Speaking of anachronisms, Morse Clary continues to use the book form as a "sculptural metaphor," as he describes it. Building on the premise of an open book, Clary articulates richly layered ideas that "read" as story, concept, emotion, setting.
They're both visual and verbal, with titles like Dialogue in Contrast (above) and Crossroads (below). They feel familiar, yet also rarified, old, sometimes appearing like an artifact of a forgotten language.
Clary, a college art instructor for 30+ years, engages the viewer, giving just enough information for us to want to reach out and learn more. His exhibition of "Journeys and Journals" continues through December 11 at NIC's Boswell Hall Gallery.
I love irony. It's one of the most basic yet versatile tools an artist has. James Green works in stone lithography, a printing method founded upon our earliest awareness of stone carving and image making. In his recent works, including an exhibition entitled In Defense of Thingness at Eastern Washington University, Greene explores the paradoxical state of image making.
From his statement: "What are we to make of a culture that considers digital books to have an infinite lifespan but considers stone tablets obsolete? If anything, stone tablets have more than proved themselves capable of survival into the future, while my digital photo files of only 5 years ago are a challenge to maintain and retrieve without some kind of digital corruption or data loss. For this exhibition, I consider our current technological moment while working with my hands to produce objects that stand out specifically because they are obsolete. I have grained and leveled 12 long-forgotten lithography stones (once used for commercial printing) in order to reinvigorate the value of satisfying craftwork and careful execution needed to perform this obsolete technological process. The objects depicted are things I either own or regularly use to perform tasks. All of them have been outstripped technologically, but all of them represent things that have proven successful at surviving into the future. These objects reflect a humanness and concreteness that is bound specifically to the interest they hold as things.
He also works in photography, prints and installations. I won't get to his show at EWU before it closes December 10, which is too bad because I was just talking with one of my editors about the lack of exhibitions showcasing truly contemporary art. And here's one of them (that won't get covered locally, unfortunately).
While it's not the kind of work I can immerse myself in the way I like to with narrative art, I appreciate the conceptual depth and challenge. It's this chicken/egg approach of the thing versus the image of the thing versus the making of the image versus the potency of the thing within our visual lexicon. The image above, for example, is a blower used for making fire. As Greene mentions, this is an object that has remained fairly unchanged over time. Not many objects can be regarded as such; there's such a bent to revise, improve, technologize.
For more mindblowing, check out his website at Valuistics.com.
Envy is not a pretty thing but I'll admit to it when it comes to Mary Maxam. At first, I envied her poise and patience when it came to teaching. When I met her 9-10 years ago, she ws the senior member of the visual arts faculty in Lakeland School District (the visual arts faculty consisting of her, myself and two junior high teachers).
Then, when I had opportunities to visit with Mary during rare unstructured collaboration days, I had all the more reason to envy her exceptional painting skills. Like this humble little painting of a reflective gift box shows, Mary Maxam knows paint. And color. And light.
With her specialties including fly fisherman, landscapes and the occasional still life, Mary shares her artful gifts via a self-titled website on which she has recently added "daily paintings."
Ok, so now I envy her one more thing: retirement (and time to paint).
She's been abroad for a bit, charcoal in hand and a keen eye for the delicious curves that populate her often haunting charcoal drawings. A field in Provence, France. The ridiculous curled lip of a sneering gargoyle. A shaft of light at the distant edge of an overgrown lake. These are the images that come into view from her painstaking process of charcoal drawing.
A long ways away from her beloved Palouse, Nelson nonetheless expresses elements of these foreign vistas as if they were a second home, fraught with all the mystery and moodiness that her earlier eastern Washington landscapes possessed.
At The Art Spirit until November 28.
If the drive through the Palouse doesn't inspire your feelings of belongingness to our uniquely western landscape, perhaps these painters will
October 16 – December 5, 2009
Six innovative contemporary painters from four different Western States exhibit work featuring diverse approaches to technique and media.
Squeak Carnwath--A UC professor whose work comes across as a cross between outsider and Pop Surreal, with a hint of lyricism. She works in sculpture, but mostly painting and also printmaking, layering and interweaving images, works, icons and symbolism in a deceptively unschooled-looking, flattened style. Right: Fly, Fight, Fugit.
Roll Hardy--Portland artist whose unsentimental paintings of detritus-filled spaces capture the quiet drama of urban places in transition. Devoid of people, the impact of humans on his landscapes are nonetheless everpresent. There's often a surreal light quality and hazy paint-handling that lends to their overall feeling of inevitable evolution.
Travis Ivey--A younger Wyoming painter whose earlier realistic style has evolved to address the impact of human development on the formerly wide open lands of his native state. Fences, oil rigs and other signs of humanity invade Ivey's distinctly western landscapes.
Mary Josephson--Also from Portland, Josephson's works channel Frida Kahlo's subject matter and outsider-art approach to the figure, with a little bit of Picasso, perhaps. There's an apparent joyfulness to her color use that is undermined by what feels like analytical distance or maybe even skepticism. The results are portraits that attempt to get at the elusive inner quality of the subject.
Kasey Keeler--With a background in Wyoming, New Mexico and Montana, there is an openness to her work that reflects the sense of space we traditionally associate with the west. Yet there is nothing sentimental about her use of color and shape. Instead her style tends toward consummately painted, luscious surfaces that are extremely conscious of the fragile balance between the land and steward.
Michael Schultheis--From his home in Seattle, this cerebral artist transforms color and shape into mathematical notations, resulting in abstract layerings of paint that still retain a sense of expressionist movement. If they were likened to landscapes, one could easily see the gray weight of a Seattle shoreline or the golden glow of a western sunset--albeit expressed in his enigmatic artistic script.
Bad weather and end-of-week apathy kept me from going to this opening for Lanny De Vuono and Linda Kraus-Perez but fortunately the work is still up until October 31. De Vuono is on sabbatical from Eastern Washington University in Colorado right now, presenting here some new work and a few pieces from 2008. Kraus-Perez is an EWU alum and has taught at various colleges locally.
From Lorinda Knight Gallery press release:
"Lanny De Vuono and Linda Kraus-Perez explore the relationship between nature and culture. DeVuono’s paintings often come in several parts as diptychs or triptychs. Kraus-Perez uses caulk to build varied low relief before she adds pigmented oil paint.
DeVuono is interested in how we construct interpretations of nature. Her subjects include the sky (with planes flying among the clouds), the earth (often with buildings dotting the landscape) and water (with helicopters hovering over the dark waves). Sometimes she takes a distant view of a flooded landscape or mountain range. Sometimes she focuses on individual trees or building elements. The variation in scale among parts and the box-like construction of the paintings reinforce the idea that we create cultural artifacts in order to reflect our own perceptions of what exists in the world.
Kraus Perez invented a process that recalls the way remains of previous events have been embedded in the strata of the earth. She might take notice of her grandmother’s knick-knacks or wilted flowers or the crumbs left over from last night’s dinner. It’s all material for her invented calligraphy. She builds up fragments of color, texture and line to create varied levels of content. The shapes and colors seem to be in flux, emerging from and sinking into the background layer.
Both artists are recording to scale artifacts and features that may be distant in space or time and yet tug at our attention because they matter here and now. "
Because you're not busy enough tweeting and facebooking...
This came across my email "desk" the other day courtesy of my editor at Inlander. A new art website, Artaculous. According to their site, their target audience is:
Music, Fashion, Painting, Theatre, Graphics, Photography, Architecture, Communications Design, Philosophy, Filmmaking, Performance, Media, Design, Culture, Information Technology, Producing, Dance, Bodyart and Others.
Sounds kind of broad-based to me but, hey, if you want to know what's happening in the hip haven of Paris bodyart, then this might be the site for you.
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