Joy Yamusangie shares the process of creating a fictional jazz club

Like many of us, the final speaker of the night at Nicer Tuesdays August, Joy Yamusangie, picked up a few new hobbies during lockdown. Alongside running and baking banana bread, they also decided to take up the saxophone, having spent much of their childhood idolising Lisa Simpson for her skills. Joy explained to the audience that, before long, this new creative outlet had begun to feed into their main practice of drawing and painting – making works featuring saxophone and trumpet players and audience members watching them play. For a while, Joy was enveloped in the world of jazz both sonically and visually and this immersion gave them yet another ambition – to open their own jazz club.

“NOW Gallery approached me and said ‘Hey, we want to give you an exhibition space and you can do whatever you want in it’, and I thought ‘Maybe I should ease into this jazz club [idea] and do a jazz club [themed] exhibition instead…” they recall. Taking the audience through the process of creating the exhibition, Joy explained that even the fictional jazz club they set up in the gallery (which they named Feeling Good after the Nina Simone song) involved a lot of work – from finding the right layout, to sourcing the furniture for the space, to finding an actual band to play on the opening night. They concluded by saying that even though the exhibition ended up being a huge success, and they “had a great time” creating it, for now they would “stick to art.”