2014 TEDxSalem

If you’ve spent a lot of time on the inter­net, par­tic­u­lar­ly social media sites and Buz­zfeed arti­cles, you may be famil­iar with the cat beard trend.

For Cather­ine Miller, her intro­duc­tion to cat beard­ing came at a piv­otal moment in her life.

Some­thing about the sil­ly inter­net images stuck. Miller spent hours look­ing through peo­ple’s pic­tures with their cats (and dogs), find­ing the fun­ni­est ones.

“I laughed so hard, my face hurt, my stom­ach hurt,” she said. “And then I start­ed draw­ing them.”

Miller, a 29-year-old artist born and raised in Port­land, has been an artist all her life. As a child, she immersed her­self in the col­or­ful world of crayons (“not just the cray­on itself, but the wrap­per, too”) and was nev­er with­out a col­or­ing book. Her school­ing was all in art and she has curat­ed a num­ber of exhibits through­out Port­land in a vari­ety of media — paints, sculp­ture, water­col­or, sketch­ing. She’ll work in what­ev­er medi­um feels best suit­ed to a piece, she said, but “if I’m want­i­ng to feel relaxed or feel at home, it’s always with a brush.”

Her art has large­ly includ­ed the same theme. Miller is visu­al­ly impaired (she’s legal­ly blind), and is in fact the first visu­al­ly-impaired artist to grad­u­ate from the Pacif­ic North­west Col­lege of Arts. Since grad­u­a­tion, she has used her work to point out how the fine arts can often fail to cater to dis­abled patrons, and worked to make the fine arts world more inclu­sive. In 2011, she curat­ed an exhib­it called ‘A Some­what Secret Place,’ meant to high­light art cre­at­ed by and for those with dis­abil­i­ties.

She’s been obses­sive­ly draw­ing cat memes from the inter­net since last June.

“Late­ly I’ve switched from just cat beards to inter­net-famous felines, so I’ve been work­ing on hip­ster kit­ty and dub­step kit­ty a lot this week,” she said. “It’s great. I find that I real­ly con­nect with peo­ple that way.”

She sees an impor­tant inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­o­gy, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and, of course, cats. And that inter­sec­tion is with art.

“The job of an artist, real­ly, is to point the gaze of soci­ety at some­thing,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been draw­ing these images. That is, I’m not say­ing it’s great or it’s not great. It is. This is. And per­haps more impor­tant than you were think­ing.”

For Port­land native Jonathan Chase, the two defin­ing moments of his life came when he was 14 years old.

For one thing, he began learn­ing how to play the bass gui­tar. It was­n’t long before he was reg­u­lar­ly play­ing gigs as a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian.

That was also the year he was diag­nosed with Asperg­er’s Syn­drome.

“At its core, autism means some­one whose brain is wired dif­fer­ent­ly,” Chase said. “We think dif­fer­ent­ly and make dif­fer­ent con­nec­tions. Some of those con­nec­tions are hard­er to under­stand because you can’t see the inter­nal process.”

And as one of this year’s speak­ers at TEDxSalem, Chase will com­bine both of these things into a visu­al demon­stra­tion of the mind of some­one on the autism spec­trum.

“It’s going to be a chal­lenge to draw peo­ple in because every­one knows music, but most peo­ple aren’t pas­sion­ate about pur­su­ing or under­stand­ing autism,” Chase explained. “That’s the chal­lenge I’m tak­ing on. And that’s what I’m excit­ed about, is con­nect­ing with peo­ple who don’t think about this stuff every­day.”

As Chase describes it, he works in two worlds that are very dif­fer­ent.

The first world is his music. The 31-year-old Chase has been per­form­ing bass pro­fes­sion­al­ly since he was 16. He does­n’t have a favorite kind of music. He likes it all — jazz, coun­try, folk, blues, even dis­co. He’s stud­ied local­ly and in Nashville; he’s played with Gram­my-win­ning bassist Vic­tor Wooten. He’s cur­rent­ly play­ing with a clas­sic rock band, record­ing a bass and ukulele duet with anoth­er musi­cian and record­ing some instru­men­tal jazz pieces.

If that does­n’t sound busy enough for you, in his oth­er world, Chase works as a men­tor and advo­cate for those on the autism spec­trum. For the last six years, he has served on the Board of Direc­tors for the Autism Soci­ety of Ore­gon. He men­tors teens and young adults and works part-time with the Syn­er­gy Autism Cen­ter, and teach­es class­es for edu­ca­tors on how to accom­mo­date stu­dents on the autism spec­trum.

He can now add TED speak­er to his resume. TEDxSalem will be Chase’s first expe­ri­ence with TED.

“I think I’m just over­whelmed by the prepa­ra­tion,” he said. “I’m com­fort­able speak­ing. I’ve done a lot of speak­ing events, but it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent ani­mal in this kind of set­ting.

“But I think it will be a fun event,” he added. “I’m real­ly excit­ed to be a part of it, and I like a chal­lenge.”

So what can atten­dants expect to hear from Chase’s talk?

“I’ll be using my bass gui­tar live and per­form­ing some pieces,” he explained. “And I’ll show visu­al­ly on the screen what they look like inside my head. There will be col­ors and shapes. The impor­tant thing is that it’s not synes­the­sia. I don’t see col­or and sound except when I’m think­ing about music the­o­ry. So it’s a sys­tem that I use, where I take all of this infor­ma­tion and I cat­e­go­rize it into a visu­al sys­tem that helps me nav­i­gate my instru­ment.”

But Chase’s talk will do more than pro­vide a win­dow into the mind of some­one on the autism spec­trum. It’s also an exer­cise that can be applied to our world at large.

“My hope is that peo­ple will go home with, not just a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how peo­ple think dif­fer­ent­ly, but respect for the fact that every­one we meet expe­ri­ences the world dif­fer­ent­ly than we do,” Chase said.