When an artistic collaboration accidentally turns into managing an international supply chain

Art, Death & Taxes unpacks the art world's greatest taboo: money. Nine acclaimed artists explore the economics of their practice, peeling back the curtain on all the work that goes into the work. Stream the full series now on CBC Gem.

Note: Art, Death & Taxes was produced before our world turned upside down. While many of the issues it raises around artists, business, and money are now more relevant than ever, some of the details reflect a world different from our current one.

"When I look at a piece of art, the thing that excites me almost instantaneously is looking at the craft and the meticulous details, the time that someone has taken to make the work," visual artist Sanaz Mazinani says in her episode of Art, Death & Taxes.

Making her work — which pops with light and colour — can be quite an intensive process, and for her show Light Times at Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto, she decided to work with a number of different collaborators. "I didn't want it to be only about me making the work," she explains.

But while bringing on collaborators enabled her to take her work to a new level, it also came with challenges. "This exhibition was a challenge in that regard because I was working with upwards of 20 people to make the show happen. That was really stressful because working on this larger scale and thinking about the way that collaborations can happen internationally results in, actually, a lot of paper work and a lot of economics that need to go into it."

Stream Sanaz Mazinani's episode of Art, Death & Taxes now on CBC Gem

In this episode of Art, Death & Taxes, Mazinani uses her piece Blind Shift #3 as an example of the challenges that can arise when working with others to help produce your work. The piece is a complex lenticular print that shifts in colour depending on what angle you look at it from. "When you walk by it, it slowly shifts tones and colours," Mazinani says. "I wanted to make a work that encompasses multiple perspectives at once."

"Blind Shift #3 was made in Montreal, and I loved working with the team there — it's a family-owned business. It was kind of an amazing experience and the pieces turned out really well."

But there was one problem: "They were really expensive to produce."

"If I'm showing it in a gallery and someone wants to buy it, I almost didn't want to let them go because they were so expensive to make. So I was like, 'If I make more I need to figure out a different source.'"

Mazinani had a studio in San Francisco and found a place in San Jose that could produce the piece for her for less. "They were a lot less expensive, so I ordered it and he said it was going to take a minimum of three weeks." Mazinani expressed that she thought that was a little long, but they went ahead. Some time later, she received a surprising delivery. "To my surprise, a piece arrived with all sorts of international labels on it and it had come from China. Because I had rushed him, I believe what he did was instead of shipping it to himself, repackaging it, and shipping it to me again, it came direct to my studio."

"And it wasn't the same. The kind of quality was not there. There were chips and dings because of the fragility of the material — having shipped, you know, by way of sea to me."

Reflecting on this situation as a lesson, Mazinani isn't entirely sure what the best approach is for future work and if she wants to only collaborate with those she knows, or if the best move would be to more actively engage a global production source. "How far do I want to expand my production network? Is it a matter of working with people that I know that have simply moved to other places because of the kind of global network we live in, or is it something that I want to engage in — take a trip, go to China, meet the lab there, get the conversation going with the technicians and build my artistic language with them?"

"What's really amazing about the role of an artist is you're kind of your own boss," she says at another point in the interview. But as she discovered, being your own boss can also sometimes mean managing complex international logistics.

Stream Art, Death & Taxes now on CBC Gem.