What could be better during the hottest part of the day on a three-day weekend than listening to someone talk about the kind of art you can do in the air-conditioning, the kind of work you can get so lost in that you will forget it’s 90 degrees outside?
TJ Ahearn, better known to some as Art and Culture Center of Hollywood curator Jane Hart, will discuss her collages and contemporary art in general in an informal setting on Saturday afternoon at the Girls’ Club a non-profit Fort Lauderdale art space that specializes in exhibiting contemporary art by women.
Last year Swampspace hosted Hart’s show Jukebox, which featured 50 collages she made on the back of record albums from the ‘60s and ‘70s, from images she’d been culling for six years from magazines published over four decades. She made them in her bedroom. “I live in an apartment,” she explained last October, “ and I’ve never had a detached studio . Whenever I have been making art it’s always been where I lived, which I like because sometimes I stay up late. I like the immediacy of it as opposed to having to get up and go somewhere to work. … I sit on the edge of my bed with stacks and stacks of magazine and glue, and paper everywhere. I’m neck deep in paper while I’m doing this “
Ahearn has also been neck-deep in the art world for 25 years and exhibiting since she was a teen attending an arts academy in Europe. She has since lived in New York, and spent 13 years in LA, where she curated and collaborated with artists such as Keith Mayerson, John Baldassari and Doug Aitken, but had little time for her own projects. After returning to South Florida six years ago, she began to create again, this time collages rather than the paintings and drawings she had done earlier.
The process appeals to her. “I just love it because I find that it’s much more intuitive, and I also like the unexpected nature of it,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll make a collage and I’ll start with a certain idea in mind and then while I’m doing it — or sometimes after I’ve done it — I will see certain things that have occurred while making it, such as formal or symbolic elements that happen in a very intuitive, subconscious way. That really excites me.”
Hart, alias TJ Ahearn, will chat 1-3 p.m. Saturday afternoon at the Girls’ Club, 117 N.E. Second St., Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-828-9151.
