(gentle music) [Jennifer] Hey there.

Welcome to "Monograph."

I'm your host, Jennifer Wallace Fields, Alabama artists spread far and wide.

We're headed out west to catch up with some Alabama expats in New Mexico and Arizona.

The first stop on our trip is Albuquerque, New Mexico.

There we will visit the home of David Brower, longtime Birmingham resident and filmmaker.

We'll hear about his lifelong pursuit of a creative life and building community.

Being an artist is too much of a pigeonhole, but as a species, I think we're by nature creative.

I'm really just solving problems.

I'm really just answering questions, and maybe the most artistic part is asking the right question.

(gentle music continues) I accidentally went to film school.

I was studying photography at Columbia College in Chicago.

I was experimenting with all kinds of different printmaking and whatever just looked interesting.

I look back and I see that I was doing triptych images that were playing with patterns that kind of go through three images, that kind of thing, but I also realize in hindsight that I'm filming rack focuses and pans and tilts, and really mentally I'm already, before I even accidentally took a film class, moving towards thinking that way.

Kind of interesting, you know, how the mind works.

But what grabbed me with filmmaking was the collaboration, that coming together, greater than the sum of its parts kind of phenomenon, visual to music, to writing.

It's also the science and technology of it all.

Optics, exposure, and the combination of the people and the way they work together that makes the process magic.

(upbeat music) It's all of that stuff coming together that makes it a whole.

And I think kind of cliche to say, it makes you a whole person.

I mean, uses all parts of your brain.

The worst day on the set's better than the best day in the office.

I loved commercials, because generally speaking, you had all the tools to play with.

It's fun in that way, but then there's something so much more gratifying about telling a story longer than 30 seconds.

And at some point, you gotta do something that doesn't just pay the bills, but feeds the soul a little bit.

I love the part about seeing somebody else's perspective on a subject and their ideas about it and bringing that to life.

I remember going to a sidewalk salon and saying, "Hey, if anybody needs a DP for their short project, I'd be interested in reading the script.

You know, if it's a good script, I'd be happy to shoot it for you."

You know, for me to do something that fed the soul and to do something that was outside the norm.

I didn't think of it as mentoring, but had a lot of fun projects with a lot of really talented people just by being open to it.

(gentle music) At the drawing group, I might use five different media in two and a half hours, because this pose makes me think I should work in charcoal and this pose makes me think I should work in BIC pen, or whatever it is.

And it almost doesn't matter, the media, as long as I'm making something.

The gallery showing that I was a part of sort of covered the range of what I dabble with.

One of them was a quilt, one of them was a drawing mixed media piece, and I think maybe five, four, five, six of them were photographs.

It's not so much about the technique.

Each one I do, my skills get sharper and they're a little more refined, but I kind of stumble into, you know, what I do next.

(gentle music continues) Many people in their lives go through a series of reinventions, but I think it's very much a part of a creative life, is that whatever you're doing is going to change.

In my career, I've worked my way from a very large city in Chicago to a little smaller in Phoenix, to Birmingham, to Albuquerque now.

There's no place that has a monopoly on talent and vision and stories, and you can find them anywhere.

Alabama was kind of the last place I thought I would be for any length of time.

We thought it would only be a few years before we moved out west again.

You know, kids sink roots, you start a business, one thing leads to another.

Before you know it, a few decades have passed.

I love the tenacity of the desert.

I love being able to see for a hundred miles.

It really puts life in perspective when you can look off into the distance and see the maces that are the high ground and understand that the top of those maces is lava flow that filled the valleys of eons ago and everything else has eroded away.

(gentle music continues) Left to my own devices, my own memory, my own chronology, I would forget half the things I've done in this life.

There are times when I think my life has been so mundane and unremarkable, and yet I go back through.

You know, sometimes it's the drawings and the paintings and the photographs and moments and realize how precious they all were and how wonderful.

An artistic view of life keeps you in the moment and makes you appreciate life that much more.

(gentle music fades) [Jennifer] From Albuquerque, we head to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Aries Jo has gone through a metamorphosis to create an authentic life and use their creative process as a way to express joy.

This doesn't have to look like anything, 'cause your grief doesn't have to look like anything, your relationships don't have to look like anything.

It feels really nice and really cool to help other people figure that out, and I think that does show in my creative practice too.

My name is Aries Jo, I use they or he pronouns.

I am an artist and an organizer, and I currently live in O'ga P'ogeh, which is unseated Tewa territory, colonially known as Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And I'm from unseated Creek territory, colonially known as Clanton, Alabama.

I do nothing traditionally.

Everything about my life is non-traditional, including my art practice.

Before I understood myself more, my visual art, particularly my sculpture and body casting, was a way for me to try and understand and process those really challenging feelings about my body.

Those really challenging things that other people had told me about my body for my entire life.

And yeah, a way for me to kind of come to terms with existing in this meat sack that I have, which, I'm on better terms with it now and I think, yeah, my art is, my visual art at least, is a big part of that.

Also my writing probably, but.

Then the theme really started to emerge that stayed with me for many, many years until pretty recently, and that was processing grief, because my mom died of suicide my freshman year of college at UAB, and that really impacted my whole world.

I didn't have access to good grief therapy, I didn't have a great experience with the death care space at that time, and I didn't have a way to process the fact that this constant in my life since childhood was suddenly gone.

And so, ephemerality and grief and loss and tangibility became incredibly difficult for me to wrap my brain around.

And creating visual art, particularly sculpture, became a really important way for me to process that and process that grief and that loss and understand it in myself.

And it took so many years.

This is what my work was about from my freshman year of college through grad school until just a few years ago.

And after working in the death care profession myself and learning more about it, it felt like a nice seal to that chapter of what I needed to think about all the time.

For a long time, my artwork and creative practice was about processing and understanding grief, and now it's about processing and understanding joy.

I feel like where I live now and who I am now, being out, being my full self, being my whole self has allowed me to find my chosen family and find my community, and it does make me want to give back, whether that's through holding a grief circle, or distributing harm reduction supplies and doing mutual aid work, or doing my job at New Mexico School for the Arts where I'm helping kids get a tuition free arts education.

All of that is thinking about community building, helping others, loving others.

And that's the baseline through all of it.

It all gets to be exactly what you want it to be, and that is the most freeing thing to understand.

And maybe I had to run away to the desert and have some wide open spaces to figure that out.

When I moved to Santa Fe, one of the ways that I connected with community is through Wise Fool, which is the local circus arts school.

I was like, "I gotta take this giant puppet making class."

A couple of my friends were in it, and we were supposed to be making these giant puppets that could be about anything.

And at that moment in my life, I was really thinking about these dichotomies in myself of joy and grief and masculine and feminine and non-binaryness, and decided to, I wrote out this whole long prompt about the iridescence of life and our ability to hold multiple truths at the same time, and thus Pearl, the giant puppet, was born, Pearl is a physical representation about how we can hold all of our truths at once.

And so, Pearl's face is sad and happy at the same time, or a little angry and a little excited.

And I used a lot of natural imagery.

So, one of the hands is a seashell, one of the hands is a butterfly.

There's a lot of iridescent fabrics and shiny fabrics on Pearl because yeah, that iridescence, that kind of shimmering quality is what I was looking for, and that's what Pearl is named for as well.

I've always been a very silly person, and my friends will tell you I call myself and they call me lovingly a silly goose.

And that's who I am, for sure.

And you know, as I've come more to terms with who I am as a person and I've wanted to bring that back into everything that I'm doing, including not just my house and my fashion and how I present myself in the world, but also my creative practice.

And that really has become about processing joy and giving myself permission to have joy in really difficult times in the world, and to have joy in the face of grief and the truth that we can hold multiple emotions and multiple parts of ourselves that might be challenging or conflicting to each other.

We can hold all of that at once, and that's really important to how I live my life now, for sure.

What I would tell my young self growing up in Clanton, Alabama and knowing what's ahead of that person is stay curious, hang in there, and it doesn't have to look like anything.

[Jennifer] Last but not least, we go to Phoenix, Arizona to chat with Birmingham native Lily Reeves, who is a sculptor of energy and light.

I just have very lofty beliefs about visual art.

I believe that we're creating the world.

Everything that you see in the world is designed by someone.

Artists kind of have this special role where we can kind of like actually create the world that we believe in, you know what I mean?

And so, I love that about art.

(gentle music) My name's Lily Reeves.

I am originally from Birmingham, Alabama and now I live here in Phoenix, Arizona.

I am a light and energy artist.

I have a really deep connection to Alabama.

My great-great-great-grandfather, he helped erect the statue of Vulcan.

Two years ago when I was home visiting and we were up at Vulcan Statue with my dad, he was like, "Oh yeah, this is your ancestor on the plaque and there was this like prophecy, and then under the prophecy is like my last name.

The prophecy is cool too.

It talks about the people of Alabama forging a better future of art and science.

So, yeah, it all felt very serendipitous and reaffirming that I'm kind of like on the right path, you know?

Whenever I'm feeling down, I just think that my name is under this prophecy, you know, forged in Alabama Iron on Red Mountain, and it just gives me a lot of like, a lot of confidence.

I was really lucky to have art in high school, and so my mom, she recognized that and she was like, "You should apply for this summer youth apprenticeship at Sloss Furnaces."

And it was at Sloss really where I really stepped into being a sculptor.

We were casting iron and learning how to weld, and it was a really formative time.

I started in Montevallo because they had a great arts program, and I met a lot of people from Alfred University, which is how I ended up applying to the school there.

And so, I came in and immediately saw the Neon Studio and I was just like, "What is that?"

Like, I need to know what this is.

Had all these neon signs hung up in the door and you know, it's like a moth to a flame.

You kind of are attracted to life.

You know, we think we're better than bugs, but we're not like.

We like shiny things, we like things that light up.

And so, neon was a medium that just like really called to me because it always kind of retained that energetic quality and it always seemed like it was alive, you know?

And it is alive.

When I finally did get into the classes, I was like the annoying kid that was like so overly excited about being there, you know?

A lot of people learn through apprenticeships, through sign shops, but I was in this really special place.

I became a more sort of conceptual artist with the media while still having the hands-on practice of bending it and processing it and assembling it and knowing how it's made.

And so, that opened up this whole world of possibilities for me.

It takes four years to master the art of neon bending.

It's not a hobby.

People all the time are like, "I wanna take a class, I wanna make a sign."

I'm like, "Don't get excited."

Like, you really break a lot of stuff for a really long time.

So, it's a lot of practice, a lot of muscle memory, a lot of fine movements, a lot of control that you build over years.

So, you make your pattern, you heat the glass over your fires, you bend it to your pattern.

Once you have your glass pattern, you've probably at that point broken like four or five versions of it and you attach your electrodes, and that is how you electrify the unit.

Once you have your gas in the tube, then you hermetically seal it off from the manifold and then you take it off your processing table and you hook it up to a power supply.

And that's kind of the magic neon.

Neon, it's a colloquial term, but not everything is filled with neon gas.

Neon gas is a very traditional red-orange, like really bright color, but about 80 to 90% of what you see in the world is actually filled with argonne.

Basically anything that's not red or orange will be argon.

Color theory is very different with objects that are made of light.

When you look at a color and it's a pigment, you're looking at a reflection of light off of an object.

When you're looking at something that emits light, you're literally ingesting the light into your eyes.

So, you're kind of like eating it in a way.

It's like color theory on drugs because it makes you feel ways that looking at a red thing doesn't make you feel, you know?

It's very abrasive and intrusive.

I use a lot of rainbows in my work.

For me, it stands for the sort of like inherent magic of the world and being alive.

And I think in our society, we have lost this ancient, like, deep connection with the land and with nature.

And for me, the rainbow kind of represents that magic that's very real and present, you know, if we're just receptive to it and open to it.

I try and do rainbows as much as possible in public space, 'cause I think everyone needs a little more magic in their lives.

I also use a lot of circles and ellipses.

I'm really interested in energies and the idea that art can carry spiritual significance.

I think that art has a lot of the same qualities that we seek out in religion.

I also worked a lot with a lot of like folk artists in Birmingham and that really kind of shaped my visual language, and I think it's why I'm so interested in the surreal or the occult, because I think there's like cultural qualities in Alabama that are very like Southern gothic and the uncanny and all of these like kinda weird, quirky things about Alabama that yeah, really bled into my work and who I am.

I think that's why I'm so confident in making work and I just, I don't overthink it.

I think that's a wonderful thing that folk art gave me.

Even if you're not educated formally, even if you're not thinking about it, it still just like bubbles out of you.

No one ever thinks about making art, you know, they just do.

Birds don't think about singing, you know?

That's just what they do.

(gentle music continues)