The Artist Formerly Known as Jed

In response to Juliet Capulet’s query, ‘What’s in a name?’ the boy named Sue might’ve answered, ‘Plenty’. But Canberra-based artist Jed Wolki would be more inclined to side with Juliet.  

 

Jed, who earned a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) from the ANU School of Art, can’t understand why more artists don’t take on a working identity.

 

“Your name itself seems very unlikely to be relevant directly to your practice,” he says. 

 

“It’s something else you can control. You can change the name depending on how you want it to be seen or something just a bit more abstract.”

 

The artist formerly known as Jed views his real identity as a distraction from his work, in the vein of how if an artist has a racialized name, people might view their work through that lens.

 

“It’s similar along those lines. I don’t think it’s important that I’m an Anglo-Saxon male,” he says.

 

Producing his work under an artistic identity, he says, stops preconceptions being brought to the work based on the maker. 

 

“I don’t think the maker’s identity is always important to the work itself.”

 

 ‘Knees’ goes way back to when Jed was doing a lot of damage to his knees messing around on push bikes and skateboards. Fittingly, the name isn’t descriptive of his work.

 

Instead, a prevailing artistic interest of his has been machines; hybridised ones of current real-world machinery. 

 

“I envision the purpose the machine will need to fulfil and find all the bits and pieces I need from current machines to be able to put together to make that machine,” he says. 

 

“I’ve always been dealing with machines and how they work and what they do for us and what kind of possibilities they raise.”

 

His landscapes are drawn from early 2000s video games. 

 

“Which is how you get that nice block kind of polygonal forms,” he says.

 

Lately, his artistic universe has involved space exploration and “terraformation”, which he describes as ‘a form of planetary engineering where efforts are made to make a planet more hospitable for earth based lifeforms’. 

 

His current exhibition at Megalo Print Studio+Gallery is the Terraforming Expo. It comprises mainly three-dimensional-looking hybridised machines of Jed’s imagination. In his artistic universe, Knees is the corporation manufacturing all these machines for terraforming, and travelling through space. And indeed, printed on some of the machines is the brand Knees.

 

The exhibition reflects Jed’s philosophy on what’s in our future. He says that space colonisation is the next logical progression for humankind. 

 

“We’re burning through [our planet] too quickly and I’m not convinced that we’re going to be able to stop that before it runs away on us,” he says. 

 

 

Terraforming Expo opens on 17 March at Megalo Print Studio+Gallery in Kingston. Jed’s work is also emblazoned on the office wall of Woroni, the university’s student-run newspaper.