Terry Maker explores big picture questions with humor, plates and deep thinking

Artist Terry Maker isn’t afraid to explore the fundamental nature of life, the stuff most of us put aside for ... well, later.

Life and death. Desire. Good and evil. The meaning of life. The transient nature of everything. Joy. Faith. Transcendence.

In “Reckoning,” a retrospective of her work running through June 3 at the Fine Arts Center, she juggles (prods, excavates) those ideas in moving, funny, puzzling and sometimes quite lickable works of art.

“A lot of my work comes from looking at one little strange thing, like a finger nail clipping,” she says, “and considering that odd piece of our DNA and how it might be included in something. The best kind of art comes from that kind of thing. It’s about the big picture, but that minutiae, that little stuff in life is kind of the fodder for my work.”

Take her “Jawbreaker” series, which pops up in various iterations in the show. In one panel of the triptych “Jaw Breaker Bars,” for instance, the colored circles in resin float like candy planets in a universe of pumpkin custard.

Beautiful. Slick. Touchable. A pleasing exercise in color and symmetry, right?
Maker, though, unfurls a different story.

“I was struck by this idea of candy,” says Maker, a Boulder artist. “Particularly jawbreakers.”
“You know, you can’t just bite into one,” she goes on. “So you lick and lick and lick and lick until you get into the good stuff inside. It’s a metaphor for life’s search for meaning: We settle for these temporal sweets that may not have all that much meaning in life.”

The duality of the everyday and the eternal, the decorative and deep surfaces throughout Maker’s work.

“My desire is to keep mining materials, the various detritus of our lives. Almost like Leonardo drew. Almost like intellectual archeology,” she says. “Of course, a lot artists use found objects, but ... I want to find a place of reinvention, to kind of consign it to a new place of meaning.”

Maker creates work like “Side 9” (which arranges shards of LPs into a dense starburst) and “Superscopic 1” (a rough-hewn complex of pill bottles, pencils, pens, markers, erasers and shredded medical documents) by assembling the parts into bundles held together by resin. Then she slices the amalgamations with an industrial band saw. What emerges is a thin (or thick) strata of reinvented matter.

Perhaps no work speaks so directly to Maker’s aesthetic than a 16-by-20-foot wall work  called “Bitter,” which, with “Sweet,” is her “The Garden of Ninevah.”

From a distance, “Bitter” looks like dangerous wallpaper: vertical stripes of shades of green that would be right at home in Tim Burton film. Walk closer and you can almost smell the fat fragrance of of the candied yellows and greens. Horns (or are they thorns?) — thimble sized and big enough for a healthy rhino — grow out of the stripes, which are colored resin.
And from hidden speakers: murmurs of desire.

“I want to have total peace,” says one voice.

Another voice:  “I want to be free of debt.”

Then, “I want to wake up not worried.” Then, “I don’t know what I want.”

 “Sweet,” which faces “Bitter,” is honeycombs alternating with golden panels and large droplets. That’s perfection, that Eden that is “The Garden of Ninevah,” and “Bitter” is the world made by our desire.

“We can not stop wanting. Even in Paradise there was this want," says Maker, who mines the Bible for the starting point of many works. "But the want is also kind of perilous. If you close to those thorns, you get close to the dancer that you’ll get stuck or pierced. Which I have, by the way. I got one in my ear.”

Maker is funny and she brings that playfulness to her work. Her jawbreaker belt is made to fit a 600-pound shut in. The 100-foot snake that sits in the middle of the gallery is made of bread-shaped slices, which are filled with shredded money. It’s called “Reptilius Consumerus Devourus.”

“I have a tendency to be very ambitious. I take myself too seriously. Really, I do. It’s kind of the human condition.”

Typical of Maker, her humor has a darker meaning as well.

“There’s a tremendous need for levity because no matter how great your art piece is or your writing is or your song is, ultimately it’s going to end and fade away. ... Inside the humor is this soberness for me. Inside the humor is this underbelly of mortality.”