The Miracle of Collective Art Making: An Interview with Jaimie Warren

Sure! For the opening we worked on a couple of performances with students from Red Hook Art Project, aged 6 to 17 and together we put on a little series of live performances. The set for the show is this giant, oversized bedroom, which is based on references from a big mashup of different movies and ’90s sitcoms; from Full House in the ’90s to Rhonda Shear who hosted a show called USA Up All Night on the USA channel. It’s also in the vein of Elvira, if you know Elvira? Elvira’s a pretty great character, a gypsy vampire woman, who in the ’80s and ’90s introduced horror movies, public access TV style, where they would have guests come on and talk to them in funny sets and have silly things happen.

There is an Exorcist girl character hanging out on the bed, with a deadpan gaze and reading a book about possums who then falls asleep, it turns into a nightmare where all the kids come out in these possum costumes, head-banging to a Metallica song. That performance happened a couple of times, another performance was with a 9 year old dancer from Red Hook Art Project who improvised a horror theme dance to the Halloween song from the movie Halloween. She was dressed in the same costume as the Exorcist girl, based on a mashup of a few different characters; Regan MacNeil from the Exorcist, in the pyjamas of Heather O’Rourke from Poltergeist III with green skin, a nod to the Wicked Witch from Wizard of Oz.

There are daily performances. And there’s a lot of animatronics in the space, and animals that come to life, some of them  made by my artist crew and others by students aged 15-21, from the Beam Center which is about 10 blocks from Pioneer Works, the Beam Center does a lot of animatronics stuff, we created these animal props together and worked with the people from Beam Center to animate them. Also it’s a little bit of a nod to – I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of – Chuck E. Cheese?

 Yeah, the whole show is based on American pop culture, crazy references all the way through.

Yes, definitely, it’s basically tonnes of different references mashed up from different movies and TV shows.

Yes, that too! There’s this series of paintings on the wall of the bedroom, from the kids at Red Hook Art Project in the oversized bedroom, made to look as if the Exorcist girl had painted them. I wanted the kids to paint characters that creeped them out when they were younger and not necessarily haunted characters from scary movies, but maybe things from Sesame street or SpongeBob or shows that they grew up with as a little kid, that freaked them out for reasons that they didn’t understand why. 

We’re working towards an immersive musical for the public on April 4th and 11th, directed by Matt Roche who is a main collaborator on this project, along with Sofia D, it’s open to anyone from Red Hook to participate in. The space right now is mostly filled with pop culture icons and characters and references from my childhood, but for the musical we’re going to be filling in all the holes and creating a narrative with characters from the pop cultural inventories of my performers too, characters from their childhood, creating a giant mix of different generations, pop culture icons and references.

I’m kind of obsessed with DIY, make your own Halloween costume or make your own… there is a very handmade look to everything. The idea is that anybody who comes and sees this show will be able to have at least something to grasp onto and relate to. It’s all about shared cultural touchstones and using that as a tool to even attract a non-art audience.

I am a teacher as well and oftentimes it’s kids that haven’t done art before. I use humour, pop culture, haunted characters and themes with B horror movie special effects to either garner excitement, be funny or have it be something that the kids can relate to  their favourite singer be implemented into their art-making with things that they’re already excited about or have fun with.

Yes, definitely.

I have just an undergraduate degree from the Kansas City Art Institute, so a Midwest undergraduate degree – so not too much. I actually lived in the Midwest up until about six years ago. I haven’t been in New York too long.

Yeah. So se were living in a smaller city with a smaller arts community and we were interested in branching out further, and also teaching. So we created this fake public access TV show and community arts project to have this live free experience and really expand the communities that we were reaching. Having it be this cross-cultural, cross-generational experience where any age could appreciate it and you’d really learn a lot about your community and have different groups collaborate that might not normally work together. So, that’s kind of how this all started. And it’s really just continuing to expand. And there’s a lot of crossover with Whoop Dee Doo artists and the people that are involved in this project at Pioneer Works.

My earlier personal work really focused on pop culture and re-creations of pre-existing content. But there’s so much crossover now because I do so much teaching and I seek out the same goals and sense of accomplishment that I would want with the Whoop Dee Doo show, where it is really community-based and involves so many people. So the productions have gone from the photos and music videos that I used to make to these really immersive spaces and community collaborations.

I’m pretty much the person that connects everybody and does all the outreach. For many, many years we were just kind of cold calling people to see if they’d like to be involved in this project. The project started in 2006, and right when we moved here we got connected with Art21 and we had two mini documentaries about Whoop Dee Doo made, so that’s made things so much easier, because we can send groups the link, and they can really usually understand what we do, because it is such a bizarre project. But basically we just cold call and reach out and just see what groups are interested in working with us and expanding beyond what their normal practice, collaborating with kids and really investing their time into what we’re doing. And yeah, it’s been really incredible. Especially since moving to New York, because we’ve gotten a lot more attention and it’s allowed for so many more in-depth collaborations and people trusting us that we have really good intentions and we work really hard to make it as good as it possibly can be. It’s been wonderful.

Yeah, we definitely love New York, I lived the Midwest until I was 33 and I’m almost 40. We had so much support in Kansas City, and it was just an incredible place to create work, and you’d have such a great community that wanted to see things happen, everybody would be willing to help you with your projects, I think we were just there a couple too many years. We’re just really excited to be in New York now because there’s so much to see, so much to be inspired by and we’ve really developed a wonderful community.

Oh no. I mean we would be happy to do this anywhere. Absolutely. I would love to do more projects in Europe. I actually, maybe about 10 years ago or so, I was doing multiple performance projects in the Netherlands and Belgium and I was hoping that would, I don’t know, garner more attention for that, and I would be out there performing more. I don’t know if you know the performer Dynasty Handbag? I was doing a little tour with her as a performer and we did a Whoop Dee Doo project in Malmo, Sweden and somewhere else, but this was all quite some time ago. We would love to be doing more projects out in Europe! 

Definitely amazing to be compared in any way to Cindy Sherman. I think especially earlier projects of mine were really focused on transforming myself into different characters but now, over recent years, the work has become so community-based that that kind of the focus has changed. Although I will say with the performance-based work that I’m doing, involves live transformation heavily influenced by drag and really quick transformations to make myself into very different characters. The last performance I did at American Medium, I think I went from Marjory the Trash Heap, which is from Fraggle Rock, a Jim Henson giant pile of trash that’s a puppet woman. And then I transformed into GG Allin, the famous punk musician who would shit on stage and throw faeces on people,  and would cut himself and bleed everywhere – very vulgar, very provocative, very extreme. Then I transformed into this giant flower character where I was singing a Stevie Wonder song, it was this beautiful choral moment.

So I am constantly changing the vibe of the performance and changing into these different characters and doing live singing even though I’m a terrible singer. But I try to, in these performances too, get all of the performers to do solo singing moments, which is very vulnerable sort of space for everyone to be in. It’s a tear jerker to hear people sing as beautifully as they can when they’re terrible singers. It’s kind of amazing.

It’s really, really wonderful. So I’m going to be really pushing for that for this musical at Pioneer Works, also. I’m really trying to get people to sing.

Absolutely. Of course. And when people see you willing to have that vulnerability and that’s such an easy and quick and effective way to give that, everybody just feels so much more connected when things like that are happening. They’re really beautiful moments.

I don’t know if we’ll ever have an opportunity to have this kind of space and support like we’ve had with Pioneer Works. So I really truly think that when we do this performance in April, it is going to be a miracle. I think that it is going to represent the community in a way that I feel will be beautiful and miraculous, with these different incredible references mashed together in this very gorgeous, bizarre and provoking way.

Even with what we did with the kids just last week at the opening, they felt such ownership over the space from how they helped create it and a lot of their ideas were very obvious and present, they really owned the stage, it was just a beautiful, beautiful moment. Thanks to Pioneer Works as a base and because we have that support to create something so gorgeous where these kids can really feel that ownership and feel that sense of creation, I feel like in the end when this entire thing is complete and we do this giant production, I do think it’s going to be a miracle. I really do. I can’t wait. We’re on a really good track to make it powerful and beautiful. So, I’m really excited.