The Verve: Artist Collaboration Show brings creative minds together

This weekend, dozens of artists will be displaying their work at Hatch Gallery, 9612 E. Sprague Ave., during the second annual Artist Collaboration Show.

The Artist Collaboration Project was created by artists for artists as a sort of matchmaking organization, bringing strangers together through social media and events to share, learn new things and form relationships.

“We urge artists of different disciplines and different backgrounds to get together and make something amazing,” said Marion Flanary, artist and co-collaborator of the organization.

Some of the participants knew each other before joining forces while others put their faith in total strangers.

David Jacobs, who has never shown his work publicly, experienced the latter.

“I happened upon the ACP group page a while back and met some great artists, including the two I chose to collaborate with,” he said.

Jacobs grew up in Coconut Grove, a neighborhood in Miami. “It was a bohemian neighborhood,” he said, “I was a beatnik baby, surrounded by art and music.”

Creative expression became second nature to Jacobs and, while he received an art scholarship, he chose instead to join the workforce as a brick mason, a stone setter and a tile contractor.

He retired young due to lupus and began using art as a creative outlet, taking photos and extracting elements to create new photos, making thoughts tangible with hand-drawn, intricate designs and, for the past 10 years, building robotic-looking things with screws and epoxy. The latter are characters and props that will be used in a science fiction action story in the near future.

The two artists he chose to collaborate with are Oksana Tepp and Kelly Marie Dawson. He handed his black-and-white designs on canvas to Tepp and trusted her to interpret them with color in acrylic ink and paint. With Dawson, he focused on her creative energy, photographing her and then enlarging and manipulating the photos in a representation of “Mind, Body, and Spirit.”

The experience has been inspiring, Jacobs said. “I’m loving connecting with other artists.”

The Artist Collaboration Show includes 32 teams of artists who work in an array of mediums. From experimental to traditional, including steel, wood, wire, Barbie dolls, bottle caps, paint and ink, the hodgepodge is somehow cohesive; a melting pot of ideas.

There is organic material hanging from the ceiling as well as a mobile made of raku, glass and copper. There are photographs, paintings, drawings, assemblages, sculptures, video and a live performance scheduled for Friday and Saturday at 6:30 p.m. where artists will use materials as well as their bodies to convey meaning and to share experience and ideas with each other and an audience.

“Certainly I’ve built some relationships through the ACP but being creative and making art really strengthens the relationship I have with myself,” Jacobs said.