Genre: Other

Jeff Hamada Jeff Hamada Interview by: Reid Stewart Photographs by: Jennilee Marigomen I dont' get to see Jeff much these days but I sure love the guy. I first got to know him through a show we worked on a few years ago called "Tangents". It was a group show that revolved around artists he had worked with and featured on Booooooom and artists we have worked with for Lifetime. It was a real pleasure to work alongside him and really see how creative and collaborative he was. I get to work with a lot of different people with Lifetime but it's folks like him that really get me excited to keep creating. Keep up the great work Hamada! How old were you and where were you when art/creativity started to become an interest for you? Was it even something that you consciously realized was even happening? My mom still has all my old drawings from when I was like 5 or 6, but I don't think I was conscious of it back then. It was maybe a year or two later that I realized making pictures was something I liked to do. I would invite friends over to draw on our kitchen table and I didn't really think it was that strange to spend an afternoon doing that. Thinking about it now, it's funny to know how many of my friends I subjected to that. How did art become important for you? I don't know if I've ever thought of art as something important or unimportant. Creating something has always felt like the normal thing to do. If my day to day life was a pie chart and one slice was eating, and another was working, I wouldn't make a slice for art. Art would be a smaller circle in the middle that is intersected by all the other slices. It's somehow a part of everything. I don't really know if that makes any sense. When did the creative process start to enter into the equation for you and what did that look like? I have always loved brain teasers and things like that. My uncle had all these puzzles in his house and I remember one of them was this small smooth wooden box that wouldn't open. That was it, that was the puzzle. I remember staring at the box for a long time and trying a million different things until finally I spun it around really fast and the box slid into two halves. Inside I could see that there were these little bullet shaped wood pieces that were loose, and the only way for the box to be unlocked was for each of the pieces to be at the outer edge of the box. So essentially it was an elegant way of illustrating centrifugal force. I still think a lot about that puzzle, how perfectly designed it is. I guess the creative process for me started as a designer, problem solving, and just inventing dumb things. I remember Marble Madness was a popular thing at the time (I'm talking about the plastic building set, not the video game), and my friends had all these sets we could join together. So we would make huge "booby traps" and Rube Goldberg type machines using parts of the Marble Madness sets, cut-up cereal boxes, lego, anything we could find. Someone's mom would open a door and a bucket might fall on her head and start a chain reaction across the house. What style of work are you currently working on and why? I like to play with words, I like hand drawing letters and text. Sometimes they are conversations I've overheard or just things I think about. I took creative writing in college and really enjoyed it. When I transferred to Emily Carr I took film and I thought I wanted to be a director but I realized after a while that I just liked the story-telling part. Some of my ideas are a lot funnier as text and don't translate to an actual image. Lately I've been reading lots of comics and trying to effectively turn some of my written ideas into drawings and text. What sorts of influences do you draw upon? Generally are these influences always changing or do they remain constant through out your process of making art? It's always changing. I love Tauba Auerbach's text works, I think she probably grew up interested in puzzles too. There is a sort of math in all her work. I am terrible at math but I think have an analytical mind. I had a magic set as a kid and one of the tricks involved these 5 cards with a whole bunch of random numbers on them. In the trick I think the person had to point out which cards had their number on it and the magician would secretly add together numbers from one of the corners of each card (I forget how the actual trick worked exactly) and instantly knew which number the person had chosen. Anyways, I lost one of the cards and I remember spending a whole afternoon staring at the cards until I was able to figure out which numbers had to be on the missing card and I remade it with an old recipe card. Do you travel well while creating or do you need to be in a certain space? I know this can be different foreveryone. I like to be in one place. I need to not have anything else on my mind, I have a hard time juggling different projects and then also creating. I can do it but I don't enjoy it. It's probably why I've quit doing any freelance design work. It's just my personality, it's the same if I go out for lunch and I have something else to do in the evening. I don't like going straight from one thing to the next. I like a buffer, even just to sit and do nothing for a little bit in between. How do you document daily inspirations for future work? Or do you? That's kinda what Booooooom is, a personal document of work I find inspiring for later reference. I don't even really have to keep looking back at the archives, I can recall most things I've ever posted on there so the ritual of posting about something kinda locks it into my memory. How did the idea for Booooooom come about? Why? It really just started as an archive of work, but now it's become a way for me to encourage people. It's as much about inspiring people as it is about encouraging artists to keep going. I think sometimes the assumption is that really talented people know they're talented and don't need encouragement. It must be an amazing network of people you've come to know and meet over the years? Meeting new people has really been the best part for sure. I've made some friends that I'll have for the rest of my life because of Booooooom. I've probably had lunch with at least one new person every week for the past 2 years. It's kinda wild. Has this process helped your own art work and process? I'm sure you've been able to learn from other people's ways and experiences. It certainly has. In order to make great work you have to see and experience great work. Aside from Booooooom what have you been working on? What future projects are you looking forward to working on? Is it tough to get time for your own work? I don't know if there's anything I do now that isn't at least partially related to Booooooom. It is my life! Right now I'm working on collaborations with a couple companies to develop some actual Booooooom products. I'm still slowly working on my own drawings but it has been tough to find time for it lately. I am trying to block out most of July and August for my own work - trying.