artloft is brought to you by the friends of South Florida [Music] PBS artloft it's the pulse of what's happening in the Arts across South Florida in this episode filmmaker Dennis scha takes on a new medium bringing his visual practice focused on Collective memory to Miami jeie jaffy Works big the sculptor and storyteller's work often starts small and scales up and up and up and we meet a museum Without Walls bringing its first show to the community in a new [Music] way for the past decade longtime filmmaker and art collector Dennis scha has been quietly working on a visual arts practice and like some of his best films that practice is rooted in memories here in his Studio he shares the process behind the work and what's driving his first South Florida show my practice primarily works with memory but it's not just my memory in other words I'm not making work about when my dad got me a bike when I was 10 years old I'm making work about Collective memories big events in our history that didn't just impact me but impacted a lot of people my name is Dennis Shaw and I'm an artist and a filmmaker I've been a filmmaker now for about 15 years but the thing I learned very quickly is that it doesn't take one person to make a film it takes 15 people to make a great five minute film and so as a director mostly in my film practice I find myself having to give away pieces of the film and take them back and give them away and take them back and and I was really looking for something beyond that where I could just sit in a room and obsess about making things having a creative practice that I could do 247 and so about 10 years ago I started to make Studio Art and it wasn't very good and I did it for about 5 years and I threw it all away at the end of 5 years but then I found this thread that I've been working through and I began to make things that I was I was happy with i that I felt were you know good enough to show people and uh interesting and it was a real Revelation for me to become an artist and I've enjoyed it very much I'm the oldest emerging artist that you'll ever see at this point in [Music] time that is a very very big part of what drives me is to try to find a conceptual idea that you can also turn into something that's aesthetically pleasing I like to make work that works on two levels I like to make work that when you're far away from it you see it and you see in my case a lot of symmetry and a lot of repetition so then as you get closer you see that there's more to it and you have to dig into the work and that comes from using uh objects of Desire objects that are wellknown uh objects of of culture objects of history and so sometimes you'll get really close and you'll see a newspaper that's part of the practice and in a work and you'll want to read the newspaper so I want you to look from far away and see the Symmetry and the repetition then I want you to come really really really close and look and see what's going on and hopefully I can trigger some some interest in your life about what I'm showing the one question I always ask people is what is your most Vivid Collective memory what is it that you remember like it was yesterday that we all also remembered at the same time now for me it was the Kennedy assassination I was 8 years old I was in the Christmas play rehearsing my teacher came running down the stairs she was crying I'd never seen a teacher cry before and I went home and sat in front of the TV with my mom for like 3 days in a row those kind of memories are things that really have shaped our nation and also shaped how we feel about each other when you have those Collective Memories the country tends to come together in various ways and so a lot of the practice is about me out there trying to find these historical artifacts and assem them in a way that will trigger a collective memory for the viewer to draw the viewer in because we shared the same experience that day when that happened it's about trying to remind you the viewer what happened that day when you were in class and you were 14 years old and they Trott it out of television and put the the Challenger launch on and then right before your eyes you know it explodes and those astronauts are lost those are things people don't forget they never forget that stuff using memory in my practice has been almost therapeutic if I can say that I'm not somebody who looks back a lot I have always been looking for the next idea the next opportunity the next ambitious thing that I wanted to pursue And yet when I started making art and I sat down and I began to think about what is it that I want people to see it was about memories and maybe it's cuz I'm getting older I'm not sure I'm trying to take these big moments in time the 1972 Munich Olympics when the terrorist came and took the Israeli athletes hostage and we lost them all uh the space uh Landing when we landed on the moon I'm trying to take those memories and kind of bring them back to the four the most interesting thing I think that happens is when somebody walks up to a piece and looks at it and they say oh I remember that let me tell you where I was that day and let me tell you exactly what I was thinking boy that's a win for me I I love when that happens and I ask everybody I meet who is interested in the practice what is your most Vivid Collective [Music] memory it's about assembling these objects whether it's newspapers or it's Cypress knees uh all sorts of different different objects but there's an underlying architecture to the practice and that is I work with the do deagon which is a 12-sided figure now I've chosen that because the 12-sided figure represents the hours on a clock the months in a year uh the Zodiac and the dodecagon has a long history of being very important in architecture and religion and so I use that as the underlying infrastructure if you will of the practice and then when I get these objects I acquire them at auction generally I just have to go out and search for them and search for them but when I get these objects I build them on this idea this grid this this 12-sided figure to give you I guess the feeling of time passing uh thinking about the months in a year the uh hours on a clock the Zodiac so it's really about using that as the underlying infrastructure uh to show you that time is passing and I'm taking you back in time I don't start the day with a paintbrush in my hand or a chisel with a piece of marble I start my day by looking at 30,000 objects a month on the internet at auctions and all I do is I get my iPad and I go whoosh whoosh whoosh and I'm looking for that one object that I can make into a piece of art and I would say at the end of the month I probably found about 10 things that could be a piece of art the problem is I didn't find them on the street I can't pick them up and bring them back to the studio I have to actually bid on them at the auctions and so at the end of the month I really wind up with about one or two things that I can turn into a piece of art sometimes it's a group of things in one lot where I can acquire them and voila it's a piece of art instantly as I scroll through and I scroll through and I scroll through that could be something or maybe that could be something anybody that knows me knows that I've been an art collector for 47 years and I've acquired over 2,000 works of art during that time period so it's a natural extension of my collecting practice in the way that I'm making art now it would have been disingenuous I think for me to become a painter and announce that I was a painter but this is really taking the skill set that I've developed over so many decades and now turning it into a a studio art practice I'm basically just transposing my collecting Gene which I can't do without I mean I I wouldn't stop breathing before I would stop collecting and so I've taken my my collecting Gene and I've been able to turn it into a studio art practice and you know people are responding which is really joyful I've been able to show in London in Berlin uh New York I'm going to do a show at Pierro augari Gallery in Miami so uh it's been it's been an exciting [Music] time I knew that I wanted to show Elsewhere for a while before I came home with my practice because this is my hometown it's important to me I Revere the artists in my community and if I'm going to show work in my hometown I I want want it to be something that uh I can be proud of and that and that people will want to come see so I've spent the last four years showing work pretty much all over the world and now I'm finally going to bring it home I'm nervous uh I can't lie um there are so many great artists in our hometown and uh you know we'll see what happens I'm I'm excited about the show it takes you back in an instant and that's what the work's about just trying to bring you to that place that you probably haven't thought about for a very very long [Music] time jeie jaffy is a multi-hyphenate Marvel artist sculptor painter former teacher stop motion animator what they all have in common is making meaning or finding the story in the work it's something she says that often starts with a spark frequently not all the time but frequently yeah it starts with a vision vision is like energy coming together the experience of a vision is kind of a little bit of chaotic energy you feel uncomfortable and then all of a sudden the Energy starts moving and making form it it starts coalescing and then that's what it's like my name is Jeannie jaffy and I'm an artist I live in work in Miami now for many years I taught at a university and taught in China and spent some time in Japan there's a lot of freedom in teaching because you don't have to worry about sales so I really was able to pursue the imagery that I wanted to work with and that was a blessing when I wasn't teaching I was working in the studio I'm really interested in how we become who we are how we um form identities what is human development once we have language we name things we stop seeing them we stop experiencing them we stop even relating to them it's a category preverbally we don't know anything by name so we're experiencing and trying to decipher it so I'm very very interested in those early implicit memories some of the times the work will start just with a ball of clay in my hand and then I'll blindly model it until it feels like something these are the preverbal series and they're kind of like a language system a preverbal language you can read them down and up you can read them across and they mean different things depending on the position they're in and what they're paired with just like in syntax and language it's becomes like a hieroglyphics or a pictorial um language system I wanted these to look like Stone um so and some have slight coloration and oxidation to them and some don't so these are some of the preverbal objects in a box like archaeological finds and but they also form a sentence the sentence would be created by the viewer when I'm making these preverbal objects and forming them the way I do it really is a form of not knowing something and discovering it so it is like an archaological dig our subconscious is similar to archaeology we're digging through the Earth to find what we're not aware of you know our awareness is much deeper than in our conscious everyday life I think what got me interested in archaeology originally was how people make meaning you find these objects first of all it connects you to people thousands of years ago and you're aware of how similar life remains even though technology and everything has changed so much so much Remains the Same and so so much of the proverbial things are trying to dig and find connections between things and a different way of looking at something I used to play in the woods a lot and makeup stories when I was a child I like linal spaces where things are transforming in other words I am fascinated by how things morph and become other things and how people people morph how we morph how we are one thing at one period of time in our life and another thing and and that is a transforming event I want people to be able to reclaim stories so that they can retell a story in a way that gives them agency so they can examine them if you have your preverbal experiences where there's some sense of real creation going on you're creating the world at that point you're you're not being told what the world is so when you're creating the world and then you get stories I'm really interested in providing for the viewer the capacity to they can recreate a story that is a known story to them based on their experience now on the world now cuz stories change the world changes I had done a animatronic piece on Tesla Nicola Tesla and with a um Grant from Nea and that was my first experience at movement animatronics I did a very small stop motion about his dream what a dream of Teslas would be and then I've done some other pieces like um Little Red Riding Hood is a crime scene and reversing the who's the victim we're more of a threat to the wolf than the wolf is to us so I started thinking about other stories I wanted to do and other stop motions I wanted to do and Alice was perfect because they leave one world and go into another [Music] world as I I started with the uh Marinet making the Marinet of I knew I wanted um Lis Caroll and the um dodo bird Alice and the rabbit and the caterpillar but I wanted different kinds of encounters to go on in in this world then Co hit and then I thought well this is perfect because the world's changing so much and so I thought well I'll do one where they go down the wrong rabbit hole and end up in 2020 I just love being able to create that world so this way in a condensed space I can cover a lot more territory and a lot more time and tell a story in a way where people can follow it through time and move them through different emotions whereas in a sculpture you have to compress all that into one [Music] object I like slightly uncomfortable artwork and I go to work to look at other artwork that makes me uncomfortable it makes me have to think and I think my work does the same kind of thing to some some people that's positive for me in that it really when you're uncomfortable you have to think about things and you have to consider what is it that's doing that and I feel like it's something that our culture tries to prevent people from from doing going into that kind of space and keeping us always externally focused so the discomfort for me is a positive thing in that that's where change [Music] occurs on these there's a mouth in the back and you can look through the mouth and see out the eyes of the sculpture I wanted the audience participation so that wasn't just a thing anymore and that you had to enter into it I am now building these at 5T tall so you can look inside the space of the head as well as out through the eyes and so this is the male this is the female and it also even has kind of reference to paintings from like Dutch paintings where they always had the strange haird but it also looks like some kind of futuristic as ECT it really is about trying to imagine yourself as someone else I speak I think through my body so my hands are one size and I love working that size and then I love working with my whole body involved with a piece I do very little that's kind of tabletop so I do either um large or really big where I love looking up at something so that I feel even in another world the ladle this is a good example of the scale relationship so these I started the way I was describing before by just taking clay in my hands and modeling it and um modeling first the ladle and then the ear because it looked like in here and what I then can do is I wanted a bigger version of it so this is made in wood so I just can take this form and scale it up and this was all scaled by hand and then the much larger one for the Deering Estate went outside so you can work in different ways with the same image and change it alter it um and have different [Music] scales it's strange and familiar at the same time and I like that combination I think that combination of both familiar and strange I guess that's what the uncanny is um The Uncanny is those things that we tend to want to forget but when we're presented with them uh we can't forget them they're very seductive in that they're um real real and unreal at the same [Music] time Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African diaspora or M mad is working with Partners at the black archive and The Lyric Theater theater on a special murals project they're bringing murals inspired by the community to life on walls across the city and on new digital platforms Miami mad started operationally in 2015 when it obtained a feasibility study from the night Foundation our core mission is dedicated to the collection the preservation and dissemination of art of the African diaspora we started knowing that we did not have a building and believed that technology could be used to enhance accessibility but also we could leverage technology to present art in new exciting and exhilarating ways we're in the lobby of the historic black archives Lyric Theater and it is also provided Gallery space for our traveling mural exhibition the black archives was founded by by Dr Dorothy Jenkins field to collect preserve artifacts history photographs of black Miami which is really telling the story of Miami the lyric is an iconic historic site that was a Cornerstone of culture entertainment in Overtown back in the day when Overtown was a thriving business and cultural hub of Miami and it was also known as the black Harlem of Miami it reminds us of the Glory Days of Overtown Overtown was not always a town in need of support there were homeowners business people civil servant workers teachers lawyers and ordinary people who lived here together as a result of racial segregation we started with youth hackathons collaborating with Miami Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami we also had our own popup exhibition right here in Overtown at the ward rooming house our Innovative Spirit led us to place our murals in three places one on the streets of Overtown Northwest 2 Avenue Northwest 3rd Avenue in our website and now with our traveling mobile exhibition titled telling Overtown stories saying their names our curator Donna Marie Baptist selected the artists Miami mocad brings its view of what the theme should be we started this project with three murals but we also Incorporated QR codes as interactive technology that could bring the oral histories of Overtown to life they're not just paintings on a wall they are paintings that speak they are paintings that say our names the names of people who lived in Overtown the names of people who preserved the history of Overtown this particular piece that I did was like something very special to me um because I live in this community and I always like seen this building a few of my friends fathers are long Shermans a few of my friends who I grew up with are now long Shermans the long Shermans is uh people who are responsible for unloading cargo ships and bringing them into the city they also work for the cruise line too where they take off um luggage off of the cruise line 80 something years ago like nobody else wanted to do it a lot of African-Americans and bahamians like would do these do these jobs and also they get paid a lot of money but it's also dangerous Reginal talked with you union members he researched their photographs he looked into their spirit and as a result he was able to use his imagination to present their power show us the underlying Beauty and strength of long shoran Brotherhood there was that image of them inside of the Martin Luther King parade that they had and they were all like walking together in unison I thought that that image in particular like encompasses the unity that I kind of feel when I'm like in their environment and the fact that all of them are like African-American men and women it almost seem like they're very very militant but they're just you know people of some a lot of importance when it comes to the city I come from Overtown and I know that our history and also our city and our belonging in this city is constantly being like uh taken away from us so I think that to try to honor and try to have some sort of like umid reservation of our history was important to me I just know what they mean to our community and for me to get the opportunity to honored him was like it's a it's a dream come true artloft is on Instagram at artloft SFL tag us on your art Adventures find full episodes segments and more at artloft SFL dorg and on YouTube at South Florida [Music] PBS artloft is brought to you by the friends of South Florida PBS [Music]