Level Green artist Natalie Condrac's miniatures make big impact on area art scene

A childhood fascination with miniature Christmas villages led to a life’s work for artist Natalie Condrac of Level Green.

Six of her tiny tableaux are showing through Aug. 26 in the landside terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport. She also is creating a new piece to be featured at “Colorful Collision,” an after-hours, 18-and-older event July 29 at Carnegie Science Center.

“We grew up with dollhouses. I think everyone has some sort of fascination with them, and for me, it was the little Christmas villages,” said Condrac, 26. “I always wished that someone was living in them, so I could listen to them or peek in and see them.”

She wants to share that fascination with others through work that she describes as “a little creepy, but interesting.”

Her miniatures take inspiration from the “I Spy” children’s books, which have pages filled with objects accompanied by a verse listing which objects should be located. Condrac creates a back story for each of her pieces, often told in a poem.

“I want to give people of all ages the opportunity to become curious again, because we are surrounded by a lot of things we don’t know,” Condrac said. “Regardless of what we believe in, there are doors and walls that block us from seeing, and you never know what’s going on behind them.

“You never know what’s out there, and I like to capture that. That gives me butterflies.”

Was it real?

Among pieces showing at the airport is “The Bathhouse,” depicting a traditional Japanese bathhouse.

The accompanying poem describes someone hiking in mountains, where it’s wet and cold. They come across the bathhouse, hear a drone and smell an enticing aroma coming from inside.

“They go in to a feast, eat, soak their feet and head out at dawn. They turn around and it’s gone,” Condrac said. “The idea is that it appears to whoever needs it. Where did it go? Was it real, was it not?”

“The Arboretum” is the name Condrac has given to the yet-to-be-built piece for the science center event. It will be a 24-inch-tall facade of a yellow house.

“It’s closed off with nature reclaiming it, like a scientist lived there, but then he left and everything that was outside and inside swallowed this old house up,” she said. “There will be some things in there that will be hard to find, because there are always hidden narratives in my work that are a little bit frightening. Like what happened to him? Did he do something bad? Did the plants eat him? You never know.”

Condrac was invited to create the piece after emailing the center to offer her miniature-making services.

“I just happened to email, asking if they’d be interested in me building anything for them, because it can’t hurt to ask,” she said. “Dan Lavoie from their community engagement team said I emailed at the perfect time.”

The timing was fortuitous, said Lavoie, the center’s team and program development coordinator.

Activities planned for “Colorful Collision,” being organized in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Museum, the August Wilson Center and seven artists from the Society of Sculptors Pittsburgh, will explore connections between science and creativity. The sculptors will display works of their own, and attendees will have the opportunity to make art in various media.

“Art and science almost occupy the same space, and we’ll be exploring the natural intersection of where art and science exist,” Lavoie said. “Her piece fits in great with that.

“As you search the house, more and more information unfolds,” he said, illustrating “how your brain looks at art and interprets it.”

Ability to imagine

Condrac grew up in Monroeville and is a graduate of Serra Catholic High School in McKeesport. She started making miniatures while majoring in painting and drawing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

“My professors were very gracious in letting me explore other things,” she said.

Her first miniature and accompanying poem addressed the topic of mental illness.

“A year later, I brought the piece out and put a light behind a closet door in it,” she said. “I remember how remarkable the light was, coming out of that door. You couldn’t open the door, but you knew there was something behind it. I liked giving people the ability to imagine what it was.

“Miniatures allow you to show people a completely new perspective on things they see every day,” she said. “I love installation art, and miniatures allow me to do that on a small scale.”

Condrac said her artistic practice has been influenced most by the work of American realist painter Edward Hopper, best known for his 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” in which four people are viewed through a city diner’s large window.

“There was always something about (Hopper’s paintings) that made you wonder what’s going on there. Something seemed off, almost, but it was always so beautifully done,” she said. “It wasn’t just someone painting a house, it was someone painting the being of a house, the aura of more going on there than what meets the eye.”

Condrac has two permanent vendor spaces that she calls “The Old Crooked House,” one at Miller’s Crossing in Irwin and the other at The Steel Goat Marketplace in Penn Hills. In addition to her art pieces, she sells vintage and antique items that she sources while looking for materials to use in her work.

She is the exhibition coordinator for You Art Here in Jeannette and often contributes work to the gallery’s shows. She also shows at Dairy Barn Art Center in Athens and Majestic Galleries in Nelsonville, Ohio.

Her piece called “Door on Demure Alley,” based on photos taken in Nelsonville — which Condrac calls “the definition of Appalachia, sad but beautiful” — was accepted for this year’s juried exhibition of the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh.

“She’s young, she has fresh ideas and she’s edgy in a good way. Her work as a whole is amazing, her vision and attention to detail and the stories she tells,” said You Are Here co-founder Mary Briggs. “She’s one of our key imaginative minds, and her fresh ideas and creativity jibe with everything we’re doing. Though we wish her all the success in the world, we hope she won’t leave us.”