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 Jennie 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 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 our iological 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 archaeological 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 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 preverbal 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 more and become other things and how 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 not 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 marionettes making the Marinet of I knew I wanted um Louis Carroll and 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 uncom able 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 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 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 a participation so that it wasn't just a thing anymore and that you had to enter into it I am now building these at 5 ft 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 hair de but it also looks like some kind of futuristic IC a aspect it really is about trying to imagine yourself as someone [Music] 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 the piece I do very 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 an ear 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 all 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 present with them uh we can't forget them they're very seductive in that they're um real real and unreal at the same time [Music]