Jimmy Limit is a contemporary artist based in Toronto who has exhibited internationally at the Albright-Knox Museum in New York and published in Frieze Magazine in London.
His work was curated to MakersPlace thanks to community member “Kortelin” and interviewed about a recent transition to NFTs and his MakersPlace genesis release.
Jimmy Limit in the Press
Q: How do you see NFTs contributing to digital photography?
A: I’ve always liked that famous Douglas Huebler quote “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” I took a break from exhibiting my photography in galleries and the idea of dematerializing my practice has really grown on me. NFTs allow me to keep my digital work in its native format and break the traditional process of object to image to object. If you think about it, a traditional photograph is of a physical object, which is captured as an image and then transformed back into a physical object by printing, framing and hanging it in a gallery.
In Web3 we talk about cutting out the middleman and NFTs allow me as the artist to share my work in its purest dematerialized form, which is digital. What’s really interesting is the next sentence of that Huebler quote: “I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or place.” Smart contracts and the blockchain allow us to fulfill this ambition of time and place using just the data of the photo file.
Q: What does moving past the physical art object mean to you?
A: When I got my BFA at OCAD in Toronto I learned about the traditional studio environment, where you use strobe lights and a digital camera and the outside of the frame does not matter, only what is in camera. But I also saw the amount of waste it produced. Sets are built and torn down and the material is carted off to the dump. In my “Show Room” series of 100 photographs I wanted to address the life cycle of the art object. The inanimate objects featured in the work were purchased, photographed and then returned to the store. The food in the photos was consumed after the shoot. And the ceramics in the compositions were used at home or gifted to friends after.
Q: Your Genesis NFT on MakersPlace is part of a series called “Show Room”. What inspired you to create this work?
A: Any time I make art I think of the context it will be viewed in. How will it be displayed, to whom, and under what circumstances. I thought it would be interesting to create a series of 100 pieces whose meaning would change depending on what audience viewed it. If I showed it in an art gallery it would be interpreted one way, maybe focusing more on the conceptual aspects of the content. If I showed it to corporate clients looking for commercial photography, they would probably focus on the technical elements. With NFTs the opportunity to interact directly with new collectors who are thinking of new parameters around the meaning and utility of unique digital objects is really exciting.
I minted “Yellow Glove With Lizards On Blue (sunrise)” as my first NFT because I think it encapsulates the entire sensibility of the series in one photograph. It is inspired by historical still lifes and advertising images. It plays with image fatigue from viewing so much content created to artificially generate desire and consumption. It’s really about the over-saturation of images we encounter across the media landscape and what social media has taken to a whole new level. The work has an emphasis on form and making the everyday appear as something new and strange.
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