O.T. Rx. by HAYDEN MENZIES at #Hashtag Gallery (830 Dundas Street West), Opening Thursday (Oct. 8), 6 pm. See listing.
To put together all of the pieces for O.T. Rx., his first solo show of paintings and drawings in five years, Hayden Menzies didn’t need time. He needed a deadline.
“I’m so used to saying no to everything,” he says. “I’d always have a reason why I couldn’t do it – ‘I won’t have time, I don’t feel like it’ – so at the time [#Hashtag] approached me, I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m just gonna say yes. For better or worse, I’ll make something work.’ And there’ve been times in the past couple months that I’ve thought that was a mistake, and other times it’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s good I have something to work forward to.’”
Still, a bit of time could probably help. Menzies’s regular gig is drumming in noisy, critically acclaimed local band METZ, and their gruelling touring schedule can make it difficult for him to find time to work on his art. Things are coming down to the wire, in a sense. When we meet, he’s just come from the gallery and is buzzing from all the coffee he’s been drinking. There are still some finishing touches to complete. But Menzies says limited time doesn’t affect the quality of the show but instead allows for different approaches.
“I don’t think it devalues the work, whether it’s writing or poetry or music or illustration. I don’t think it takes away from it. I think it channels it in a different way. Those ideas are there. They’re not coming out of thin air just because someone tells you it’s gotta be done by a certain time. It doesn’t mean it’s any less thought out or less important. It just means it’s under a different format.”
Menzies has been drawing and painting since before he started playing drums, and has combined his art and music lives in the past, designing T-shirts and posters for bands. His drawings and paintings are extremely busy and incredibly weird, built out of dozens (maybe, in some cases, hundreds) of bizarre pieces, each perfectly placed in their own spot on canvas or paper. They are unendingly fascinating to look at, and you get the feeling you could stare forever, leave and come back, and find something that didn’t seem to be there the last time. Menzies says the process of creating them is similar to the way METZ writes songs.
“It’s very immediate,” he says. “It could just be like, you had a good day or a really shitty day, and that’s somehow going to work into it. It can deal with stuff like family and home life, and security or competence, and things like that. Or anxiety.”
There are no pre-sketches, no planning. If something doesn’t work, he starts again, which Menzies says can be frustrating but also encourages him to work with mistakes and use them as a step in a new direction, a way of seeing something that hadn’t been there before. All of these things – deadlines, screw-ups, re-arranging, adapting to ideas as they happen – help keep him from feeling creatively stagnant.
“It’s exciting to have those risks or challenges,” Menzies says. “’Challenges’ sounds like such a serious word. It’s easy. It’s art. It’s fucking fun. It’s spontaneous and fun. That’s how it should be.”
Menzies isn’t the only local with multiple disciplines. Here’s some more Torontonians juggling two (or more!) careers:
- Simone Schmidt (The Highest Order, Fiver)
- Lido Pimienta
- Josh Reichmann (Tangiers, Jewish Legend)
- Andre Ethier
- Victoria Cheong (Healing Power Records)
- Sook-Yin Lee
- Petra Glynt
- Matt King (Absolutely Free)
- Sean Dean (The Sadies)
- Andrew Scott (Sloan)
website@nowtoronto.com | @mattgeewilliams
