[Narrator] "Art Loft" is brought to you by.

[Narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft," it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, exploring architecture, art, and design.

We meet sculptor Luke Jenkins, as he explores textures, environmental impacts, and the unexpected.

Commissioner introduces us to an artist and architect focused on the rituals of spaces, and the telling of stories.

And we connect with an Ohio design duo stretching the boundaries of traditional architecture.

Luke Jenkins is a Fort Lauderdale based artist, sculptor, and furniture maker, letting his fascinations lead him to some unexpected places.

Here, we learn about his current explorations.

Those are pieces of plywood.

They've had patterns of termites carved into them, and where the light penetrates through the piece of plywood is where both of the carved patterns have intersected with each other.

They both get carved about halfway into the plywood, so wherever they meet is where light comes through.

Those all come from a bunch of termites that I caught during the last swarming season, and right here in the shop, actually, which is extra, extra terrifying.

My name's Luke Jenkins, and I run In Bloom Studio.

I do a lot of woodworking.

That can either take the form of sculpture, or furniture.

We're here in my workshop.

I make my own stuff.

I do client work for commissions, as well as just fabrication.

So I have a full wood shop with a laser cutter in the back, and a big CNC router in the front.

So I do more traditional woodworking, as well as digital fabrication where things are designed on a computer, and then they are kind of cut out by machines.

I would love to try to recreate termite patterns, and how they eat wood, which I'm really interested in, because it's not linear, and it's not really that logical.

It's this weird hybrid of seeking, and then just eating as much as you can really fast, and then seeking again, and eating as much as you can really fast.

I want to kind of make these portable termite capturing devices.

It could be this technical, and this kind of like pseudoscientific, or it could turn into something else, you know?

I don't really know what it means yet.

I just know that I'm very interested in it, and the same thing happened with the thermally modified wood, which is that I'm super interested in it.

Why has no one used it for furniture and art?

I need to study that.

The wood is thermally modified ash.

That basically means that the wood is heated up to around 415 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and all of the resins, and sugars are kind of caramelized out of it.

So you could take this wood that's normally an interior grade wood, and put it outside in South Florida weather for over 30 years without, you know, painting it, or putting any oil on it, or anything like that.

So I was really interested in a material like this that could kind of go in between interior and exterior.

This grouping of the vessels, I made 36 of these bowls, or vessels, and they were meant to kind of just house either different finish samples, or different materials within the wood, to see what would happen, just leaving them outside.

And these were the ones that I had metal interact with the wood.

This one was steel wool, so that rusted out.

This one was aluminum, this was brass.

They're two separate pieces.

They're both called "Day One," and they're thermally modified wood, and they've all been sanded to 3,000 grit, which is a really high grit, like a lot higher than you'd normally sand wood at.

And it makes it almost like polished.

That one has wax on it, additionally, as well.

And after that, after they were made into these kind of fetish objects through the ultra finishing of them, and they were perfect, I put 'em outside, and let 'em get rained on.

They're called "Day One," because they spent 24 hours outside.

This is a kind of representation of that shift from a high fine woodworking, highly finished, into exterior where it just interacts with the elements, and you can't really protect from that.

And that's not really the point of this wood, anyway.

I'm not trying to protect anything.

I'm just letting the environment do its thing, and you know, the wood kind of just becomes an index of the environment that it's been in.

Cool.

Whenever we're cutting something on the CNC router, and we're cutting all the way through it, we put a piece of a sacrificial board underneath it, to cut into.

So, all of these patterns that are in the wood right now are previous projects that we've cut.

Some of them, you know, really kind of organic and flowing, and some really, really rectilinear.

This body of work that I think a lot of people know me for is just carving into plywood, and that's something I started doing when I first opened the shop up.

I really wanted to just start making work that was about CNC routing, and the plywood seemed like a really good place to start, because it's an industrialized material, so it's very highly controlled already.

And I started carving through the different layers in different ways, and that led to this kind of gouging pattern that is, when at first glance, it looks like it was done maybe by hand, but then, either if you are a woodworker yourself, and you understand, you know, gouging, a lot of the gouges are way too long for a hand tool to make.

I wanted there to definitely still be some noticeable sign that it was made by a machine somehow.

And I like that aspect, that there is still like a sign of how it was made within it, and I guess that's kind of like a, back to my roots in furniture design is part of that craft of there there being some indication of the process that you used to make it.

It's touching in the middle.

Termites are near and dear to my soul, as a woodworker.

They terrify me, and they're invasive, and we all hate them, and we're all kind of terrified of them in a lot of ways.

And that grossness is also something that I'm very attracted to, in kind of exploring that, and understanding it, and then seeing how it relates to me, and how I can translate that relationship I have into physical objects.

If there are already termites in here, which there probably are, 'cause it's South Florida, then I may as well be studying them.

You know, it's a way to control your fear in some sense, as well.

I think that's definitely something that has been consistent in my work is this kind of unknown thing, and trying to control it, and understanding it in some way.

Part of the fun in woodworking is doing planning beforehand, but also leaving enough wiggle room, kind of in the middle of the process, to allow you to still go down a different avenue, or make slight changes in the piece that will bring you to a new solution, or a new object, or a new thought.

[Narrator] Our partners at Commissioner bring us this very personal introduction to the architect, artist, and educator, Germane Barnes.

His work is at the intersection of social practice, how we gather, and the power of storytelling, and it's all by design.

So I always tell people I'm not an artist.

I'm always like, I'm not an artist.

They're like, but you do artist residencies, you make things.

I'm like, yeah, but I feel like there's a certain freedom that artists have that I don't have.

If nobody ever saw them, they would always still be making things.

And so, that intersection was very interesting, because when I was approached from MoMA, I immediately said, "I'm not doing any architectural drawings."

Like, I'm not making a single one.

I'm gonna blend visual arts and design, and I'm gonna make everything that could be visual arts, instead of just architecture.

I want people who don't understand architecture to still understand this spatial praxis.

The intersection lies at storytelling.

If I tell this story properly, with the right drawing process, I can nail it without ever having to talk about architecture.

My name is Germane Barnes, you can call me G. That's what most people call me.

If you are my grandmother, you can call me my baby.

I like to tell people that I am an architectural anthropologist, and I design.

Buildings don't really excite me.

Like, I don't see a building and go, oh my god, this is the greatest thing that's ever been done, which I know is counterintuitive to being an architect.

And instead I'm always like, what type of rituals happen within this type of building, or this type of structure, this type of space?

And so for me, that's way more anthropological than it is architectural.

I create the opportunities for people to gather, and then those bodies together is the spatial component.

A lot of the work that we do in the studio is really based around the Black experience, but specifically the Black experience to the Great Migration, because like a lot of this stuff, they're things that I know personally, and then I try to splice in different locations of where I've lived, and what the diaspora means in those various locations.

So really, it becomes like a mix, a way of sort of mapping places I've lived, places I've practiced, places I've worked, places I've researched.

And then, what does it mean when you collapse all those levels of Blackness on top of each other?

I mean, I like to believe it comes out with some pretty cool stuff.

The architect as the keeper of stories, that's something that I've been dealing with, internally, for a while.

But not all architects care about those things.

Some architects just like, all right, there was a building here before, don't care, knock it down, build something new.

But like, what was the significance of that building?

What does that mean for someone to see something, and immediately identify their lineage?

And so, I personally only know how to make design where it talks about narrative, and it utilizes storytelling.

So the cool thing about Ukhamba that it 100% represents the communities that I've lived in, one of those communities being in Cape Town, South Africa, and the other community being in Miami, Florida.

And so what makes this project successful is when everybody's there, when the Junkanoo band is performing, when the stilt walkers are walking around, when people are eating conch salad, when people are drinking flop, like that's when everything works.

That's when a project is at its best version.

In the past, the things that have inspired me have just been my family, like them as a place.

A lot of the things that I draw from are just interactions we had when we were kids, or adolescents, or high school, et cetera.

And that's where all the work comes from.

If I'm not doing that, to be totally blunt with you, I read a lot of manga.

I read a lot of manga, and I watch a lot of anime.

So I tell people all the time, I might be the coolest nerd you'll ever meet, because the kind of stuff that I'm actually interested in, but then how I blend 'em together.

When people are like, yo, how did you figure that thing out?

Like, I don't know, but it came to me when I was watching "Naruto."

I mean, I think Commissioner's incredible.

It's so hard, as a young person, to figure out how you start an art collection.

And so the curation is great in that regard.

And the other side, as the one that actually does practice, or has an artistic discipline, how do you get your work out to the world?

So I think Commissioner fills, and bridges a great gap between art access, but then also art practice.

I tell people all the time, my practice can be summed up in one phrase, if you know, you know.

And some people are like, what the hell does that even mean?

I'm like, precisely.

[Narrator] Up next, we head to Columbus, Ohio, where WOSU public media introduces us to Outpost Office, an experimental design group pushing the boundaries of the definition of architecture.

We are an experimental architecture practice.

So what that means is that we design buildings like a traditional architect would, but not only buildings.

So we also design public spaces, we design furniture, we design landscapes, and kind of everything in between those scales as well.

And we try to be kind of experimental, and push the boundaries of also the definitions of each one of those things, and the definitions of architecture itself.

Outpost Office is a clearinghouse of our ideas, but also ideas that are brought to us by compelling clients, collaborators that we've worked with, consultants, kind of everyone is part of Outpost Office.

I think that one of the most important things for us and our process is that we don't really search for problems.

We chase hunches.

So, I think one of the things we're always working with is trying to find new techniques, or new means to work with.

The field paintings are kind of architectural scale drawings that are executed with a striping robot.

So the striping robot is GPS controlled.

It's not totally autonomous, but we communicate with it through coordinates.

[Ashley] We call them drawing fields, because they're something between a painting, a landscape installation, and architecture.

We see them as architecture, because they're specifically spatial, and they're spatial prototypes.

And so, what we're interested in, really, is understanding and looking at how people behave with the kind of simple act of drawing a line on the ground.

We're trying to experiment with notions of temporality, thinking about architectural drawings as more than just representations that are preparing for the act of building, but actually are things that can be embodied, can be experienced in space.

I think the premise in most temporary work is that temporary work builds toward more long-term work.

And so, that establishes a kind of value scale where things that don't last as long aren't as valuable as things that last longer.

And I think that we used to kind of understand that value system as pretty concrete, but after doing these paintings, and starting to experience the way these temporary things can actually have a kind of lasting impact, we're questioning a lot more.

It's like the premise that bigger things are better than smaller things.

You know, that's a really kind of simple way to look at things, and there are a lot of precious things that are very small, and we're looking at timescale kind of in the same way, where maybe longer isn't necessarily better.

So while the painting was our first engagement at the Wex, and it dealt with understanding how the exterior landscape could be activated, the furniture pieces that are now on display are a little bit more of an opportunity to ask those same questions, both inside and outside the building.

[Ashley] You're almost never allowed to touch the art.

And so, we like as architects, where you can always touch a building, and so, touching for us is a very important aspect of what we do.

We want it to be, people to physically engage with the objects, not only visually engage with the objects.

It is something between the size of a room, and the size of a piece of furniture.

So, we like this term super furniture, because it suggests that people interact with it, touch it, sit on it, lay on it, but also suggests that it's not a table, and it's not a chair.

We design things that might have horizontal surfaces, or vertical surfaces, or angled surfaces, but we really make sure that they don't look like furniture that you've seen before, and used before.

Because we want people to improvise.

We want people to invent new uses, use their bodies in different ways.

We also want it to conform to bodies of different sizes, or bodies with different abilities, and really be very inclusive of different ages, and and different population groups.

[Erik] A lot of our hunches have to do with color.

Color is a fascinating topic, but it's a little underserved in the world of architecture.

Part of that is what some people have described as a kind of chromophobia.

Architects are almost afraid of color, and part of that is that color is, as we're discovering, really, really, really hard.

In all these experiments, what we're trying to do is understand how color can perform effects that we're used to form doing.

[Ashley] We're inspired a lot by art.

We're inspired a lot by history, the history of art and architecture.

And we're inspired by different geographical contexts, traditions, and cultures in architecture.

Some of those we've witnessed firsthand, living in different countries, but many of those we just enjoy kind of learning about, and expanding on our own horizons, either through the courses we teach at Ohio State University, or again, learning from from our students, and really just seeking out new knowledge, and new forms of inspiration wherever they kind of happen to come along.

[Erik] One of the terms we use in the office is timeful.

So thinking about how architecture can be experienced, and be built at a lot of different speeds.

At the core of the architecture discipline are these kind of Vitruvian values, and one of them is is firmness.

This idea that, you know, to be an architecture, something has to kind of last.

But we ask a lot of questions about exactly how long that duration needs to be, and how something endures.

Does it endure as a kind of relic, or does it endure as a kind of memory, or does it endure as a kind of experience?

A typical architect might work on a project for three to five years, and while I have projects that have run that long, I'm often anxious for the next, to mix in kind of shorter term projects along the way.

And so I think working in academia, but also working in more gallery context, in more art context, and in temporary architecture, allows me to explore things that work on the duration of two weeks, or two months, or two years.

[Narrator] Let's dig into the "Art Loft" archives, and head to the Florida Keys.

There, we'll get a lesson in building community and exploration, with a public sculpture trail that's scattered across the island chain.

We were approached by our art patrons, John Padget and the late Jacob Dekker about a vision of bringing sculptures that had been created at the Art Student League in New York.

And so we thought, well, we would love to bring big, outdoor monumental sculpture to the Keys, and it really goes along with our All-American Road.

Their work gets to come, and get a whole new audience here.

Something that we're constantly, as the Arts Council, trying to do is to integrate our geographically diverse county.

And we really thought about, where could someone pull off, where was a great vista?

And each piece has sort of found its own home.

There's wonderful storytelling about this sculpture trail.

The first topic of our series was around the town square, and community dialogue, and community conversation.

So those are the pieces in Islamorada, that is "Everything Between," and "Fragments."

And then at oTHErside Park is "Everyone Breaks," and "Stand Tall, Stand Loud."

And then we have the art studio piece, which is called "Leaves of Grass."

In Grimal Grove, the "Wind Tower."

And this beautiful bird on a big pedestal is at the airport, and we feel like it's the gift that keeps giving, because like the pyramid, really brings all sorts of attention to Crane Point, and this incredible environment here.

My name is James Emerson.

I'm a multidisciplinary artist.

In general, my artwork is largely focused on representation of the human condition.

This sculpture, in particular, was executed.

There was a theme of the public square.

So it's very much about exactly that.

The sort of intersection of all of us, you know, where we all meet.

It's designed to be entered into, and it's sort of a panorama.

I've tried to build a place where people can bring what's inside of them into the sculpture, as well, you know?

And so, I hope that people get that out of it.

They're part of it, you know?

All of those are real people.

They're all portraits done from life.

So they're all of us.

The title is "Red Nun."

Calling it "Red Nun" was something that we learned when we came down here to do the first part of the installation.

As it's been explained to me is it said it's a marker that helps bring you home.

The walls are on this 36 degree slope.

Because of the science of optics, and line, right?

The drawings have to actually be distorted in order to be in proper perspective for the viewer.

So it's an incredibly difficult task that I sort of created for myself, but I'm getting an opportunity to make all the elements of the piece better.

Aaron Bell is a wonderful artist from New York City.

It's a phenomenal piece.

"Stand Tall, Stand Loud" is the name of it.

And it's a very provocative piece that stands out against hatred, bigotry.

It's exactly what we like to do here is have these difficult conversations with great access to people passing by that are able to see this.

So, you have a really inspirational quote from Martin Luther King at the base, with these kind of beautiful hands, like they would be holding up the world, but when they hold up the world, instead here, they're holding up a noose, and the noose has a cross through it, standing against the hatred.

And prior to Hurricane Irma, the noose stood above, and was sprocketed, and geared down to a sail that was rotating through the chest.

And as a gust of wind flew by, it causes the noose to spin up top, standing out that as long as this noose still spins, hatred still exists, and it's important that we continue to speak out against hatred and bigotry.

So, that message just absolutely got me.

I still get goosebumps when we talk about it.

And, as of last month, funding was secured with the Art Students League of New York City to make sure that we could bring this thing back to life, 'cause it's an honor to have it here.

The three new pieces, that theme is around water.

And it wasn't just about water, the ocean water, but water rising, and do we have enough water?

There's just so many other themes that came forward that we thought connected with the Keys.

We have "Moire," and we have "Gaea," and "Wavehenge."

It was intended for locals to certainly enjoy, and interact with them on a daily basis, but also for our tourists to understand how much of a culture of the arts, and a history of the arts that the Florida Keys has.

[Narrator] "Art Loft" is on Instagram @artloftsfl.

Tag us on your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments, and more at artloftsfl.org, and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft" is brought to you by.

[Narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys, and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.