Page 24 - the NOISE February 2014

savage heart:
where the primal beats contemporary
by sarah gIanellI
Imust admit I was a little intimidated the first time I saw Jessi Rae Carpentier on the streets of Jerome. Tall and tough in dusty cowboy boots and a hefty septum nose ring, she exuded a strength almost masculine in its intensity and the kind of hard-won maturity that made her seem much older than her 24 years.
But up close, with her Botticelli skin, beach glass eyes and a giggle that bubbles up out of her silly side as naturally as her tears, Ms. Carpentier, now 28, is as soft as she is fierce, a mollusk in a shell formed to help her weather the elements without and the stormy emotions within.
Still, not a woman I’d want to mess with. After all, Ms. Car- pentier calls her jewelry company Savage Metal, and one line that perfectly illustrates her dual nature incorporates beads and crystals with bullet shells.
Ms. Carpentier was born and raised in the mountains out- side of Taos, New Mexico, where she had no running water or electricity until she was five. Her father, an alcoholic, left around the same time. Growing up she lost many loved ones to tragic, often drug-related deaths, and struggled with sub- stance abuse herself before getting clean. While not an easy life, Ms. Carpentier is proud of her upbringing and New Mex- ico roots, evident in one of her many tattoos of a modified medicine wheel raincloud giving way to the state flag’s Native American Zia symbol.
“I love the way I grew up,” she says. “I love the story of my mom, who grew up in Brooklyn and hitchhiked out to Taos as a teenager with nothing but a sleeping bag and some re- cords, and ended up trading her sleeping bag for a teepee or something like that. She told me that in high school she found a pair of cowboy boots in a thrift store and found the only country radio station in New York City, and would fall asleep at night looking at the buildings imagining they were mountains and the lights, stars.”
Ms. Carpentier comes from a long line of artists and jewel- ers. Her grandmother, a drafter, worked on drawings of the Hubble Space Telescope; her mother was an illustrator and all around creative type; her father, a painter, musician and jew- eler heavily steeped in the Native American tradition of the Southwest. Her family spent every Christmas on the Pueblo; she remembers barbecues as a child with Native American men drumming, and her godfather owned a bead shop in town and was a regular trader at regional pow-wows.
Ms. Carpentier started beading at a young age, in addition to collaging, painting and writing poetry. When she started taking college courses in Santa Fe, thinking she wanted to
be a writer, she felt burdened by the tedium of academics and decided to take an art class to lighten the load. Just like her ideas, inspiration and materials often find her, so did the chance encounter that would start her on the road to becom- ing a professional jeweler.
She was having a yard sale when an eclectic “hippie” wom- an covered in exotic jewelry approached a table of beads Ms. Carpentier was selling because she was getting more into silversmithing. The woman said she should meet her son, a silversmith, who had a studio around the corner and was in need of some help. That was Noah Pfeffer, who was just breaking into the Southwest jewelry scene, and is now a highly collectible and sought-after artist whose primary retail location is Garland’s Indian Jewelry in Oak Creek Canyon. It was the start of an eight year on-again off-again apprentice- ship between Ms. Carpentier and Mr. Pfeffer.
When Mr. Pfeffer returned to his home in the Verde Valley, Ms. Carpentier eventually followed to continue working under him. “Noah has been a huge inspiration to me,” says Ms. Car-
pentier. “I could sodder and saw, but I was slow and my skills were very basic. I learned casting from Noah, lapidary, gold work. I like to say in college I learned fine jewelry, with Noah I learned rough and tumble jewelry, and mine is somewhere in between ... what I call primal contemporary.”
In her eclectic apartment, which also serves as a studio when she’s not utilizing Mr. Pfeffer’s shop in Clarkdale, two powerful multi-media collages — a medium she hopes to show one day as well — occupy the walls. Bad Blood Runs Deep brings toy cowboys and Indians, bullet shells, broken record pieces and shards of glass together in an explosive commentary on the culture clash in New Mexico between Natives, hippies, cow- boys and old Hispanic land grant owners. On her work desk, a row of her .22 caliber bullet shell earrings hang on a wire dis- play rack she made out of found metal. “I found them or I shot them,” she says. The bullet line is mostly for pocket money; the pieces she creates out of passion are more elaborate and time- consuming works of wearable art, like the lava rocks and brass crosses spaced out on coral beads with a hammered s-shaped copper clasp and a Buddhist prayer bell pendant.
Ms. Carpentier mills most of her own silver, even making her own wire from rolled out sheets of the metal. She shows me a traditional Native American “popsicle stick” chain, named for the link shape that results from wrapping wire around a pop- sicle stick. She demonstrates by wrapping a wire around the tip of a scissor until it forms a coil. From there, she would saw the coil into individual links, hook them together, file them
flush, plier them together, sodder them shut, and then put them to a grinding wheel to smooth away any imperfections. “I like how intense jewelry is,” says Ms. Carpentier. “Beading
is clean, quiet and soft, but jewelry is actually a very loud, dan- gerous, dirty art form. I love the way metal reacts to things, how forgiving it is. The way I can form it and shape it ... it’s so resilient. And if you do break it you can melt it down and start over again. In a strange way, it also allows me to have some amount of reverence for the memory of my father ... jewelry is a way of keeping him alive for me in a positive way.”
For the first time, Ms. Carpentier has her own case in a gal- lery — a breakthrough moment in a jeweler’s career — and the pieces at Jerome’s Epiphyte Gallery are deserving of the space required around works of art for them to be truly appre- ciated. Draped over a cow skull is a necklace called Vascular Solitude. An arterial piece of natural coral rests at the hollow of the throat and a brown and orange Koroit opal dangles from a single length of chain. A droplet of garnet finishes a chain off the clasp. The centerpiece of the multi-component ring Cow Knuckle is curved bone set in shiny silver “jaws” and accented with a rainbow of precious and semi-precious gem- stones.
Both pieces showcase Ms. Carpentier’s unique juxtaposi- tion of raw, rough, organic materials suggestive of the maca- bre, with the clean, refined quality of fine jewelry, resulting in pieces that transcend both.
“My work definitely has a dark side to it,” says Ms. Carpentier. “But art has also been the light for me. It’s the thing I’ve al-
ways had to exorcise my demons through and to lift me up. I find beauty — and art — in everything, even the ugly stuff, like a rotting carcass.
“More than anything, I think art should hit a chord in some- one. Even if it’s totally repulsive or instigates some real pain. I want people to look at my work and for it to enliven some- thing inside of them. Whether it’s just ‘oh, that’s beautiful’ or
‘that’s really strange.’ I feel like there’s a huge rebirth of art right now. I see a lot of beautiful acts of creativity going on with the increasing connectedness of the world — that’s a really cool thing, even if a lot of it has come out of darkness.”
Jessi Rae Carpentier’s Savage Metal jewelry can be found in Jerome at Epiphyte Gallery, 511 Main Street; and at Magda-
lena’s Bazaar, 154 Main Street, magdalenasbazaar.com.
| Sarah Gianelli is a supper club maestro who’s taking back the kitchen this Valentine’s. sarahgianelli@hotmail.com
24 • FEBRUARY 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us