- In this edition of "ARTEFFECTS embarking on a journey of Potentialist exploration.

(ethereal music) - Our partner here at Potentialist, they're like, "What are you actually gonna do, And then the only thing that came to my mind were these stories for my kid.

(ethereal music) - [Beth] An otherworldly art exp (suspenseful music) - [Daniel] What I'm interested is in giving people experiences that they've never had before in ways that stimulate their ima spark their creativity.

(suspenseful music) - [Beth] An engaging autistic ex - I had never shown their artwork in this magnitude before and it was exciting to be able to give them a space and say, "Okay, imagine what could you do with this one gallery, this one space."

(lighthearted music) - [Beth] And exploring yourself as an animal.

- A lot of the masks came from p but now this painting is kind of going the opposite di The masks are influencing my pai (lighthearted music) - It's all ahead on this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

(lighthearted music) - [Announcer] Funding for "ARTEF is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motor (uplifting music) Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(uplifting music) - Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan, and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

In our first segment, get ready to release your imagin as we head into "Upside Down Lan inside the Potentialist Workshop This 11,000-square-foot immersive art installation gives you the space to explore and reconnect with your younger So take a deep breath, and let's enter this dream-like wonderland.

(ethereal music) - I was born kind of in the middle-of-nowhere Montana, and they thought I was just so s Just very, very overactive imagi (Pan laughing) And then I've had a very lucky go at this career.

I sold my first painting when I I've never done anything else.

(ethereal music) Potentialist Workshop is a space where you can come and really create your own dream We have a gallery, the Savage Mystic Gallery is loc Then, we have a large space that is currently an immersive.

(ethereal music) "Upside Down Land" was created by House of Infinite Potential, and that's what the Potentialist call ourselves when we make an immersive.

Our partner here at Potentialist Morgan Savage, dared me.

And then, like any moment with any artist, they're like, "What are you actually gonna do, And then the only thing that came to my mind were these stories for my kid because I'm like, "I think everyone will enjoy that."

(ethereal music) - I could see the vision from the very start.

I felt transported to childhood, definitely.

- I think everyone will instantl Even if they don't know any of these stories, I think they'll walk in and be like, "Oh, imagination."

(ethereal music) (synth music) So you start off here in this be The bedroom is already odd, to b And then you go through the closet, you wind up in a desert, and then you have a choice.

There's a grass route and then a monument or temple route, and then there's just this cave-looking sandcastle.

You can go that way.

Each of them lead to these diffe that you can explore.

And if you want to go up things and looks like you should crawl you definitely should go up ther because it's totally worth it.

(upbeat music) We have 41 artists that worked o Some of our leads, they're all like heads of things of their own, so they all have their own teams So we had, really, an all-star g I know that's like what everybody says about their group but it's really rare that many alphas, that many like, "I don't need anybody else on my own planet," want to make anything together.

(upbeat music) - I'm Jessi Sprocket Janusee, and I was the lead artist for "Octopus Ocean," which is this section of "Upside Down Land."

We started by creating the fabric ocean that's above.

It's a football field's worth of It took a really long time to hang each piece so that they look like waves.

I also added fans with a smell e because that was really importan So we have these scent packets that add another layer to the ex (uplifting music) - I worked a lot in the desert a The sand is like two tons of sand that we put in here.

And the one thing that I'm reall is this table that's behind me.

It's like a pretty big resin pou And I really liked having this like branch coming out from the top of it was like a vision that I really wanted to make, and I'm glad that it turned out (upbeat music) - Here we are at the "Cathedral of Many Wonders," and within these are tableaus that represent each part of the This is a place for a soul elevation kind of thing, almost medicine.

(ambient music) - And we have the octopus of "Octopus Ocean" right here, which was made by Daisy May Dixo And then we kind of created this space for that with this paper coral.

And then Kristen Straight made these gorgeous jellyfish, and my friend Chris helped me kind of construct all of this with my friend Lee.

So there's a large group of people that all work together to make the ocean come to life, which was just a really fun way to spend a few months building work with our friends.

(ethereal music) - [Alfredo] For me, this project was just a massive teamwork proj amongst so many artists that worked so hard.

Those days where this place was just packed full of people working on things are like some of my favorite days about this project.

- [Jessi] It's so beautiful to have made this place with so many different artists, and they each have their own noo and their own like expression, and their own skills that they've brought to it.

And then together, they're combined to be this wonderful land.

And what else is better than tha It's a great showcase of the art (uplifting music) - [Alfredo] I really like seeing people come in here and enjoy the place that we made - We had some teens in here the and I could hear them, and they "Oh, are we in the ocean right n It even smells like the ocean.

We're in the ocean!"

And it was just exactly what I w And it was so cool to just watch people walk through and have that experience.

(upbeat music) - The reason that I create any piece of art is, one, for love.

And then two, I would really like to remind people how made up everything is.

And I think there's a lot of neg and I think the best you can thi is that it's all gonna explode.

And that's the... Like, that's the only way it can We need to have bigger imaginations than that, (Pan laughing) so I hope that when you walk thr that you say, "Wow, I'm gonna go and make my street how I want my street to be."

You'll find that your neighbors want that, too.

(ethereal music) - Learn more at potentialistwork Now, we take a trip underwater for an immersive experience in W called "Deep Lake Future."

This surreal art adventure imagines a future where freshwater-invasive specie have overrun the Great Lakes.

(pensive music) (ambient music) (mellow music) - What I'm interested is in giving people experiences that they've never had before in ways that stimulate their ima spark their creativity, kind of aesthetic experiences that can transport them.

We are in "Deep Lake Future."

This is the first show of FuzzPop Workshop.

It's an interactive immersive art experience set in a surreal underwater futu (synth upbeat music) Well, FuzzPop Workshop came because I was trying to develop for a production company, a stud but really with a kind of interactive hands-on approach.

So something like a workshop that you would really be engaged with and involved with.

(synth upbeat music) I love garage rock, which uses a lot of fuzz guitar, and FuzzPop had a good ring to i and was something a little odd that we thought that worked.

So yeah, we've got a great team of 25 artists, all people I started meeting about a year ago, and everyone was really excited and wanted to do something big, had heard about these kinds of immersive art experiences and wanted to be part of somethi And so there's a great team of folks working on this.

We have lighting designers and e sculptors, muralists, a couple o Drew York is a muralist who's done some great walls all over Milwaukee.

But, like the rest of us, it's stretching beyond and learning new skills, working in sculpture and painted most of the surfaces that you see here.

- From the beginning, Daniel reached out just, I think, by hearing my name from other ar and finding out that I was a local muralist.

So from our first meeting, we talked about how I could be a part of it and if I could paint things here or where I would fit in.

And now, it's turned into learning how to sculpt a large 25-foot long lamprey.

(synth upbeat music) - Eduardo Zavala is a young arti recently graduated from MIAD.

Has created a gigantic stone god that lords over this world that we've created and has really done some amazing work bringing that to life.

(electronic music) - I met Daniel here through the at a studio space here, and he was needing someone to take over this large sculptur And I'd worked with bone before, so I was really excited to jump I've never worked in something this large-scale, so working this big was really e and I still really liked their i (electronic music) - The experience starts in a kind of laboratory, where a group of scientists has been trying to experiment wi or maybe understand strange crea that are this sort of merger of technology and biology.

(pensive music) So in that room, we set up the s there have been great floods.

And since then, people have tried to find a way to survive.

And then that leads people through a kind of portal into this surreal underwater wor where they can explore our versi of Milwaukee's Deep Tunnel Proje filled with strange life forms.

Zebra mussel mound, where they can play on a sturgeon synthesizer and make their own music.

(synthesizer grumbling) A rainbow cave that's underwater that glows as you move through i (electronic music) I think my hopes for this show and for FuzzPop Workshop general is to create exciting aesthetic experiences that stimulate people's imagination and creativity.

Show them something they've never seen before.

Think about something that's in their world, but from a totally different and fantastic point of view.

(electronic music) We've really thought of this as a kind of prototype, and so the hope is to do this on a much larger scale, all still in this interactive immersive world and plan that it's still really on the local and the regional.

So here, we've got a Deep Lake, but also a North Woods.

That's also this surreal version that's unexpected and tells a different kind of st about the region in Wisconsin.

(electronic music) - Learn more at fuzzpopworkshop.

And now, it's time for this week's art quiz.

Immersive and interactive art has been a part of artistic movements for decades.

Which of these artists is considered to be one of the pioneers of immersive art with her "Infinity Mirror Rooms" Is the answer A, Yayoi Kusama; B, Judy Chicago; C, Georgia O'Keeffe; or D, Marina Abramovic?

And the answer is A, Yayoi Kusam (lighthearted music) Let's go to the Cornell Museum in Delray Beach, Florida to experience the immersive exhibition "Seven Solos."

The show includes site-specific from seven different contemporar and engages visitors when they enter the gallery space.

(lighthearted music) - When I curated this show, "Seven Solos," at the museum, I went about it a different way than I normally do.

I usually start with the artwork but in this case, I started with the artist.

(lighthearted music) I'm Melanie Johanson, the museum director and curator here at the Cornell Art Museum in Delray Beach.

(lighthearted music) I had never shown their artwork in this magnitude before, and it was exciting to be able to give them a space and say, "Okay, imagine what could you do with this one gallery, this one space."

A lot of them are actually from South Florida, one is from New York, and one from South Korea.

I'm sure a lot of your viewers have seen these immersive art ex that are popping up all over the and I wanted to kind of bring that to Delray Beach.

I knew that we had art artists in our own backyard, artists that I'd worked with prior that could do this, and so that was kind of the insp of doing this immersive kind of (mellow music) Miya Ando, she created these sil with ocean waves on them, and then there's a painting on t that's called "Waves Becoming Li (mellow music) This room also has two big piece that are created from metal with gold on top of it, which actually represent two different types of moons.

She's very in tune and inspired She comes from a Buddhist backgr And so going in this room is very calming and different from a lot of the other gallerie (pensive music) That takes me to "Ebb and Flow," an installation actually created in collaboration with two artist Giannina does a lot around South with salt sculpture, and Freddy created a loop of vid that plays Miami scenes and the and he's kind of commenting on the fast-paced city, and she's commenting on the ocean, the tides, the calmness, so it works really well together (pensive music) Shinduk Kang is an artist that I've become familiar with.

Shinduk has done outdoor installations all around the wor and that same piece that you see in the gallery is the same piece that has traveled the globe.

She installs it different places and then every place she installs the work, she'll add another section of fa She was saying it's supposed to like a mother's womb if the visitor sits on the bench inside of that swirling fabric.

(pensive music) "The Janis Project" by Frank Hyd he wanted to show these Janus pieces all around the world as kind of like a pop-up, and so it was my idea to kind of fill the space with Janus heads, but I really wanted them to glow from within so that when you go in there, it's like this overwhelming sense of like eyes on you.

(pensive music) Janus is a Roman god of balance, and you spell that Janus, J-A-N- And it's a male, but in this exh he spells it J-A-N-I-S so that it doesn't have a gender.

(pensive music) So Brookhart Jonquil creates the where he uses one-way mirror to kind of throw the viewer off and create this feel for infinit And in his artist statement, he says that he's creating somet that's really only viewable through the mind of the person looking at the pie (pensive music) This one is called "A Clear Vision of the Thing to Come."

And when you look into this piece, you don't see yourself.

(pensive music) This gallery is created by an artist named Jacob M. Fisher, and he creates work using reflective strings and light.

Each thread represents a memory, and the light dancing on the thr is kind of like the fleeting nature of those memories.

And there's no way you can be in and not contemplate something.

I think... the artist also created the projector mapping of the light, and so the light will never touch a part of the room that doesn't have a string or isn't intentional.

(electronic music) "The Atrium" was done by an artist out of Miami, Alex Trimino.

It's 26 feet high from floor to There's a little bit of her Colombian heritage in there.

A women's group in Columbia are supporting themselves by creating those crocheted piec We are an 100-year-old building with contemporary art inside.

You come into the museum, you kind of get a feel for the old, a feel for the new.

You are able to see the exhibiti in about an hour at the most, which, I think, is refreshing.

So it's definitely a different vibe than your usual museum.

(mellow music) Up next, we meet Michelle Lassal She makes animal masks out of pa and they each have their own per She's performed at different art galleries and events and even created the whimsical d of the 2016 Artown Poster.

- My name is Michelle Lassaline, and I'm an interdisciplinary art I am a painter, and a performanc and a mask maker, and costume de (uplifting music) As I'm building a mask, the personality starts to appear with the kind of asymmetrical ey and eyebrows, and the mouth.

The expression starts to form a little bit by chance and a little bit by me molding it that way.

When I get into one of those mas I kind of become that character.

(uplifting music) Each character is like allowing to isolate one part of myself and just really build on it and exaggerate it, which is really fun to do.

(uplifting music) I wear the goat most often, partly because it's a really sturdy one and it works well, the mouth works well.

And it also kind of looks like a really ancient animal.

And like I kind of feel like a really old person when I'm wearing it.

So I'm kind of subverting certain archetypes with different animals.

(upbeat music) One of my main goals is to creat that's really direct, and interactive, and accessible.

I'm not trained in theater.

My performances are more of a visual experience than something on stage.

One of my most recent performanc was for Artown last summer, where I built a trailer that was towed by a bicycle and rode on the trailer as the c And we would park at each art ev or family event for Artown, and I would draw spirit animal portraits for kids.

(uplifting music) Artown is the Reno Arts and Culture Festival that happens during the month of And this year, I made the poster which features coyote and other animals in a parade.

(uplifting music) Artown put out their call for their poster artists, and I applied with a proposal that involved animals in costume so they're kind of human bodies with animal heads wearing all different costumes.

And it was accepted, which was very exciting.

And then I worked with Artown to come up with a final concept.

And what we came up with was a herd of Northern Nevada native animals, but wearing costumes that are kind of significant to the arts and culture of our region in a parade, kind of marching along.

The idea of each different version of the arts being represented.

So music, and dance, and theater, and painting.

(ambient music) There's a bighorn sheep, of cour in the front with his kind of blue and white marching uniform on.

And then there's the blue bird who is wearing this kind of showgirl outfit that's kind of gold.

And that's based on all of the people who moved here to be in the "Hello Hollywood" s 'Cause a lot of friends that I've had my age, their moms all moved here for th There's a rabbit who's wearing this kind of athletic costume because part of Artown is being outside, and biking around, and walking, and just being acti in our wonderful climate and reg And then there's a pronghorn because they're a beautiful anim that not everyone knows we have And he's marching along with a b because they kind of sound of their galloping feet.

And then the coyote is behind th which is kind of my representation of myself.

She has a big paintbrush and she's splattering paint all And then a burrow, and a raccoon A nuisance, but a really lovable little character.

(Michelle laughing) My past performances have influenced the Artown poster for this year, just combining kind of my love o with the performances in a new w a lot of the masks came from pai but now this painting is kind of going the opposite di The masks are influencing my pai (uplifting music) Having people interact with some that's out of the ordinary makes it feel like an experience that's a little bit of a coincid and a little bit magical in their daily life.

And other goals for my performan to inspire this kind of childlike wonder in people that we forget about, 'cause that's what drives my artwork, I think.

(uplifting music) - See more from Michelle at michellelassaline.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

If you want to watch new artifact segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel.

And don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of "ARTEFFECTS."

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMil Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Funding for "ARTEF is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motor (uplifting music) Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(uplifting music) (pensive music) (pensive music continues)