(gentle music) - [Jennifer] Our mission with our artwork is to lift spirits and brighten the world.

- I'm Dave Frei.

- And I am Jennifer Corio.

And we make up the artist team for Cobalt Designworks.

The world right now is heavy.

I feel the heaviness.

And I think that's why I'm always striving to design with a lightness.

- Creating a piece of public art, you're putting out something that's visual and creates a conversation.

It becomes a part of the community and I think people tend to have pride in it.

Even if it's a little controversial it becomes something they can talk about, and share with people visiting the community, and it becomes important to them.

(dynamic music) - Can you show it in the round?

- [Dave] Yeah, let me do something real quick here.

- Oh, I like that.

I actually think we exaggerated the spike in my original design.

The piece in Ashland was all about a work of art that speaks to the transformation that the railroad made.

They have a whole railroad district that was created in the late 1800s when the railroad came through.

And Ashland was a very important part because it was the final connection between Portland and San Francisco.

When they finished the rail, it marked the complete circumference of the railroad around the nation.

So it was a golden spike moment.

The golden spike became a canvas for some words.

Then as I dived into the history I saw just how pivotal the Chinese were in coming over and building the railroad.

And it says in English, in honor of the Chinese men who laid these tracks despite discrimination and without recognition.

Today we offer our belated gratitude in sadness.

- [Dave] Which one do you want green?

- Mm, try the dog.

- Okay, go with our green imagination, the stuff we use.

- I guess there.

We met almost 24 years ago now.

We were both working at Hewlett Packard at the time.

And Dave was doing R&D mechanical engineering work, and I was in the marketing department.

A friend of mine knew him and I thought he had smiling eyes.

I thought he was really handsome.

I'm gonna rework the dog.

- Yeah, find a dog with a bigger jaw.

- Well I want the dog to look friendly.

He lived out in Battleground, and he had a shop that he built that was at least five times?

- Three times.

- Three times bigger than his house.

He'd have all these different cars in there.

(upbeat music) I thought it was cool, but I let him do his thing.

I had been working in marketing for about five years.

I was doing a lot of project management and more process oriented stuff.

And taking these art classes at Clark College, I started exercising my creativity.

And so these art classes, I was having a blast.

- She was coming home from her classes and sharing.

"I got to use a plasma cutter today.

Do you know what those?"

"Yeah, I have one."

And she said, "We learned how to tig."

I go, "Oh, I have a couple of those."

She started realizing she married into a dowry of a fabricator.

(both laughing) - [Jennifer] Dave and I started coming together.

And we would work in the garage, and just do it as a hobby.

- Jennifer had had some successes with the sculptures she and I did.

And all of a sudden, HP had a downsizing and I qualified for early retirement.

We took the leap and started Cobalt Designworks.

(upbeat music) (chime jingling) - I work in my design studio.

I'm the one who is looking for the art opportunities.

Once we have secured a commission, the first part for me is the most exhilarating and the most daunting part.

It's playing detective on trying to talk to as many people as I can about what they want this art to represent.

Then I'll also start collecting images.

I might take out some of my son's books, books that I read to him as a kid.

They're just a source of so much fun inspiration, like this one, color.

I mean the stories are fun, but just the pictures.

(machine whirring) - A lot of the work requires hand forming, hand shaping.

A new area for me, but it's been really enjoyable in learning how to shape metal, and get the shapes we wanted.

A lot of people think of metal as quite rigid, but it really is very much like pizza dough.

So when you press it out, and stretching in certain areas, shrinking in other areas, you end up creating bowl shapes, and waves, and shapes like that.

So the material will take a shape just like bread dough or something soft like that.

(upbeat music) Because all our pieces are one off everything has to be assembled.

Fabrication process takes hundreds of hours.

So it's a matter of breaking it down into different pieces, and stepping through, and trying to create one step at a time.

(tool grinding) (metal clanging) - I will say, we've worked with some delicious colors.

We work with powder coat mostly.

Sometimes we do automotive paint, but mostly powder coat 'cause it's much more environmentally friendly.

They electrically charge the sculpture, and then they spray the powder, and the electrical charge is what attracts the powder to the piece.

And after it's been coated, it will go into an oven, and it gets baked on.

- If it's anything over six feet, has to go through engineering process, and has to have a structural engineer look at it.

- Dave and the engineers are always bringing me back down to earth.

They're reminding me that gravity is a thing.

(both laughing) And sometimes, they're like, you gotta thicken this up.

And I'm like, oh, that takes away this sexy look.

But we, there's a back and forth.

And it ends up being both graceful and structurally sound.

(upbeat music) - [Dave] We're finishing up a collaborative project with the Vancouver School of the Arts.

It's their design, but we are doing the actual fabrication.

- The visionaries behind this project really want the students to learn how do you work with the client to get to come up with your concepts?

- How do you find funding, apply for grants?

- [Jennifer] And they're just getting to see the whole process.

And I think this will really help launch them if they do wanna go into public art themselves.

- [Dave] Okay, so I'm gonna get the cocoon.

You go and get up there.

- Okay.

- [Dave] So we each have our role in this process.

And it's the coming together that really builds both our business and our relationship.

Okay, you're good.

- [Jennifer] That's feeling solid.

- I'm convinced our relationship has gotten stronger and stronger because of what we're doing here.

(dynamic music) - I love a sense of lightness and a sense of brightness.

If I can lift somebody's mood through our art that brings me a lot of joy.

And so it's meaningful to know that these things will last for a long time, decades to come.

And they'll be out there hopefully making a lot of people smile.

(dynamic music)