- In this edition of Artistic Horizons exhibiting ancient Marine reptiles, I'm dealing with something that is really bigger than us as people, both on the physical scale and also on the time scale.

I think that is the most important message of deep time - Finding oneself through painting.

- The biggest thing is capturing the spirit of that person.

You're gonna see that in every piece.

So I, I love that part of my work.

- Art vending machines.

- I really wanted art to become accessible.

I wanted to activate space and I wanted people to feel good, feel value, feel nostalgia, feel joy.

- It's all ahead on this edition of Artistic Horizons.

Hello, I'm Mark Ro, and this is Artistic Horizons.

In this segment, we take a trip to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno to experience an exhibition that shares a story of the prehistoric past.

Through science, history, art and design visitors are introduced to the giant sea creatures that called Nevada Home.

Take a look.

- The Nevada Museum of Art is the only accredited art museum in the state of Nevada, and we also have a really unique focus.

We have a research center that's dedicated to art and environment.

A few years ago we saw a major article in the New York Times about this huge IA source skull that had been excavated in the desert of Nevada.

And we soon realized the paleontologist behind that was Dr. Martin Sander from Bond Germany.

These special fossil fines from Nevada often get taken out of Nevada and housed elsewhere at museums in California, in Utah.

And we wanted to find a way to bring those back, bring them close to their point of origin, and to create an entire exhibition and an experience around this animal.

We know as the ich.

Theo, - What is an ior?

The name means simply the fish lizard.

The I source of the Jurassic look very familiar to us.

They look like a modified dolphin, but the ones from Nevada, from the Triassic period is something that has evolved before in a group called Moosa.

So it's really kind of a sea monster design.

It's a fierce head and then a very long body with four fins as a long fin snout.

And there is an enormous eye that is nine inches in diameter.

So like this, a large eye will indicate one of two things or two things together, either high visual acuity or low light conditions.

For low light, you can do two things.

You can either be active at night or you can go deep into the ocean.

These giant eyes evolved very early on and then there remained a hallmark of I theor evolution to the end of when they died out about 90 million years ago.

- Dr. Martin Sander is a paleontologist who has been working here in Nevada for over 30 years.

He continues to return to Nevada because Nevada truly is one of the Globe's epicenters for research when it comes to ichor fossils and paleontology.

- Martin Sander has found 80% of all the IY fossils in Nevada over the period of the last 30 years.

Us - In August of 2024, we convened a group of journalists and paired them with Dr. Martin Sander for a trip out to the Augusta Mountains.

You really can't fathom the scale of the desert and the location where these fossils are found until you see it in person.

- From my personal experience, I have fun asking the people.

Do you know where the Augusta Mountains are?

The Augusta Mountains are a small and extremely remote mountain range of Nevada.

And to visualize the remoteness, basically it's two hours east of Lovelock, two hours south of Winnemucca, and then it's three hours northwest of Austin and three hours northeast of Fallon.

If you look around, none of the mountains here is quite as rugged as this one.

The good news is that it gives us the steep slopes that will provide us with the fossils.

If we want to find fossils, we don't want to have grass growing on them.

We want to see the bare rock or the bare dirt.

The bad news is that we have to climb it or fly.

Today we are in the far reaches near the end of Fav Canyon, in the Augusta Mountains, and we are an altitude as nearly 6,000 feet in a ior quarry.

The fossil that is largely taken out from here is a big IOR nickname, Martin one.

For each of these fossils, of course we keep a field log plus a photo album.

So you see how heavy these blocks are?

- Probably like this, right?

- Does it give you a fit?

I think it must be something like that.

- Push it still there, - Right?

Yeah, I think that's, that's looks pretty good.

Okay, so we'll leave it like this.

We left part of this in the field, which we knew, but we didn't know about that bone.

And sometimes it's really hard to see these bones because it was dark too.

It was dark.

And because they're very black in the rock and when their weather, then they, their color becomes much more obvious.

We have some ribs that we have sort of reflect the discovery situation.

- I think one of the most important parts of the process of doing deep time was trekking out to the desert with Martin and his scientists to the site where the specimens are still in the rock.

And then spending the day there and coming back with a little tiny rock and then coming back the three and a half hours down the mountains again to the base camp.

So this is really skin in the game and I think it's not convenient, it's inconvenient, but that really gives you almost like a physical appreciation for what you're actually dealing with.

- These fossils from the Nevada desert became ever more important.

And then eventually the idea grew that we should display them to the public and in particular the people of Nevada.

And this then came to pass in a cooperation between the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and the Nevada Museum of Fart.

- Deep Time Sea Dragons of Nevada is a major exhibition in our 10,000 square feet of galleries.

When we started putting this exhibition together, we knew that it had to be something special because it was going to be in an art museum.

And so we invited Nick Hoffer Moss to collaborate on the design so that it would take us beyond a traditional natural history museum exhibition.

- I grew up in Germany's probably most boring city called Casa, which would turn every five years into Germany's most exciting city because it's home of Documenta.

Documenta is one of the biggest international art fairs, contemporary art, big installations.

And it would transform the whole place for a hundred days.

And for me as a child, it was so fascinating.

'cause of course, you know, from this perspective, everything is much bigger and you don't ask why something is, you just take it in and you are just fascinated in wonderment, recreating this kind of wonderment and fascination.

That's my driver for designing exhibitions.

I am most interested in how the digital finds its way into the physical and how the physical finds its way back into the digital and trying to find, capture the, the essence of the digital and bring it back into the space and make it tangible and to somehow relate to our human scale and our human sophistication as, as people who have so many different senses at the same time.

That's something that, that I'm really passionate about.

- We titled the Exhibition Deep Time because we are asking our visitors to look back in time, 250 million years.

This was a time when Nevada was completely submerged beneath the waters of an ancient ocean.

- Deep time Sea Dragons of Nevada is an exploration on scale.

I would say it's an exploration of physical scale.

And for me, even more importantly, as in the title, it's an exploration of timescale in relationship to our own timescale as human beings.

We're talking about 250 million years.

So for me to imagine a thousand years, a 10,000 years, a hundred thousand years, a million years, 10 million years, and so on and so on.

It is so abstract.

We're so caught up in our daily lives, in our very narrow view of the world that we sometimes miss the the big picture and deep time is about the big picture.

- Deep Time Sea Dragons of Nevada looks at these fossils from both a scientific and an art perspective.

We have historical organization of the IOR fines, starting with the oldest fines by miners and by the King Survey in the 1860s.

And then we have three big bays, the first one being the work of John c Merriam and Annie Alexander in the Humboldt Range, mainly in a 1905 expedition.

Then we have the fifties and sixties work at Berlin IO State, parked by Charles Camp, that's the second bay.

And then the third bay is the work of my team in the Augusta Mountains.

Since 1991, the whole process of IOR collection is embodied by this place here, Berlin.

I Theor State Park Charles Camp professor of vertebra paleontology came to this place on a tip by a lady from Fallon on reporting IK theor.

And then he spent probably about six field seasons out of this place here, excavating IOR fossils.

We are here at the fossil shelter at Berlin ix, theor State Park.

And its general purpose is to preserve some of the IOR fossils in place.

We have IOR bones in the ground.

The most recent analysis found that we're probably looking at seven skeletons.

So we have ribs here.

I mean there's a rib cage here and there are also some ribs here.

The upper arm bones of these OSAs are just very short and stout.

This here is the shoulder girdle.

So here basically what we have here.

So then this is one of the upper arm bones.

This is the other upper arm bone.

Why is this place important?

Because when camp started here in the 1950s, then he recognized these are very large.

And that was the first glimpse where it became really clear.

Triassic osa are much bigger than the Jurassic ones.

Nevada is sort of my second home because I've never tallied up how many weeks or months in the end.

I have spent out in the Augusta Mountains in our camp.

And I've also learned to love the people of Nevada.

And I'm super happy now that the first time, really the people on a large scale get to see what is found in this state.

- When you encounter this exhibition, you'll not only encounter original fossils, spectacular fossils that have never been seen before, but you might turn the corner and encounter historical painting.

And then you might see a large scale digital immersive installation by a contemporary artist that really brings these animals to life.

- Such joy to be here today.

And what an effort to put all this together.

I am David Walker, I'm the CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art.

And we expect a huge turnout from the region, but also from around the globe for this exhibition.

- There's absolutely something for everyone in this exhibition, whether you are a lover of geology, whether you have an interest in paleontology, whether you love art and history.

But I think what's also fascinating is that we really delve into the popularity of the theor in our collective imaginations.

- If you ask me what is the most favorite part for this exhibition, for me personally, is I get to see a reunion of the fossils that I've collected over the 30 years in one place.

- Nevada has an amazing community of very active paleontologists as well as museums that are dedicated to telling all of these different stories related to the ich theor.

However, I think this is really the first major exhibition that brings all of those voices together.

So we've been fortunate to work with partners across museums and different fields to really celebrate this beloved state fossil that we all know as the atheist.

So, - And now for the artist quote of the week.

Up next, we travel to Ohio to meet contemporary mixed media artist, LAE Boyd, working with oil, acrylic sculpture and collage.

She creates striking figurative work that explores the human psyche.

Here's her story.

- My work is very much figurative.

I make really big paintings and I usually capture people that I know and my color palette is like super vibrant.

So that's probably gonna be the first thing people see and notice about my art.

The vibrancy is really speaking to just the lightness because my subject matter is a little heavy.

I talk a lot about self transformation and dissecting the psyche of a person.

So, you know, it can be heavy stuff 'cause I'm pulling from real experiences.

Sometimes it can be traumatic experiences that I'm pulling from.

So that color palette being light and bright and the skin of my subjects are magenta, that bright like pink color, it just like speaks to that lightness, like the light at the end of the tunnel kind of thing.

I went to Columbus College of Art and Design and I, I was kind of lost in school and, and I was really attracted to figurative work.

So that was always my thing.

But my is really what helped me understand the levels I could go with my art, the layering, the coloring and everything.

We were walking around, I was with David and Gavin, and we were just kind of doing our adventure, just exploring the city.

And I saw this guy with big muscles and he had a straw hat and a cigar and you know, he just, I, I was drawn to him because he, he looked like something that I already visualized.

I kind of had this idea coming to Cuba of what I wanted to capture.

So he, he was like the perfect picture moment.

I was shy to ask him for a picture.

It's a awkward exchange, right?

Like you're an American, they obviously know you're American and you have this, you know, camera.

And they're like, you know, you don't wanna feel like you're exploiting them in a way.

So, you know, he was just kind like, he was kind about it.

So I took two shots of him.

He took the cigar out of his mouth at one point and I directed him to put it back in his mouth.

And so it was kind of like me still doing what I do, staging and directing people.

'cause that's what I do in my work.

There was a blue building behind him.

So there's just so much color to work with, which also captures the essence of Cuba.

And I usually when I do this, I I am literally doing it as, as if I was going to do it on canvas.

So this is like the overall sketch.

And then, so I kind of started filling in his skin.

And so this is kind of close to what I'm gonna be using some, there's some purples in here, there's some lavender in there working with the shadows that were falling on his face, magenta's.

And then there's like some light pinks and, and so this is like usually the color palette I do work with when I'm making my figures.

And then in the background here, there's this like, texture of like oil pastel.

So like I'm gonna be using oil pastel for that.

And I, and I am gonna be using some oil pastel in his skin as well as kind of displayed on the procreate.

It's really cool 'cause you can like, you know, pick different brushes and pencils and pastels.

You, they can kind of like, you know, imitate that, what that texture would look like.

When I think about how I grew up, when I think about the things that I went through, I always look at it as like a means of like kind of shaping my purpose in life.

And I wanna help other people get to that same feeling.

We all have like trauma experiences that, you know, bigger, small, that shapes who we are.

And I think it's a very important for us to find that core self, even like, outside of what we've been through, you know, I'm motivated to let people know not to attach themselves to those experiences and become your own self.

I would say the biggest theme is the spirituality aspect.

And when I say spirituality, I'm not talking about religion.

I'm talking about literally we all have a spirit, like we all do.

And I think that that's the biggest thing is capturing the spirit of that person.

You're gonna see that in every piece.

So I, I love that part of my work.

It's, it's true to who I am too.

I've always been like a spiritual person.

It is possible to be from any background, any race or whatever religion, whatever beliefs you have, we all are connected in some way by our stories.

And, and you know, I think that it's important that people just take that they're, they're being seen through the art at the same time.

Like regardless of who they are, I want people to feel seen.

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

In West Palm Beach, Florida, one will come across vending machines that are stocked with affordable local art.

The first of its kind in the area.

Flamingo vending activates spaces and gives artists a special opportunity to share their work with the public.

Let's find out more.

- Hi, my name is Megan McKenna and I am an entrepreneur in West Palm Beach and I'm the founder of Flamingo Vending, an affordable art vending machine featuring local artists.

I really wanted art to become accessible.

I wanted to activate space and I wanted people to feel good, feel value, feel nostalgia, feel joy, and I feel like art is the best way to make that connection.

It also supports local artists.

So that was a big draw for me there.

These are actually hand painted canvas magnets from a local artist named Jess Kirby.

So she's a surrealist.

So these are two inch canvases and these are citrus butterflies.

We have strawberry jellyfish, so you can have your art gallery wherever you go on your mini fridge or wherever you need it.

When I first started, I had a list of art that I wanted to own and I approached them and I said, look, I'm a huge fan.

I would love, I'm working on this project, I'd love for you to be involved.

And they kind of took a leap of faith with me.

Since then, since we've grown and people got word of it, people have been filling out an application on my website, and then I curate from that list folks that are interested.

Currently I have, I think 51 artists.

So I either have a piece of their art on consignment or it might be in one of the machines or we're working on it.

These are prints done on canvas of hand painted art by a local artist, Melissa.

So she's, she does a lot of Florida scenes.

The Jupiter Lighthouse underwater creature.

She's really inspired by our local sea life.

Some artists have the tiny art already.

They might make something small that they would like to put in the machine, but a lot of times we work directly with the artists to curate something special, something unique just for the, the art vending machine.

With the affordable art in the vending machine, we're really trying to have people feel the joy, the emotional connection of art within their budget, within their time.

It's available to everybody.

It's, it's right here.

- And now here's a look at a few notable dates in art history.

And that wraps it up for this edition of Artistic Horizons.

For more arts and culture, visit wpbs tv.org.

Until next time, I'm Mark sro.

Thanks for watching.