Joy Yamusangie

Joy Yamusangie: Outside of art, in my day to day life… yes! Haha. I think when you say your name is "Joy,"  the responses that I usually get are the same. So if I have my normal face, which is neutral, people will say, “Oh, how come you’re not smiling?” I get many of those kinds of comments.

 

I think I’ve just heard it so many times that it makes me laugh. It doesn't bother me too much. I like having a name with meaning in this way, even though it's not how my mother intended it to be. She actually just named me after someone in a TV show she liked. It has nothing to do with the feeling, haha. But I like that it means something else to other people. I like what it means for my mum. I've got so many different nicknames! So it's one of my many nicknames.

 

Oh, you know what? I’ve never thought about it that way! That's a really nice way to see it. It hasn't been something that I've thought about in the past. I'd like to think so after you say that now. But actually, maybe it has had an influence on it. Or maybe how other people perceive my work, knowing that it's made by someone called Joy, they might see it in a certain way. 

That’s really cool! Yeah, it goes way, way, way back to my childhood. I made a drawing of a circus and I gave it to my mum. She actually still has the drawing. I mean, it's not something that looks like what I make now. But I remember being like, I love drawing. I really love drawing. I used to make comics for my siblings, and I used to make animations. I was always trying to make stuff. When I was young, I was really encouraged with my art and always kind of felt proud of whatever I was making, even though it's not necessarily work that I would put out there now. 

 

I loved watching cartoons. I watched everything on Cartoon Network and everything on Nickelodeon. I loved the Powerpuff Girls! I loved Dexter's Laboratory. I originally thought that I was going to take the path of animation. I thought that's the kind of thing that I want to be able to do because I used to make school drawings and then trace over them. And then I made the ones you could flip through in the pre-computer days. When we had family portraits taken, I’d do editing… I think I might have used something like PowerPoint to make animations. Yeah, I was definitely influenced by all that TV. I watched so much TV, haha.

 

Oh, that was my last one! Yeah. I started making playlists for my parents for my first exhibition, actually. I think what made me think about doing that was that I wanted to invite my mum to the exhibition. She just didn't really go to galleries. Part of that reason is because I feel like it's not really a welcoming space. You go in, and you feel like you're not meant to be there. People look at you, and it's just silence. I always thought that if I had an exhibition, I'd love for there to be music playing so it just feels comfortable. And even if you don't know what to say about the work, I can pair songs with the paintings, and then maybe you could understand it a bit more. So for my very first exhibition, which was called Do You Know Your Middle? I actually got my mum to make a playlist for me. And she made a really good playlist! Some of the songs I couldn't even find on Spotify, they were just old Congolese songs that weren’t online. But then I had that playing throughout the exhibition. I also invited this collective called Touching Base, which had drummers and someone on the saxophone, to interpret the paintings. But ever since then, I've been making a playlist for every single exhibition that I’ve done.

Yeah, she loved it because they were songs that she recognized, all these old Congolese singers. She had a great time! She told all my family about it. She posted on Facebook. That’s how I know I made it when she posts about it on Facebook. 

 

I will say more from reality, actually, just because there’s so much going on. There is so much going on in my life that it ends up affecting what I dream about. And the dream is just the unrealistic version of it where anything can happen, which I like! I like drawing from the conversations that I have with friends and close ones. Or memories I have that I want to remember. But then, if I have dreams that maybe kind of stick out to me, I will make pieces off of them. 

 

I had an exhibition a few years ago that was just based on dreams. I actually felt like it was quite, I want to say, exposing, you know? I’m sure someone like your partner would be able to read into the deeper meanings of these dreams. But I guess being an artist is playing with your whole life and sharing it anyway. 

I don't write them down because I’m a bit lazy, but I’ll do a voice memo. When you listen to them back… I just cringe so much, haha! Because it doesn't make sense. And then I just take long pauses… It's actually quite funny. Yeah, I have to do this almost instantly. But then I have some dreams that really stick with me. I think the ones that are really weird in terms of the visuals—I actually remember even going into the day.

 

Most of them are actually me, or versions of myself. Only in the last couple of years have I included the people who are around me. And I think that is because of the way that I got into drawing. I felt confident drawing from these exercises that I used to do in college, where I would get a mirror and then draw line drawings of myself. So I spent a lot of time in college just drawing myself. That's why a lot of the figures start with me.

 

I think when I first started, it was quite uncomfortable. Like being a late teen and having to extract all the time at that age when you’re changing quite drastically. But I'm actually really grateful for an exercise like that because it kind of made me appreciate my blackness and my features. Features that my family has. I think that it really made me see beauty in that, at an age when you're just seeing so much media that is not reflecting people who look like me at all. I kind of understand much more why my teacher, who was a Black man, gave us, a predominantly Black class, this kind of exercise. And it's something I still do. Yeah, I think you can learn a lot about yourself, but it also helps with confidence. Yeah, it definitely helps confidence.

My uncle used to take me to galleries. I absolutely loved it, and I had a really good time. I remember the first exhibition that I went to, one of the early ones that I went to on my own and had a sense of awareness as an artist, was a Henri Matisse cut-outs exhibition at Tate Modern. I really enjoyed the show because I really liked his use of color and cutouts. And just that much was done with paper. I was thinking a lot about my own practice and how I didn't have a lot of money at the time, and I thought about what I could use to be able to make artworks, starting with paper, too. I would definitely say that the way that he worked really influenced me in the early days. There are so many artists that I want to list, but I think that actually it's just the people that I know and am surrounded by. They really inspire me. One of my favorite photographers is one of my friends, Bernice Mulenga, who's also Congolese. I love their work! Their photographs kind of show people living in every way—whether it's in happiness, joy, or partying. I'd like to think I do that a bit too with my work. Yeah, I'm definitely inspired by my contemporaries.