Three exhibitions featuring an animated man taking hammers to his hat abstracts on stainless steel, and a literary-meets-visual interpretation of Vodou priestess Marie Laveau will open at artspace this month.

Oscar-winning author, filmmaker and animator William Joyce will give visitors a behind-the-scenes look into the making of his latest short film, “Mr. Spam Gets a New Hat.” Painter Byron May will present new abstract works featuring his unique paint on sheets of stainless steel. Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani, who won Critical Mass 8’s literary prize, will offer visitors a deeper understanding of Marie Laveau with a collection of art and poetry.

The exhibits will open free to the public at artspace at 708 Texas St. in Shreveport on Aug. 27, with an opening reception from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. They will run through Oct. 2.

William Joyce’s show will feature hundreds of pieces of artwork that illustrate the animation process of his new short film. Complimentary tickets to the film will be available for visitors attending the artspace exhibition to see the same-day premiere at Robinson Film Center. Robinson will show the short film every half hour during the opening reception at artspace.

"It's to show everybody: This is how we do it,” Joyce said. "I think it's important for people to understand how difficult and complicated it is to do animation. It's a ridiculous way to make a film."

Still, anyone can make a film anywhere as long as they have a team, Joyce said. The team that made “Mr. Spam” was never in the same room because of the pandemic. Some team members were even on other continents.

The film, set in 1927, tells the story of Mr. Spam. He works at the “Hammers to Heads LLC” factory, but he is also an inventor who lives in a cottage with his dog, Spot, and a house full of dancing cutlery and walking clocks, Joyce said in a news release.

“He has many dreams, but none as joyful as his dream of love for the lovely and talented Miss Dot who lives next door,” Joyce said. “Complications ensue. But love and daydreams win the day.”

“Mr. Spam” was an experiment to see how to create an animated project in isolation. It was also an avenue for harnessing the power of Unreal Engine software for animation, which hasn't been done before, Joyce said. Unreal Engine is a suite of creative tools primarily used for game design from Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite. It was used to create realistic digital landscapes in “The Mandalorian” from Disney+.

Joyce and his team learned how to work with Unreal Engine while producing the short film. The software allows filmmakers to see the set with lighting and move their characters around all in real-time.

"That's never happened before, in my experience," Joyce said.

A team member recreated a "digital form of old Technicolor," which was a complicated task, he said. The goal was to achieve the “dreamlike and luscious and otherworldly” quality like the old film. They tried to recreate the feeling of old movies. Joyce wanted to appeal to people of all ages.

"A child can watch this, a 90-year-old can watch this, and they will both, on a certain level, understand that it's about love. It's about following your dreams. It's about joy and whimsy and all that stuff,” Joyce said.

Joyce said he was inspired by the silver linings people have found during the pandemic. He and his team were also inspired by early Hollywood and 1920’s artists such as René Magritte and writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Joyce and his team are working on a feature-length adaptation of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby," also using Unreal Engine for the film.

Byron May’s show, “Abstractions on Steel,” will bring visitors into his unique method of painting: with his own paint on sheets of stainless steel, like refrigerator fronts.

The paint was derived from printing ink. May is the owner of SB Magazine and owned a printing company for more than 35 years. He worked with a company in Dallas over the course of five years to develop an artists’ paint out of printing ink.

"You can put colors down — reds, blues, yellows, bright colors — and you can cover that color up with dark blue, and then with my palette knife I can open up those colors, and they stay perfectly pristine underneath that dark blue,” May said. “If you did that with acrylics or oils, it would turn to mud."

May didn't intend for the paint to behave that way. He experimented with it in the studio one day, and discovered that property as a “happy accident.” Once, he did an in-show painting in Las Vegas and covered everything with dark blue.

"I had probably 20 people watching me at that time. Everybody just gasped, thinking that I had just ruined everything that I did,” May said. “And when I started opening up that color on the palette knife, it was amazing, the look on these peoples' faces. They got giddy."

May started painting because a series of back surgeries took golf from him. He competed in golf all his life, but one surgery gave him extreme back pain. He had three more surgeries to try to fix the problems, but some of them couldn't be fixed. May ended up with permanent nerve damage.

"Golf was really kind of out, and I was in a lot of pain trying to figure out what to do. I was on heavy drugs, I couldn't sleep. I started painting, really, to find something to get my mind off the pain that I had,” May said. “It was never really an intention to become a professional artist and sell anything. It was basically a survival mechanism for me when I started painting."

Now, May has sold about 130 pieces in the 11 years since he sold his first one. He wants to patent the paint and see what other artists can do with it.

Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani won the literary award for Critical Mass 8 in 2020 and received a commission to create a follow-up show, called “Thick Air: Rituals of Resistance.”

The show will feel like if visitors were to visit a diviner in the French Quarter in New Orleans, she said. It will feature art pieces and poetry dedicated to Marie Laveau. Laveau was a 19th-century Vodou priestess who cared for the sick, delivered babies and did conjure work.

"The knowledge of the history of Marie Laveau in terms of the Vodou culture, it is one that is usually steeped in this whole idea of something that is mysterious in a way that is we shouldn't deal with, we shouldn't touch, almost like devilment, and it's not that," Bomani said. 

It’s important to them to challenge the negative ideas of Laveau because at this moment, people are finding spirituality isn’t just about a male figurehead, Bomani said.

"Women and the LGBTQ community, you have a lot of different people who are speaking out and claiming their position and their place in spiritual culture, and I think that part of that is alternative spirituality,” she said.

Bomani is a diviner and has had more people coming to them from the Western spiritual system because of the pandemic. A lot of those people’s stories have made their way into the pieces for her show.

“I definitely would hope that they (visitors) would see that Marie Laveau can be a focal point of that healing, can be seen as sort of a deity that they can look at and say that she is someone who is here to provide solace,” Bomani said. “...We don't always know what's going on when we see somebody smile, we don't know what's going on behind the smile, but just to recognize that we are all individuals who are living lives that might be riddled with a lot of pain, but we're still trying to survive and go on to the next day."

What: “Mr. Spam Gets a New Hat” by William Joyce, “Abstractions on Steel” by Byron May and “Thick Air: Rituals of Resistance” by Mawiyah Bomani

Where: artspace, 708 Texas St., Shreveport

Opening reception: 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Aug. 27, runs through Oct. 2

Gallery hours: Noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

Info: For more information, visit artspaceshreveport.com.