move to Montreal. I was super young and I just wanted to get out and go do something. I landed on Montreal because I had a couple of friends that said it was cool (laughs). And it worked out great. Concordia has been amazing and the arts community is really fun.
GRACE KALYTA - Well this summer I’ve been trying to go to the pool. I’m a night worker so even if I try to get here early, I’ll just do nothing for the first three or four hours and then I get into work. But I feel like doing nothing is a part of the work itself. Just being here and staring at the wall or staring at your phone and fucking around will eventually get you into something. I also like having the productive procrastination of working with my beads and things. I could paint but I could also come here and do dumb stuff that turns into something later.
AM - When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
GK - Super young. I was really lucky. My family was super supportive of it and always had me in art programs. My grandpa worked with his hands a lot; he worked in construction but also would always just tinker. He would fix violins. We bought this 100 year-old piano in pieces and he put it back together and re-did some of the woodworking. I was always around that when I was younger. He would let us use the drill press and we’d build little furniture things together. I just kept going. I was always doodling in the back of the class. I didn’t consider other things when I was looking for a university.
AM - What was it like growing up in Winnipeg?
GK - I haven’t spent much time there as an adult but I liked growing up in Winnipeg. It was a nice place to live. I really love Winnipeg. There’s a ton going on there culturally; lots of freaky film happening there.
AM - Did you feel like you had to leave Winnipeg to continue developing as an artist?
GK - I don’t even think that I was thinking that thoroughly about my choice to move to Montreal. I was super young and I just wanted to get out and go do something. I landed on Montreal because I had a couple of friends that said it was cool (laughs). And it worked out great. Concordia has been amazing and the arts community is really fun.
Grace Kalyta - Hall of Mirrors (2024), Pangée — photo by Will Sabourin
AM - Your work isn't limited to paint on a canvas. When did you start incorporating so many different materials into your work?
GK - I’ve always worked back and forth between small, sculptural, material study things and that often leads into the paintings. I’ll work on an object and then move into painting from the object. I always considered myself a painter so I never thought that the sculptural works were part of my practice. It was just something I was doing. But then I figured I could just bring in [the sculptural work] because it informed the paintings anyway.
AM - What’s most exciting about what you’re working on now?
GK - I’m trying to figure out how I want to explore the carousel. I’m working with found images, a lot of it is coming from Facebook Marketplace and the carousels of images that exist there, and so I’m exploring how I want to see that and seeing where that lands in my work.
AM - What’s your relationship to photography?
GK - I didn’t realize that I was a photorealistic painter until someone pointed it out to me. Because my work is always a little messy, it’s not hyper real. But it’s true, my practice is very much lens-based. I’m more interested in the snapshot, the low image, the fast image; something that would be discarded and trying to find how you come to that image. Even when I was taking photos for a past series, my goal was to look like I dropped the camera as I was taking the picture. There’s something about that movement and the casualness and then bringing those things into the “high” form of oil painting.
I try to always think about the quality of the image in the way that I paint. The application of the paint shifts depending on if the image is pixelated or blurry. I’m not trying to exactly translate it. It might lean more into impressionism if the image is really fuzzy or blown out. I’m looking for ways to translate it in a more painterly way. I’m not interested in that clean of a representation, but I am interested in the immediate pull that these images have. I’m not sure if it’s like fetish, but playing with the seduction of the thing itself and carry the feeling from the image into the painting.
AM - How do you approach painting then? Are you very picky about your brushes and your paint? Does the casualness of the images you’re referencing carry over into how you paint?
GK - Every now and then, I’ll come into some very expensive paint. And I get excited and I’m like, I’m gonna make a really expensive painting, so it’s all going to be cadmium and orange and yellow because it’s expensive. But lately I’m finding that the cheaper or the shittier the brush, the more interesting the marks are. I picked up some brushes at Home Depot that are for staining furniture so I’m really liking those. But I also have brushes that I love that are more traditional. It just depends on what I’m going for. The brushes all have their function, right? Especially if I’m moving through different ways of mark making, it’s good to have variation. I’m really not picky though, like my favourite colour is Hooker’s Green from Georgian, which is like a six-dollar tube of paint.
AM - Given that you’re finishing your Master’s, I’m assuming you have some sort of affinity for academia.
GK - Concordia is funny; it’s what you make of it. You can go really deep into your research; you can bop around and do your own thing. All the research that I’ve been doing has been deep dives into what I’m interested in. I’m getting better at writing about my own work. But I think the most valuable thing for me has been the access to the professors and the mentors. Concordia’s got such a large MFA program so there are so many people to interact with daily. Always talking about your work, their work, others’ work. I like being around that many artists all the time. Before I did my MFA, I didn’t have that many artist friends. Having the community is sort of new to me. During my undergrad, I was working three different jobs and trying to do school so I’d just be there painting at like two in the morning. It’s been really exciting to get to know people and to rely on them. If I have a question, I can ask people around me.
AM - Do you find it hard to balance academic performance and artistic development?
GK - That’s one of the harder things to negotiate time-wise. Something that we try to remind each other in the program is that part of your research is painting research; it’s not just reading and reading and reading and reading. It’s really tough to flip flop back and forth. For me, I want to do a solid two months of reading and then just paint and just forget about it. But then come back to it. Like, I’ll be working on some paintings and reading something later, and realize Oh, yes this is what I’m talking about. Navigating that back and forth is tricky because the MFA program is intense. Everything goes fast and you have to do so much reading and your brain is overloaded constantly. It’s definitely spicy to go through.
AM - What does your research look like, outside of reading and painting?
GK - A lot of material research. Tons of scrolling. Doom scroll turned into artistic practice, which is the best (laughs). But yeah, material research, like I started this woodworking stuff. I had never done it before. I was learning as I went. I call it cowboy artmaking where I’m just like I don’t know what I’m doing; I’m gonna do it! So I’ll start with the wrong tool and then someone will have to step in and be like Grace, there’s a better way to do this. My friend Ally has been really great. I was like Oh, I can just use a jigsaw and she was like Nope! We’re gonna put it through the machine and plane it out. Let’s do this properly. But yeah, still just using the wrong chisels but it’s working! And I like it so it’s great. I guess eventually I’ll get better at woodworking, but really I just go until it does what I want it to do.
AM - Does that get frustrating though? Are you good at seeing things through?
GK - I had Delphine [Hennelly] in my first semester of my MFA and she always says “Kill your babies.” You know, maybe the thing that isn’t working in the painting is the part you like so you have to kill that part and wreck it to then get through it, which is something I’ve gotten more comfortable with. If a painting is not working, I’ll just force it to work. I’ll paint over it, even if I worked really hard and it feels wasted and it was like 72 hours of painting. Just go over it and all of that will add to the richness of the painting in the end. Some of my paintings are done really fast and others are painfully long to make.
AM - Where else do you research?
GK - I think pop culture has a lot of influence on my work. Especially with something like Depop, there’s definitely an aestheticized image in there, even if it’s just people selling their second hand stuff. If you’re taking things from there, you can’t escape trends. They proliferate through everything. If I’m looking at something on Facebook and I want to see more of something, I’ll just search it a couple more times and the algorithm will just start throwing all of it at me, which is great if I get into an idea. But at the same time, you get into trends and you need to figure out how to navigate that. The point isn’t to paint trendy stuff, but sometimes the trendy stuff comes in because that just happens to be where I’m drawing from.
AM - Have you had trouble with seeing trends in your work?
GK - No, because I think if you come at it with a more critical lens, it can stand. I’m interested in Gen-Z blank-core trends. When you start unpacking what’s happening with those things and breaking down how they decide on this material, this shape, this colour, this look; all these things become the trend. I like the idea of Biker Core. My uncle is a real Harley Davidson man. It’s a real thing and the aesthetics are just built into it. And then there’s the offshoots of that, where there’s the blinged out version of it, with rhinestones and stuff. And then somehow, a teenager is wearing it, completely out of context and pairing it with something else and calling it a new name. It just gets so weird and so fun. You can get these things all the way back, sometimes hundreds of years, and see where everything is coming from. [The trends are] like etymologies of the image or of the surface. I’m looking at these things like a language and looking at how that language shifts.
AM - How did your relationship with Pangée start?
GK - I think it was back when I was working at Mon Lapin. They were in there and Vanya (Filipovic) was like, “You need to see Grace’s work!” being the good boss that she was and they said “Oh no, we know!” I must’ve already been on their radar somehow, probably through Instagram. When I started the MFA program, we started doing studio visits and they proposed working together. It’s been nice because I just got to travel to LA and Miami with them. They’re really fun and comfortable people to be around.
AM - What’s next for you?
GK - I think I’m going to do Art Toronto and maybe NADA Paris…which is really crazy. And I’m going to start teaching in the fall. Call me Professor Grace (laughs). I have a whole Intro to Painting course, two full semesters to do so I’m really excited. It’s my first time.
AM - Are you scared?
GK - Yeah, I definitely have some imposter syndrome. Like, what do you mean?! There’s no way I’m the right candidate for this job, I’m too irresponsible. But at the same time, you need to remember that you do have a lot to offer especially to people starting out. I loved being a teaching assistant. The students have so much energy and there’s just so excited to be there. I can’t wait. I have a really intense syllabus for them. Lots of research. They’ll either love me or hate me.
Kalyta’s work will be shown in London at Pipeline Contemporary in a group show titled Give Me an Inch which opens November 7 and runs until December 21.
Keep up with Grace and her upcoming work here and here.
GK - I think I’m going to do Art Toronto and maybe NADA Paris…which is really crazy. And I’m going to start teaching in the fall. Call me Professor Grace (laughs). I have a whole Intro to Painting course, two full semesters to do so I’m really excited. It’s my first time.
AM - Are you scared?
GK - Yeah, I definitely have some imposter syndrome. Like, what do you mean?! There’s no way I’m the right candidate for this job, I’m too irresponsible. But at the same time, you need to remember that you do have a lot to offer especially to people starting out. I loved being a teaching assistant. The students have so much energy and there’s just so excited to be there. I can’t wait. I have a really intense syllabus for them. Lots of research. They’ll either love me or hate me.
Kalyta’s work will be shown in London at Pipeline Contemporary in a group show titled Give Me an Inch which opens November 7 and runs until December 21.
Keep up with Grace and her upcoming work here and here.
