Jukebox @ Swampspace

"Born to Be Wild," by TJ Ahearn

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Miami gallery Swampspace may look like a used record shop on Saturday night. That's when TJ Ahearn's Jukebox will open. The installation will include about 50 new collages that Ahearn created on the back of record albums from the '60s and '70s. Each of the works is named for the song from that album that inspired the work. So the exhibiton will include collages such as "Good Vibrations," Born to Be Wild" and "Soul Survivor" as well as 145 album covers that will take up an entire wall of Swampspace.

To create these collages, Ahearn drew from thousands of images she's been culling for six years from magazines published over the last four decades, and a large collection of record albums, some of which she purchased from Michael Dean, alias DJ Yard, former owner of the now-defunct South Florida store, Yardbird Records.

Ahearn's 50 collages were created in the bedroom of Art and Culture Center curator Jane Hart, and there's a good reason for this. Hart is TJ Ahearn. In fact if you're good at word jumbles you may notice that all the letters in TJ Ahearn's name, if rearranged, could spell Jane Hart.  So Hart, when not working as curator, is at home making collages in her bedroom. "Like a teenage kid," she says laughing. "I live in an apartment, 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 somewehere to work. Meanwhile I would love to have a dedicated room for making art, but I don’t have that luxurty at his time. So 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 im doing this "

While many know Hart, who grew up in Miami, as the curator at the Art and Culture Center, she's been actively involved 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 also 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 intutitive, 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 Im 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 developed her TJ Ahearn alias just prior to exhibiting her first collages at Aqua Art Fair in 2005. At the time her main mission was running a project space called Lemon Sky, which participated in many art fairs. Eventually she incorporated her collages into the mix, but under a different name, to create a distance that would allow people to talk to her more comfortably about the work.

Four years later, more people have learned that Hart is TJ Ahearn, but she still keeps the alias, and likes the idea of a still somewhat secret alter-ego. TJ Ahearn even has her own Facebook page, but posts more about music that Hart does. Ahearn loves music, and so apparently does Hart.

Jukebox combines her art and music passions Hart says she once had thousands of albums but that after so many moves her collection had dwindled. "I grew up in the age of vinyl, and there’s a real resurgence of inetrest in it," she says. "A CD or an MP3 doesn’t have the same kind of warmth and complete experience that an LP does. Part of it is just hearkening back to my own fascination with art, albums and music." For this project, she went out and bought a collection of vintage LPs from the 60s and 70s. Many of them came from former Yardbird owner DJ Yard, who will DJ at her show. 

"He's actually gonna be playing records at the opening, including the records or songs that are inspiring the collages, and then during the time the show is up [through Nov. 14], I have a turntable and a whole setup so that people can take down any of the LPs from the collages. They come off the wall and they're in these specially designed frames that are made for LP art, so they have little clips. You remove the clips, take the album out and put it on the turntable and play it. To make it easier for people, there's an iPod shuffle that has the 50 songs on it. So during the day, while the show is up, Swampspace owner Oliver Sanchez will have the shuffle going, so if people just walk in and don’t want to deal with putting the records on the turntable, they can still hear the songs – all 50 of them!"

To preview some of Hart's art (well, TJ Ahearn's art) check out the accompanying photo gallery.

TJ Ahearn's solo show Jukebox opens 6-11 p.m. Saturday at Swampsace Gallery, 3821 N.E. First Court, in Miami. The gallery is  located in the Design District (just next to Locust Projects where the TM Sisters will be doing their encore performance of Whirl Crash Go). DJ Yard will spin 7-10 p.m. and there will be beer courtesy of Grolsch.