Strait Art 2009
March 22 - May 10 Two of my paintings will be at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, along with some great work from 35 other North Olympic Peninsula artists, for Strait Art 2009. Here's what PAFAC has to say about the show, from www.pafac.org:
35 North Peninsula artists exhibit diverse personal visions in the annual showcase drawn from the local scene.
Strait Art, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center’s annual showcase of local talent, opens its 2009 installment on Sunday, March 22, with a reception for the artists from 2-4 pm. The exhibition presents the works of thirty-five artists from Clallam and Jefferson Counties and will continue through May 10.
“Each year this show provides a rich opportunity to sample what the artists of Juan de Fuca country are up to,” said PAFAC director and exhibition curator Jake Seniuk. “From the more than fifty applicants I chose a mix of newcomers and veterans of past Strait Art exhibitions.
“In order to provide a venue for the widest range of submittals we don’t search for any kind of overarching theme other than the artists’ residency on the North Olympic Peninsula. The existence of a bona fide regionalism has long been in decline as a serious consideration in art, and in our age of instant interconnectivity and information overload one is likely to find lots of overlap between local and international outlooks.”
Space is always at a premium in the relatively small footprint of the Webster House, but Seniuk feels it is important to show more than a single work from each artist. Except for a couple of installations, each artist is represented by a pair of works.
“In addition to showing the best work offered,” said Seniuk, “it is the curator’s challenge to make the most cohesive exhibition possible. That means finding both formal and conceptual relationships. By presenting at least a couple of works by each artist, not only does the viewer get a stronger inkling of any given artist’s personal style, but it also helps nurture the impression that all these diverse works somehow belong together.”
Apart from artists who are so awed by the intrinsic beauty of their home landscape — a predilection that is easy to cultivate amidst the Peninsula’s operatic grandeur of sea and sky, mountain and forest, river and meadow — Peninsula artists, like artists everywhere, struggle with form and content to make a broad range of observations, ideas and emotions visible. “It is the artist’s understanding and skilled handling of the interrelationships between form and content, which gives their works a depth of interest that sustains repeated viewings,” said Seniuk.
Redeye Over Vegas, 2007, acrylic, ink, glitter, 30 " x 30 "
On display are paintings that range from Lisa Gilley’s bucolic rural landscapes, to Counsel Langley’s architectonic designs that suggest systems part organic and part robotic, to Jack Galloway’s free-form Surrealist abstractions that give the impression of an interior space that could be in the bowels or in the mind, to Jennifer Lozada’s large Zen-inspired scrolls that revel in the gesture of the brush.
There is plenty of subject matter, too. Anna Nichols and Harold Nelson collage myriad magazine scraps into their paintings to provide an imbedded narrative. There are stories to decipher in the black-and-white documentary photographs of Harry von Stark, Ed Jaramillo, and Jeremy Johnson, while Brian Schroder, Arthur Grossman, Bob Kaune and Jessica Spisak push their color photos deeper and deeper into abstraction, and Rene Simons foregoes the camera altogether, relying on Photoshop’s liquefying and layering effects to conjure a warm agar in which microscopic and/or extraterrestrial life forms might spawn.
Color is of paramount interest in Renne Brock-Richmond’s weavings that rove across the spectrum in subtle gradations, in Barbara Houshmand’s bold geometric quilts, in Carolyn Cristina Manzoni’s fiery mohair vestment-like shawls and stoles, and in Kim Thomson’s yarn-wrapped vessels that resemble a species of hairy Venusian fruit.
The goddess imagery on Gayle Lutschg’s ceramic vessels draws from both Renaissance chapel frescoes and folk art, while Henner Schroders brilliant cast glass shields blend aboriginal pictographs with the luminosity of backlit cathedral windows.
Artists working in the round include Kathleen Meyer, who is equally adept at both figurative and abstract bronzes and Larry McCaffrey, whose fabricated stainless steel arcs are reduced to shiny vectors in a state of pure motion.
Gray Lucier and Margie McDonald both build up their abstract figures with scavenged materials cast-off by industry, while Anna Wiancko-Chasman draws from the natural world for found forms she molds into shamanistic figures and Pamela Hastings raids the knick-knack bin to create psychologically loaded dolls for grown girls.
One of the most curious pieces is Karen Hackenberg’s Swarm, a giant wasp’s hive constructed of hundreds of wooden match sticks, populated by dozens of tiny model train figurines that bustle about their business oblivious to the tinder box on which they dwell.
There’s much more with works by Denise Erickson, Tammy Hall, Kim Kopp, Sandra Offut, Deanna Pindell, Cynthia Thomas, Jeff Tocher, and Rolf Wald.
Sunset 02115, 2007, acrylic, ink, glitter, 30 " x 30 "
Approach, 2009, acrylic, ink, glitter, 30 x 60"
