Oddities art exhibit to be held at Newnan train depot Oct. 27 | Arts & Community

A local filmmaker is putting on southern gothic art exhibition inspired by her short film.

Senoia resident Jayden Rose said she began producing short films last year after moving to the area.

“I moved here not long ago from Florida,” Rose said. “I had been in the film industry for a little bit, but Florida’s isn’t very large.”

“Mud and Bone,” the oddities exhibition inspired by Rose’s upcoming short film of the same name, will be on display at the Historic Train Depot in Newnan on Oct. 27 from 6-9 p.m.

Rose said the work the exhibition was inspired by the screenplay for her short film, which will go into production in February and will be released next year in October.

Oddities art tends to focus on death, decay and decomposition, Rose said.

“Honestly, I didn’t have a relationship with oddities art until this project,” Rose said. “I realized there was a thematic and visual overlap between the film and oddities.”

Rose said “Mud and Bone” is about an impoverished boy who recently lost his mother. While he’s starving, his mind is splintering from loss and the film follows him as his hunger manifests as a monster.

Loneliness, emptiness and small spaces are recurring themes in Rose’s short films, the filmmaker said.

Rose said her southern gothic inspirations came from authors like William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor.

The themes of poverty and classism still resonate today, Rose said, and she plans to continue exploring the southern gothic genre in future work.

The “Mud and Bone” exhibition will be split into four chapters, Rose Said, which will be Weeds, Cockroach, The Hole and The Thin Man.

The chapters will be different portions of the space as attendees move through the exhibition. Each chapter represents a different section of the film and a different thematic idea, Rose said.

“At the center is a fracturing face of a young boy to represent his fracturing mind throughout the film,” she said.

The artists contributing to the exhibition are all local, Rose said. The short film’s screenplay was used as a jumping off point for them to create new work.

The pieces will mostly be sculptural, such as a collection of hands and a large 12-foot monster.

Rose said she hopes the exhibition will be a way for to engage with the community.

To find the artists for the exhibition, Rose said she reached out to people on Facebook and attended expos, vendor events and other oddities art exhibitions.

A group of artists based in Senoia, known collectively as Disco Clown Studios, will be contributing several pieces to the exhibition. The three artists a part of DCS live and work on their art together.

Kari McGrady, one of the members of DCS, said Rose’s personality is what inspired her to be a part of the show.

“We met her online several months ago and she had just moved to Georgia and was looking for some people who were interested in art,” she said. “She is a very motivated, inspiring young woman.”

McGrady said DCS will be contributing bone masks with apocalyptic creature bodies to the exhibition.

Their work often consists of 3D printing and using materials, such as bone, to make their pieces. The sculptures at the exhibition will be assemblage rather than classical pieces.

“We repurpose just about everything,” McGrady said. “I had some fuzzy purple fabric that I had left over from a different project so I was like ‘I’ll make a chair out of this.'”

After reading the screenplay, McGrady said she visualized the scenes in her mind and “just started creating.”

“I was seeing this monster,” she said. “What it would like like and how it would feel.”

McGrady said reading the screenplay brought back the feelings of losing her niece in March 2019. Because of that, she said she felt compelled to work with Rose on the exhibition.

“I think about that story story and that’s how I felt going through the loss of my niece. It was so raw and you’re so hungry for something. It may not be food, it may not be a physical thing. It was a spiritual, emotional hunger and starvation,” she said. “I knew when I read the story I wanted to work with her.”

After working together, members of DCS fell into their individual rolls. McGrady said Marcus Gindroz, a member of DCS, will often start projects with designing and 3D printing. Mona McReynolds, another member, will sand and prime the sculptures, while McGrady will do fine tuning.

Gindroz said he moved to the area from Kansas City after meeting McGrady and wanted to work on projects with her.

In college, he said, he had planned to study medicine, but after he took a PhotoShop class on a whim, he pursued art.

“I just kind of steamrolled from there,” he said.

Gindroz’s piece in the exhibition is a large sculpture of a monster. The monster is crouched down and wears a top hat, he said, but if hit was standing, it’d be over eight feet tall.

The monster sculpture was too large to be 3D printed as one piece, Gindroz said. Instead, he designed and printed 10-12 smaller pieces that were assembled, glued and painted.

The entire printing process took about two weeks.

“It looks like it’s made out of bone and sticks and some clothing, but you can see the ribs and everything,” he said of the sculpture.

Before moving to Georgia, Gindroz worked in a print shop where he made billboards and other large-scaled artwork.

He said his instructors in school told him to “make big art,” a direction he’s followed ever since.

“I want things to be larger thant life,” he said. “Big things make you pya attention, small things just pass by. Something that’s taler than you or bigger than you, you can’t help but look at it.”