¡Colores!; 307; Nanibah Chacon, Sasha vom Dorp, Joel Nakamura

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: The Nellita E. Walker Fund KNME-TV Endowment Fund The Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund ...and Viewers Like You >>THIS TIME, ON COLORES! ARTIST NANIBAH CHACON HONORS ALBUQUERQUE'S WELLS PARK NEIGHBORHOOD WITH A MURAL ON THE HARWOOD ART CENTER. >>I wanted to take these tattoos of people around Albuquerque and put them on this building to show that this building has sustained a life. >>TAOS ARTIST SASHA VOM DORP DISCOVERS EXTRAORDINARY PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES. >>BLENDING FOLK ART, DREAMS, AND CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY- SANTA FE PAINTER

JOEL NAKAMURA SAYS HE HAS BEEN CREATING WEIRD PICTURES HIS WHOLE LIFE. >>The journey to create the work, to me, is more important than the actual physical artifact of the work. >>IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES! NANIBAH CHACON CELEBRATES 'PLACE' WITH A MURAL ON THE HARWOOD ART CENTER. >>[Chacon] - The title

of the piece is "With Respect." I wanted to choose that title because, one I just want to give respect, to Albuquerque, to history, to the people that are here, I want to give respect to the legacy of Johnny Tapia growing up in this neighborhood. >The bigger concept that I wanted to happen here - I wanted to take these tattoos of people around Albuquerque and put them on this building to show that this building has sustained a life. It has been here, is a historic building, it sustained it through the time Johnny Tapia was here, through the time I was living here, and it shouldn't >It's important for me

to create pieces that people interact with and that people find their own stories in, their own messages in, and that also speak to the environment that they're created in. It doesn't seem satisfying to me just to put up anything that is just straight from my imagination or something that I would make up and it has no resonance to anybody else but myself. I look for things that are going to bring people to interact with the spaces that they're created in. [Man] - Dang, I didn't know you were going to get on it this quick. [Chacon] - Yeah it was fast. [Man] - Is it hard? [Chacon] - It's hard and everything about it has been kind of weird. >The main problem is the delicate nature of the full piece. Essentially gluing paper onto a wall andthen working with the glue that, in itself, is delicate, and then working with a very

delicate building - you're taking this very delicate object you're trying to compose and put together and you're putting it outside. >Inspiration is always an interesting thing and an interesting part of process. I started thinking about what my attachment to this neighborhood was and I've lived not too far from here for a lot of years. I started thinking about how this neighborhood has changed. Since I lived here, I had

recentlyread the autobiography by boxer Johnny Tapia. He was very open about his experience in Albuquerque.It wasn't anything that he tried to gloss over and I think when you have somebody that is so celebrated and they can be that vulnerable and that honest, it's an important thing to look at because they're shedding their soul for you. >What's important, and what I think people miss is that the character of neighborhoods, the beauty of neighborhoods, of a person, of their soul really comes from those scars, from those experiences and those things that had happened in that place. >Well's Park is a really old neighborhood. It's one of the more established neighborhoods in Albuquerque and, for me, putting this type of tattoo on here, these

Chicano tattoos, these old homemade tattoos, was a personal reflection of what I remembered in this neighborhood, people I remembered here.For me, it's really about the smaller things that make it unique and tattoos are a part of that - walking down the street and seeing people, seeing these glimpses of tattoos on their arm, sharing that with you, it reminded me of the people that are here. So I wanted to show that, something very personal, something very private that you don't always get to see, [Man] - The cool thing

about it is outside, it's not inside of a building because people won't go in. Even into museums or art galleries, but when they're able to see it outside, that's what murals are all about too, they're for the people and that's cool man. I like it. [Chacon] - Working in a visual format gives me the opportunity to express things, that, I don't think we always have words for. [Woman] - I like that, up close, it's sort of different then when you are standing back from it. [Chacon] - I think that the role of the artist is to communicate. A lot of communication, to me, is interpreted and I don't always have the answer and I don't like to begin communication thinking thatI have the answer for everything. So, in using a visual format, it allows that dialog to happen between people and it allows those questions to be answered or them to be raised on a completely internal

basis. Essentially, whatever reaction somebody has to a piece like this is going to come from their heart. [Man] - Who picked out the quotes from Tapia? [Woman] - She did. [Man] - They're fabulous! [Chacon] - When you do something on this scale, you're really imposing your ideas on an environment which can have really big implications. This piece, in particular, is important to me because I lived in this neighborhood. For me, I feel a large responsibility to pick things that are not only goingto satisfy the messages I want to say, but are also going to be some kind of voice for the community. It's an opportunity to say something big and the bigger things have to come from your heart. >>SASHA VOM DORP'S PHOTOGRAPHS CAPTURE THE INCREDIBLE INTERPLAY OF

>>[Hakim Bellamy] - What is your interest in patterns? [Sasha com Dorp] - Seems to me that patterns are everywhere. With the sound waves, it's all patterns. Different frequencies create different patterns. The problem is that

our perception is so limited, things are happening so quickly that it's really difficult for the conscious mind to actually grasp the patterns and pull something out of it. It's more that it's difficult to really understand what's really going on and that's the beauty of a photograph because you cancatch that moment and you can really look at it and study it, see further than your conscious mind allows. [Bellamy] - What are you exploring? [Vom Dorp] - I'm exploring sound and light and the interplay between the two. In a way it's an exploration of vibration and an exploration of perception. I work with light and sounds

because I want toknow more about the worlds we live in. Light and sound are both different parts of the same energy spectrum - they're both vibration. As far as we can tell, all matter is vibration. I've been trying to create an environment that allows the observer to experience actually three senses - the tactile,the visual, and the auditory all combined into one experience. These are very small moments in timeand I like to think about them. That's documentation of this little instance in time. [Bellamy] - What is exploration of light and sound? [vom Dorp] - I built a scene that allows the observer to see what sound looks like. I used sunlight as the source

of light. I passed sound waves through water at different frequencies and the sunlightstrikes the sound palette and the water creates refraction and opens up inspires me when I discover something new, something I haven't seen before, something that's remarkable, something that broadens my awareness of this little microcosm that i'm exploring. [Bellamy] - Can you talk about this notion of discovery through your work? [vom Dorp] - When we make a piece of art, what we're doing is we're bringing something that has somesort of truth or some sort

of meaning or some sort of magic or something of the unknown and we're creating reality. A discovery is - you observe something. I'm able to capture it and it becomes something that adds to my awareness. If I make it into a piece of art and I share it with somebody else, it becomes a part of their awareness. We're a product of our whole environment, we're a product of everything we've experienced and art is something that adds to our awareness, our experience, it addsto the collective consciousness in a way. [People talking] [Girl] - You just put

your hands in there. You can put your hands all the way under there. [Woman] - Your voice is activating it. [Bellamy] - Now in this process of discovering truths, can you tell us about a truth that you found,that you unearthed through this work? [vom Dorp] - Amazing little things like surface tension. The sound waves will push the water up and create droplets. Those droplets then won't be able to go back because of the surface tension, so they'll sit there

and they'll dance. I'm not a physicist, I love science. In quantum physics, you can't observe something without effecting it. In a way, I like to think of an artist doing the same thing. We're a part of this whole and when I'm looking at my sound palette and thelight interacting and I see something and I take a picture of it, in a way what's happening is it'scollapsing the wave and making it real. A lot intention, I think. I really like to think about energy and that's why I'm working with sound and light. It's actually a physical, tangible energy. It's not an esoteric energy - it ripples, there are

waves, this is vibration. [Bellamy] - So what is your intent? [vom Dorp] - I like to think about trying to be a conscious creator. Creation is love and love is creation. If I have an intent, that's what it is. The role of the artist is to explore our world, to think about things, to look deeper into things, and to share >>FOLK ARTIST JOEL NAKAMURA IS INSPIRED BY DREAMS AND EVERYDAY LIFE. (music plays) >>Well, if we look at folk

art, I think we have people, have connected to a dynamic source, even though they may be doing depictions of everyday things. So, I'm trying to connect to that same dynamic source in myself. (Music) >>Welcome to the collective unconscious. (music) >>So, I love the sense of line and color in this work. I love the glowing red outlines

around all the figures. It creates kind of a magic realm in which we're looking at this. And, I know it's going to influence something of mine. (music) >>Well, I think the experience of mythology kind of relates to our dreams. Mythology are kind of public dreams, and our dreams are private myths. It's fantastic that these animals have different colored polka dots. They're not representing any kind of reality, and this one has three heads. Folk art has always resonated always been drawn to it. I've always wantedto be around it. I wanted to collect it. And, so I think it speaks to me on a very deep level and therefore, I mean, it's so popular that I think it speaks to many people on a very deep level, that

this is a glimpse into an authentic life. This is a glimpse into a fantastic place. This is a glimpseinto going from the ordinary to the extraordinary. (music) >>This might be my favorite display in the museum. The general glossary of folk art and how its interpreted provincially or in a local level or the folk level will change from region to region, or from culture to culture. But there will always be themes that carry through on a global level. Trying to interpret what's happening in our daily lives or what things inspire us to go to a deeper place, to go on an adventure, to cross that threshold, to go somewhere unknown, the art work can help transport us to that place. (music)

>>The biggest obstacle I face is myself. That, I have doubts, or I get bored. Or, I don't want to pursue something as long as I should. Through my own personal mythologies I'm able to do that, and work through those things with the pictures. Well, growing up, I was one of the only Asian faces at my school, and so I just wanted to draw pictures about Godzilla all the time, and Ultraman because that was a connection to my heritage that my friends thought was cool. He was kind of my totem animal that I thought of him

as a relative. Godzilla was always there for me, you know as kind of my hero. (music) >>My parents were both in concentration camps for being Japanese, even though they were American citizens. So, our eye was kind of turned away from Japan at that point in time, so I began to search out mythology using the cultures that were around me. It was mainly Hispanic and surfers. I heard somebody talking about surfing a long time ago that they believed there was a source of good waves wherethey came from and so I wanted to do a painting about what is that source, the wave generator? Which is an octopus that inside he has a hammerhead shark with eggbeater feet that are generating a waveinside

his dream. (music) >>SO learning about myself, through the art, I think it's more of a subtle process, not only in the doing of it, but the thinking about it, and the execution of it. So, I learn a little bit about myself every time I do a piece. Through the martial art Aikido, I kind of discovered how to be Japanese again, for the first time. The guy that invented Aikido, supposedly he could summon and train with Tangu spirits and they helpedhim create the art. So, if we thought about animals and people that had died and they get beamed uplike a Star Trek Transporter and everything gets jumbled together, they get reconnected in strange ways and become Tangu spirits. Through

paintings like these paintings I'm trying to show other practitioners of the art that when we lift a weapon to the Tori, we're asking one of these spirits to come train with us for that period of time. (music) >>Well, this has possibilities to be a painting. What's important to me is the process, and I'm just going to create this work, I have to go through the process of creating it, the journey to create the work, to me, is more important than the actualphysical artifact of the work.

(music) >>I don't take myself that seriously. I like to have fun with the pictures I create. I want to have people have fun, it to be a fun experience to view my paintings, and maybe they get a little laugh about what's going on in that painting and maybe they find a little joy for themselves and experiencethe joy I had for COLORES was provided

for COLORES was provided in part by: The Nellita E. Walker Fund KNME-TV Endowment Fund, The Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment