(joyful music)
- [Narrator] Snow means something different to everyone.
- Snow takes all the complicated details
and simplifies the landscape toward
the possibilities of naturally occurring sculpture.
- [Narrator] For snow globe artist Walter Martin
and Paloma Muñoz, snow is what draws you into
their surreal world.
- There's like a paradise feeling
where man and beast live in peace
and work together to do the laundry.
- [Narrator] Here, they work out ambitions
and exercise anxiety.
- Teetering, there's a sense of teetering
and of continuous balance.
- [Narrator] The globes freeze miniature landscapes
in wintry wonder.
Twisted logic
and macabre humor.
- It's like our own little form of poetry.
- [Narrator] Inspired by nature and the elements.
- We feel a lot of angst and dread
sometimes in the winter.
And (whoosh) it goes into the globe.
- [Narrator] The couple puts a modern twist
on an age old craft.
Transforming nick knacks into custom works of art.
- So imagine a world full of stories
and the camera goes in and just picks up
this little fragment in time and a little moment.
That's what the globes are.
They're samples of a larger world,
but becomes alive when you shake it.
(joyful music)
Working together for us is one experiment.
Maybe like a marriage, but it's a more complex marriage
because we're trying to create art together.
We've been doing the snow globes now for almost 15 years.
We started in 2001.
That was when we made the first one
and we had no idea we were going to be making
snow globes 15 years later.
Everything starts with a small canvas that
is the space that you have to fill in the globe.
And then, you start adding figures
and you continue to explore their landscape
in relationship to those figures.
- I think I was fascinated with the way
that the snow kind of takes all the complicated details
and simplifies the landscape,
the unification of the landscape.
It tends to be a great equalizer.
And when there's something outside of that world
that's interjected into it, like a human
with a colorful wardrobe, or an animal, or a small house,
or anything that's not of that world,
becomes the focus.
It is a frozen world.
- [Paloma] We live at the edge of a small town
and on the other side of our house
is North Eastern American Forest.
It's complete wilderness and we walk it everyday
and we love it.
- [Walter] Depending on what day and the time of year
and the time of day and the weather,
uh, the forest can offer a totally different face.
- It's like we have one foot in the wilderness
and one foot in civilization.
We can bring those worlds together through our work.
We see a lot of silly things throughout the day.
It leeches into the work.
- I'm from Northern Virginia,
which is a flat coastal city in mid-atlantic region
not known for it's snow storms.
So I fantasized about escaping to a place
where there was snow.
- For me, the challenge is always
how to make something that is relevant
that contributes something to the conversation
of what art is and what being a human-being in this
moment in time is like.
- [Walter] A successful snow globe would be absurdist humor
combined with a real human condition.
- I think people find the globes very interesting.
They love them.
They absorb you and they allow the viewer
to be immersed even for just a few seconds
in a completely different world.
(joyful music)