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 schaw 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 5minute 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 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 24/7 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 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 well-known 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 three 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 assemble 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 terrorists 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 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 Dagon which is a 12-sided figure now I've chosen that because the 12-sided figure represents the hours on the 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 of 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 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 arti art practice I'm basically just transposing my collecting Gene which I can't do without I mean I I would stop breathing before I would stop collecting and so I've taken my my uh 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 Pier augari Gallery in Miami so uh it's been it's been an exciting time [Music] 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 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 time [Music]