KTUU.com | Alaska's news and information source | Mountain View artists create unique, melting face art

Mountain View artists create unique, melting face art

by Leyla Santiago
Thursday, July 9, 2009

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Alaska has always been home to talented and eclectic artists, creative minds crafting masterpieces for everyone else to admire.

Erin Pollock and Steph Kese make unique art at their studio in Mountain View. They've worked together for five years and both are intrigued by the human face.

"It would be really nice to say that this is effortless and we're just artists," Kese said. "But we spend about 15, 16, 17 hours a day, probably seven days a week for the last four months."

The masks are faces of real people, reflecting scars and wrinkles that real life brings.

"You're staring right at this person for hours of for how long, and get to know them pretty well," Pollock said.

The face artists admit they're obsessed.

"It's pretty bad when you go to the coffee shop and you're just scoping out everybody's face," Kese said.

They say capturing the character of a person in a wax mask has become addicting.

"Usually they take like 30 hours to get to a place where they look like they have life in them," Kese said.

And that's just for one mask.

Once all is snipped, stirred and studied, facial features are copied quickly. Plaster and mold coat the entire face, and after 10 minutes of darkness and breathing through two straws, a new mask is born.

They've duplicated almost 100 faces seen in the crowds of Anchorage everyday.

But the masks are about to become even more radiant than they already are.

"We plant the colors inside," Pollock said. "So that maybe a red will shoot off the top of the head and a yellow off the bottom."

For that to happen, they have to do something most people would never do to a piece of art.

The fate of the faces is about to melt away in a rainbow of color.

"Each of the colors is distinct," Pollock said. "And sometimes crazy things happen like a chin will unattach itself and fly off in one direction."

But there's a bigger picture to it all -- the arson of art becomes the face of film. The melting faces are captured on film where they rise and fall within minutes.

"What comes out of that is a lot more interesting," Pollock said.

What looks so real seems to magically disappear.

"We want to keep making more, but we have a small studio," Kese said. "So we have to do something with them."    

The artists melt the masks in a controlled environment, and it is not something people should try at home.

Pollock and Kese will show the film of all the masks beginning at 5:30 p.m. on July 17 at the MTS Gallery in Mountain View.

Contact Leyla Santiago at lsantiago@ktuu.com