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.
When those things died, I would try to come in
and take those organisms that had expired
and turn them into something beautiful.
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My dad has been a bird nut his entire life,
and so everywhere we ever lived,
first thing if we moved into a new house,
he'd go out and start building these giant aviaries,
and he would fill them with beautiful birds.
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 was 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'd dedicated their lives to feel the same way,
and almost all of them do.
[ rooster crowing ]
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.
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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 planet.
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.
They had these terribly preserved,
horribly presented beetles in these frames,
and it blew my mind.
I -- I mean, I'd 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 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 going to 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 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 going to 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.
Oh!
So I was kicked out of my own studio
because some people couldn't handle
the smell of... [ coughs ]
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 large specimen.
It's not taxidermy.
I'm not skinning the animal
and then 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.
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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.
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 no one even knows that there's an issue
until it's too late.
And so hopefully there is some hope
for the Santa Catalina rattle-less rattlesnake.
What was 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!"
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We're 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 ]
TRAVIS EDDY: 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?