Artist Conversation: Jeremy Frey

(audience applauding)

Good evening, everybody. I'm going to assume that applause was for Jeremy Frey and not for me, but that's totally fine. (audience laughing) Thank you all for joining us this evening. My name is Miguel Perez.

I am the associate director of engagement programs here at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I have this great pleasure of introducing Jeremy Frey and Andrew Hamilton, who will be in conversation tonight. It is phenomenal to see all of you in this room. I've been working with Andrew over the past couple years to create a space for Indigenous artists here at the Art Institute of Chicago on stage, in these programs, so to see so many of you in this room tonight really touches home for me.

A brief reminder before we begin, if you could please silence your cell phones. And now a little bit about our two speakers tonight. Jeremy Frey is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation.

Born of the Passamaquoddy Indian Township Reservation in Maine, Frey is a descendant of a long line of Native weavers. He learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and by apprenticing at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Working with time-honored materials such as ash wood and sweetgrass, Frey introduces new forms and techniques, creating art that is all his own.

Frey won Best of Show at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 2011, making him the first basket maker to achieve this honor in the market's 90-year history.

Whoo. (audience applauding)

[Audience Member] Whoo.

That same year, Frey won Best of Show at the Heard Museum Indian Guild Fair and Market in Phoenix, which he would repeat in 2015, making him the first artist to ever do so. (audience applauding) Andrew Hamilton is associate curator of Arts of the Americas here at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work explores the art and architecture of the ancient and colonial Americas, with particular interests in the Andes and textiles, as well as contemporary Native American art.

He is deeply invested in analyzing objects, how they were made, used, and eventually disused in order to understand why they were created and what cultural meanings they bore. Once again, thank you so much for joining us this evening. I hope you enjoy tonight's program.

(audience applauding)

So thank you all for coming tonight. We're so excited to have Jeremy here. We're so excited to have Jeremy's exhibition here.

I hope you've all had time to spend in the exhibition. You know, this is a retrospective that covers two decades of your career and features some 50 baskets.

Yeah, well, I'd first like to say thanks, everybody, for coming. This is a great turnout. I'm really happy to be here at the Institute and in Chicago.

And I love the way the show came together, and I hope everybody else does, too. (audience applauding) But, no, yeah, it is a retrospective. It's kind of an early retrospective.

(audience laughing)

Mid-career retrospective.

Well, I used to say, I used to say that, 'cause somebody asked me if I'd ever do a solo show. I said, "Yeah, maybe in like 20 years." (Andrew laughing) And then 20 years went by, and it happened, and I think it turned out really nice.

Well, and the exhibition, you know, I think forecasts a lot of the new work you've been doing and directions you're going in. So we thought today we'd walk through some of the different favorite moments of ours and favorite pieces in the exhibition that gives you sort of more to look at when you next visit again.

So, I've always tried to innovate, and it's been a slow process because, you know, you weave, and if you try and do too many changes to a weave, sometimes it doesn't look as good as you'd like, so I tend to just make small changes. And if you go into the show, and you look at it in that way, and if you kinda look at the dates, you can see these little tiny changes. And then, by the latest pieces, they developed into something completely different.

But the show gave me the opportunity to, just having a show motivated me to create new things and to branch way out of my comfort zone and to approach art in a different way. And I sort of did that to myself because I knew it was a platform. And I've always been an artist, I just fell in love with weaving, so I kind of stuck myself in that area, but I thought what better time than now to really try and spread that a little bit?

Well, and we're thrilled at the Art Institute because, you know, one of the lead works in the show is this piece, which is in our collection here, and it's really a landmark work in Jeremy's career. It's special for a lot of reasons. This is one of the three largest baskets that you've ever made.

Yeah, yeah, and, you know, I made that for the Institute, and I kinda wanted to kinda tell the story of everything I've done. So, like, the black and white stripe, it was an early kind of a trademark of my design before I really got into color, but I also wanted to kinda hint at the idea of color. And I wanted it to be elegant.

I mean, this establishment is elegant. The art here is amazing.

But, I mean, one of the things, you know, when I first saw one of your works, you know, as I'm constantly looking at objects and trying to understand how they came together, how the parts sort of got configured to create the work, and I looked at your work, and I just couldn't make sense out of it, you know? It is so intricate. It is so precise, you know? And so this is a piece that, as I said, is one of the largest you've made, but, you know, it's a towering basket, but what's so incredible about it is that if you look up close, if you take the time to look up close, there are the tiniest little features that you might not have recognized. So if you just see here, this is a closeup of the detail around the neck.

You can just see these little green bands. But if you look close at them, you see that the X's that go around them are actually braids of ash wood.

Wow. To my knowledge, to my knowledge, no one has braided ash before. I haven't seen braided wood. I mean, you have to think, it's hardwood.

And it's not just me. I mean, the ash has the ability to form itself in so many ways, but understanding that and knowing that, I think that it took a while. I think the core of my practice is innovation.

And as clean and straight and sort of simple as the basket looks, I had to develop new techniques of making forms. I had to develop new techniques, several new techniques just to make that piece exist. So a lotta the innovation has nothing to do with weaving.

It has to do with toolmaking, different approaches, and different ways of just using the wood because the wood's a natural material. It's not always straight, and you're making straight work.

And so this is, you know, most of your baskets you make over forms. There's a couple different kinds of forms that you use. One's called a "puzzle mold." There are some examples of that in the video that plays in the exhibition.

And then "rib molds." But, as you were saying, like this is one of the largest pieces you've made, and you had to do a really innovative way of actually creating something that large.

Yeah, the puzzle molds, they're a collapsible mold, and I make 'em all myself, but they come apart in all these little pieces, so you can weave over the whole piece, and you can just pull everything out through the center. Well, they're solid wood, so they're really heavy, and my tooling can only go so large, so like bigger pieces I make over these forms that are, they're basically a bunch of ribs on discs.

[Andrew] Sort of like a barrel.

Yeah, and so when you weave over that, when you get to the widest point, you have to weave it freehand or find another way to weave the top. And I really love symmetry, and I love to kind of reach for perfection. You never get there.

But pushing towards that, this was the first time I had tried using a different technique to make the top. So, and, you know, the backstory to every piece, it has a lotta different innovation in it, I think.

So, you know, throughout your work, you've created a lot of vase forms. And for those of you who've gone through the exhibition, you'll see that vase forms are a sort of recurring form in your work. But, you know, in the second gallery, there's these urchin baskets, and this is, I think, a traditional form of Wabanaki basket.

[Jeremy] The form is. Doing the color and the points and the different styles of points.

[Andrew] But, so these are called urchin baskets 'cause they take the form of sea urchins, right?

Yeah, so if you take the cover off, and you flip 'em upside down, they look like an urchin shell that you'd find on the coast of Maine. I used to sell baskets to a local little gallery when I was first coming up, and every time I'd go in there, they had this case with these antique urchin baskets. And when you weave a circle, if you're weaving out, you can pull that weave as tight as you want, and it goes into the center circle so it holds itself in place.

But when you go back over a form, and you weave into the center circle again, now, if you pull it tight, it wants to loosen the weave, and it was so intimidating. I mean, I don't know how many of you guys weave, but (audience laughing) it's an intimidating form anyway. So, you know, some of my innovation earlier was changing the size of the weave, changing, you know, how tight the piece could be without it being, you know, too tight and just looking ridiculous.

But the real main challenge that I faced early on was this exact form, and I ended up having to make my own molds for it 'cause they didn't exist. And actually, if you look at the brown one (chuckling) over here, that was made on my very first form. I don't even use that form anymore because it was a bad form, but.

(Andrew and audience laughing) Well, I had sad little tools. And if you look at the blackish one or the darker one in the front, that's the same size, but it's on the newer form, and it's a lot more, I just like the form a lot better. But, yeah, that whole table has so many stories in it, whether it's playing with color or, you know, innovating with size and trying to understand how to really pull those together.

I feel like talking about this basket and trying to sort of walk through some of the ways- Well, this-

in which it's made could be helpful, like.

So this, you see, I don't know if you see how the points line up at an angle as well as up and down and left to right. Well, that's very deliberate. The original point weave kind of staggered 'cause that is a traditional weave.

But I realized that if you separated the points with a little, with a small spacer, that you could get them to line up in other ways. And you'll see this theme in my work over and over again now. And the bigger the piece is, the more it'll play with your eyes, and it lines up in all different ways.

But also, the point itself, depending on what angle you look at it from, it hides the back color behind the point or it shows it, and so you can make these pieces that change color as you walk by them, and they're just pieces of wood, you know?

And so maybe it's helpful, like for those of you who haven't sort of watched the video or watched Jeremy weave or weavers, you know, a basket like this, you start at the bottom and you work up. And, you know, there's various different parts of the basket, but you start by making a sort of radius as the spokes on a wheel, and those are the standards. Those are kind of like the warp in a textile.

And then you come in, and you weave the horizontal weavers around it, you know? But so, in these, like you're talking about those points, and they feature a lot in the urchin baskets 'cause they, you know, are reminiscent of the spines of a sea urchin.

Well-

But that's all secondary. You make those as like a second weaver. So, just so you guys know, I'm not not looking at you. I'm looking at pictures.

So I'll stop doing that. (audience laughing) But no, so the great thing about the urchin basket is that you can look at the, you can look at the weave from every single angle because of the way that the radius works. So, at the top shoulder, you can see through the points. On the top, if you look there, it's blue.

And then, if you look down on it, you get these other spirals coming out. And if you look at, if you, I mean-

[Andrew] But there was a point when this basket was just undyed wood, and the black navy color- Yeah.

[Andrew] and didn't have any of the points on it.

It was just a sixteenth-of-an-inch basic weave. That's the traditional urchin. It's the shape of an urchin.

That's all it is. It's just a basket.

And can you talk a bit about like how? I mean, 'cause you prepare your materials with such precision so meticulously, but, you know, the way you have to shape the standards to get that form, like the sort of math that goes into bringing the wood into this shape. And then, as you know, we looked on the top view, you can see how the points get smaller and smaller as you go towards it. Like, it creates a really impressive optical effect.

So, you know, if you guys go back through the show, and you look at any of the pieces, one of the things to look at is the spacing between all the upright pieces of wood. We call them "standards." My goal is to make that, that spacing, no matter how wide the standard is or where it is on the basket, pretty much be the same space, and there's many reasons for that, but it's very structural. So the more extreme the shape, the more extreme the rib has to be.

What I love about this piece, though, and all these pieces is that if you take "Nearly Monochrome," the Art Institute's piece in the first gallery, and you compare the scale of the work to a small basket like this, it's the same. Like, even on a large basket, you're working as finely, as precisely on a three-foot tall basket as a three-inch tall basket.

You know, looking back at "Loon," and it's the biggest piece I've ever done, and we were lucky to get it for the show. And when I first tried scaling up, I thought, okay, I'll just, I'll put bigger pieces on and make the same basket. But it didn't scale properly.

It looked bulkier. I didn't like that aspect of it. I mean, if you went massive, that might work, but just doubling the size, it took away from kinda the spirit of the piece, so I had to find new techniques to add more standards.

'Cause when a piece gets two feet across, you need like, what, it's like 98 uprights, and they tend to spiral in the center. So if you have 98 of 'em stacked, the bottom's like six inches tall. So I had to find ways of eliminating that spiral and still having all the.

And then when they get super long, again, it's a natural fiber, and I don't cut across the grain, so I follow the grain. So if the tree kinda has a little sway to it, well, that's the way the wood's gonna be. And so when you're trying to get these perfectly straight seven or eight-foot pieces of wood, I mean, you almost can't.

[Andrew] Yeah.

And so I had to find new techniques of just scaling up and, but again, without adding size. I just add more pieces. So there's thousands and thousands of pieces in some of those large pieces.

Well, and I just, I love this table in general 'cause it just shows a whole array of ways in which you've tackled the same form, the same shape and different sizes and different techniques with different colors, with different aesthetics, and it produces a whole, a different basket every single time. And I know you've said you never make the same basket twice.

Well, it's not entirely true, but, (Andrew laughing) but it's almost true. Now, the one in the foreground, the brown one, it's completely natural color. Early on, I didn't use dye at all.

All I would use was things that I could harvest, period, but then I realized you can harvest dye from Walmart. (Andrew and audience laughing) And so, boy, did I start harvesting. But, no, the one in the foreground, it's braided cedar bark, and you can age it and darken it.

You can have it light almost like skin tone, or you can darken it down to this dark brown, and it's all in technique. But it becomes very strong. It has a great smell, a great feel.

It's very time-consuming, so you won't see a lotta cedar bark weaving in my work 'cause my work's already time-consuming. But in like, during these moments of like intense innovation, I just do crazy stuff just to push it. And then maybe I can't continue to work at that rate, but they exist, you know? And I know I can do them, and I know that I'll visit that again from time to time.

But I'm always like just trying these different avenues. And basketry is a really basic. In its essence, it's so basic.

It's just up, down, left to right. I mean, it's just over and under. So, to take that simple thing and to try and make it complex has been really daunting, honestly.

Jeremy mentioned smell two seconds ago, and I will just say one of the things I wish we could share with all of you in the galleries is how amazing these works do smell. Unpacking the crates for the exhibition was really amazing. I mean, all the woods have this beautiful, beautiful scent.

I thought we should talk a bit about this basket 'cause Miguel mentioned it in the introduction. So this is the piece that Jeremy--well--you tell the story.

[Jeremy] So, okay, this is my first Best, well, my second Best in Show, but it was my first Best in Show at Indian Market. Actually, my only Best in Show at Indian Market.

[Andrew] But this was the first time you ever entered Indian Market?

[Jeremy] Yeah. (Andrew laughing) And it was the first year they had a basket category.

[Andrew] Oh, wow, okay.

So we solidified that for sure. (audience laughing) That's the royal we. So when I went, so Indian Market was a national stage, and it was, again, a reason for innovation.

You know, you're going out into this new audience. There's thousands of people there. There's a thousand artists.

And I wanted to compete 'cause I figured that was the best way to be known, and so I went. At the time, that was the largest scale I was working in. And I had always been working towards doing vase form, and I was working a lotta black and whites at the time.

No one had seen anything like the work. It was amazing. If you see it now, if you see the evolution now, like you go in there and you look at that piece, it's a great piece, but you can see where I went, what I was trying to do.

And the balance is different in the new works. There, you know, I'm working in color. I don't think that piece could win again today.

Yeah. (laughing) 'Cause people have, they've seen it, and it's-

And but that's just what's so amazing about seeing your work all together is that you can see how far Jeremy has pushed the needle basket by basket by basket and moved this artform forward. That, I mean, that basket is one of the first things you see in the exhibition, and, you know, room by room, the baskets just keep getting more and more than where you start here where you won Best in Show.

Now, we're only touching on some design tonight because we're limited on time.

Yeah. I mean, there's other pieces that we're not gonna talk about at all.

[Andrew] But here's sort of, you know, what I love about this is you sort of see this progression of these black and white stripes that are kind of a hallmark of some of your earlier pieces. And in that sense, "Nearly Monochrome" is sort of a capstone of that aesthetic.

Right, and I still revisit the black and white. I think it's just so classy, and it just shows 'cause weaves are positives and negatives and sorta have the positive and negative color. It just, it makes it pop.

But baskets are also a wonderful palette for color.

And, you know, this is a basket that just really shows how far, you know, any rule there is or any sort of accepted wisdom of basket making that there might be, I feel like you're always trying to push what that could be, and this is one of those that really just blows open.

So I did a group of, I did a group of baskets for a show in New York, and this was one of the pieces in there. And I was just exploring kind of everything that I've ever kind of touched on. And this is what I refer to as a double wall, so it's basically two baskets.

But the story that I kind of went with was the idea of prejudged Native art and what Native art can be. Like this, the outside is rough. It's the actual pounded surface of the tree.

There's still pieces of bark on it. I deliberately randomized the weaver size, so none of those, none of the weavers that go around are the same size. They're all different sizes.

And then the inside, I made it super precise, patterned out like crazy in a solid color, and they're really vivid color. Normally, I would never make a basket in those colors. But having the opposite on the outside kind of brings it back into the realm of what I do, kinda what my practice is.

And that piece is called "Navigating Tradition," and the idea was like when I first started weaving, a lot of the traditionalists would say that you're doing it wrong.

And so I had to just know for myself that I had a vision and a goal, and they would still be traditional. They'd just be my version of it, you know?

And that's what I mean, for me, that's what makes your work so art historically important. Like, you are moving this artistic tradition forward basket by basket.

Well, every, see, tradition can be great, and it can also be stifling. Like tradition now was contemporary once, but people get stuck in the idea. Especially when you're trying to preserve a culture, you want it to look like that culture.

And so, I do save so many elements of the work deliberately that are culturally significant, but I'm just trying to make them relevant today.

And I mean, that's one of the reasons why I really love this room in the exhibition because it brings together so many different ways in which you're expanding Passamaquoddy basket making. You know, in the case in the middle, I just thought we could talk about, you know, this basket for a bit. You know, we'd mentioned that some of Jeremy's earlier works were these black and white sort of vertically striped baskets.

And I think in some of your current work, you're really expanding the color palettes that you're using and really exploring different ways of using colors that are color pairings that might not be so disparate or so striking, but sort of really soft modulations of colors. So, if you look at this basket, it actually has two really close colors of purple, and there's a sort of grape and a mauve, and it creates this amazing visual effect. So the points, you know, they create this density of one color around the contours of the basket.

And then, as you were saying, the points sort of change angles as you work over the curvature of a surface.

And again, you can see that the shape of the piece was designed to work with the points so that, so as you walk by that piece, it looks iridescent. It tends to shimmer, and different angles will be different colors of purple, and that's very intentional. You know, my work has become, and I called that weave, it's a point weave.

My work has become point heavy because of the way you can work with color. It's like I'm kind of in my color theory years, and points do that the best. But that being said, I do, when I create like a body of work, I try to be more diverse, but you'll always see points in that body of work.

But like this is one of the baskets that you're just showing in LA right now. So this isn't in the exhibition, but, I mean, it really, I think, shows how you're pushing color forward.

Yeah. I mean, if you were to put those colors on a table, I wouldn't think they'd go together necessarily. (Andrew and audience laughing) That was a happy accident, honestly.

But I love like the concentration of red that visually accumulates at the bottom of the basket and then- But-

how the blue comes forward.

Yeah, but even thinking about like, this piece is designed from like five other pieces. It's evolved to this, and I have images of all of them. And I think about just the way that colors work together.

And a lotta times, it's a complete accident for me, but it's experimentation. You know, I'll learn something from a piece, whether it's design, color, the way that weaves work on certain forms, and then those, I try to carry as much as I can into the future work. And this piece is probably the best example-

[Andrew] Yeah.

of the color evolution. And I wish I had, like, the four pieces just to take you right through it because it's just fun. And it's great to come up with a combination like that, and I've used it a few times now.

Yeah, and, I mean, color and weaving is something that I think you're really exploring a lot now in your prints, which is a new, like a totally new application of basket making. So, in this room, you know, some of your prints from the collaboration with Wingate Studio are on view.

[Jeremy] Mm-hmm.

[Andrew] And I think it might just be helpful to sort of walk everyone through like exactly how you made these prints.

So the idea behind the prints is just diversifying. We have an invasive insect, you guys probably all know about. It's emerald ash borer, and it's killing the one tree I use to make baskets.

And so, as an artist, I've sort of really hyperfocused on weaving, but I wanna go back to some of my earlier practices. But since I'm so sort of visible now, I wanna do it in a way that makes sense to the audience, and so I thought, you know, one of the ideas was to print on paper with actual weavings. And I had to modify the weavings so that they'd go through a press without having high and low points.

So you're weaving sort of basically the way you might weave the bottom of a basket-

Yeah. before you bring it up to the sides.

Yeah. You're weaving sort of that flat piece.

Right, and like, and again, you can play with color.

Yeah.

Now, unfortunately, when you make plates that are wood and woven, and once you put a color on there, it's in the wood. So the prints, yeah, they kinda become colored, so.

Well, I mean, what I love about the prints, and it's worth spending time with them for this, is that like, as you look at them closely, the way that the wood took up the ink and then imparted the ink and embossed it onto the paper makes the prints on paper, which have no wood in them, look more like wood than the actual baskets do. Because you process your materials so finely that the fact that it's wood, that it was once a tree, you almost can't see because it just does such a pristine, meticulous form.

Well, the other thing is the dye, the dye completely colors the wood, whereas the ink only covers the high points, so you see the grain.

Yeah. So, yeah, you do. It does become that.

You see sort of the wood grain and the woven structures almost better in the prints than in the baskets themselves.

And then, that translates into the idea of just weaving flat images. And so, you know, that's kind of the next phase is making things that aren't necessarily vessels, but they're my favorite parts of the baskets. Like, when I'm weaving a piece where the ribs come together, they make this cool little spiral, but unfortunately, there's always covers on.

You can never see them, and so-

I mean, when I visited you in your studio, one of the first things you did was take a basket that you made and like stuck my head in it, basically.

Right. (Andrew laughing) Well, okay- But it's so amazing to look down the inside of a basket, one of his baskets. So this is the inside of "Nearly Monochrome," which you can imagine is this three-foot tall basket. It's really an enormous basket to look into.

But this is what it looks like to look inside the work in our collection.

So when I'd show nationally, I'd be at a table handling my work. That was my favorite thing was to take the covers off because it's like, "Wow, that's a great piece," and then you open it, "Wow, it's even a better piece." I can't do that anymore. No matter where they're being shown, if it's in a gallery or in a museum, I can't.

If I start handling it, other people are gonna wanna handle it. The values are up. And there's just so many reasons not to touch 'em anymore, but it's just, it's such a shame, so, (Andrew and audience laughing) so I'm trying to find other ways of exploring the insides of works in a way that they can be seen.

'Cause, I mean, I've had half-made baskets that I've taken images of just 'cause I love the way it looks.

Well, and so one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition is "Caesura," and, I mean, this was a piece that you were making for the exhibition. And I can remember us talking about it on the phone. You're like, "I'm gonna make a basket, and it's gonna go into the wall." And I was like, "You mean it's gonna go onto the wall." It was like, "No, it's gonna go into the wall." (laughing) And so, indeed, it goes into the wall.

[Jeremy] So if I remember correctly-

[Andrew] Uh-huh.

you were like, "Yeah, I don't know if we can mount that. Can we put it, I don't know how we can.

can we put it on a table for this?" We'll have to build a wall.

Nobody knew what I was talking about. And then we put it up in Portland, and it just, it worked. And they were psyched.

And then, I think after that, we decided we could.

But, so this is a, I mean, you turned the form for this. You made a specific form for this so that you could weave over it- Right.

in order to create this effect.

[Jeremy] Right, and so it's not just the shape, but it's also the weave. If you stare at that weave, again, it has that your eyes try to make different patterns, and that's something I've been playing with with the weave.

[Andrew] But I love how these can be in conversation with the prints and the baskets. They're basically like, you're doing two-dimensional prints, you're doing three-dimensional baskets, and here you're creating a work that creates the optical illusion of being two-dimensional when you first see it and then realize that it's actually three-dimensional.

So working for like a gallery show for sales is different than working for a museum show where you're not, like, this isn't made to be sold. This is made to just make people think and provoke and tie the show together, and I really love that. And the idea was, yes, that was meant to be shown with the prints.

It was meant to trick the viewer because who'd put a hole in a museum wall? You're just, you're not. (Andrew and audience laughing) So, you can't. You're like, no, how do you do that? 'Cause you're not gonna go to that as your first thought, and I knew that.

Yeah. And even you were like, "No, we're not doing that." Yeah. (laughing) Well, and what I love about this work, too, is you can see just how much people enjoy it because there's forehead prints on them, (audience laughing) on them, like seeing. And there's nose prints on the glass.

So everyone is looking at it really closely, and, you know, it really is that work that literally draws you in.

Yeah.

But so, you know, you're also now thinking about sort of dimensionality in your work. And these, again, are pieces that aren't in the show, but.

[Jeremy] Well, you know, you can stay on this image.

Okay. But, you know, you think, so that piece is ridiculously impractical, (Andrew laughing) but I learned a lot, and it was part of the evolution of the work. It's fine that it's impractical. And then we took some of the printed plates and framed them because I just love it.

Those are inked, so, yeah. So these are some of the matrixes that you used for creating the prints- Right, right, so-

[Andrew] that now you're thinking of as objects themselves. So, again, it's a different color. I would never, I don't ink my baskets, but just the way that they show off the grain. And they have a history to 'em.

Like the blue one has different colors on the inside from other plates being exposed back onto 'em. I just love the life that they've had already.

And so, I mean, dimensionality is something that you just are continuing to play with and continuing. Like these were pieces that then had to be flat so that they could go through the printing press. But now, even sort of the next stage, and I haven't seen this work in person, and I can't wait to, 'cause it's 5 1/2 feet in diameter.

Wow. So that has the spiral. So it has points relief or point relief out of it. And you can see the influence of "Caesura" in that, where it has the patterning, and it plays with the eye.

[Andrew] So this is in your studio?

[Jeremy] That's in the studio. That was like, I just finished, I hung it, and-

[Audience Member] Oh, wow.

[Jeremy] and it has a color gradation.

[Andrew] So you created like a sort of ombre effect in throughout. The great thing about that is if you were standing in front of it with me and with a friend staring at it, we'd all see different things. (Andrew laughing)

And then no matter, and then if you change angles, like you can see in the photos, it lines up differently. It moves, it's hard to look at up close.

But I love it 'cause that was what I was going for. And so "Caesura," the piece that I made just to mess with you guys, basically, inspired that. And then so it'll inspire the next, and that's kind of, it's just they take so long, you know? Yeah.

And so it's these little tiny innovations over this mass amount of time, so it took me 20-something years to get to this.

And I mean this, just looking at it, like this must've been a real challenge to harvest the wood and then shape the wood to get those weavers that are 5 1/2 feet across-

Yeah. that are shaped to. But I love like this lateral view and seeing how the weavers all pile up in the center.

[Jeremy] Yeah, it looks like Atlantis.

[Andrew] Yeah. (laughing)

[Jeremy] I don't know, maybe not.

[Andrew] But then here it is in LA right now in Karma Gallery, which is an exhibition that's open until December 10th, right? Or December 21st?

21st, yeah. 21st. But you can see sort of that conversation now between your vase form baskets, your double wall baskets, your prints, your wall works.

So it's interesting, you know, it's this traditional art form that comes from the woods, and it's in my studio. It's got ash everywhere. So like putting it in a white space where the only thing you see is the work, they sorta glow.

I mean, this photo doesn't do it justice. If you get a chance to go to LA, not to take away from what you guys have going on here, (audience laughing) but there's moments. We love your work wherever it is. (laughing)

Sometimes less is more. (Andrew laughing) No, and this has the whole story. It has some of the printed pieces and then the evolution.

And I don't know if we have photos, but I wove smaller versions of this giant one where you get that spiral in the center. There's a textured surface. It's dyed instead of ink.

So it's this combination of the basket and the print form. And then, you know, that gives me other idea. We were talking today about new ideas for flat works.

[Andrew] Yeah. Now- And I just love to talk, I just love to talk my way through things because I'll think about 40 new ideas before I actually try one. So it's a lot of it, a lotta the innovation is just happening in my head.

Now, our exhibition here, you know, ends with another one of your new forays, your new kinds of works, your time-based media work, "Ash." Yeah.

And I have to say that, like, I had seen this work many, many times before we installed it here. Of course, I'd seen it in Portland. I've seen it even before then.

I knew how it ended. But seeing it installed here and seeing the images play over the tops of your baskets in real life was very arresting.

[Jeremy] That's a cool photo. (Andrew laughing)

You have this cavalcade of baskets, and then the-

Yeah, so, so the video. Okay, so video work was probably the most challenging thing, and really, it was the initial idea for the show. And so knowing that, it was really intimidating to approach, and it felt like it was never gonna end, and it wasn't gonna turn out how I wanted it to.

'Cause I had all of these preconceived ideas, but never having done video before, they were preconceived ideas. But I wanted to make something that drew the viewer in, and 'cause the idea was you've already seen the show, and then you see this video, oh, this is how he makes baskets. This is great.

And then it's, you just get that powerful change and whatever that change is, really. It's hard to define what the video is, but if you ever view it again, I want you to just think of it as an art installation. I'm not telling you anything.

I make baskets. I barely show you anything in that if you really think about it. (Andrew laughing) And I'm not telling you how to feel about what you see.

It's really, it's supposed to come from inside. It's supposed to be kind of a reflection of yourself. So, if you go in there saying, "Oh, what's he trying to say?" Don't do that.

Just go in there and just view it.

So, you know, the video's called "Ash," and it's a video in which your ash wood ultimately becomes ash.

Yeah.

And I know that that ending is, as I said, very arresting, very moving.

You know, the day that, you've probably all seen this. Hope it's not a spoiler. (Andrew laughing) But the day that that burned, it was just every, we were outside, and everything was perfect, and the way it fell apart was perfect.

The idea that I had originally was that it would be a basket made of ash, and it really is. And it glows from the inside in ways I could never have anticipated. I mean, the fire made a whole other art that I really hadn't thought about.

And you can see so much in that if you can just let go of the fact that we just burned a really crazy piece of art.

It is actually amazing sort of as you watch the sort of embers of the basket sort of erode. It's like almost the basket unweaving itself.

Yeah, so, and then even the cover doesn't fall off the plinth. Like all of these little, it was just, it was really a wonderful, horrible experience.

Well, thank you all for coming.

Yeah. (audience applauding)

Really wonderful to see so much interest in Jeremy's work. And the exhibition's going to be open until February 10th, so I hope you all have a chance to come back and see it. Bring your friends, bring your family over the holidays.

And this talk has been recorded, and we'll make efforts to get it online soon. So if you enjoyed the talk, then share the talk with friends as well, thank you. (audience chattering) (audience clapping)