All You Can Eat: Janey Gioiosa

show.” When Dobrow gave up commercial art, he also shifted away from chronological storytelling in his visuals, opting for more loosely conceptual work. His style didn’t mesh with the bicentennial’s, but it proved to be perfect for Brighter Together.

True to form, Dobrow consciously chooses not to tell a story with his work on these buildings—either of the university at large or of the pandemic year. “I didn’t want to create a piece that contemplated…the horrible reality [of 2020],” he says. “We’ve had enough of that. Let’s dance, let’s have some fun.”

Fun doesn’t begin to describe the sublime projections. Some of the images are recognizable and taken from the animal kingdom, like a tiger prowling across the surface of the chapel or a butterfly visiting flowers on the Rotunda—a decidedly more peaceful image than the bicentennial’s flaming Rotunda, itself a callback to the disastrous real-life fire of 1895. Other Dobrow images, rippling and morphing shapes and patterns, are less rooted in reality. Everything is connected by different selections of EDM music that can be heard at each of the Brighter Together events.

Dobrow identifies these soundtracks, and how they interact with the visuals, as the most important relationship in his artwork, aside from the relationship between the art and the building onto which it’s projected. For Brighter Together, he enlisted the help of Red Flower Lake, a local husband-andwife group that has done audio engineering for Dave Matthews. The duo’s otherworldly tunes pair nicely with Dobrow’s trippy visuals, creating a product that might be commonplace at a music festival, but is considerably more remarkable when projected onto UVA’s historic buildings.

Projection mapping is still a new art form, particularly in the U.S. “It’s huge in the rest of the world and has been for years,” says Dobrow. “Like most things in the United States, our first exposure to it was...through revenue-generating advertising.” He’s advocating for it to become a more accepted medium, both for patrons of the arts and for aspiring creators. “A huge part of what I do is education, especially for at-risk kids. No one has heard of [projection mapping], but a lot of it is accessible.”

Not only is the concept relatively recent, Dobrow says it’s also constantly in flux thanks to continual technological improvements— or, in his words, “basically everything that’s going to turn us into Terminator 2.” It’s already incredible, he stresses—the GPU technology he’s used for Brighter Together enables the images to interact with the music in real time—and it’s becoming more advanced by the day. He contrasts the canvas and brush process of traditional painting with the more complex world of projection mapping. “With technology, we are experiencing things we didn’t think we could do.”

What Dobrow wants to emphasize most—and what’s hardest to convey in a newspaper article—is the sheer magnitude of his projects. He says the creation of his projections often gives him small-screen fatigue, hunched over “my little laptop for endless periods of time…but when I go and put it back on the building, it’s huge. It’s everything. The transformation hits me every time.”

Whip it good

Janey Gioiosa takes on recipes and cancer in new YouTube series

By Alana Bittner

living@c-ville.com

I’m cooking along with local chef Janey Gioiosa’s “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” on YouTube, and get halfway through the video before I realize I’ve overlooked something on the list of ingredients—yeast.

This recipe is a brave choice for me. As far as I’m concerned, pretzels come from Auntie Anne’s at the Fashion Square Mall. Yet in her rustic Crozet kitchen, Gioiosa’s easygoing attitude gives me the confidence to think I can pull this off. But as I follow her direction, and pour lukewarm water into a mixing bowl, something hits me: Pretzels need yeast.

Images of flat, concrete slabs of pretzel flash before my eyes. I rummage desperately through the fridge, the implications of last March’s global yeast shortage suddenly becoming clear. Just when I’m sure my pretzel venture is shot, I see it. There, at the back of the cheese drawer, is a jar of bakers’ yeast. Several risings later, I pull out huge, golden- brown soft pretzels, just as Gioiosa promised. Auntie Anne’s, eat your heart out.

For anyone intimidated by making pretzels, or any recipe for that matter, “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” is for you. Gioiosa takes the kind part seriously in two ways: She sets a goal of kindness, not perfection, and she says “If I make a mistake, I’ll show you that I made a mistake. So it’s just kind of a cooking show.”

Gioiosa begins the pretzel video by shouting “Take one!” with a determined clap. Thirty seconds and a few montages later, she’s at “Take 12!” The winning intro is, “Welcome to ‘A Kind of Cooking Show.’ My name’s Janey. We’re gonna make some shit up today.”

At times, Gioiosa’s dog wanders in to see what’s going on. At others, her husband (musician Will Overman) hands her utensils from offscreen. She frequently sings her sentences and sometimes forgets the egg and butter. The effect is charming and utterly authentic. It’s when we’re twisting dough into pretzels, that Gioiosa says, “So…cancer.”

Gioiosa was 19 when she was diagnosed with uterine sarcoma. She was plucked from typical teenage soul-searching, and thrown into a new reality of hospitals, scans, and chemotherapy. She fought it off, only to have it return when she was 23. Today, not yet 30, Gioiosa is a two-time cancer survivor.

She’s thankful for the support from her family and friends. But still, being a young adult with cancer was isolating. “You’re in this weird in-between, where you’re too old for pediatric care but too young for the older generation,” Gioiosa explains. “Nineteen is a weird age where you’re becoming an adult and you want that independence.” As her friends went to college and began their new lives, Gioiosa watched from the hospital, feeling more dependent than ever.

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After two bouts with cancer, Janey Gioiosa created “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” as a way to connect with those going through something similar, and to teach everyone how to have fun while cooking.

The resources around her didn’t make things better. “You watch cancer movies all the time and they have all these friends who have cancer,” Gioiosa recalls. “I’m like, where are my fucking cancer friends! That I can bitch to and relate to, just the simplest thing!”

In that vacuum of connection, unlikely things stood out—such as a YouTube series called “Shit Cancer Patients Say.” “It was one glimmer of like, ‘Yes!’ I watched those videos over and over again, because it didn’t feel like I was alone.”

After her second battle with the disease, Gioiosa had newfound determination. “There is a pre-cancer Janey and a post-cancer Janey, and they’re very different people,” she says. “I’d always wanted to do culinary school and I never did, so I just did it.” She completed the two-year culinary program at Piedmont Virginia Community College and entered the Charlottesville restaurant scene. If you live here and eat food, it was probably made by Gioiosa at some point. She’s worked in local favorites from Brazos Tacos to Petite MarieBette.

Yet Gioiosa knew she still had work to do. “I’ve always disliked the saying that everything happens for a reason,” she says. “I’ve turned it into, ‘You make a reason out of something.’ So what’s the reason I got cancer?” “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” has given her an opportunity to provide the community she yearned for as a young person who was sick.

The recipes come from moments in her journey. Those soft pretzels, for example, were first made during an early round of treatment. However, she eventually wants to shift the focus from herself, and she plans to bring in guests to tell their stories about cancer and food. It could be memories, she says, but it could also be, “What did you crave or what did you wish you could eat?”

No matter how “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” evolves, its goal will remain the same. “I just want that person that was like me when I was 19 or 23 to not feel so alone,” says Gioiosa. “That’s success there, period. Signed, sealed, delivered.”

You can find “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” on YouTube (Janey Gioiosa) and Instagram (@janeygioiosa).