- In this edition of "Arteffects," mosaic on reclaimed materials.

(soothing music) - [Elizabeth] I feel that the reclaimed materials I use add character to the piece.

(soothing music) - [Beth] A vibrant outdoor art exhibition.

- I love the concept of energy.

I love the concept, you know, and, and, and visuals of movement, which I think have strong connections to life.

- [Beth] Computer-generated drawings.

- [Patrick] Over the course of several hundred works, he did more than anyone else to explore the parameters of what was possible.

- [Beth] And soap art.

- [Kathryn] That's why I think soapers in general, we don't compete with each other, we just compliment each other.

Because there's so much variety out there, and everybody adds their own personality to it.

- [Beth] It's all ahead on this edition of "Arteffects."

(upbeat music) - Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, The June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno members, and by - Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan, and welcome to "Arteffects".

For our first segment, Meet mosaic artist Elizabeth Wright.

She creates colorful mosaics with stained glass, rusted metal, old wood, and anything she can get her hands on.

The result is a beautiful mosaic with great texture and meaning.

(soothing music) - [Elizabeth] Mosaic art is any time you take smaller pieces of hard material, glass, tile, stone to create a picture or an image with those items.

So anything in that description is considered a mosaic.

I don't think I'm a typical artist in that you don't look in mine and go, oh, she does this one thing.

That's what absolutely pulls me into mosaic, is that I can go in so many different directions, but I use rusty things I find in the desert, dishes, pottery, beads, stone.

The biggest thing I use is cut stained glass.

(soothing music) The first thing I think of is what substrate am I gonna put it on?

And that substrate is the bottom.

What, where, what am I going to create it on?

We were out in the Santa Rosa Mountains in Nevada, and I found this big deposit of these flat rocks.

And I was like, "Oh my gosh, these are going to be perfect for mosaics."

But then I get down to my little pieces on nipping.

So I hand nip, nip, nip, nip, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

I'm gonna use silicone to glue those pieces down, and then I'm gonna tape it off.

Here you have this beautiful piece of art you've created, and you're gonna take a black grout, and you're gonna smother the whole thing of your beautiful piece you've created, which is a little unnerving.

And then you clean, and you clean, and you clean, and you clean.

The cleaning will be toothpicks and Q-tips.

You want to get everything out, so you can see every piece of glass in that piece.

So it is a little crazy when you see this process, when I'm doing that, but it's very meditative, and it's, you know, I get some good music going and it's just, I can just get lost in what I'm doing.

So it's, it's a wonderful way to relax.

Cutty has over 50 colors of glass.

To get the, the shades and all of the inspiration, I actually have to mix the glass, you know, almost like a painter, where if I put two colors of glass next to each other, they will start to give the illusion of another color.

And Cutty also has seven different colors of grout.

And I took the time and you have to tape it off, grout one section, pull that off, grout the next section, tape the rest of it off.

It's a really intensive process.

I like that as my art has evolved, I use reclaimed materials, literally in everything I do.

It's not about the economics of it.

I feel that the reclaimed materials I use add character to the piece.

So let's say I want to make a sunflower.

You know, you can put it in a simple frame, and that's okay, that's okay.

But to put it in a, with a rusty piece of metal, we found out in the desert, and then to put it on a, an old piece of barn wood just makes that sunflower so much more special.

And it makes it where you can envision that sunflower near an old barn or out in a field.

It's amazing the rusty things we have found in the desert, and you're like, "What is this?

What was this?"

But what I see coming from this is, you know, I can see it in my mind.

I see something happening.

And it's not just what people think, you don't just smash dishes and glue 'em onto something.

(laughs) Not to make it art worthy, you need to actually cut those into shapes and create things.

And it makes a beautiful, colorful piece.

And I think people really are like, "Wow, that's those were old dishes."

And they can see that.

But I just think it's also environmentally a good thing to do.

If I'm taking something that's just rusting away in the desert, and why not?

And that adds something, and its character.

And I'm also just taking some garbage out of the desert and I'm making something out of it.

It's amazing when you put some cut stain glass, and some beads, and it just turns it into this old thing you found in the desert into something very beautiful.

- Find more of Wright's artwork at elizabethwrightmosaics.com.

Jordan Wong, AKA WONGFACE, is a graphic designer, illustrator and artist.

Inspired by Asian art, video games and comic books, his artwork is full of imagination, whimsy, and movement.

We take a trip to the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, to view his outdoor exhibition, "The 10,000 Things."

(mystic music) (bell chiming) (mystic music) - [Jordan] So "The 10,000 Things" is a Dallas phrase that refers to, you know, the universe, the world, pretty much all that's in existence.

And it, it kind of relates also to the, to the imagery of of things that are flowing, ebbing and flowing, and just always shifting.

I, I love the concept of energy.

I love the concept of, you know, and and visuals of movement, which I think have strong connections to life, to narratives, to human beings and growing, a lot of the choices that I make connect to that.

(bell chiming) My grandfather, he would take like computer paper and like, you know, cut it up into like smaller squares, and just have like a big stack of it in the kitchen for me to draw on.

I could spend hours drawing, you know.

- [Interviewer] What, what were you drawing?

- [Jordan] Oh, cartoon characters, comic book characters, you know, video game characters, things, you know, things that I was watching on TV, like Sonic the Hedgehog, Dragon Ball Z, all, all those things.

(bell chiming) This is Sun Wukong, and he's one of the main characters in Journey to the West, which is a classic Chinese novel written long time ago.

And there's a lot of, you know, adaptations of this character.

And I grew up watching the "Journey to the West" TV show that was made back in the eighties.

So my grandmother would record this show, and and have it on VHS tapes for me to, to watch.

And the stories just fantastical and and really appeals to your imagination.

(bell chiming) Someone asked me recently, like, you know, what, what is the use of rings and halos?

And I think they're a great motif to kind of connect to this idea of the divine or, or otherworldly, you know, something that is beyond this physical realm you know, to have this, this like halo or ring kind of like float around, (laughs) around you like 24/7.

It's just like this really cool imaginative you know, scene.

(bell chiming) I like using clouds because I feel like they're a great imagery that communicates wonder, imagination, whimsy.

And you can use them in in all sorts of different ways.

You know, whether they're like kind of really fluffy and and playful.

And now that I'm thinking about Chinese and Asian artwork, the clouds are are really used, especially in images of heaven, and then things that are divine beyond the realm of what we know.

(bell chiming) Yeah, hiding little versions of myself is, is kind of been like a new thing, just because the works I've been doing recently are are just so detailed, and there's so much going on that, it's like, "Oh yeah, why not get away with hiding this like small version of myself?"

And it's kind of become a way to quote, unquote, sign my, my works.

(bell chiming) (mystic music) A lot of the work that I'm doing now, and also in the past, the common thread is, is, is this idea of like perseverance, encouragement, growth.

Now I'm exploring like, again, in relation to like those Dallas ideas, the ebbs and flow of life, you know, being, being a little softer, when when things are are tense and hard and yeah, just kind of finding a balance, and and maybe bliss in, in, in this crazy life that we live, which, you know, I think applies to not just the times we live now, but in the past and times that we're going to live.

So it's, it's, it's weird how it's like all connected, and and just always in flux.

- Learn more at akronartmuseum.org.

Now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

Mosaic is considered one of the oldest forms of art.

In what millennium was the first known use of mosaics?

Is the answer A, fourth millennium BC, B, third millennium BC, C second millennium BC, or D first millennium AD?

Stay tuned for the answer.

At the University of New Mexico, the computer program, Art1, gave artists the opportunity to use technology to render works of art.

One of these artists was Frederick Hammersley, who made over 150 groundbreaking illustrations in this manner.

Here's the story.

(upbeat music) - [Patrick] The movement that started with computers at UNM was really cool.

The program Art1 becomes the medium that the artist uses.

And it's an entirely new medium.

What happened was, a whole bunch of artists took over technology that was meant for other purposes, like payrolls and nuclear weapons.

And they played with it.

They made something visually interesting, and completely unexpected out of it.

Hammersley was the kind of an artist to function well within limits.

Over the course of several hundred works, he did more than anyone else to explore the parameters of what was possible with art form.

He he was very interested in, within, within a boundary, if the boundaries were clear, his type of art was to move all around to every possible corner of that sort of walled garden, exploring the possibilities up and down, in and out, back and forth.

(upbeat music) It's reducing a visual idea to a set of instructions, and and computers that this is still true, computers are very stupid.

They have to be told exactly everything down to the last parameter.

And so this kind of thing appealed to Hammersley.

Working through a language like that.

He was, that was his kind of thing.

He flourished under it, for the better part of two years.

He devoted almost all of his attention to creating art works with Art1.

(upbeat music) Hammersley had a great sense of humor.

He was always making jokes.

He, he'd often gave his works titles that were, that had a sort of a play on words in them, like, "Take a moment for you," and then in a prominent place in, in the work would be the letter U, you know?

And so he was always, he was, he was looking for ways to use humor, to kind of demystify art and make it more user-friendly.

What's going on is, that they're taking a line printer that prints numbers and letters and math symbols, and they're using those symbols in a new way to, to take the old meaning out of them, and give them a new purely visual meaning, within the framework of a, a page of computer paper.

The big discussion back then was the two cultures.

We have a scientific culture and a literary culture, or an artistic culture, and they have nothing to say to each other.

After World War II, this was the, this was the cultural debate back then, because you have avant-garde art that very few people understand, and then you have avant-garde science, some of which is like top-secret.

Where's where's the meeting point?

Guess what?

Art1 is the meeting point.

What I loved about Hamersley's art is its, is its originality basically.

He had a show of these works in Albuquerque, and the reviewer said, "It's sort of interesting to see something used for tax forms now becoming art."

And that's the biggest surprise of this whole thing.

You don't expect it.

You're like, "What's this?"

And any time an artist gets you to sort of wonder where you are at that moment, then they've succeeded.

They've challenged the way you look at stuff.

And Hammersley, he accomplished that.

Art1 can expand our understanding of what art is, because look, the computer that they use did the payroll for UNM, it participated in the Manhattan Project, making nuclear weapons.

It did the scientific and mathematical calculations for the science departments.

And guess what?

It made art.

It, it was something, it was a, it was a corner of creativity in a very esoteric and even top-secret world.

That's that's inspiring.

That's a cool thing.

- And now let's review this week's art quiz.

Mosaic is considered one of the oldest forms of art.

In what millennium was the first known use of mosaics?

Is the answer A, fourth millennium BC, B, third millennium BC, C, second millennium BC, or D, first millennium AD?

And the answer is B, third millennium BC.

At Wild Sierra Soap, artist Kathryn Howard demonstrates how making soap is both an art and a science.

Using locally sourced ingredients, she handcrafts one of a kind bars of soap with care and attention.

(relaxing music) - [Kathryn] The beauty is, is that you've got the world is, you know, wide open.

There is so many possibilities.

And that's why I think sopers in general, we don't compete with each other.

We just compliment each other.

Because there's so much variety out there, and everybody adds their own personality to it.

So it's just a ton of fun.

I'm Kathryn Howard.

I'm a high school teacher.

I'm certified in math, science, and I formally taught home ec for 15 years.

So I use those skills to blend them together, because you need to have a background in all of that to put together a, a nice bar of soap for someone.

Today, we're gonna be making a vegan soap, but I also do goat milk bars.

So some of the bars are goat milk.

Goat milk has a lot of emollient properties, and a lot of vitamins that adds to your skin.

Wild Sierra Soap starts with our snow.

All of our water is supplied through a local well, and that well is supplied from mountain feed, off of Mount Rose.

So we're gonna start out with getting your ingredients together and your materials, and with anything, this is just like any science experiment, safety is a key.

So you need goggles.

I wear an apron, that's plastic and gloves.

Get all your materials going, because once you start soaping, soap is not forgiving.

It moves and you've got to be ready to move with it.

So we're going to start out with mixing water with lye, and let that cool down.

I like to soap at room temperature.

And then in another bucket, I've mixed together all of the oils that we're using, we're going to use a stick blender, and that's going to blend together the lye water into the oils.

It's saponified, fancy smancy word for lyes blending with oils.

So when they blend together, and you'll see it comes together like a vanilla pudding.

From that point, you can add some colorants, you can add fragrances, then you're ready to pour it into your molds.

Once it's poured in the molds, then it has to incubate.

Soap is exothermic, produces its own heat.

So sometimes I'll let it just sit in the oven.

Sometimes I'll wrap it in a blanket.

Good to let it sit for at least 24 to 36 hours.

During that time, soap goes through what we call a gel phase.

Glycerin forms naturally in the bars.

And it also allows any of your colors to really pop.

I like to, to go through gel phase, 'cause I enjoy that pop of color, and I want glycerin in my bars.

I think that's really nice.

At that point, then the bars are cut.

They're stamped with our little stamp that says, "Handmade with love!"

And then they go into a curing cabinet for about four to six weeks, where they dry.

So that's pretty much from start to go, and then we have to package it up, and get it out to the customer.

(relaxing music) This is be about three years now, that I've been working on soaps.

I was gifted some super nice soap.

And then when it was all gone, I went to look for it and it was $10 a bar.

And I thought, I bet with my science background, my math background, a little bit of YouTube videos, a little bit of reading.

I can start putting this together.

So I started playing around.

My eldest daughter said when I was making the first bars of soap, she looked and she said, "Mom, I thought you were making soap, what is that?"

So the first bars looked anything but that, the soap seized on me, it was ugly.

So it took a little bit of messing with formulas, doing more calculations, because every oil that you use, needs a different amount of lye with it.

So now all those formulas are printed out.

They're in a binder, they're got plastic sleeves over them.

So that they're in one good place and I don't lose them.

Sometimes fragrances will also interact with the, with the oils in the soap as it's going through, and will change.

For instance, I'm using a vanilla fragrance today.

When we started pouring the bears for the soap we're gonna make today, they're, they're white, they're polar bears.

Within three days, they turn into black bears, because the fragrance is reacting with the oils.

And it turns it.

Same with micas, and some of the oxides that are used for coloring, they're all natural, same as you find in your makeup, but when they're reacting, some of them are changed.

I have one that starts out as a beautiful fuchsia, by the time it finishes though, it goes blue.

I had a couple surprises that I did not expect that to happen.

And you just went, "What?"

And you, you look at it and you're like, "What happened?"

Now lots of times, it's not maybe what you wanted, but someone else goes, "Well, I think that color is great."

And you're like, "Okay, but I was shooting for, you know, green and I got orange, you know what happened here?"

I always tell the customers, like, "If you really like a swirl in that bar, you better pick it up, because I can't reproduce it again.

It's done by hand and no two bars are ever the same, even within the same loaf."

So it, that's part of the fun, is gettin' to see what that looks like.

Making the cuts are always the fun piece.

Wide currently.

All right, let's see.

All right, is see a nice gradual green.

Darker on the bottom.

Getting super light on top.

Super perfect, love that.

I think I want it to have something that I could probably use rather than just have around.

You know, I think over the course in anybody's life, you mess with different things in different art forms.

So this was just a new medium that I'd never tried before.

And it was a challenge.

It was a challenge to work the chemistry, to work the math, to work the art and put it all together.

So I, I enjoy that and I still do.

That's part of it, to get it's like, create something new each time you, you go to make something and be able to, you know, sell it and share it with other friends.

- To see more, visit wildsierrasoap.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "Arteffects."

For more arts and culture, or to watch past episodes, visit pbsreno.org/arteffects.

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, The June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno members, and by (upbeat music)