Twenty in '10

March 14 - May 9, 2010

The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens a new exhibition, Strait Art Twenty Ten, with an artists’ reception on Sunday, March 14 from 2-4 pm at the Center, and simultaneously at Peninsula College where a satellite show is also on view.

This marks the 20th edition of the Center’s annual series dedicated to the artists of Juan de Fuca country. Featuring twenty-nine artists spread across the north Peninsula from Joyce to Port Townsend, Strait Art, unlike other multi-artist exhibitions presented at PAFAC, has no pre-determined theme other than the artists’ place of residency. “However,” said PAFAC director Jake Seniuk, “that requirement is not meant to direct or restrict imagery or subject to any specific physical terrain, although all who live in this rhapsodic landscape are most assuredly inspired every time they glance out the window.”

The open call to artists generated submissions from forty-seven painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers and mixed media artists. Those were whittled down to twenty-nine by Seniuk and Peninsula College art prof, Michael Paul Miller.

The new collaboration between PAFAC and PC nearly doubles the exhibition space, allowing most of the artists to be represented by four works, two in the Webster House and two in the complementary exhibition at PC’s Pirate Union gallery. “I feel it’s important to see a number of works from each artist,” observed Seniuk “That allows the viewer to get some insight into the visual language and themes that each artist has developed. The twin exhibitions present a wide range of aesthetic approaches from painstaking realism to free-flowing abstraction, from miniature to monumental, from decorative to pointedly conceptual.”

Paintings in the show follow a range of approaches. Terry Leness’s (Port Townsend) photo-realist depictions of neighborhood homes and yards are tightly composed scenes of complacent domesticity. With their bold patches of light and color Pamela Hastings’ (Port Angeles) expressionistic portraits read less as individuals and more as archetypes that transcend personal history. In Stephen Yates’s (Port Townsend) large abstract canvases dense fields of dashes and gurgles suggest watery currents that convey the artist’s moods and gestures.

Water is a prevalent subject. Photographers Michael Berman (Port Ludlow) and Bob Kaune (Port Angeles) aim their cameras at watery scenes to create different impressions of time. Berman’s Open Ocean series is made up of five-foot wide panoramic views of waves and sky that evoke the timelessness of the perpetual waves frozen in the shutter’s instant.

Kaune aims his camera downward on to the glassy smooth surface of the Elwha River, marrying water and heavens with placid reflections of sky and inverted landscape that, too, convey a sense of eternal renewal.

Lost time is at the heart of Charlotte Watts’s (Sequim) meditative studies of the WWII Japanese Nisei internment camp at Manzanar in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Mounting her photographs on tall hanging scrolls made from pressed tree bark, she brings alive the physical presence of the trees that have reclaimed much of the site and which frame the remnants of the camp and its vanished internees.

The Japanese aesthetic is evident, too, in Carrie Goller’s (Port Ludlow) nine-foot wide triptych of koi fish painted in heavy encaustic wax pigments that bring to life the shimmer and motion of the dark sparkling watery realm in which the fish thrash and dart.

Narrative is alive in the paintings of Linda Okazaki (Port Townsend) and Frank Samuelson (Port Hadlock). Okazaki’s Fire Inside the Heart is a tall watercolor in which reclining lovers swirl in a constellation of free-floating objects that have all become mementos of passionate moments.

Samuelson mines Northwest salmon lore in large canvases composed with a homey streak of back-porch surrealism. In Cone Falls on Stage migrating sockeyes battle their way up a whirlpool-like pyramid of water that is swirling heavenward on a wooden dock framed like a stage.

There’s whimsy and narrative in Linda Jarvis’s (Chimacum) toy-like sculptures.. King of the Towed takes the form of a miniature aluminum-skinned travel trailer, whose lone occupant is a humanoid toad who enjoys the sculptural beauty of industrial design.

Formal sculpture is represented by David Eisenhour’s (Port Angeles) elegant stainless steel castings of deeply textured organic forms that are based on enlarged plant life.

Larry McCaffrey (Sequim) prefers to work with stainless steel in manufactured sheets rather than liquefied in a bubbling crucible. His hollow constructed solids are pure geometry exploring an evolving language of arcs, circles, flat planes and voids.

Assemblage — a collagist approach of grafting together artist-made and pre-existing found objects — is the method of choice for a number of artists. Inspired by the pubescent mating customs of the Irish gypsies known as the Travelers, Susan Hazard’s (Port Townsend) Child Bride is a life-size salt figure dressed in a wedding gown and emerging from a baby carriage festooned with pots and pans that stands as a totem of female subservience worldwide.

In the show’s largest work Gloria Lamson (Port Townsend) takes assemblage a step further and engages the viewer and the exhibition space, itself, with a gallery installation that suggests the inner sanctum of the artist’s mind. In Falling Apart and Coming Together a large illuminated light box leans against the wall and projects a whirlwind of scribble-scrabble lines that suggest a human figure in motion. The floor is strewn ankle-deep with thousands of jigsaw puzzle pieces and scores of spent teabags are attached to the wall like an army of moths in flight. An old typewriter is set up on a low table, its blank paper perhaps inviting viewers to weigh in with their thoughts.

There’s much more from Port Angeles’s Bill Green, David Haight, Clay Murdach, Eric Neurath, Brian Schröder, and Anna Wiancko-Chasman, Sequim’s John Goodwin, Jean Heessels-Petit, and Paul Thomas, Port Townsend’s Newel Hunter, Counsel Langley, Harold Nelson, and Kim Thomson, Joyce’s Steve Carlyle, and Quilcene’s Harry von Stark.

Both shows continue through May 9. Fine Arts Center hours are Wed-Sun, 11-5. Peninsula College’s Pirate Union Gallery hours are Mon-Fri, 7am-8pm. Admission to both is free.