The New Face of VEMU: A Conversation with Artist Jessie Anneli Viirlaid McNeil

While walking or parading down the streets of Tallinn, in modern and traditional dress (often a gracious and tactful mixing of the two), visitors and residents from all walks of life were immersed in a celebratory environment of the festival week. During her time in Tallinn, McNeil captured this sensation with her camera, then later, assembled the collage re-representations in her studio. The series was on display at VEMU in spring 2015 and explored the perspective of a Canadian-Estonian during the festival, from moments of mundanity to emotional highs. While expressing themes of memory and experience, McNeil's collages in "Outsider Inside" posed the complex question, "What is an Estonian today?" While working on VEMU’s new brand in 2021, we came back full circle to Jessie’s meaningful collages depicting being Estonian and multicultural tensions. Her works were found to be perfect to visually convey the messages within VEMU’s new brand, here are her thoughts on it all...

KK: When did you first get into being creative, realized you would want to be an artist and pursue it more seriously as a career? 

Jessie McNeil (JM): I think somewhere between 3 and 9 months old, one of my parents put a pencil in my hand. It probably started there! Being creative is something everyone is born with, and it just takes one teacher or person to tell you you can’t draw or sing and then suddenly you believe it to be true. I’m lucky that didn’t happen to me. And a career in the arts is definitely part of my family history. My maternal grandfather was a writer and poet, my mum majored in Art History and worked as a talented registrar at the Vancouver Art Gallery and my father is an artist, and his mother was a draftswoman. It was probably inevitable that I would take on the “family business.” Although at one point in high school I suddenly became aware of the realities of working as an artist and thought I should take on a more practical career as a designer. Then art school (Langara College and then Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver) happened and I was officially hooked.