We don't have to have a dialogue about immigration and illegal or legal immigration, but it's about people and humanity. And there are many different people on the other side of the wall. And what we did with this exhibit is put the wall up so that they, wherever they are, are on that side. And we, wherever we are, are on this side. There's this narrative that if you build a wall, you're protecting who's on this side. But are you protecting us? Or are you denying us access? We can build walls mentally about people in a different neighborhood or the other side of town, we build prisons with walls that lock people up. You know, walls mean a lot of things.
In divisive times, people put up walls, both metaphorical and literal to separate themselves from what they see as a threat to their way of life. But defenses really make good neighbors. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. With the art installation Moreau to artists are using their backgrounds living and working as global citizens to rethink the idea of walls and tribes. Today, we're talking with them about the inspiration behind their gallery installation, which physically separates the viewer from the art. Hey, I'm
Jim Neely. I am an artist and part of wisecracker studio. We were my partner and I David was responsible for the installation in the gallery currently, the work that I did on this project is a little bit different than my typical studio work. My work is really more assemblage assemblage work, which is a lot of found materials and repurposed materials that are put together in three dimensional arrangements.
I'm David, I'm the other part of wisecracker studio and also wisecracker design. Jim and I have had wisecracker design for about 20 years by day. I'm a product designer. And when I finished that work, hopefully by early afternoon, I have turned back to being a studio artist. for about 30 years, Jim and I dragged my ceramic tools and clay making tools around from house to house and storage unit to storage unit. And two years ago, inspired by a friend of ours and local artists, Jeanne bright, wiser, Jim got back to studio work full time. And I thought, Well, if he can do it, I can do it. So I picked up those ceramic tools and started working again,
who came up with the initial concept for the exhibit that's at the heartland. Joe McCauley gallery right now, Moreau
would say the concept for the exhibit the intention, all of that was something that I had been thinking about. And there was a specific local event that kind of got me thinking about it. And then Jim, who has been the Creative Director for wisecracker design for all these years. And it was really good at the design of the installation, the actual piece thinking through conceptually, location, space, lighting, all of that really took the lead there.
I mean, this project, this installation is really almost like a little mini theater set, if you will, the way the space we really looked at this very small space and kind of thought about what can we do that's a little unconventional. We knew what the messaging was, what our intent was, and the messaging but it was really like interior design project, or as I say, a theater set. And as a result of that, I think that with the lighting, the figures that are in the room, the color, it has kind of a theatrical feel to it. And I think that's what is just another layer of interest in this in this exhibit. That's typically you don't see specifically the construction of the slatted wall that bisects the room kind of keeps the viewer from entering into about two thirds of the gallery and all of the the work and David's tribal masks and these figures which he referred to as souls are viewed through the wall. But the viewer does not have access to really get up and touch and feel and and look closely at the figures
United thank Jim took these different elements that we conceptualize together to make the statement and then really use the space. Well, for instance, there are three cubicles that usually have literature sitting on them, or might have sculpture sitting on them. And we stack those to the ceiling and painted them the kind of floor wall color. So they, they recede, but they created this column for us to stack and populate with these different souls. And it gave the impression of a crowd or more bodies. So it's the exhibit as a use of individual mass. And then these souls that are actually on 3d figures, with Jim designed, and then we fabricated out of found lumber from a house project up in Michigan.
So David, let's talk a little bit about the masks what you call souls, you have other work besides the work that's in this exhibit, where you create these, what would look to me kind of like almost tribal style masks in certain cases. First of all, what draws you to creating those? And what is your approach when you're creating these faces?
I've been fascinated with indigenous mass tribal mass from Mexico, from Africa, all around the world. Last year, we visited this beautiful exhibit in British Columbia, of Native American mass from that region. And I worked from this sort of central query do maths I'd who we are, or do they allow us to be something we're not. And I, I've worn a lot of different masks in my life, some preservation all and some to kind of try and be something I'm not like an artist right now I you know, it's when I turn the day job off, I put my artists masks on and immerse myself into it. And I started year and a half ago working with self hardening clay, I don't have a killed, I didn't want any excuses for why I couldn't pursue this. So I looked at self hardening clay and working with it initially has a lot of the same attributes and characteristics as stoneware or other clays. But it self hardens and you don't need to fire it. That's a tricky process. Because just when you think you've become the master of a particular piece, and nature sets in with temperature and moisture and all of that, the clay kind of takes over and sometimes in really happy ways because the natural patinas that occur are can be really beautiful. And then when you wake up in the morning and forgot to cover something, and it's in six different pieces, because it's cracked apart. You know, kind of who the boss is. Because there's so much dry time working with the clay, I looked at another medium paper mache and started working in mass and full size heads as well. And that originally was something to do while Clay was in some process. And then it became really interesting to me and very three dimensional. And it's kind of incredible how flour and water and newspaper torn, not cat torn pieces can become this really hard, rigid, strong, durable object to work with. And then in this particular installation here at Heartland, I'm also showing for the first time sculpting wax and glass beads. That's I get these big blocks of hard sculpting wax that I break up into smaller pieces melt down and then hand form them into the basic facial features or characteristic. And then I use hand strong glass beads in a very repetitive, very circular kind of application of putting the beads on there. And I think one of the strong pieces at the front of the installation that hopefully your listeners will be able to see is an example of this. All black glass beading. There's also some wood beating is involved as well.
When I see David's work in the show, that is really the best representation of the best presentation of his work because it includes, I don't know how many masks are in the show, but I would suspect 2430 masks something like that. And that's where you really get a very strong impression and impact. And when you take one mask out of context and Put it in a large room with soaring ceilings or whatever it feels like it gets lost to me. So I think to see the work, David's work, especially the masks, to see them and masks like this is the way I'd like to see it done in a residential or commercial installation.
When you mentioned the masks, there is a correlation there, as you say, some of them kind of look more like tribal masks. And earlier you said, masks might hide. But they might also reveal the very essence of saying something is tribal is you're trying to show your commonality with other people in a tribe. So regional tribal masks are probably saying something about the culture of where they're from of the tribe, thinking about your commercial and residential design your interior design business, I imagine your clients want to say something about themselves when they transform a space. So I just wonder if there is a commonality in the expression of using masks in the same things that you pull in from other parts of your career, trying to find the elements, maybe even in a minimal way that express something somebody's trying to say?
I think it's an interesting question, from the interior point of view, even setting aside art selection. Because I think one of the words that has described our work, both residential and commercial, has been an eclectic, part of that comes just from Jim's point of view, and our point of view, but also our extensive travel. We are serial travelers to lots of places around the world that we feel very fortunate to have been able to experience and in our own home. And in other projects, we try and layer in those objects that had been collected. Rather than having a project look like it all just came out of a box from the same place. Unwrap it, put it out, there you have it, we try to guide clients to have an acquired sort of look to things. And maybe they have their own items and possessions. Or maybe they don't, and we have the opportunity to shop with them. Or in some rare cases, where client just says I totally trust you do it, then we can go out and create the look of found objects and acquired objects, it looks like people are living in their home. And that home represents them and represents their experiences, and life together and travels and things like that. We have never designed or tried to force our look or strong point of view on a client. We share our perspective people come to us because they know how we design something,
or they've seen something we've done or they've stayed in a hotel where we've done work in and we have a couple of clients that were guests in a in a hotel in San Francisco, that we did about four dozen guest rooms in there. Each room was unique and different, which made it really interesting. That's kind of the hotel's vibe. It's not just a cookie cutter room that's rolled out to you know, 300 rooms, they were all unique. And these guests took the time to go to the general manager and say, who did these rooms they saw what we did, and there was this connection and relationship and we've done now three projects for these clients. So I think it's people who kind of get our aesthetic or relate to our aesthetic that gravitate towards us.
I also think with a brand name that has wisecracker in it design or studio. There's a bit of wit that comes through in the work for example, we did a project in medida Yucatan and Mexico, which was a renovation of all the public spaces for the Hyatt Regency there. And we designed and fabricated a 18 or 20 foot soaring stack of luggage. All hard sided leather covered trimmed luggage with solid brass hardware
that was suspended from some floating floating in the room suspended from braided airplane and haircare craft cable is like this super heavy duty cable that these this stack of luggage was literally just sort of levitating off the floor in the lobby space
which Jim dubbed and named traveling light and it's kind of amusing to see these very buttoned up guests come through the lobby and do these kind of like the Leaning Tower hoes where they try and hold the stet 20 foot stack of luggage,
like the Leaning Tower of Pisa shots that everybody does, you know, the obligatory shot. So yeah, it was fun seeing how that weird piece caught on.
Jim, you grew up in the Midwest, but your mom, she had acquired furniture,
she was furniture and gift buyer at a department store here in Bloomington called roelens, her department had her very unique point of view. And you know, she traveled to the various markets in Dallas and Chicago to buy these things. So I definitely get that I owe her a lot of my interest in design and interior design.
And so David, your family's pretty diverse, too. You had people that worked in costuming and makeup and hair in your family in California, which is where you're from. Or then also your dad was an economist is that it PhD economist with an international client base. Again, you match this sort of this art and these objects with an international view that kind of influence your perspective on when you're looking to, to create, or to design something and not just, I guess, making it homogenized,
the greatest gift my parents gave me was taking me everywhere they went, my dad had offices in Tehran. So as a kid, I spent two or three weeks a year, three different years, and had the great fortune to go through Europe on the way and be in the Middle East and then come through Asia on the way back. And so the exposure to cultures and people and our and food and all of those things was so eye opening. And as a short, fat kid with freckles walking through a bazaar in Tehran, with people that didn't really know what freckles were and just the language in the senses. And I think in art gyms in my travels to Morocco, which really brought back childhood memories, every sense is on high alert, the evening call or the multiple calls to prayer during the day and spice markets and color and just all of that. Absolutely it inspires and informs your work and appreciation for not just appreciation, a love of respect for other people and other things. And I guess that definitely informs Morrow,
something we didn't do is we didn't talk about the title of the exhibit. Say what that means. What Moreau is,
Morrow was the Spanish word for a wall. And I mean, that's sort of the foundation of the installation is this wall and symbolically and metaphorically. And realistically,
one of the things that you mentioned earlier in discussing the souls, the mask figures is you use these different styles and the masks look different, they really do vary in how they appear, they can represent a diverse goods a very diverse group. That's the striking part of the exhibit. Because when you have all the masks together, you notice the commonalities between them. Some of them look like they might be part of a family. And then you notice the how the glass beaded mask, for instance, looks so drastically different from the clay mask, or the paper mache mask. And that's something when when talking about the political element of wall building, there's often the idea that what's on the other side of the wall, actually on either side of the wall is kind of homogenized.
Right? And that couldn't be farther from the truth. Let's just take Mexico as the obvious example, with the wall. If one doesn't go and visit Mexico, they will never know the incredible diversity of people and cultures, and geography and topography and food and art. I mean, it's a big country and there are arid lands and beautiful forests and agave plantations and citrus and seaside and there are Mayan people and Aztec people and there are people of Spanish descent and background, all looking very different. But somehow, I think there becomes this narrative of next stucco and Mexicans.
They're just all brown skin, people, you know, and they live south of the border and,
and really agreed justly are lazy people or, you know, just looking for a handout. And I think our experience of being able to live and work, work live part time in Mexico for about a dozen years, gave us the opportunity to see just how untrue all of that is. I mean, as a kid from California and growing up in California, you also see how industrious and hardworking Latina and Latino communities are. It's not uncommon at all, to see a group of Mexican and Honduran people lining up at a gas station the morning to work. It's not for handouts, it's not too big. It's to put in an honest day's work with money that often goes home to their families. And we don't have to have a dialogue about immigration and illegal or legal immigration. But it's about people and humanity. And there are many different people on the other side of the wall. And what we did with this exhibit is put the wall up so that they, whoever they are, are on that side. And we, whoever we are, are on this side. And there's this also narrative that if you build a wall, you're protecting who's on this side, and but are you protecting us? Or are you denying us access is that physical wall becoming something metaphorical? That is preventing us from learning who our neighbors are, I mean, we can build walls mentally about people in a different neighborhood or the other side of town, we build prisons with walls that lock people up. In disproportionate quantities of people of color. You know, walls mean a lot of things we use the obvious wall, the wall, in this installation, but the intent is to get people thinking about having a dialogue and assessing, what do walls do are? Are they making us safer? Or are they dividing us and separating us,
when you were building this installation, you got to build a wall. And it bisects the two parts of the gallery. And so I'm guessing that sometimes you're on one side of it, sometimes you're on the other side of it. And you know, I've put up a fence before. And when you're trying to figure everything out, when you're putting on a fence and you're setting the concrete posts and everything in your you got to be on both sides of that fence. And I've had the experience where I'm on the other side of the fence, and I have this reaction like oh, man, I'm, I'm somewhere I'm not supposed to be going to the neighbor's yard now. So I wonder if maybe you just had to get the job done and get it put up. But did you have any thoughts when you were building that wall and building that space? How it kind of made you think about what you were doing and in your relationship in it?
Like, what are two old white guys doing building this wall with a kind of social political statement is that sort of that sort of that might
be one thing, frankly, you might have felt trapped, you know, you might have felt like somebody that was on the other side of the wall that you were constrained by
I will say that as the not really the construction of the wall. But as the figures began to be brought in and populate that two thirds of the gallery space, that that began to feel like a bit like and I don't want this to sound strange, but it almost felt like I was on the other side of the wall. And not that I shouldn't be there. But it was like I was on. I was south of the border, I was on the other side. So I never really thought about that to raise that question. But as that room filled up with these figures, it's like, this is, you know, this is Mexico or this is, you know, the this other other side, the other side. So it's an interesting, interesting question.
I think that the other thing I thought about from the other side, was making sure that our intent was received. People talk about white privilege and a lot of those sorts of things. And I get it. I totally get it. And I think Jim and I try with our art dry with philanthropic engagement to use what we've been given to the benefit of our communities. And I was concerned that I would did not want to be misunderstood. And I think one of the most gratifying things in reading the log book check in More guesswork are comments from names like Hernandez and Lopez and Mendez, I got this immediately. Thank you, this is so important thought provoking. So, you know, it was done with no intent of sides, you can have whatever view you want to have. But think about it. Think about the separation of children, is there a different way we can do this? Children and Families think about policy? And is it time that we actually tackle this and do something, I'm not asking for somebody to abandon their views of legal immigration, per se. But I think we have to talk about it, we have to come up with a solution together. And immigrants alone won't solve that people are citizens of the United States won't solve it, we have to talk about it. And in this small, kind of perfect Gallery in the middle of this building on a college campus, where students hopefully see this daily as they walk by and teachers and professors and guests, hopefully, and based upon some of the comments in the books, it's causing people to stop and think
the barriers that you have, which are a series of thin columns that separate the figures from the viewer literally cast a shadow. And I wondered if that was to kind of essentially eight, maybe more metaphorically, that even the idea of creating this barrier casts a longer shadow that has unforeseen or complicated ramifications.
You know, those shadows were interesting in designing the show, I really wanted that additional element of that sort of repeated stripe shadows of of the slanted wall to project on both sides of the wall. And there's this gizmo that lighting designers use the projects, very specific shadows and designs, you can create anything. And so I talked to this guy, he said, You know, I want I want to create the shadows. And he came out and looked at it. Yeah, we can do that. But the happy accident was is that when we were installing the show and starting to light, the room, the figures and light the wall and all that just sort of magically the shadows, these beautiful dynamic, strong shadows appeared on both sides of the wall. And we ended up not having to invest in a lighting designer to do that. It just kind of occurred naturally. So it was a very happy accident, if you will. And I think the idea of the wall, the shadows being cast on both sides, to your point, I think the wall does it, metaphorically casts a shadow.
I think the lighting also the happy thing that occurred with the shadows was it populated the other side of the wall with even more souls that the walls have these really beautiful shadows that are being cast from the tower of masks or from the different standing figures. And it just rounds out the installation, even beyond the physical pieces that have been put in there.
And I think definitely thank you to Heartland and to the curator tonnelle for, you know, having the I don't know if courage is the right word, but having all us courage, having the courage to allow us to come into this space and create this statement installation. Back to David's point, I think if you come and see the show, and I hope that you will, I would encourage you to look at the visitors log book and see some of the comments. I mean, those comments to me. I'm very proud of the way the show looks. But I'm very proud of the reaction that it's getting from the folks who are coming and looking at it and, and remarking, we have a small suggestion box in the space now where folks can fill out index cards with thoughts, positive, negative, whatever it is, and we intend to kind of go through those cards and actually post them tack them to the wall over the course of the show. So I hope folks will come out to Heartland and see that see the installation.
Thank you both for coming in. Thank you Jim Neely and David Dow or the owner operators have wisecracker studios. Their exhibit Moreau is running at the Heartland Community College Joe McCauley gallery until March 6 2020. If you'd like to hear more interviews about art, culture, history or other topics, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this episode. Thanks for listening
