In this edition of State of the Arts, quilted cartography.

Meet an engineer with a passion for the colors of our planet, an art exhibit that explores the delicate balance of an ecosystem, and Tucson's All Souls Weekend returns.

It's all ahead on State of the Arts.

[music] I'm Mary Paul, and this is State of the Arts, where together we'll explore what's happening in the art world, across Arizona and across the country.

First, we look at one engineer who found artistic inspiration while looking at the surface of the Earth.

Satellite imagery is often used in geographic information systems, or GIS, mostly for scientific purposes.

Now, she's transforming the beauty and complexity of GIS into colorful quilts.

Hi, I'm Deb Berkebile.

I am a mechanical engineer by day, and every other waking hour or minute, I am an artist.

[music] I do art quilts.

I take satellite imagery and create, actually from fabric, these depictions of the art satellite imagery.

[music] I take hand-dyed fabrics.

All of my fabrics are either dyed with procion dyes or shibori or whatever, whatever the colors I am needing, I hand-dyed my own fabric now.

I went to Chicago and bought my quilting machine from a quilt festival up there.

I had done quilting before.

I really wanted to do customer quilting to get a little bit of more money, so I actually started customer quilting.

But then in 2014, I went back to school again and started doing GIS.

So I'm a professor of geography and geospatial technology.

The GIS in that stands for geographic information systems, which is a part of the overall geospatial approach to mapping and to gathering information about the Earth's surface.

And GIS involves the computer systems that acquire, store, analyze, and produce data that can be used to make maps and to be integrated into models about the world around us.

I found some images, the satellite images in a class, a remote sensing class.

And I fell in love with the colors and the variations and just how bright and cheerful these images were.

Right after I got my certificate in GIS, I started not working in the field, but I started doing art quilts of the satellite imagery.

Most of my clients do piecing of different patterns that are traditional.

There are a few that do some art quilts, but most of them are traditional piece quilts.

So the art quilt world, you know, they like the traditional quilts.

There are a few quilt shows that mostly show your traditional quilting.

Just in the last probably, I would say 15 years, maybe 20, the art quilts have become more successful and actually now they have more categories and they're more juried into your quilt shows.

I like to do actually go into just the art world itself and go into some juried shows of different mixed media.

A lot of people say, oh, quilting is dying, but it's really not.

If you look and go Google, there are quilting guilds.

A lot of people aren't familiar with them because they think that the quilting world is, you know, very low.

But if you Google quilting guilds just in your area, you'll find quite a few.

Well, we're both fiber artists, although she's a true artist and I just mess around.

I had seen this quilt under construction and Deb had never been to Yellowstone or seen the Grand Prismatic Spring, which I have.

So to be in her presence when she saw it was just so special.

And of course I told everyone we saw, well, she made a quilt like this and here we are.

So when I was at Lakeland, my professor, he was very interested and was very good at like remote sensing.

And that was one of my favorite things during the class time that we, that one of the classes that I took.

Deb is one of those students who has multiple talents and she was working for a company doing mostly solid works engineering.

And so Deb came to Lakeland to get her certificate as an adult already in the workforce.

She wanted to add GIS to her skill set.

And that all seemed well and good.

And here's an engineer coming to us and taking classes and we're off to a great start.

And in one of the classes that I was teaching in remote sensing, it was 10 years ago in spring of 2013.

I remember the day when we were doing an introduction to Landsat satellite imaging, where we start seeing all those images with colors on the screen and we can look at the world through a new lens and a new perception and we can begin to detect and understand what's going on with things like vegetation and rock formations and so on.

And all of a sudden Deb clears her space and starts scribbling away on a piece of paper.

And everybody else has their nose on the computer screen doing their lab assignment.

So of course I asked Deb, "Hey Deb, what's going on?"

And she says, "Oh, I'm doing a quilting pattern."

The first one I ever did was the Painted Desert.

And it has been around the country.

It has been in several shows.

And I'm very proud of it because people, when they look at it, they say, "So how do you do this?"

The Painted Desert and the Eye of Sahara are two of my first ones that I've done.

And they're very unique.

They do not have the hand dyed fabrics, but they're mostly Batik fabrics.

But they are one of my, you know, proudest moments, I guess, of making, starting the art quilt world.

The GIS quilts, what actually got me inspired for that was I found images in a book that's called Earth as Art.

There's a few of them published.

And it's all satellite imagery from NASA.

So you looking at a satellite image and it's green doesn't mean that it's vegetation.

Sometimes the color red is your vegetation, like during some of the glaciers.

Red will be your vegetation.

So the colors of that really fascinated me.

It's her curiosity, ultimately, I think, that's impressive.

Her artistic ability is incredible, but certain people have the gift and the talent to interact with the world in a particular way.

[Music] This Was Water by Kellie Bornhoft and Carey Campbell is an interactive sculpture, sound, and video installation centered around the Great Salt Lake.

The sculptures are modeled after the gypsum crystals, or dirty diamonds, that emerge through the salty crust at the Great Salt Lake due to water consumption and climate change.

This multimedia installation invites reflection upon our relationship with this fascinating and fragile inland sea.

Let's take a trip north to Utah to learn more.

[Music] It started out as a concert work.

I was just planning this concert work.

And then Kellie, she contacted me and said, "Hey, I hear you're working on a Salt Lake artwork.

I also work on similar things."

So we met and Kellie agreed to do some video art for the first performance of my concert work.

And one thing led to another, and she started proposing this idea of an installation version here at the Dumke Plaza.

Part of Carey's composition is improvised.

The musicians can take different amounts of time.

So the video that I created had to be adaptable, and I actually VJ'd during the performance.

We actually worked really closely through the development of the video.

I brought in these dirty diamond crystals, and Carey responded to them and adapted the sound for the performance.

And we recorded video together in the studio.

While we pulled this together, I had this vision to create these sculptures and develop an entire environment around the dirty diamonds themselves.

We made a proposal to the Dumke Plaza, and that's how we got to where we are today.

We chose to model the sculptures after these selenite crystals, which are this really unique phenomenon of a lake.

They actually only occur in one other place in the world that we know of, in the salt flats in Oklahoma.

They are increasing, they're becoming more abundant as the lake bed recedes, because the clay, where the lake once was, is like it propagates them because of the gypsum that's in the clay, and also the water pressure of what remains in the kind of clay bed and the previous lake bed.

And so for me, they've really become this metaphor.

There are these really beautiful artifacts of loss as the lake recedes.

There are these kind of remembrances or tombstones.

And Dr.

Bonnie Baxter actually has been researching these and has found that the crystals, because they form so rapidly, which in geological terms is 50 years, they encapsulate clay, which is where they get the name "dirty" from.

And the clay inside of them holds microbes that continue to live and build worlds.

In all, the idea is to make the familiar unfamiliar.

And in doing that, we sort of shift our relationship with the world as we know it.

And part of the impetus behind this whole project is to shift people's perspective in terms of how they relate to their environment.

When I started working on the concert piece back in 2023, it was finished in 2024, when I started working on the concert piece, the initial kind of drive behind it was what I was reading about the lake and how the lake was drying up, and there were going to be these huge environmental consequences.

And I noticed that a cultural attention span can be kind of short.

And if we had a rainy day, then everyone's like, "Oh, okay, the lake's going to be fine."

But in fact, we need to learn to think in geological time.

And that, of course, involves displacing ourselves, creating another sense of time.

But it was really that idea of, "Oh, wow, the lake is going to collapse.

If the lake dries up, this whole ecosystem is going to collapse."

And my own experience of the lake prior to that had just been, "Oh, look, it's a pretty lake."

It's interesting, but yeah, okay, cool.

But then I started reading about what would happen if the lake dried up, and that's what led me to realize how important it is for wildlife, for humans, for the air quality, for all of these things.

And all of that is embedded throughout my concert piece as well, somewhat abstractly sometimes, but it's there.

In my work in general, I'm really interested in bridging the relationship that we have to the Earth and the planet and the environment that we live in with the kind of data and the scientific information that's really hard to understand and comprehend.

And so for me, what I'm really interested in doing is creating an opportunity for the audience, the viewer, the public to come in and experience, sometimes through a metaphor like the crystals, what rapid change is happening in geological terms.

And that kind of shifting of the timeframe that Carrie's mentioning is really important because in our day-to-day life, climate change or the disappearance of the lake feels kind of static and like a far-off issue.

But if we change our lens and look at it in a geological perspective, it's rapid and it's alarming and it's an emergency situation that will make potentially the city that we live in unlivable in the next 10, 15 years.

But we just think in these kind of daily perspectives.

And so that perspective shift is really essential.

We had about 10 weeks to build the sculptures last summer.

We took over the sculpture lab at Weber State.

I had three students work with me and they all had really distinct roles.

So Max Richman took these 3D models that were really rudimentary that I created and he adapted them in Blender and created the crystals and then figured out what the facades would be.

Then we laser cut the facades, the kind of planes of the crystals, assembled them together and coated that in resin to really give them the look that they have.

I had Zanthie Harris who's another Weber State student.

She's an art student and she did a lot of R&D on the crystal surfacing and how to get them to really kind of have the right aesthetic.

I had another student, August Roth, who's also an art student.

She did all the welding on the project.

And meanwhile Max was going in and doing R&D and developing a specific kind of concrete.

The concrete on the sculptures is only 1 to 2 inches thick, which is really thin.

And we needed to do it that way so that they could be hollow and strong and be able to be transported down to the plaza.

So we developed our own mix and did all sorts of experiments just to get the material right.

We started with a welded frame, put chicken wire over it, put the concrete on that and then did this kind of textured surfacing concrete so it could crack and have all the different variation in it.

And we put the crystals once they were assembled inside of that and finished the whole thing.

These are living ecosystems that are encapsulated inside of the crystals that I think of as this kind of metaphorical skate pod.

Like the lake is kind of trying to capture what it has as it rapidly diminishes.

In the natural world, these things are really small.

They're about the size of a pinky.

And so by blowing them up to a 6 foot, 8 foot tall sculpture, this massive scale, we're inviting a kind of perspective shift that we've been talking about.

All of a sudden, we become the small one.

And I think that it invites further contemplation on our place on this earth.

And the content that we're talking about in This Was Water is the evaporation of the lake, which is something that's always in flux.

And so having an environment that's also always changing just feels right.

Yeah, we wanted to create a space, not just something to look at, but a space in which people can inhabit, at least for as long as they're here.

And creating that space, of course, means creating sound, creating lights, creating interaction.

And I think that that's one of the strongest and funnest things about this particular installation, is the idea that it's as if the crystal sculptures are aware of our presence.

[MUSIC] Now we preview a Tucson tradition more than three decades in the making.

All Souls Weekend will bring the community out to the west side after dark this weekend to honor the dead and celebrate life.

The altar dedication ceremony took place earlier this week at the MSA Annex, where it will stand through Sunday when the annual procession takes place.

Here's a look.

[MUSIC] The kinds of things that people typically add are photographs of people that they've lost.

I was asked to create the community altar with volunteers this year.

It's my first year doing it, and it was a huge honor to be asked to do it.

I had wanted to leave space for people to come and add things to the altar.

And so I initially felt a little empty, but I was so, so amazed and thrilled when I came back, and it was like completely built, like half a block of stuff had been added to the altar.

Over a week's time.

It takes a community to do these beautiful things.

You know, it's not just one person, one place, one altar.

It's all the altars.

It's all the hearts that connect.

[MUSIC] We face the direction of the west, the direction of endings.

And we thank you.

And we thank you.

Thank the great spirit for the beautiful fire in the sky each day that helps us to remember to give thanks for our daily blessings.

Everybody is very respectful of items on the altar.

Nothing is ever messed with on an altar or even taken.

And I really encourage anyone who has never participated to give it a try, to hold hands with death, and to talk to their ancestors.

Now let's take a look at a unique art exhibition in Akron, Ohio, where gallery spaces are illuminated with neon and light.

One of the things that I wanted to showcase was how many different working styles there are within this medium.

So there are artists who work with professional neon manufacturers.

We have artists who bend their own neon, and then two artists who even use recycled neon from wherever they can find them out in the world.

And then they combine them into these new compositions.

So it's really beautiful to see all these different working styles, to see artists who are minimalists, to see artists who are maximalists, and then the variety within that.

Max Hooper Schneider, he's taken a helicopter, wreckage, suspended it from the ceiling, and from that are all these chains with fluorescent tubes, just the kind of thing you would find in a hardware store.

And then he's created this resin pond with all of this kind of detritus, this material that's embedded in it.

And then there's these plants that are growing out of it, and then all this neon.

And the neon is activated.

And then there's also these tesla coils that sort of draw energy, kind of like static electricity from the air.

And once they have enough energy, they activate, they send off these sparks, and then the fluorescent tubes are lit up.

And it's loud, and it's this kind of bright flashing light, and it almost feels like a lightning strike.

My whole modus operandi, as they say, is from recycled material.

And if the glass is not broke, chances are it still works.

So that can be a challenge to get it to light up, because it's always a surprise.

You never know what kind of gas is in it, because neon and argon are two different gases in two different colors.

And the phosphorus on the inside of the glass is what gives them many of the colors.

When I get glass, I like to take that paint off, so I can see the whole thing.

Even with this piece back here, I have removed a lot of the paint that was on those, so that those little blue specks can come out.

And it gives it a whole other color in there as well.

So argon is the blue, and the many other whites, there are like 10, 12, 14 different whites that you can get.

The cooler colors, the cooler colors are argon.

The warmer colors, your oranges, the reds, and the other kind of warm colors are neon, which is why it's so prominent, because people want to be able to see that, and they can see it from across the street.

This is the view of the city through a keyhole, and it was actually in a different version of this one before somebody brought me the big orange piece.

And I took that old piece out, because I really wasn't happy with it.

Put that one in there, and I'm going, "Yes, now it works."

And it's a pretty literal piece.

I mean, you can sort of see what's going on there.

Whereas this one over here, it's argon.

It speaks for itself.

It wasn't really until the 60s that artists started exploring how you could work with light, how you could manipulate light in different ways.

And one of the first artists to really think about neon was Keith Sonnier.

And he is in our show.

He's from Louisiana originally.

He started experimenting with neon and plexiglass and rubber and mirrors, and really started being very playful with them.

He creates these works that are sort of gestural, like a drawing.

But when you think about it, it's not a drawing at all, because you have to bend these to these exact precision.

But he's created a work that's so playful and feels improvisational, but that would have been highly structured in the way that you make them.

Breakneck Creek, which is a tributary to the Cuyahoga River, is right behind my house, and I walk back there almost every day.

So I was walking back there, and I came across this sort of horizon of ice in the forest, which I hadn't seen before.

And it was like these frozen circles of ice around trees.

And it just really struck me, and I just stopped there and listened and watched.

And it was sort of like one of those vista moments.

It just was there in that time, in that place, experiencing it.

And what had happened was that it flooded, and when the water was high, it froze.

So there was this like two inch layer of ice stuck on the trees, and then the water went back down.

So it was just hovering there in this plane.

And it changed the space that I see every day into something other, something new, that there was always something new to discover.

And I would hope that the people visiting the gallery for the first time come in and have a similar feeling where they're taking a bit out of what's normally running through their mind and into a space where they're more focused on the present.

I want people to think about how their senses are activated and how that impacts how they feel in the space, their memories of the space.

There's a lot of different topics that we're addressing within the show.

So I hope that they engage with those and think about some of the things that we're bringing up.

But ultimately, I just hope that by activating your different senses, you can really create a positive core memory of this exhibition and your time at the museum.

Thank you for joining us for this inaugural edition of State of the Arts.

We look forward to sharing stories of art and community with you each week.

Until next time, I'm Mary Paul.

Thanks for watching.