♪ AZPM INTRO PLAYS ♪ (Mary) Coming up on State of the Arts, a printmaker's creative vision, an uncanny look at identity, and birds of a feather dance together.

These stories right ahead on State of the Arts.

Hello and welcome to another tour of the art world.

I'm Mary Paul, thanks so much for being here with us.

We begin by meeting artist Christine DiPiro Abbott, who finds her inspiration in printmaking.

Having exhibited nationally for over 10 years, her vivid work has struck a chord with audiences.

In this segment, we find out more about her depictions of both private and shared spaces.

♪ LOW, AMBIENT SYNTHS ♪ (Christine) As an artist, I really consider myself a maker.

I'm always making things.

So even when I'm not in the studio, I'm patching jeans or I'm making a card to give to somebody.

I just, I never not wake up in the morning.

and just want to work with materials and make things.

And so for me, that's how I kind of connect to people and move through the world and think about my role in the world.

I am a multimedia artist, primarily printmaking.

And I've been working with imagery of interior scene for over 10 years.

So the artwork started after an experience cleaning another couple's home.

And I was in their space kind of over and over and over again.

And part of both kind of the caring for their— caring for them through caring for their space and just visually seeing it over and over and over again, it just came out in the work.

I've explored other motifs, but I returned to that imagery when I had really my second son.

So at that point, I was a little bit more ready to do a deep dive in the studio after—first kid, you get a new identity.

The second kid, you just give yourself away to it.

And so that's about the same time I started working at Phoenix Rising Printmaking.

I found a really supportive community there.

A lot of other artists, moms, who just understood where I was at and was very supportive.

And it just was really a natural sinking of imagery and just the practicality of working in a printmaking studio.

So printmaking, by its nature, repetition is a big part of that And, you can do a lot of preparation at home, but the printing aspect typically happens at a print shop.

It's a more communal way of making work.

And so between kind of the supportive community and then I was in my same space over and over and over again.

So it made sense to use repeated imagery to kind of describe this experience.

♪ AMBIENT SYNTHS CONTINUE ♪ (Christine) Because I include collage with the printmaking, it allows me to work in my home studio and at Phoenix and not be too rigid about the process.

I almost feel like there's a compost part of it where I'll work on something and maybe it's not a resolved piece in itself.

I just throw it in the bin of creative compost.

And then I always have something I can pull out and respond to as well.

And that's a way for me to, you know, I continue to reuse materials.

And that also relates to the way that I prepare to print.

So I actually am currently working a lot with just recycled materials, AKA trash.

I feel that just as much as it's kind of feels very natural as an artist to kind of see my everyday world from that perspective, I say that way, why should I have to kind of reach so far with materials?

So I kind of feel like I can express some of that perspective with the materials.

That said, I work with kind of most high-end fine art paper and inks, I'm not making trash to make trash.

They're just part of the process.

And another reason why I like to work with recycled materials, and I encourage students too, I work with students, so I spend a lot of energy thinking about the creative process and encouraging other people to engage in it, is because you owe it nothing.

So I feel like you psychologically just feel the freedom to experiment with it.

If you're with a collage, you just cut it off if you don't like it.

This allows me to be present in kind of my season of life.

It's to not be so tied to a very prescriptive way of working.

I think as an artist that you don't have to look very far for inspiration.

I think seeing your experiences through the perspective of an artist really brings them to life and they really are a way to connect with other people.

The experience of being at home with young children is not unique to me at all.

And of course with COVID, just being at home, period.

So kind of in what an interior space means.

Kind of between public and private, inside and outside.

And I also, on top of that, kind of see a— just the metaphor of a window is a very timeless metaphor, especially when you work two dimensionally.

So that's a way of framing things just in pictorial space.

So there's a lot of just really straightforward overlap there, but also the metaphor of a worldview, kind of your lens seeing out in the world.

So in my work, I want to continue moving forward to really manipulate where the viewer feels, whether they're on the in looking out or on the out looking in, and really think about how often porous that is and how that relates to community and kind of the way that we relate to the world outside of us.

And again, for me, it's not an answerable question.

I just, I have not found that to be the case.

♪ HOPEFUL SYNTHS RISE ♪ (Christine) I have been living in the same house for over 10 years now, and I feel that much more engaged in our neighborhood.

So when I walk in our neighborhood, these are friends of mine, or the house, even if I don't know who lives in there, that neighborhood we live is pretty tight knit.

It's likely that I'll know someone who knows someone there.

And so that really influences the way I think about neighborhood.

As a person of faith, I really also think about it just conceptually much more broadly, much more broadly than kind of the people who live near me or the people that look like me or have a similar perspective to me.

And so for me and my work is a way for me to just be curious.

I really think, I don't think I've come to a place where I have answers.

I think we're at a place culturally with so many kind of tectonic shifts, the idea that I could answer a neighbor, who's my neighbor, I think that's actually a really good question.

I don't think that's a question that's like really truly answerable.

And in the nature of that, that's really rich creatively.

So yeah, so that's kind of what informs my work in the direction that I'm going in.

[ WHOOSH ] Jeannie Jaffe is Florida-based, multidisciplinary artist.

From drawing and sculpture to stop motion and installation, she evokes the uncanny through her creations and delves into language, history, and identity.

[ WHOOSH ] [ TICKING ] (Jeanne) 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 starts coalescing, and then, [ SNAPPING ] that's what it's like.

♪ JOVIAL ELECTRIC PIANO ♪ My name's Jeanne Jaffe, and I am an artist.

I live and 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 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.

Pre-verbally, 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.

♪ SMOOTH JAZZ ♪ These are the pre-verbal series, and they're kind of like a language system, a pre-verbal 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 becomes like a hieroglyphics or a pictorial language system.

I wanted these to look like stone.

And some have slight coloration and oxidation to them, and some don't.

So these are some of the pre-verbal objects in a box, like archeological finds, but they also form a sentence.

The sentence would be created by the viewer.

When I'm making these pre-verbal 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 archeological dig.

Our subconscious is similar to archeology.

We're digging through the earth to find what we're not aware of.

Our awareness is much deeper than our conscious, everyday life.

I think what got me interested in archeology 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 pre-verbal things are trying to dig and find connections between things and a different way of looking at something.

♪ QUIRKY ELECTRIC PIANO ♪ (Jeanne) I used to play in the woods a lot and make up stories.

When I was a child, I liked liminal spaces where things are transforming.

In other words, I am fascinated by how things morph 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 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 pre-verbal experiences where there's some sense of real creation going on, you're creating the world at that point.

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, because stories change.

The world changes.

♪ GENTLE ELECTRIC PIANO ♪ I had done an animatronic piece on Tesla, Nikola Tesla, and with a 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 Tesla's would be.

And then I've done some other pieces like "Little Red Riding Hood is a Crime Scene" and reversing 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 world.

♪ LIMINAL SYNTHESIZERS ♪ As I started with the marionettes, making the marionettes, I knew I wanted Lewis Carroll and the Dodo Bird, Alice, and the Rabbit and the Caterpillar, but I wanted different kinds of encounters to go on in this world.

Then COVID 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 object.

♪ BITCRUSHED GUITAR AND DRUMS ♪ (Jeanne) 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 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 participation so that it wasn't just a thing anymore and that you had to enter into it.

I am now building these at five feet 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 this strange hairdos but it also looks like some kind of futuristic aspect.

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 the piece.

♪ INQUISTIVE STRINGS ♪ I do very little that's kind of tabletop.

So I do either 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 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, and have different scales.

♪ CONTEMPLATIVE STRINGS RISE ♪ (Jeanne) 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.

The uncanny is those things that we tend to want to forget.

But when we're presented with them, we can't forget them.

They're very seductive in that they're real.

Real and unreal at the same time.

[ WHOOSH ] Finally today, it's the collision of dance, jazz, and birding.

A creative project called Avimancy, where these birds of a feather dance together.

Let's take a trip to the National Center for Choreography in Akron, Ohio to find out why this project isn't just for the birds.

[ WHOOSH ] [ WIND AND BIRD NOISE ] (Monika) Oh, white breasted nuthatch.

It's very cute.

I think that being outside and listening for something is really magical.

See, he got closer.

They're very nosy.

They want to know what's going on.

Oh, there he is.

So looking at birds as an omen and as we look at bird populations declining, it kind of is an omen.

So I feel like bringing this project to life hopefully will kind of cause people to say, "Oh, that's not just something flying or moving around."

Like they have this poetic way of seeing and moving and being that's really magical.

♪ IMPROVISATION BY CHRIS COLES AND SOULS OF DUENDE ♪ (Monika) We were camping in the Valley Overlook in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

And we were awakened by the sound of the wood thrush.

[ WOOD THRUST CALL ] I, being a birder, knew what this sound was coming from.

They're a very beautiful, ethereal sounding bird.

And Chris, not necessarily a birder yet, but a fabulous musician was inspired by the wood thrush.

So I would say that is his spark bird.

So a spark bird is a species that kind of gets you into birding, gets you excited about learning more about birds, getting out there and listening to or seeing birds in the wild.

(Chris) After hearing the wood thrush, it was just like, "oh, I think I'm going to transcribe this."

So this is like another sample.

This is from the original wood thrush recording that we made.

And I just put like a simple filter on it.

(Chris) I think as I started like working on this and like learning like what the notes actually are and like some of the devices that the bird uses and things like that, I presented this to a faculty member here.

And we did a short little study on it.

And then Monika took it further and was like, "well, "maybe we should do an actual film, "and or try to lean towards creating a film "with all types of multimedia things present being "sculpture and dance, music, spoken word, "put all these things into one project."

♪ IMPROV BY CHRIS AND SOULS OF DUENDE ♪ Christopher said, I'm interested in transcribing birdsong.

And I'm interested in finding dancers that might improvise the way that he does as a jazz musician.

That got me really excited because this year we happened to be working at NCC Akron with mostly percussive dance artists who are both dancers and musicians.

And this gave them a shared task to explore something together.

Souls of Duende is an all female percussive dance trio.

We have a guitar player, we have a percussionist and we have a trumpet player.

And we have three forms of dance.

We have tap dance; we have Kathak; and we have flamenco.

All from different places, but sharing the same stage at the same time, having conversations.

♪ MORE IMPROV BY SOULS OF DUENDE ♪ In its song, it has a few basic parts and while they may not have a pattern that you would follow, things do repeat.

They do come back, just not in any systematic way.

So I think music is perfect for that because we can mimic all things through music.

I mean, we've been doing it.

Every culture across many millennia have tried to use sound to connect all things in life.

So I think it's a perfect medium for that.

♪♪ MORE IMPROV BY SOULS OF DUENDE ♪ So what I'm doing while they're dancing is gathering up ideas for a longer piece.

We're going to be working on a film that kind of shows the juxtaposition of the outdoor world where birds are free singing and then our indoor cooler world where there's less of that natural sound trying to blend and kind of contrast those.

♪ IMPROV BY SOULS OF DUENDE ♪ Birds have been used in art for millennia and I think it's a great way to bring people together and it's a great way to bring us out into nature.

It's just so nice to be in this short moment of collaboration with Avimancy and talking about nature and what's here and because place matters.

So not only are we learning about Akron through coming here in this choreographic center, but we're also learning about nature and what is surrounding the choreographic center and what is housing the house that we're currently in, which is giving us more information about the music that gives us an ambiance of the energy of the space in which we cook.

♪ IMPROV BY CHRIS COLES AND SOULS OF DUENDE ♪ Love this program?

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