She is an accomplished artist who uses jawbreakers and shredded money in her work. He builds robots. And they live in a former Army barracks that was cut in half. So you might wager that their house would be quirky.
And you would win.
But the Louisville home of Terry Maker, the artist, and Chris Rogers, the robot maker, isn’t a mishmash of wacky. Instead, the interior revels in a certain thrift-store-meets-Andy-Warhol aesthetic, where a gorgeous (and real) wasp nest the size of a watermelon hangs in the living room near Maker’s “Buckwheat Pancakes,” a series of pancake-piles made from a batter of shredded money and actually griddled by Maker. The pancakes, with resin syrup, are framed and attached to a wall.
It’s hard to take more than a step in the house without encountering something arresting: the 1950s-era Philco Predicta television that still works; the painting of a human colon with a handcrank that moves something beneath its surface, making the organ undulate; the transparent music box containing an enormous dead beetle and flies on wire. (Wind up the box and the insects revolve while lullaby music plays; Maker calls the piece “Bug Funeral.”)
One theme: old photographs of strangers.
“I like to collect groups of people,” said Maker, looking at a long, framed photograph of men in tuxedos at an America for Insurance Group convention in Atlantic City, N.J., in the early 1950s. “Look at these people!”
The couple’s décor aesthetic, said Maker, grew out of “resourcefulness.”
“Out of need, and out of the challenge of being a unique couple of poor scrappers, we are drawn to the happenstance of finding cool and thrifty items,” she said. “These items always have a story or an interesting history. That is truly what drives our aesthetic. This is sometimes lost when one can afford the available factory-made, perfectly produced home furnishings.”
She and Rogers spend most of their time working on creative projects — the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, in fact, features Maker in a solo show that opened last week — but hunting for quirky stuff occupies them, too.
They go to a lot of estate sales and thrift stores. Maker combs “for sale” columns in newspapers and online. During a recent visit, in fact, she had to scoot to meet with a woman selling a “retro recliner.”
Rogers’ domain is the basement, a wild sprawl of tools and wires and machines. Maker’s studio is in the basement, too, but her stamp is more evident in the home’s living spaces.
One of the most prominent pieces in the house, called “Thrift Store Dog Extended,” began when Maker bought a large painting of a dachshund head at a thrift store.
When Chris affixed a large flat-screen television to a living room wall — a decision not celebrated by Maker — she painted the rest of the dachshund on another canvas. The two dachshund halves now bracket the television, turning its black, shiny spectacle of plastic into something else — something with a story.
Maker loves the dark and the macabre, she said, but whimsy is just as important.
Take the cow hairball. When Maker heard a rancher in Sterling used cow hairballs — hard spheres of hair often found in cow bellies — to create puppet-like figures, she visited the man, and returned with a plain hairball. She treasures it.
More whimsy? The glass eye in a box, something she found in a thrift store that was a vintage advertisement for protective glasses.
Maker, who grew up in Abilene, Texas, said her experience as an artist helps with her approach to décor — the former seems to inform and animate the latter.
But anybody, she said, can at least approach their décor with a sense of playfulness and an appreciation for things out of the mainstream.
A good step: Buy some original art, she said. Or make stuff.
“What you want is the antithesis of Pottery Barn,” she said. “You can do it beautifully if you are looking for objects with history — if you just keep an eye out for things that are unusual.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
