The Interview: Jessica Oreck

She built a museum in Las Vegas. Now she's taking it on the road.

Jessica is a filmmaker, animator, and founder of the Office of Collecting & Design, which has been based in Las Vegas, and now is becoming a museum on wheels. Check out the museum's Kickstarter campaign here.—Steph

“How do we get people to look at the things that they can't see any longer and think, holy shit, that's actually pretty amazing.”—Jessica Oreck

Tell us about yourself.

I am a filmmaker and an animator, and now I am the curator of this funny little museum in Las Vegas, which is soon to become a traveling museum.

I’ve made feature films, documentaries, and animated educational short films for more than a decade. I really love animating. It's something you can do on your own—you don't have to have a crew, you don't have to have a ton of money. It's very low impact. So before the museum existed, my plan was to build a robust studio where all of my small props and sets would be at my fingertips; but because I’d worked at the American Museum for Natural History for 10 years, it occurred to me that I could open this to the public. My friends and family were like, “Yeah, you've got weird shit. You should totally do that.” So I opened the museum, and now it has taken over my life, and I don't have time to animate or make films.

What is your training as an artist and a filmmaker?

I went to film school as an undergraduate, and I hate to say where because I had a terrible experience. My focus was science filmmaking—I wanted to double major in biology and filmmaking—but the dean of the film school told me I couldn't do that because I was a girl.

What are your obsessions?

I'm obsessed with invisible things. I'm not talking about magical invisibility. I'm talking about the things that we say, do, and use on a daily basis and don't think about anymore, and I'm really fascinated by tools and objects that have disappeared into familiarity. I am constantly digging those up. I also love etymology, the history of language, and understanding the way words have come to mean what they mean.

I love the gestures that we use on a day-to-day basis when we are not actually thinking about the movement—when it has become such a part of our lives that it's invisible. You tie your shoe, you button your shirt, you pull on your pants one leg first, like nobody ever thinks, “oh, today I'm going to do my left leg first.” I love watching people wash their face. I love watching women put on makeup. I love watching men shave or tie their ties—those routines that become rituals because we've done them so much. I'm also fascinated by religious rituals, and to me, there's a lot of overlap between our daily motions and the motions of religion.

What problems are you working to solve?

Oh, you know, world peace. And I am invested in the idea of adults finding joy. I made a very dark movie for the first time in 2019, One Man Dies A Million Times, and it was a wonderful but difficult experience. I hope to never do that again. But other than that, all of my work revolves around this idea that adults have lost their childhood wonder.

Kids are full of wonder. It doesn't matter what they're looking at, kids come to the museum and they're interested—but then they're equally interested in the broken glass in the parking lot. I think it's so much harder for adults to find wonder, and that is what I'm interested in: how do we get people to look at the things that they can't see any longer and think, holy shit, that's actually pretty amazing; I love that.

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A few of my photos from the museum.

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How does the idea of invisible things, or things we don’t see anymore, tie to the museum?

I would say the museum is full of things that are sort of invisible. Not all of it, but a lot of it is stuff that I describe as the silt that settles to the bottom of the junk drawer. It's a little bit too charming to throw away, but its purpose is obsolete, or it's broken or forgotten. But those objects, when you bring them together, have a palpable nostalgia, and I'm attracted to that.

How do you know what objects to keep, or what isn’t a fit?

It’s almost an impossible question to answer because it is truly intuition. I have to hold the object in my hand, first of all. I never buy things online because I have to be able to know what they feel like.

I often talk about what I call the “residue of attention,” or this idea that objects that have been in the world for a long time have witnessed so much. Not a conscious memory, but an energetic memory—oh god, not an energetic memory. That sounds terrible; it’s not that. They have this residue of attention and, for me, it's important that all the objects have a positive residue of attention.

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There are plenty of things that I see and think, oh yeah, that's cool. Then I hold it and realize it’s not for us. We get objects donated, or I find objects, that aren’t a fit. They end up in the gift shop, which is a good place because they still support the museum and find the right home.

Did you have an “a-ha” moment when you realized you wanted to make films?

Yes. We grew up without TV in our house, so I’d never seen a nature program. When I was 14, I saw David Attenborough's The Private Life of Plants in my high school botany class. I remember sitting through the first hour thinking, that's what I want to do. I want to make films about nature.

Then, working at the natural history museum, I was in the butterfly vivarium every day. It was like watching a scientific experiment unfold in real time. I was able to observe thousands of people from around the world interact in this static, controlled, non-variable environment, and I was fascinated by the way people would react to various elements of nature, often as something totally separate from themselves. It was so profound. That was my second “a-ha” moment.

What habits or personal structures support your work?

I am the least routine person I know. I always wash my face and brush my teeth before I go to bed, but other than that, I don't keep a schedule. I love to travel and be untethered from any sort of structure, and that’s part of what’s been hard about operating the museum. It has trapped my creativity a bit as a lot of my work is about immersing myself in other communities and cultures, trying to be invisible myself and seeing things the way that they are. I’m someone who has to be out of my comfort zone. It's important to me.

What is something that you want?

I want this Kickstarter to be a huge success so that we can make our mobile museum and get on the road. And can we go back to world peace? I really want world peace. That sounds like such a beauty pageant thing to say, but I'm a deep believer in nonviolent communication.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. (SB)