(bright music) - [Jade] Create quilts using metal and wire with artist Robin Tost.

(bright music) Collaborate with artist Natan Diacon-Furtado, and catch a performance from Conor Walsh.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA!

A House for Arts."

(bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution, and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M & T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M & T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(bright music) - Hi, I'm Jade Warrick, and this is "AHA!

A House for Arts," a place for all things creative.

Here's Matt Rogowicz with today's studio visit.

- I'm here in Mill River, Massachusetts to get a look at the industrial quilts of artist Robin Tost.

Now, forget your traditional fabric quilts.

These are made out of metal and wire, and you're gonna wanna check 'em out, follow me.

(lively orchestral music) - Thank you.

(lively orchestral music) Metal quilting, I don't know of too many other people that do it, which is smart of them, because it's a truly ludicrous medium.

It takes forever.

It is dangerous, particularly 'cause I work in scrap metals.

I told you there will be blood.

(lively orchestral music) Why do I do this?

It first started in about 2010.

I had gone on a bike trip with a pal through Vermont and New Hampshire, and we kept going, riding through small towns where the factories were all closed down.

And in many yards, there were handmade signs that said quilts for sale, and I was thinking about the fact that the women were having to make up for the loss of the income that the guys had lost in these foundries and factories.

And then I thought, well, what if it's not the women who are making them?

Women are doing, you know, all the other stuff as well, and I said, "What if it's the men that are making them?

And if I were a machinist who had lost my job, what kind of quilt would I make?"

(lively orchestral music) So that led to the first quilt, which had many, many layers of rusted metals, but also gadgety stuff that belong on machines.

I cut each piece by hand, then I lay it out, and I mark with a pen where the holes will be, and I punch the holes with a drill press, clamp them together with just clips, generally, and sew it with quilting stitches.

(lively orchestral music) I stitch with wires, and they have to be flexible enough to push them through and crimp them and then push them back.

I mean, unlike sewing with a thread, you can't do this, because the metal doesn't allow that, so you have to push through, and then be get to the other side and push it back.

(lively piano music) I like the patterns, and I also like the geometric part of it.

I like that they're mathematical as well as decorative.

(lively piano music) My metals come from a bunch of places, predominantly the local transfer station.

Also, there are a couple of automotive junkyards that I go to.

They're usually kind of dirty and kind of corroded, which is part of the things that appeals to me about that stuff.

I love what age and use does to metal.

I put lemon juice and salt to try to change the patina, and I also peed on it.

(all laughing) I started out making just flat quilts that were shown on the wall, and using traditional quilting patterns and quilting stitches, and then several years ago, somebody said to me, "Have you ever thought about working three dimensionally?"

And I said, "No," and then of course, started thinking about it.

I started making birds and animals with the scrap metal quilted as a skin on a steel frame.

It's hard to pick favorites, but I would say that the spirit bear is dear to my heart.

I think she's got personality, and also with the sea serpent, Cecilia developed a real personality, and I'm sure that sounds very booga booga, but I do kind of feel that they are, you know, they're their own thing.

The transportation on the great big things had become very, very difficult, and involved many people and lots of money, and so I just said, "Okay, I'm gonna go back and make something I can fit in the car again, the way I used to do things."

So the turtle fits to the quarter inch in the back of the Subaru.

I think of the turtle as being a martial sort of character, and the decoration that are on the different plates of the shell, I consider, you know, to be like military awards of some kind or another.

During COVID, I was here by myself.

My kids wouldn't come near me for fear of killing me, and it was a truly, truly lonely time.

And I think if I hadn't had the serpent to work on, I don't know what I would've done.

I mean, I can't imagine waking up and not having something to do, because you can only read so much, and I was just boring myself into a coma, and so I was so happy to be able to come out here to the studio and have something to work on.

- Natan Diacon-Furtado is a collaborative artist and designer.

Originally trained as a cultural anthropologist and architect, Natan is drawn to collaborative projects that connect him to new experiences and communities.

So let's find out what Natan's currently up to.

Welcome to "AHA!

A House for Arts," Natan.

I'm really excited to talk to you today.

- Hey, thanks, Jade.

- I want to know what led you into the arts?

How did you become Natan the artist?

- Oh, that's a sweet question.

Well, I think I've been in the arts my whole life.

My mom's a conceptual artist.

My dad's a cultural historian and a historian of Latin America, and so that also sort of looks at arts, and so ever since I was born, as a kid, I would help my mom in the studio and be sort of like a studio assistant.

And then in school, I always sort of was drawn to art classes, and I'm just realizing now that kind of a lot of the foundational stuff that I was putting together like, "Oh, this makes me feel good" in this art class in middle school, and like, "Oh, I've been thinking about combining, you know, this idea with this idea" in high school.

Like, all of a sudden now I'm actually going back and being like, "Whoa, I'm doing the same thing now, but now I actually know what I'm doing."

And so like, I feel like I've been in it my whole life, but every day is kind of this process of rediscovering why I go to art and why kind of live in art as a way of kind of processing my life and living through it day to day.

- Oh, so it seems like you kind of just grew up around it too.

- Yeah.

- I do love, like, my family is also full of artists as well and it is very inspiring and very nice to be around folks who have just created art since you were little wee baby to now.

- Yeah, and then they'll just roast you.

- Yeah, true.

(both laughing) The roasting never stops, I swear.

So how would you describe your work to someone who's unfamiliar?

- Yeah, so I start off by saying that I'm a collaborative artist and designer, and so that means that everything I do is open in a way that invites people to collaborate with it, whether it's by physically manipulating pieces, or by engaging with the archival process that creates those pieces, or just by sharing their stories that become part of the art.

And so that's through workshops, through printmaking, through sculpture making, and through installations mostly.

- Awesome, and any examples of like, any of your collaborative, I guess, projects that you've worked on with folks?

Just like one example so folks understand what a collaborative artist really is.

- Yeah, sure, a good example maybe is I basically have these series that continue as collaborations between lots of different folks.

So I have a series called "Our Patterns" that starts out as a pattern making workshop that can be, you know, from two hours to three weeks to three months, and it engages mostly with young adult students, and we come together to kind of create a shared visual language about our day-to-day life.

So it's just about kind of learning to talk to each other through visuals, and that project, what comes out of it is a shared visual language through a kind of a quilt of patterns.

And we use this kind of idea of a quilt as a way of saying, "Well, you can stitch everybody's individual thoughts and visions together as a way of kind of sharing and collaborating with each other."

So everybody gets to do their own thing, but you get to come together and see how it all relates.

- Oh, I like that.

- Yeah.

- I love the quilt method too.

So patterns seem to influence your work heavily, and I want to ask like, why is that, and what's the background of that?

- Well, I like to say that I engage with a globally southern heritage of pattern making as a language and art and a craft in all my work.

Most of that comes from the fact that I grew up sort of half the time in the US in the United States South in East Tennessee, and then the other half of the time in Brazil, especially in the capital city of Brazilia.

And growing up in Brazilia in particular, Brazilia is one of the few capital cities that is a totally modernist, and was built in 1952.

And part of this development of that city was that they actually designed a graphic system that could be used for sign making for all the buildings.

So without having to see a sign that says like, this is a bank or this is a church, just the tile patterns actually would tell you like, oh, you're in this neighborhood, you're in that neighborhood, you're at your bank, you're at your grocery store.

And so I just grew up with this idea that, oh, patterns have have meanings and patterns can connect people.

And then at the same time in the American South in East Tennessee, you grow up around a quilting tradition and around that idea of people coming together to make meaning through pattern.

And so for me, pattern making has just always been sort of a tertiary language with which I can understand and communicate with the rest of the world, and so that's why it's such an important part of what I do.

- And do you see pattern as language?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think that for me especially, well, I think patterns are a language for everybody, and I think a lot of the work that I do, the collaborative element is about getting folks to understand that and sort of tap into this new language that they maybe didn't know that they had access to.

But for me in particular, I think of patterns as a way of tapping into languages that have been lost within me, within my ancestry, because of the history of colonialism and things like that, so for me, pattern making, again engaging with this globally southern heritage of language, art, and craft through these kind of like, simple geometric shapes that tell stories, I like to think of the way I use pattern making as engaging with all the languages that have been lost of all those people that sort of came before me, right?

And in that way I get to kind of recuperate that, but I also get to build on that, so it's looking forward and looking backwards at the same time.

- Oh, I love that, it's really beautiful.

- Yeah.

- Well, what kind of materials do you use, or what kind of, I guess, mediums that you work in?

- Yeah, so the number one criteria for a medium for me is that it's simple and it's inviting.

So it actually changes a lot, depending on what the project is and who I'm working with.

For me, every day, my medium is rubber stamp, ink, and paper, so I almost keep like, a diary of what I see during the day as like, stamp making.

So like for example, like the shape of this couch, like, I might just see sort of like the cut of that arm, and think, oh, that's a really interesting shape.

I'll turn it into a stamp, and then I'll kind of try to make some patterns with it as a way of keeping like, a visual diary of today, and that's my method to generate this kind of geometric language that I use in everything else, right?

In terms of ease, I think we sort of split off into digital methods particularly.

I do a lot of projection work.

Digital projections are great because they can be scaled at any size, and they can interact with all sorts of different things at these different scales.

So for example, a recent project here in Troy for Troy Glow, which was called "Our Patterns, our Architectures" projected patterns that were created with these really small archival photos from the Hart Cluett Museum.

Collaborated with them to kind of remix these photos into patterns that connected more to the culture as it is now in Troy, and then through projection was able to actually collaborate with these big buildings, historic buildings in Troy, right?

And so again, it's about how easy is it to get to that stage of getting to collaborate with somebody?

So digital projections are big, paper is big for me, and then in my sculpture work, I use a lot of metals and plastics and things like that.

- Oh, that's cool.

And when you said stamps, do you mean like you said, "Oh, I like that you know, shape on the couch."

Do you literally cut out a rubber stamp or what does that- - Yeah, again, it's about whatever's at hand and what's the easiest, right?

So my default is the, yeah, cut out a rubber stamp to make a pattern.

But you could also, and I like to tell people this, like, you can use whatever material is at hand, right?

So I also will just draw the shape of a stamp to create later, or like, you know, just imagine what it would look like if I did stamp on a piece of paper and just sketch that out, sketch the finished product out.

But the idea is that I'm creating a physical pattern, an actual pattern from a stamp, but the idea of pattern is beyond that, right?

It's also like, the different patterns of thought that I'm having during that day, or patterns of culture, patterns of work that we're interacting with throughout that time.

- Amazing Recent exhibits, I know you had a recent exhibit where you kind of showcased a lot of these patterns, and like, just cool ideas of ways to do things.

That was in Japan.

So I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about that exhibit in residency when you were in Japan a little bit.

- Yeah, thanks.

I recently had a solo museum show in Japan at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center.

It was called "Field Work at Aomori Contemporary Art Center Collaborative Exhibition Lab."

So we had to sort of give it a subtitle so that people knew that they could be invited in to actually engage with the work, and that in particular, again talking about using the simplest materials that invite people to feel safe and comfortable with engaging with the combined digital projection with actually sort of cardboard cutout sculptures.

And so the museum was filled with these cardboard cutouts that were based on stamp shapes, but were made three-dimensional, and visitors were allowed to move those around the space that had an immersive projection of patterns in it.

And so in building up the sculptures, visitors created their own sort of screens for these projections, and then the projections also bounced around the walls and around a water feature that was outside.

- And how did you get into that?

- Completely by chance.

(laughs) I'm a big fan of just sort of searching online and applying for things that feel right, even if you don't really know how they're gonna work out, right?

And so I got into doing that exhibit through an open call for a residency at ACAC, and they were in particular looking for an international resident who would work virtually, and because a lot of my collaborative projects during the pandemic had to be virtual, I kind of am really versed in being able to actually collaborate in a meaningful way across the computer screen and across a time divide.

And so for me, it was a really interesting and exciting thing to be like, "Okay, can we do this?"

I'm used to doing this like, across the coast, or like, in two different cities.

Can I actually do it in two different continents?

And it turns out we can, and it's like, totally wonderful, and it's an an amazing feeling when you're coming up with an idea and hoping that people engage with it, and then this exhibit opens up in a completely different place that you've never been to before, and people are engaging with it in ways you could never imagine, which is the goal.

- Yeah, it's everything every artist wants, right?

To be able to engage and communicate their art to others, and hope that others, you know, not hope that they do understand, but we like to have our audiences kind of gain something commutative or communal out of our pieces.

- Yeah, I mean, I think that in reality, I'm the one who gains, because a lot of these pieces are open-ended, and they're about allowing visitors to bring their own meanings to the work.

And so for this exhibit in Japan, what was completely amazing was just how much people brought from their own culture into it that had, I didn't put in at all.

And that's kind of the point is to be able to create pieces that are collaborative, that are open-ended so that they can mean so much to so many people.

- Yeah, that's great.

And one other thing, what inspires you?

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Where do you pull that from?

I know you have a background, I believe, in architects.

- That's right.

- So do you pull anything from that?

- Yeah, I'm originally trained as two things.

I'm originally trained as a cultural anthropologist, and then I went back to graduate school and I was trained as an architect, particularly in public interest design.

Architecture in particular trained me how to define space, and so a lot of my art is just about making space for people to come together and make meaning together.

I like to say that my practice is a couple of things.

It's a pattern making practice, it's a space making practice and it's a memory making practice, but all of that is in the service of collaborative meaning making.

And so architecture trained me to do that, to make a space and sort of get out of it so that people can fill it.

And then cultural anthropology, which is what I originally went to school for, trained me in a really interesting way to sort of be able to develop my own tools to kind of inquire why I do things, and in a lot of ways, my whole practice is based around trying to develop these collaborative tools that people can then use to kind of discover more about themselves and dig deeper into themselves.

- Oh, God, that's great.

Well folks, make sure you check out Natan's work, amazing artist.

Love the complexity, yet the simpleness of it at the same time, beautiful.

And thank you for stopping by to talk to us today.

- Thank you, Jade, this was awesome.

(guitar strumming) ♪ Oh Mary, won't you look upon me ♪ ♪ A hopeless sinner lying down at your feet ♪ ♪ How much more can my young soul hold, I'm getting old ♪ ♪ Oh Mary, won't you look upon them ♪ ♪ Vibrant flowers that were picked at the stems ♪ ♪ Roots remain, but the soil whose soul can't regrow ♪ ♪ Another song with silence by the sound of sirens ♪ ♪ It's enough to make you go deaf ♪ ♪ Gentle giant crumbles ♪ ♪ We are left to fumble over what is left ♪ ♪ Offer my heart while I'm going under ♪ ♪ Dance with my demons as the angel's standing by ♪ ♪ We're still here, made to carry on ♪ ♪ While there are two new stars in the sky ♪ ♪ Oh Mary, won't you look upon the Earth ♪ ♪ What did we do for you to desert us ♪ ♪ When our perfect brother thought we were yours ♪ ♪ There's no remorse ♪ ♪ Oh Mary, where the hell do we go ♪ ♪ Is there salvation or is that all show ♪ ♪ I pray it's real so at the end I can see them again ♪ ♪ Mothers cry at night, sinners douse the light ♪ ♪ All my feelings are gone ♪ ♪ We are left to fight what is wrong and right ♪ ♪ Must we soldier on ♪ ♪ Offer my heart while I'm going under ♪ ♪ Dance with my demons as the angels stand by ♪ ♪ We're still here, made to carry on ♪ ♪ While there are two new stars in the sky ♪ ♪ I see them through clouds with the shooting stars ♪ ♪ They blast us for a moment then return to the sky ♪ ♪ A new day dawns without them here ♪ ♪ We never said goodbye ♪ ♪ Offer my heart while we're going under ♪ ♪ Dance with my demons as the angels stand by ♪ ♪ We're still here, made to carry on ♪ ♪ While there're two new stars in the sky ♪ ♪ There are two new stars in the sky ♪ ♪ There are two new stars ♪ ♪ Oh Mary, won't you look upon me ♪ ♪ A hopeless sinner lying down in defeat ♪ (guitar strumming) ♪ When the world tells you no, no, no ♪ ♪ And haters tell you go, go, go ♪ ♪ Where would you be if you did what they say ♪ ♪ It's a good thing we don't play that way ♪ ♪ Otherwise there'd be so many untaken roads ♪ ♪ So many tales untold ♪ ♪ There should be no one telling us where we are ♪ ♪ This ain't and easy fight, don't let 'em get in your mind ♪ ♪ But we won't stop until we reached the stars ♪ ♪ There ain't no time to second guess ♪ ♪ After 1,000 nos, it only takes one yes ♪ ♪ So many times you feel without friend ♪ ♪ All you need is someone with a hand to lend ♪ ♪ There's 1,000 hearts that know where you've been ♪ ♪ Time is now, let your dreams begin ♪ ♪ Otherwise there'd be paintings without their colors ♪ ♪ Sisters without their brothers ♪ ♪ There won't be any life from the warmth up above ♪ ♪ Reach out and grab a hand 'cause we're not etched in sand ♪ ♪ And let yourself know you are loved ♪ ♪ There ain't no time to second guess ♪ ♪ After 1,000 nos, it only takes one yes ♪ ♪ Only takes one moment to turn your life around ♪ ♪ Only takes one smile to forget you ever frowned ♪ ♪ Whatever your dream is, it is worth all stress ♪ ♪ Because within your heart you said yes ♪ (guitar strumming) ♪ So when the world tells you no, no, no ♪ ♪ All I have to say is let it go ♪ ♪ I feel it in my chest, I swear to God I'm blessed ♪ ♪ And despite all the stress, I'll strive to be the best ♪ ♪ There ain't no time to second guess ♪ ♪ Yeah, I said there ain't no time to second guess ♪ ♪ After 1,000 nos, it only takes one yes ♪ Yes, it does (guitar strumming) (bright music) - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit WMHT.org/AHA, and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Jade Warrick, and thanks for watching.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution, and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M & T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M & T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.