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Artist Bernard Moriaz turns tossed
By Burl Burlingame
trash into treasured art pieces
Star-BulletinA RESTAURANT IS THE last place you'd expect to put up a display of trash. Except when it belongs to Bernard Moriaz, the proverbial other man whose trash is treasure.
Moriaz, who has a show running through May 6 at Cafe Che Pasta on Bishop Street, is attracted by the siren gleam of decaying chrome bumpers deep in the wildwood, by the feathery delicacy of rusty tin roofing, by cast-off circuit boards, by forgotten pump handles, by long-lost valves and pipes, by flotsam and jetsam and detritus.
He sees beauty in unlikely places, which is pretty much what artists are supposed to do.
"I've been drawn to such things since I was a kid," he said. "It's inherent. The thing I really like about art is that it taps a subconscious level while you're doing it. You push and juices start flowing."
ON VIEW
What: "Hand Wash Only," sculptures by Bernard Moriaz
He gives the example of his signature pieces; aloha shirts constructed of unlikely found materials such as corrugated roofing. The corrugations in the metal become ripples in fabric after being tempered by his imagination.
"I was driving through Waipahu, and there were piles of this rusty roofing, and I thought of all the families who once lived under that roofing. That's how the process starts."
Moriaz turns the roofing into billowing shirts by cutting shapes with a torch and then painting them. He tries not to use a torch on chromed items because the heat discolors the chrome.Born in Switzerland, Moriaz moved to New York state as a child. "We had an archaeologist in the neighborhood who taught me to look for arrowheads in the soil, and that got me in the habit of examining the world for suggestive shapes," said Moriaz.
He joined the Air Force -- where his artistic bent got him a job as a cartographer -- and while on tour in the islands married a local girl. They moved to New York, but then came back and settled on the North Shore of Oahu. They run a plant nursery by day."Plants aren't a bad way to go, but my heart is in the junkyard, because that's where all the cool stuff is. Like the chrome off cars. It outlasts the rest of the car, which has a certain justice to it. The monsters of pollution decomposing in the wild, while the glittery bits remain."
The grounds of his studio are strewn with stuff. Gears. Pipes. A rusted-out machine gun. His work has a playfulness to it."Well, I do try to be positive. Some call it junk art," he laughed. "I try to call it found art."
That human beings are attracted to trash should not be a surprise. In his artist statement, Moriaz said "Birds in the wild use bright and shiny objects to decorate their nest and attract mates. People do the same with jewelry. We are drawn to the flash."
At his studio, a neighbor has dropped off an old computer.
"Hmmmmm -- I wonder what the circuit boards look like?"
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