[upbeat music] - In this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

- [Reporter] Imaginative Halloween decorations.

[upbeat spooky music] [wolf howling] - [Jason] We put out an increasing number of creatures and props, just all the magic that kind of encompasses Halloween.

[upbeat spooky music continues] - [Reporter] Painting Southern wildlife and culture.

- It's about really honing in on a single subject and you're really exploring that subject's shape, form, texture.

[upbeat music] - [Reporter] A large scale video installation.

- [Juana] I wanted a viewer who walked into the space to feel like they were occupying that space, that sort of sensation that they were part of this experience.

[upbeat music] - [Reporter] Solar powered sculptures.

- They're whimsical, they're fun.

You're curious about them when you see them.

They look like common objects, some parts of it.

- [Reporter] It's all ahead on this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to WLIW Arts Beat.

I'm Diane Masciale.

- [Reporter] In Sparks, Nevada, Sarah and Jason Harrell love to decorate for Halloween.

Each holiday, they bring their ideas to life and adorn their home with spooky creatures, lights, and lots of pumpkins.

Take a look.

[lively spooky music] [wolf howling] - I'm Jason.

- I'm Sarah.

- [Both] And together we're Harrellween.

- [Sarah] As a kid, my family didn't, they celebrated Halloween differently, and we didn't get to go trick or treating.

We had harvest parties and things like that.

So I didn't get to get into the spooky, creepy stuff of Halloween.

Couldn't even carve pumpkins for a while, so, just as I grew up and, you know, no, you can't do something the way you want to do it and we're the way the rest of the world does it, kinda was motivation of why I've always liked Halloween.

And then when we met, we both loved Halloween, and it kind of evolved and blossomed from there.

- [Jason] I've loved horror movies my entire life, so that kinda goes hand in hand oftentimes with Halloween, and I've always loved Halloween.

I grew up in the sticks of North Carolina where Halloween wasn't really much of a thing.

Missed out on a lot of that growing up, and I think I'm just making up for it now in adulthood.

- It's like we found somebody that we could really make something cool and grow our love of Halloween.

A true partner that has the same fun things about Halloween that we'd like to do.

- [Jason] Plus we love just being creative together, and I think we work together very well.

I'm very fortunate that I found her to grow that with.

- [Sarah] Yeah.

And I think, because it's been such a passion for both of us, it's really evolved immensely into what we do today.

And it's fun to have somebody who has that same passion as you.

It's fun.

[laughing] - To say the very least.

[light spooky music] - [Sarah] Come August is when we really start getting into gear and thinking about building ideas that we found throughout the year.

- [Jason] And then everything on the outside has to be done by October.

That's always our number one mission, is to have the outside ready to go for October.

We put out an increasing number of creatures, and props, tons, and tons, and tons of lights, sounds, just all the magic that kind of encompasses Halloween.

We really try to just get our personalities out there.

- [Sarah] We got a family of spiders out there of Charlotte, Webster, Spencer, and Cobb is their newest one.

We got a 12 foot skeleton.

We got a family of witches, lots of ghosts, and almost 300 pumpkins out there.

- [Jason] Yeah.

Roughly 300 pumpkins.

The majority of which are on the roof line and sprinkled all throughout the property.

- [Sarah] What we build out there is our ideas in our head where we wanna create something and you bring it to life.

And it has our own touch on it too.

Yeah, I made a 10 foot sandworm out there from Beetle Juice, but I made it my own.

Or put these spider webs with these giant spiders, it's all a form of art.

I mean, it's not your typical Picasso that you'd see in a museum, but it's just our own importation on things that we love and making them in real life.

- Yeah that's what it is.

- Yeah, absolutely.

[lively spooky music] We do have cameras on everything outside, so we're checking that for what we call looky boos instead of looky loos, just to see how many people come and enjoy it.

And so it just goes by so fast on Halloween, but leading up to it, I mean, every night we take a walk out there and bask in the Halloween glow, and see things that we need to tweak the next day.

So that's what is a good feeling throughout the month, and not just the on Halloween.

- Especially in times of the world where things may not be the happiest and they can be stressful.

People are pretty appreciative of just trying to flood the neighborhood with that spirit and that happiness.

- [Sarah] We love what we do, it's so fun for us, and it's really cool to see other people enjoying it too.

[lively spooky music] - [Reporter] Discover more at instagram.com/harrelloween.

And now, the artist quote of the week.

[upbeat music] Inspired by early scientific illustration, Chase Mullen is a self trained artist who depicts southern wildlife and culture.

In his paintings, he captures the environment in a realistic manner.

We head to Louisiana to learn more.

[upbeat music] - When I was looking into these early naturalist painters, I was obviously very drawn to that style.

I think I somewhat romanticized it in how they would go out into the wilderness and document this before there were cameras.

This is just how the knowledge was gathered, and it's how it was passed on.

There's something very romantic about that.

I like the clean backgrounds, because it reminds me of scientific illustration.

That's where my interest started with older illustrators such as Audubon, and so the more naturalist painters, they always had this very, very clean, simple background, and it drew more attention to the anatomy and to the subject.

It's about really honing in on the single subject.

And you're really exploring that subject's shape, form, texture, and it's easier to do that when you're devoid of a setting.

I like these birch panels cause they're very smooth, and they allow me to kind of elaborate with detail, and I'm not fighting the texture of canvas as much.

It just makes it more of a scientific panel.

So what I'll typically do is start there, paint the entire thing white with a Sandable gesso, sand it down to the texture that I like, and then I'll paint the subject.

And then once it's finished, I'll go back with a nice white wash which kind of cleans any blemishes I may have made.

It also serves as a closing ritual for a finished piece.

That piece is titled Seed Savers Two, and it's actually an accompanying piece for Seed Savers One, which is a very similar composition.

When I made that I was doing some reading about native plants and crops to specific regions.

And I was really interested in this idea of seeds and crops that are gone.

And there's this new generation of chefs that are looking to find seeds and crops that have left our food ways.

And they're going to find these seeds and hopefully bring them back and try and reintroduce them to the cuisine of the south, specifically.

And I was thinking about in how cow, birds, any animal that spends a lot of time in these pastures and then farms in the south, how they can act as vessels for seeds and just kind of carry them.

It was just all such a fascinating subject to me.

So I kind of wanted to build a piece that showed all of these potential vessels for seeds, bringing them to new areas and also sharing them.

I also put a cattle egret on top of the cow 'cause they typically hitch a ride.

It all felt like somewhat of a caravan.

But that's south coast.

I have been experimenting a lot with water levels and water lines.

And specifically the perspective change above and below water.

How do I bring that perspective in without completely changing lanes, as far as my solid white background, and completely removed and devoid of context and region.

And I found if I could consider the water to be negative space the same way the white is air, but it's still negative space.

It's just two elements.

I can just fold it into the rest of my work and I can merge those with birds, and I can put it into one composition.

I'm particularly interested in that piece right now, because it opens the door to me using the same perspective of other ecosystems and brackish water and swamp, and I can really play with the land and sea at the same time.

When I was looking into these early naturalist painters, if you were to take the same approach, the environment wouldn't be devoid of manmade context, that's clearly there.

So if you were to take an Audubon style, the world of birds, a book of birds, and you were to fold in what we've done to the landscape, how would that show up?

The LA 1 sign for me is iconic in its own way.

And it also adds this sense of place that can really give you as much context as I can give without a background.

I don't think of my work as realism as it does exist.

I think of it as realism in the form that it could exist.

So, for instance, like we have with the turtle shell, I was drawn to turtles for a little while, and specifically the shell.

I liked the form, I liked the shape and the color and texture, and I found that to be a really, just interesting vessel, and I wanted that to be the subject of a piece.

The turtle shell is somewhat morbid, and it's very hard to distract from the idea of death.

So I was searching for something that was alive, something that was coming back and growing.

Looking at plants that were regionally specific to wherever turtles are, some kind of fresh water plant.

And that led me to the lotus.

And the lotus has a lot of symbology to it on its own.

Its height was right, the shape of the lotus leaf was somewhat shell-like in composition.

I've drifted more into wanting my work to be able to capture the south as a region.

Having traveled a lot, there is a particular fondness I have, and an affinity that I've become more connected to as I've drifted away.

I'm self trained.

I was always drawing and painting since I could hold the pencil.

I can barely remember when I was in kindergarten and I was learning to write the alphabet, and I was turning all of my alphabet letters into little monsters, just adding arms and teeth, and the teacher actually noticed that.

I thought she was actually gonna lecture me on it, but she's just like, oh, so you like the draw, that's neat.

[upbeat rock music] - [Reporter] See more at chasemullenstudios.com.

Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

Multidisciplinary artist, one of Juana Valdez, created rest ashore.

A large scale multi-channel video installation that explores the migration experience and the refugee crisis.

We visit Locust Projects, the longest running alternative art space in Miami, Florida, for the story.

[calm music] - [Juana] When artists speak, they simultaneously are using imagery.

We're translating everything we do in our minds visually.

It's an automatic, we don't even think about it.

It became really clear to me that I needed to work with the moving image.

There's several sequence that take place underwater, and there there was no other way of representing that.

I'm Juana Valdes, I was born in Cuba, and I came with my family to the United States in 1971 through the Freedom Flights.

The exhibition is Rest Ashore.

The idea was always to do a video in which there would be no physical bodies in the video.

I wanted the viewer who walked into the space to feel like they were occupying that space, that sort of sensation that they were part of this experience.

As a Cuban, I know what it means to migrate by sea because we have been, as a community, experiencing this for the last 50 years.

And so I wanted to use that personal experience, and that knowledge, and that understanding.

And I wanted to take that and then open it up to the greater global crisis that is happening.

And especially this started to happen in 2015 in Europe because of the Syrian refugees.

When we think about migration right now, we imagine people in third world countries coming to America, or even to Europe, for escaping poverty, sometimes war, famine, but we are experiencing the pandemic right now that have made, like if you were in some cities, people have chosen to leave the city and go to the country.

So the whole idea also partly with the video and not having an individual be represented in the video, was to deal with that.

That due to climate change, or due to some other situation, any one of us at any particular time right now, could or would be forced to migrate.

[calm music] When you first enter the space, it's you sort of dealing with the history of what you are about to encounter.

The very first thing you encounter is a wall of pallets.

So you really don't know what you're entering, and in that way, it kind of gets a little bit menacing.

And it was done intentionally because it was meant to give you the sensation that maybe you were entering the back of a shipyard, right?

And what it would be like if you were gonna be taking this kind of risky journey.

You go from being a person to also being thought of as cargo and as a package.

In here you're seeing the contemporary artwork.

The video takes you from one day in the life, almost.

The journey begins, and it takes you through the whole process of what would happen if maybe there was a cap size.

[water bubbling] The video ends very slowly with a sort of small view that then enlarged itself, or what seems like countless numbers of clothing that have washed up on the shore.

Then, slowly but surely, the video begins to expand and move up and you see the ocean again, and then the sunset, and you hear the motor almost very far in the distance.

And the journey begins again.

[water crashing] [upbeat music] - At Locust Projects, we're a place of yes for artists.

So we let artists really realize their wildest dreams, most ambitious ideas.

We're really unique in the Miami arts ecosystem in that way.

We commission artists to create these large scale site specific installations, so you'll never see these exhibitions in another place, only here at Locust while they're on view.

They're typically immersive, and we really give artists the opportunity to experiment in new media with new ideas.

In our 2020, '21 season, we're focusing on Miami women artists and turning the space over to them.

So we've seen in this season Christina Peterson, who was able to realize a project she had been wanting to do for more than 10 years, which was to create a cemetery.

To cover the floors with pine needles and to fill the room with the sounds of the song called In The Pines.

And actual tombstones that memorialize really important figures from south Florida's history, but also memorialize the creatures that have been lost due to development in the Pine Rocklands of the Everglades.

In the case of Juana Valdez, again, you're really seeing Locust Projects mission in motion.

This is the first time that Juana has had the opportunity to work in video.

And here she's doing it in massive, large scale.

[upbeat music] Artists, in order to have careers, have to have exhibitions.

And that's where Locust Projects comes in.

A lot of artists will have their very first exhibition at Locust, and more established artists will be able to do something they weren't able to do before.

[upbeat music] - [Reporter] For more information about Valdez and her work, go to juanamvaldez.com.

And here's a look at this week's art history.

[upbeat music continues] Up next, we head to Ohio to meet artist Matthew Mohr, the creator of lightning sprites.

Powered by the sun, these kinetic sculptures resemble everyday objects, and in their whimsy, they inspire.

[bright piano music] - For awhile there, I couldn't produce anything when the pandemic hit.

The art just went away.

And so I was looking around for inspiration, and it just, one morning looking at the kitchen with my cup of tea, looking out my window, I was like, I love these things.

I've had these solar powered toys for, you know, years now, that keep going.

There's something just simple and lovely about the platform.

But what if we combine that with a more open ended approach to art?

What if we make it a little more open for interpretation?

And sculpture and solar powered and kinetic and boom, it was just there.

[bright music] And so then the journey became about how can I make something that expresses the way I'm feeling about the pandemic?

Here I'm drawing different possible heads for these creatures.

Again, thinking about how we interact with these forms daily.

The prescription pill bottle, or this is the top for a tube that you twist and you can open.

But then the pandemic put us right back in that moment where these very mundane tasks become much larger actions in our daily lives.

And I just thought, you know, this is a moment that's worth considering.

I actually worked with Susan Van Pelt Petry to work on a series of gestures.

Susan created a gesture that switches from recoil, which is what the pandemic made us all do, to reaching.

Reaching forward and grasping something new.

When you see this, I essentially translated it into sketches.

So here we are at reaching and it's gonna go back to recoil.

And so now they're being modeled by Todd Perkins, who's doing the engineering behind them and we're working together on these, and they're gonna be great.

[lively music] [tools clattering] - [Todd] Just need to remove the support material now, that's the part you see here.

- So I continued to work on them, and then I got a call from from David and Janet at the Dublin Arts Council saying, we'd like you to do an installation for the Art and Wellness Show.

[peaceful music] - They're whimsical, they're fun, you're curious about them when you see them.

They look like common objects, some parts of it, so there's a familiarity there, but there's also a a strangeness about them like an otherworldly.

And I think that's where Matthew came up with the sprites idea.

- Lightning sprite is essentially a moment, a flash of lightning above the clouds.

It looks unearthly.

It has a reddish glow to it, it's only there for milliseconds, but it's like something you've never seen before.

And I thought about a lightning storm coming through Dublin and depositing these lightning sprites around the forests of Dublin, as if the lightning struck a tree, and left one of these little sculptures there.

[bouncy music] - If we come out together and experience art, it's a way to move through what we've been through the past year, and so we just hope that the art makes you laugh and gives you joy, and that's our goal.

[bouncy music continues] - We are at the beginning stages of technology that will enable us to explore many, many different ways of expression.

And I see these sculptures as being part of that dialogue.

- [Reporter] Find out more at dublinarts.org.

- That wraps it up for this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

We'd like to hear what you think.

So like us on Facebook, join the conversation on Twitter, and visit our webpage for features and to watch episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time, I'm Diane Masciale, thank you for watching WLIW Arts Beat.

- [Announcer] Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[bright music]