Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by Jordan Schnitzer and the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Care Foundation Endowed Fund for Excellence... and OPB members and viewers like you.

Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] I really like using found materials because it's a great way to teach that you can make art out of anything.

It could have another life.

This is a bristle from a street sweeper.

I've been collecting them for like 30 years.

So these are perfect.

They're really-- still really flexible, they're not brittle yet.

And these would be perfect for wrapping around one of the nests.

I wish I could use this ivy.

I love the idea of using something that people don't want.

The project that I'm currently working on is called God's Eye.

And it's a series of 150 nests.

I picked the number 150 because that's the number of bird species that will be saved from extinction if we do something about carbon emissions right now.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The basic structure of the nests is street-sweeper bristles.

It was a very exciting moment when I realized I finally had something interesting to do with them.

All right.

So one thing that is really important to me, to see the voice of the natural material.

So I kind of like the way this branch wants to just go off on its own.

I think this was strapping around something I ordered.

So then I'll look through materials and find different colors that are complementary, different textures that are complementary.

I'm sort of like, "What would a bird do?"

[ chuckles ] And then it has some of my art in there.

This maybe...

I decided to do this project because I'd just read this article in The New York Times about how they're just finding more and more human detritus in actual birds' nests, including things like anti-bird spikes.

I've often returned to themes in my art of the humans and nature struggle.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In the center of each of my nests is an eye.

I think the effect of the eye looking at you makes you think about your place in the waste stream.

[ machinery whirring ] [ ♪♪♪ ] I come from a long line of woodworkers.

My grandfather and great grandfather were ranchers, but they always had a wood shop.

Sometimes you just have to let the wood speak to you and decide what it's going to be.

I love that.

I could see using this.

It's almost bird-shaped.

My grandfather carved this sculpture.

I just really love it.

It's a great example of 1930s style.

My great grandfather was a clock maker as a hobby.

I've got bicycle, um, valve caps, tire valves.

I don't know, I just save things.

[ laughs ] The Goodwill bins are a great place to just find weird, discarded things.

Here, this is my prized possession, this collection of supposedly wolf teeth.

When I was still in art school, somebody gave them to me.

He just bought a jar of them at some scary garage sale.

[ chuckles ] I found this big stash of pencils, and I thought, "Oh, that'd be really interesting to embed them in just as a little design element but not have it be too obvious."

I'm more interested when a found object is subtly placed.

I think it gives the viewer something to discover and also to talk about.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I also really love when a found object inclusion makes somebody look a little closer.

When I use found objects in work, like this old fuse, it's often the last thing I think of.

"Maybe it just needs something else at the end."

[ birds chirping ] I am drawn to birds for several reasons.

One is they're just iconic as a form.

I never get tired of exploring shape and posture, but I'm also drawn to birds just because I like them.

[ ♪♪♪ ] It's really important to draw.

Even though I don't take my sketchbook in the studio ever.

It really stays in the house, because I just...

I feel like my art is too rigid if I make what I've drawn.

I'll start with cutting my shapes, and then I'll have the fabricator cut multiples for me out of aluminum.

One of my favorite shapes that I really like.

I love figuring out stuff.

And I love working with my hands.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My parents ran a craft gallery when I was in my teens and 20s in Eugene, Oregon.

That was amazingly influential, because not only could I start to sell my work there, I could also meet a lot of other artists.

I just really felt so moved my entire life by the art others made, and that's just all I want to do... [ laughs ] ...is just make art.

[ ♪♪♪ ] One of my favorite projects was the wishing trees I did for the Ronald McDonald Houses of Portland, Eugene, and Bend.

WOMAN: Hilary's art is so playful and fun and interactive.

Her use of animals makes the wishing tree here and really many of her art pieces so connected to place, to Oregon, to our community.

It's been very meaningful to get to work projects that are designed to help people in need.

MILLER: When a family is facing the serious illness of their child, they are desperately in need of hope, moments of joy, and peace.

I absolutely think Hilary's work brings healing.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I make art because I simply don't have a choice.

Without art, I would cry forever.

[ laughs ] Sorry.

I really hope that the art that outlasts my lifetime will continue to make people happy and bring them joy and comfort.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I think that each painting is a character, and they're just trying to get me to tease out something about them that I might not know yet.

A lot of them are born out of daydreaming a lot.

[ ♪♪♪ ] They're at times absurd.

Sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're horrific.

They kind of convey that things just are the way that they are.

But, yeah.

[ laughs ] I love Ralph's work because it's shocking and just not what you expect of a painting.

It's not, like, super polite portraiture, it's not abstracted in a way that we're used to seeing, like the old masters in museums do.

It's not often that a painting makes you laugh in a good way, and I think that that's a tremendous accolade to Ralph and his work.

PUGAY: Today I'm working on this painting that is a scene of people walking around in traffic.

There will be exhaust coming out of the cars, but then there are also people that will be smoking and vaping.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I think a lot of the works definitely have to do with, like, having to do something amidst not being certain about what they're doing.

I feel like that's a bad answer.

[ laughs ] So "Gym of the Night" came about having seen a talk show host interviewing a vampire.

Somehow I had imagined that this vampires community has grown large enough that they would have their own gym to work out at.

"Meditation Contest" is about people that are competing in a meditation contest.

For me, despite the fact that we go into different spaces for healing, there are still remnants of, like, an unhealed world that we take along with us.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MEYERS: There is a painting of men in suits weeping on a ski lift.

I think the absurdity in Ralph's paintings is something that sticks with you for a really long time and makes you ask additional questions about, like, how did we end up here and what were the circumstances of this scene that he has painted?

[ ♪♪♪ ] PUGAY: I was born in the Philippines and then lived in a province that's like an hour away from Manila.

Having immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager was really rough, and so I think I did a lot of, like, escaping into video games.

For example, "The Sims."

I think that has really influenced the way that I paint pictorially.

So, yeah, like, I consider a lot of the figures in my paintings are almost like sprites, and I'm just, like, rearranging them, knowing that they convey something to people as characters.

[ people chattering softy ] I was trying to create a bridge between the paintings and the drawings.

I just want to say congratulations.

Thank you so much.

The title of my show at Adams and Ollman is called "The Longest Journey."

I love looking at people looking at the works.

I love hearing what they have to say about the works.

I get really curious about, like, how people might read something.

[ laughing ] PUGAY: No, totally.

Oh, they're being saved by... Yeah.

It was giving me, like, colonialism vibes, for sure.

MEYERS: I'm thrilled to see him getting some attention for what he does because it's well deserved, and not enough art makes you laugh.

And so I'm glad that that's a space that he occupies, and I want to see room for more Ralphs in the art that we're looking at.

[ ♪♪♪ ] PUGAY: If there's anything that I can hope that people get out of the work, I hope they're able to sort of, like, feel that life is not as flat as we would like to think.

They're not as alone and more connected to the things that are around them.

SLADE: What do you see for your future?

Oh, God.

What a weird question.

I see my future continuing to, like, evolve and grow as an artist and, like, continuing to surprise myself, maybe.

Like, hopefully continuing to do this stuff, because I love it so much.

Uh, I'm Christopher Marley.

I'm an artist.

I work with organisms, for the most part, or elements of the natural world, and turn them into artwork.

Started working with organizations and zoos and museums and breeders and importers and whoever works with organisms because everything dies eventually.

And when those things died, I would try to come in and take those organisms that had expired and turn them into something beautiful.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My dad has been a bird nut his entire life.

And so everywhere we ever lived, first thing when we moved into a new house, he'd go out and start building these giant aviaries, and he would fill them with beautiful birds.

But eventually birds die, and he didn't ever know what to do with the birds that would die.

He would just put them in the freezer.

Our freezers always had birds in them.

I mean, you know, the ice cream's packed in somewhere around the dead birds, and it was just normal.

I started wondering if other people that work with different types of organisms that they had dedicated their lives to feel the same way, and almost all of them do.

[ rooster crows ] All right.

So as I would reach out to these people that work with different types of fish or sea creatures or reptiles or birds or whatever it was, they would almost invariably have dead animals in their freezer they didn't know what to do with.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I was a reptile fanatic growing up.

I started traveling around the world when I was 18 years old, had a lot of wonderful experiences in jungles and forests and different biomes all over the plant.

Um, walking stick...

I was working with the head knitwear designer for the Donna Karan Couture line, and we were sourcing fabrics in Bangkok, and I was strolling through a night market and they had these terribly preserved, horribly presented beetles in these frames, and it blew my mind.

I-- I mean, I had seen these things in life-threatening situations a number of times and it had always been terrifying, but I'd never been able to get up close, I'd never been able to have that experience where I didn't have to fear a reprisal, and it was a magical, transformative experience for me.

And that's really where it all began.

I was afraid of insects for most of my life.

Until I was in my late 20s, insects were the bane of the natural world to me.

I mean, I'd be out digging for the scariest reptiles you can imagine and afraid of whatever spider was gonna jump out at me.

It was very strange.

When I create something with an organism that is not universally appreciable, it's very important for me to be able to have a degree of separation between the way we normally think about that organism-- its natural context, its life history, it being caught in my hair and, you know, attacking me in the middle of the night-- and the reality of the beauty of the structure and the textures and the colors and the design elements of that organism.

That's, to me, critical.

Things come to me, I have no idea what I'm gonna get.

I can't necessarily plan a piece and then go out and get those organisms-- they're reclaimed.

And so when things arrive, oftentimes they'll sit in my freezers for five, six, seven years until I really know what that piece is going to be and the organisms really inform the art.

[ saw whirring ] Ugh!

[ clears throat ] So I was kicked out of my own studio because some people couldn't handle the smell of... ugh, burning, rotting turtles, and I think they might have a point.

Invertebrates are relatively simple to preserve.

Because their skeleton is on the outside of their body, when they die, they look pretty much the same as they did even though their insides are all shriveled up.

When we die, our outsides shrivel up and we look horrible, but our skeletons still look great.

And so there's a lot more science and a lot more time involved, and it's been two decades of trial and error and some very serendipitous discoveries that I've made in being able to figure out how to preserve a vertebrate.

Some processes that involve freeze-drying, some chemical baths, and in the end, it can take up to a year for a larger specimen.

[ blows ] It's not taxidermy.

I'm not skinning the animal and laying it over an artificial form.

To me, it's important that you're seeing the entire organism-- you're seeing the muscular structure, the skeletal structure, you're seeing that organism as it exists in the natural world.

Not only does humanity have a right to interact in a symbiotic way with the natural world, but we have a responsibility to do so and we have a need to do so.

Psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, it's an innate love and affinity that we have for non-human life forms.

If we can make people appreciate these organisms, they almost have a second life.

I've been a commercial artist for 16 years, working with a lot of huge galleries and retailers.

I really decided a few years ago that it wasn't what I wanted to do, and so I started backing out of that world and building what I hoped would be an exhibit that museums would be interested in.

We had a debut two years ago at a small museum in Miami.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science came out to see it and were just-- really loved it, and so they brought it to Houston and then OMSI saw it as well, and they wanted to bring it in.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The "Exquisite Creatures" exhibit is a dialogue of art, nature, and science.

It's a little bit of that magical space between those three different elements of the human experience and what happens when we have an involvement in the natural world and it's combined with creativity and there's learning and there's science involved.

There's something there that, to me, is more than the sum total of its parts, and it's something that's pretty magical.

Lighting is everything.

Lighting reveals or hides color.

And so when you have the right lighting, you're able to really bring out all those natural colors.

There are a few organisms here that are very rare.

A great example upstairs, there is a Santa Catalina rattle-less rattlesnake, which is one of the rarest snakes in the world.

It's critically endangered, and there's not any international legislation to protect this rattlesnake.

Its habitat has almost completely disappeared.

It's endemic to one little, tiny island in Mexico, and it's one of the only rattlesnakes in the world that doesn't grow a rattle.

But to be able to tell that story, I mean, most people don't know there's any such thing as a rattlesnake without a rattle.

Without attention brought to these types of organisms, sometimes there's-- no one even knows that there's an issue until it's too late.

And so hopefully, there's some hope for the Santa Catalina rattle-less rattlesnake.

What is your question?

Over there, we saw the snake, and it has two heads.

Can you believe that?

That is totally natural!

The leading authority of two-headed snakes in the whole world called me and said, "Oh, my gosh!

That's the only time in the history of the world that that species has ever been recorded with two heads!"

[ ♪♪♪ ] GIRL: We were going to a school project, and we all got to choose if we wanted to go, and we all wanted to go to see the bugs and the colorfulness.

Yeah.

[ giggles ] MAN: This is the highest level of engagement I've had of any field trip that I've done like this.

Really been awesome for me as a teacher to see how excited they are about interacting with the exhibit and really thinking about it.

MARLEY: For people to come in and to be able to have these experiences where they're connecting with each other, they're connecting with the natural world, they're connecting with their own creativity, it is priceless.

I could not be more gratified and more excited about what's happening.

BOY: Whoa!

It's pretty cool, huh?

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Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by Jordan Schnitzer and the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Care Foundation Endowed Fund for Excellence... and OPB members and viewers like you.

Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by...