Christopher Marley’s Exquisite Creatures: A Kalidescopic journey (Review)
I was reverent of bugs as a kid. I wanted to keep them as pets, I would catch and release, I would collect little winking lighting bugs to let them go overnight.
Christopher Marley, one would think, was the same as a child.
However, that thought would be incorrect.
He was a fan of Monsters. Capital M. In the opening video to his Exquisite Creatures exhibit in downtown Seattle, near the ferry station at the waterfront, it’s hard not to be amused by the brief but sharp images of his monsters (very Shel Silverstein, if I had to compare them to any other illustrator) that he drew during his youth… and call back to them when exploring the birds, butterflies, and yes, bugs, amongst the other beasts in the preserved collection of Christopher Marley’s artwork.
The exhibit is a loop.
You begin with overwhelming mosaics of weevils and beetles, not flat photos, but actual preserved insects mounted on a platform and… glazed?
(There was a meet-the-artist on Monday, the day after I went to the exhibit, but I wasn’t able to make it to the event because of my consistent prior monthly committment to Monday’s Everett Poetry night.) Unfortunately there wasn’t really a lot of talk about the technical, nuts-and-bolts side of his preservation techniques. But he did say, both in the video and on one of the exhibit panels, that the animals are not taxidermied, but “preserved”, so that will be my phrasing in this review.
Another piece from near the front was the Lanterfly formation.
Their wings are gorgeous, much like a dragonfly in their stained-glass duality of scaled translucent wing-breadth. While they do not light up, the display certainly lights up the room with its shocking beauty.
I took dozens of photos while at the exhibit however I can only share so many with you so we’ll have to speed walk through some of the other parts of the exhibit.
With Marley’s exhibit, we are confronted with the beauty of the “Other” of animals. How they are like us, but so very, very different. How they ate, slept, and even dreamed, but also how very alive they look after his preservation techniques – as though they could wiggle a tentacle or antennae at you.
Of particular interest to me was the small but powerful staged piece of art: “Miserly”.
I spent a long time working for the diamond industry. Well, long is relative, of course, but four years out of my nearly 20 years of customer service was spent in the role of a diamond-and-jewelry consultant for a company that shall not be named.
He’s not wrong. Diamonds, by themselves, are only worth what we are willing to pay for them. We categorize them by their apparent clarity, overlooking that sometimes inclusions like additional gemstones embedded in the diamond are to be treasured. At the same time, If you take quartz and hold it up next to an uncut diamond, you almost couldn’t tell the difference. It’s only in the cut that you get the reflective light that makes diamonds shimmer- but then you’re paying for the skill and labor of the original diamond cutter, and the finished product, rather than the original uncut stone.
(I explore this a little bit in my short story “Rock Candy“. But enough about me.)
There was a section devoted to larger specimens, and although I have photos of the ginormous crabs and so forth, I am choosing the corpse lily for it’s size and neutral-colored beauty. Check out the picture of my hand behind the case for the scale of this gorgeous monster blossom.
One of the rules is that you can’t touch the artwork – and for good reason, no doubt!! Most artwork is a touch-with-your-eyes sort of experience – 2 dimensional paintings and so on. Having had a bug collection (only once and once was enough) it was heartbreaking to see the bugs I collected lose their legs and gain broken wings from failure to handle them with care in my youth. I’ve no doubt that these items on display are extremely delicate, even in their preservation.
While much of the exhibit includes colors upon colors, there is a section dedicated to the stark contrast of black and white, using monochrome to tell stories that invite the eye to see deeply into beautiful creatures from all over the world, and to lose yourself in thought about how they fit together like puzzle pieces.
Using a crystal agate to explore the shape and movement of a Blacktip Shark from Brazil, Marley invites us to consider beauty that we each hold within ourselves and within each creature that lives around us. The warmth and glow from within that we all have is echoed or even mirrored in our animal companions and even creatures around us.
In Singularity, one of the last pieces that you see before the gift shop, you find yourself hypnotically entranced by a spiral of terrapins- turtles and tortoises preserved in a mosaic that flows from a thick outer spiral to a thinner curved cone. It seems to stretch inward on the canvas, or perhaps canvas is not the right word but “mounting box” instead.
There is beauty in these creatures, in their delicate symmetry. Marley’s eye for detail and pairing the absurd with the beautiful is not to be missed.
Epilogue:
I found a few little things like the graffiti bugs leading up to the location (which likely has no actual correlation to the exhibit itself).
I also made a friend just before going inside.
I think I’ll call him Fred. Fred, thank you for holding still for your photo. 😍
It’s been a while since I wrote an art review, but I truly enjoyed this exhibition and more people need to see it.
Exquisite Creatures by Christopher Marley is a stationary exhibit in Seattle at the moment but it’s not guaranteed to stay at the waterfront forever. Feel free to check out the link in order tickets in advance or buy tickets at the door.
The location is:
EXQUISITE CREATURES EXHIBIT
SEATTLE WATERFRONT
900 ALASKAN WAY
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98104
NOW OPEN THROUGH MARCH 2027
Personally I feel that it was well worth the price of admission and walking all the way from the international district down to the waterfront where the location was and back.
