When Jayaram approached artist Nicolau Vergueiro and cultural producer Jaé Joseph to create an exhibition for our Miami studio, the two had never met. But they quickly realized that they had a lot in common: both grew up in art-loving families; both were informed by the experience of living in cross-cultural households; and both were relatively new Miami residents exploring the Magic City’s art scene. Their resulting partnership produced “Making a Living,” an exhibition spanning more than 20 years of Nicolau’s career and incorporating sculpture, painting, personal documents and artifacts, and a series of remastered video works.
Nicolau and Jaé talked to Jayaram about their lifelong passion for the arts, the creative partnership behind “Making a Living” and what projects are next for them.
JL
“Making a Living” exhibition spans your career and your life – it even features a notice of the medical bill related to your delivery. Can you talk about your background growing up between New York and Brazil, and how that’s informed your art and career?
NV
Yes, so I grew up between Brazil and the U.S. – both sides of my family are spread across different cities in those countries and beyond. So dislocating, or living in different cities, is probably the main constant in my life, which kind of transposed to my adult life.
I never remember not having at least two sets of references – of things, or cities or languages – that I was comparing and contrasting. So I think, similar to a lot of immigrants or diaspora members, this really stokes a sense of criticality in how one understands the world. This trait was an instinct or survival mechanism that became an awareness and a strategy in my schooling, and it started to help me make decisions in how to craft my work.
This is not only a really common trait in immigrants and the diaspora, but also the cultural foundation of Brazil: The modernists in the early 20th century, deemed that Brazilian culture was founded like when the cannibal natives ate the European missionaries, explorers and catechizers — it was a Brazilian modernist strategy of assimilating European ideology, shitting out what’s not useful and retaining what’s useful. So this, in a way, is how I’ve always instinctively made sense of the world.
In grad school, for example, I really used this as a conscious kind of approach to what I was doing. And I was really training myself to foster my intuition counter to conventional impulse, so to speak. For example, I started making soft sculptures because I wanted to make objects that could never be installed the same way twice. Context becomes important for me to understand everything. So the same thing in different contexts can mean different things, right?
I feel like I don’t belong anywhere, but then I also belong everywhere, you could say. In therapy, a while back, I found out that I belong in the studio, so I was like “Okay, I can have a studio in any given city and I’m still in my element.”
JL
You talked about how you’re using art to interpret the cultural context of your world, and find where you fit in. How early did you both start using art as a way to make sense of the world? Was this something that came naturally to you both as children, or was it something that came later?
NV
I’ve always been around art. Both sides of my family are deeply involved in the arts and kind of eccentrics. I don’t think I ever really aimed to be a fine artist – I kind of naturally developed my community in the arts. I went to an arts high school and have art degrees from undergrad and grad school, and it was the community around me, so I developed my language in those terms. And I feel like naturally after I kind of found this art world that I’m still part of. The flow of my career is very determined by my context and my interests of the moment and, I hate to say, it wasn’t originally a vocation – it’s more context-determined. What about you, Jaé?
JJ
I would say the desire for beauty has always been there, and I find beauty outside of the superficial context that we all know it to be in terms of television, and celebrity and media. I’ve always been fascinated with aesthetics, beauty, art and also just with the strength of free-loving and free-giving people who are practicing their craft and being so raw in sharing their passions. I think it strips you of having to share your work with the world.
I always thought it was magical to find mystery and depth and deconstruction in any medium of work – from dance to visual arts and film. So I think that the love for art and aesthetics has always been there, outside of the educational component of learning art in school and outside of learning second-hand art collecting from my grandparents and parents.
NV
You raised a good point that I can resonate with too: This freedom, or this search for this other space outside of making the work, that’s something that really drove me to be an artist – it’s this living life on my terms, because you can do that being an artist more so than in other disciplines. I think that’s important.
JL
To that point, I’ve been really interested to see how varied and diverse your careers have been, and how many avenues you’ve pursued. Jaé, for example, in addition to making art, you have your communications practice and act as an adviser to artists. Did you have a vision for how you were going to amass all these different skills, or did you realize one day that you could put all those talents together?
JJ
You know what? I think that it’s a culmination of all of my life experiences and things I had seen as a child with an untrained eye through traveling with my grandparents and visiting other countries, visiting museums, then having dinner parties at our house and listening to the various dinner table discussions about people’s work-life and things that they wanted to create. Also, taking interest in different parts of art that my friends were into from an early age, and trying to find out for myself “What is this person’s ‘why’? Why are they enjoying this? And, can I enjoy this?”
And I’m still curious about life, I’m grateful that I have that. But I never thought “Oh, I’m so good at so many different things.” I think, “Okay, how can I make all of these different things that I’m interested in workingwork together?”
JL
Similarly, Nicolau, I know that you moved to Miami to work with EDGLRD, who are working on a huge variety of creative ventures. How did you start collaborating with them, and what has it been like creating in that environment?
NV
So EDGLRD is like a tech/entertainment studio/company. It was founded by Joao Rosa and Harmony Korine. Joao is an animator, photographer and a special effects whiz, whom I’ve had a chance to work with in the past – in the show, we have a selection of short video-essays that we did together between 2012-2014. So EDGLRD sort of functions as a design collective, driven by Harmony’s film and world that he’s been crafting for the length of his career.
It is very dynamic and challenging – we have a multiplicity of segments and formats and IPs that create a kind of geodesic network, from which we’re exploring new ways of making forms of expression and new ways of telling a story, be it via films, video games, fashion, skateboards. So we do have different “departments,” and they all kind of intersect in this world that we’re creating.
I’m acting as creative director, mostly for the CG department – my day-to-day involves ideation and proof of concepts and overseeing the creative of different CG projects. I developed my own process through my own studio techniques and approach, and assimilated a lot of the AI and digital software technology to ideate and create characters and ideas and stories. We premiered our film “Baby Invasion” at the Venice Film Festival. We also do partnerships of music videos and special projects with people like Yung Lean or The Wknd and Travis Scott. It’s cool that we’re building tech to provide for our own needs, so we’re building things as we’re learning things, and it’s an exciting pursuit, for sure.
JL
And how long have you been working with them?
NV
It’s a very young company. I started working with them in November 2022, and I moved to Miami the following March, so I’ve been here for roughly a year-and-a-half. So we haven’t even moved to our permanent space yet, we’re building it, but we’re doing so much stuff it’s kind of a madhouse in that sense.
JL
How are you liking living in Miami?
NV
I like it! I think nature was the first thing that really grabbed me. Coming from a Brazilian background too, I elected to live in Miami Beach in front of the beach, so that’s really grounding to me. I like that it’s very Caribbean and South American – you feel like you’re in a different country.
But it’s very colorful and contradictory in a good way – unexpected things are hovering everywhere in a way that I wasn’t anticipating. It’s very cool. It’s really out of context.
JL
Talk about how you met. Was it through this exhibit, or was it through the artistic community when you moved to Miami?
JJ
We actually met through this exhibit. We had never worked together, this is our first time, but oddly enough, Nicolau and I have very similar friend groups from New York and similar peers that we’ve done projects with in the art and fashion world. So I think that’s what made it even easier to work together, gel together. It was a very symbiotic sort of thing.
NV
Yeah, we have a lot of the same references. Our circle of friends overlaps, in NY particularly, and I think Vivek picked up on that – intuitively or knowingly –and knew that we kind of came from similar backgrounds. I think that it was interesting for him to host these new Miami residents, as a counterpart to people who have been here for a long time.
JL
When you were putting together the exhibit, how did you conceptualize what you wanted to examine as your themes? And Nicolau, did you always know that you wanted it to be a career-spanning exhibit?
NV
No, that kind of came naturally in conversation with Vivek and Jaé and I think it ties back to what I was talking about earlier, being aware of context to make decisions – not only the place, but the time. So Vivek was introducing me to the beautiful space here, and it’s a law firm, but it looks like a gallery, and there’s the huge LED screen, so the screen was an anchor, And then I remembered that it’s 20 years since my first solo show in LA, and that the central piece of that show somehow made it to the Rubell collection here in Miami.
And I thought, “Wait a minute, it’s kind of odd that I’m in the same city.” There’s like this circular thing, bringing that piece into the conversation – and Jaé pushed for that idea to happen – that already set this biographical look at the show.
Right now, I’m also working on this kind of a coming-of-age book that talks about me being born in a different country than my parents and why they left Brazil, and also looks at the story my great-great-great-great grandfather who has the same name as me, who went from Portugal to Brazil in the late 1700s. I’m doing all this research on these things, so the vitrine at Jayaram kind of called forth this book, these annotations and books that I’ve been deeply researching.
So there were like three different capsules of my career, so to speak, and also these newer drawings. With Jaé, we kind of made sense of the law firm context that became really important in a way to understand “How do you tell somebody’s life through these documents and ephemeral pieces?” And then you have this piece which is mine, but it’s really not mine – I had to sign something that I couldn’t alter this 20-year-old piece that I made. So I decided to make the piece’s loan form part of the show, for the public. And in the vitrine I also included the first invoice of the sales of this piece.
So the show really started to kind of design itself in this way that I’m still finding interesting. And then, more interestingly to me, that very few people know, not only do I have the contents of this registered data from my parents and my background, I also decided to put my document box where I keep my SS card and passports etc. in the vitrine. So Jayaram is guarding my documents, my registered identity, for the duration of the exhibition, under this vitrine, which we thought was an interesting way of understanding what an art piece is and what’s the function of a museum or a law firm or a gallery, as keepers of identity of a person / artist.
JL
I thought it was very interesting how you thought about the space and that law firm context when considering which pieces to feature. I was also interested because seeing the exhibition, there’s the digital artwork, there’s work in fabric, there are painted works, there are sculptures. Do you start with a concept and find the best medium in which to express it, or do you consciously decide to work in a certain format, and the creative idea follows from there?
NV
At this point in my practice, it’s so fluid I’m not consciously aware of those decisions, a lot of the time. But I do come from a post-studio, conceptual art background, where content and form are always intrinsically related, but form should express content. So inherently all my work flows from that, and from ‘institutional critique’ and installation art, which were a big reference in the late 90s/ early 2000s; but somewhere around grad school, I really learned to listen to my intuition and my instincts, as cheesy as that sounds. I later started getting annoyed at being described as “multidisciplinary,” and I started calling myself antidisciplinary, so there’s always this resistance that comes innately from my work that’s like a restlessness not to be fixed on a particular.
I think now it’s not concept so much, but I do tend to go from one big research interest to another and then delve deep; the more and more my practice grows, the more technical and material vocabulary I have.
JL
And Jaé, how did you first become involved with the exhibit, and how did you approach it as an art director?
JJ
So initially getting involved with Jayaram was through Vivek – I’ve had a relationship with him for quite some time. And he came to me and said, “I’d like to see if you’d love this project.” I had a meeting with Nicolau and it was perfect, so my initial instincts were “How can I dive into this and really think about my own history and background and my cultural makeup?” Especially being French-Caribbean and having a father who’s Puerto Rican, there were a lot of things that resonated with me, but, then again, there were a lot of things that did not resonate with me, so I think that I took it as a learning experience as well.
Maybe I can’t directly apply Nicolau’s background to my own experiences, but being second-generation American, being able to understand my grandfather’s journey and maybe some of the grievances that my own mother and father have had being first-generation American, but still there being communication barriers and language barriers and financial constraints, I think I was able to dive into Nicolau’s narrative and relate it to my own life.
And then also, just working directly with him, even going directly to the framers and choosing the right frames and the selection of the works and placing of the works, getting to know him as an artist on a more intimate level, but also as a human.
NV
Ditto. That was kind of the most fun part of the whole exhibition: making those decisions and having a dialogue. That was the magic of it all, in a way.
JL
Would there typically be that sort of partnership between the artist and an art director, or does it vary?
JJ
I think it definitely varies from exhibit to exhibit. You know, in the past, I’ve been titled as a “curator” – I’d like to think of myself as a cultural producer or cultural entrepreneur, not so much as a curator. I wasn’t trained, and I wasn’t educated to curate. I think that because of my communications background and my background in art history as well as fashion, it was a culmination of things through which I was allowed to be able to connect all of those verticals and create a lane for myself – to express myself, as well as to help further develop the ideas and expressions of artists and other cultural producers or curators, to be able to work together in a collaborative space.
NV
It’s true, it does vary and there are those roles: curator, and even in galleries or institutions a liaison.
JJ
Right.
NV
Usually it can be very lonely to have a show. But Jaé hit a very good point, more and more there is an awareness of the importance of this role that’s more than an admin helper or visionaire, someone that’s really there for the artist. In the past 20 years, there was a big industry focus on curators and their vision, and there could be a lot of tension with the artist. Anyway, it’s a long-lived relationship, but this role will be more and more necessary to be reimagined, I think, not only to facilitate the work, but really to be aware of the tenderness that is involved in making a show and how exposed everybody is in the process.
JJ
1,000%
NV
And Jaé definitely fulfilled that. And also to be a mediator in all sorts, but also a fresh eye. Artists are so in their head, and we’re so egocentric, especially when having a show, that it’s also good to have an honest eye that’s not trying to push their own vision with your work, but who is rather listening to what you’re trying to say.
JL
Where are you looking, even outside of the creative arts world for inspiration?
NV
It’s kind of cliché, but really anything and everything can spark inspiration. If I had to pinpoint a common denominator, I’ve always been curious about obscure figures, facts and things in history that are important and cause great impact, but might not be known. And something I’ll always go back to is the making of fabric – I defend this theory that sewing is the first pre-human technology that’s still in use. The way weaves work and the first punching cards of the old looms are exactly the same as early computer cards, so material culture and all these connections, that’s what really gets me going to want to know more and make work.
JJ
I feel the same sentiment. You can be inspired and moved by so many different moments in life outside of social media or the mass celebrity world that we currently live in. I love being moved by nature and discovering, “This bird has a rare feather,” or anything like that. I think that we don’t take into account those moments and how much they actually can spark not only creativity but also joy into our lives.
One thing that has been refreshing and a joy to me on this particular exhibition is the natural embrace of everyone wanting to see the other person do well and also trusting them in the process. and just this environment in this multidisciplinary space that Jayaram provides for artists and the arts and cultural community within Miami. Even a few of the people who came to the exhibition said, “I didn’t know this space was here, how cool is this?” and were asking about other programming. So for me, it’s just joy that there’s a space that is created for people that they want to enjoy.
It’s an unconventional sort of tool for the firm that expresses this multidisciplinary and the vested interest that Vivek and the team have in the arts.
JL
Are there any other projects you’re working on in the back half of 2024 that you’re excited about?
NV
I’m working on a two-person show in LA opening February 2025 with Mark Flores at Timeshare, and also working on a couple of projects with a my long time collaborator in Berlin, Marte Eknæs, and Michael Amstad; together we’re working on a film project and on a competition for a public monument in Hamburg. And there are a few EDGLRD projects, most notably “Baby Invasion,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, and a full feature being realized in a gaming software engine that we’re currently working on. I like to have a lot of projects going, so that I always have something to jump into.
JJ
I think the future will bring more projects with Jayaram. So stay tuned!
A Pipeline Alphabet Study (Sanction), 2023, Colored pencil on paper; and Coil (Water), 2024, Water bottle paper labels, cotton rope, thread and adhesive tape.
B Handsy, 2024, Elastic band, leather, neoprene.
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