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Art Outside
is the program that has brought a singular open-air art collection to the former Webster Estate. The total number of artworks that have accumulated in Webster’s Woods Art Park since the inaugural 2000 season has crested at more than one hundred and twenty-five. While over the years many pieces have been returned to their creators or succumbed to the elements, the net presence of art in the park has grown steadily through gift, entrenchment and extended loan.
One of the hallmarks of Art Outside has always been to strive for a balance between sculptural objects and site interventions, with both approaches highly sensitive to the natural environment. The five and a half acres of second-growth forest has been a friendly host to artists’ imaginations. A varied topography that embraces trees and clearing, ridge and hollow, swale and wetland makes for constantly changing sightlines and new landscape frames. Artists are stimulated by our sublime Olympic setting and excited to be able to try out their ideas with the great degree of freedom accorded to them “Magical, enchanted, whimsical, delightful, transcendent” are a few of the adjectives that escape routinely from the lips of those who walk the discovery trails of this unique “museum without walls.” Recurring declarations by rapturous visitors, promising to mimic this or that artwork in their own backyards, reaffirm the impression that the activities in these Woods communicate on a very fundamental level.
The greatest charm of Webster’s Woods, no doubt, is the resonance between artists’ ideas and the self-perpetuating landscape. There is a playful and not-always-distinct border between the artists’ creations, the flora and the natural features of this spectacular property. The transitory nature of many of the artworks makes for a visible evolution in the collection, even for the new or infrequent visitor, as marked through the constant changes manifested by the passage of the seasons. This art has a tendency to make even the most casual observer see nature through a new lens, and in so doing reaches the wellsprings of our connections to the living earth that is often overwhelmed by preoccupations with proxy experiences happening on screens or on the printed page. Generous annual sponsorship by First Federal Savings and Loan of Port Angeles allows for the creation of new works each season, which are premiered around the Summer Solstice (June 19 in 2010). sponsored by
2010 SEASON
The second decade of Art Outside was launched in Webster’s Woods June 19th with the introduction of new works by seventeen Northwest artists. Works by this latest ensemble, featuring seasoned Art Outside veterans and a half-dozen newcomers, join and complement more than one hundred works still on site from previous seasons through extended loan, artists’ gifts and patrons’ permanent acquisitions.
The first new work of the season to be encountered by the visitor glints in the sunlight at the foot of the driveway that leads up to the Webster House. San Juan Island sculptor Micajah Bienvenu returns this year with another monumental stainless steel construction, this time in a figurative mode. The title Yipeee! is the sound that matches the exclamatory pose struck by this twelve-foot tall hoofer from the artist’s Dancing Fool series. The graceful flowing lines of Bienvenu’s dancer are unencumbered with detail and are a virtual diagram of movement, more like the calligraphic strokes of a character in Japanese kanji script than a well-muscled body in motion. Mounted on a central pivot the figure is free to be sent pirouetting en pointe by the adventuresome viewer, assuming new postures as it turns. Judith Bird (Port Townsend) adds color and texture to posture in animating a dozen dancing sweaters that line a path descending to the Woods’ low point. Succeeding Witness — Bird’s memorable crowd of shrunken pullovers and cardigans that occupied a hillside for several years slowly slipping into organic decay until removed this spring by the artist — Joined exhibits a lighter touch with its chain of colorful linked torsos that flank the trail like a human fence. This time Bird has enlivened the sweaters’ original patterns with bright overlays of felted shapes that seem to have escaped from a comic book and adhered to the stiffened duds in a look that recalls the bold fashions inspired by 1960s Pop Art.
If this chain of disembodied revelers is celebrating some kind of festival or holiday, the adjacent monolith, just across the path, by Dean Hanmer (Vashon Island) ,provides a ceremonial focus for that celebration. The cast concrete stele is encrusted with mosaic patterns comprised of tile shards, colored glass, seashells, mirrors and other fragments of hardscape. These bits are arranged in abstracted paths and mazes with a hint of imbedded anthropomorphism (the outlines of faces and hands), but freely suggesting garden paths, rivers and canyons, molecular motion, electronic and cyber circuitry. The plethora of possible associations gleaned from simple patterns that are part diagram/part pictogram, part monument/part information kiosk move back and forth between ancient and futuristic in their affect.
The integration of art and spirit within the bosom of nature is given symbolic form by Nepali artist Jyoti Duwadi (Bellingham), who addresses a magnificent charred old growth snag, left behind by a long-ago fire, with ceremonial substances drawn from his Himalayan cultural heritage and from local materials, which he has used to shape a sacred space in the forest. Bright poofs of ground pigments splash against the crackled charcoal. Colored yarns entwine the ancient’s girth. A simple mandala is diagrammed on the forest floor with sprinkled powders. Smooth stones from the nearby shoreline are smeared with red chalk and arranged like shorn monks in meditation. The sustenance of life force appears in a small crop of barley seedlings that grows from two appended canvas pockets filled with red earth from North Carolina, another place that was for a time the homeport on this artist’s journey.
Using only mud and earth scooped from the Webster’s Woods bog, Kuros Zahedi (Bellingham) has given five faces to the spirits that one can sense just under the surface in these magical groves. Emerging from a mossy covered tree trunk, nestled in the crevasses of a decaying old cedar log, floating next to a path just above the forest duff itself — these contemplative visages stare us in the face with intimations of our own mortality. But these are friendly ghosts, of the solid microbial earth not of some vaporous aether invented by the mind. As such they assure us that life and death are not destinations but merely changes in material state. That these faces, like our own, are designed to erode and surrender to the gyre of time is an expression of faith in the wholeness of the phenomenal world.
Out of the woods, near the building in benefactor Esther Barrows Webster’s old garden, the ancient — or a facsimile thereof — is uncovered by Anna Wiancko-Chasman’s (Port Angeles) Thyme Garden. Taking an archaeological dig as her model, Wiancko-Chasman has half-buried a dense abundance of both real and concocted artifacts in a raised bed. Ranging from miniature cave pictographs at the back of the mock excavation, to faux Anasazi pottery in the middle, to Barbie dolls nearest the viewer, the progression of styles and technology traces a timeline of civilization. Interspersed among the archaeological booty are the eponymous thyme plants that will in time reclaim the spot for nature.
When the grand madrona that graced the Webster House courtyard died with the close of the last century, a number of artists including Diana Liljelund, Brigitte Potter-Mäl and James Lapp, over the first decade of this new century, created commemorative works on its skeleton. Now that the tree has been removed from the courtyard and its various dismembered trunks arrayed along the entrance of the central path leading into Webster’s Woods, Dan Cautrell (Duvall) adds the newest homage. An avid printmaker, he has created a half-dozen relief carvings that resemble woodblocks and form fitted them as decorative end caps for the tree’s amputated stumps, giving the impression they had been carved in situ. With bold forms inspired by Salish myths about the madrona, In Memory of a Tree depicts the distinctive leaves, seeds, flowers, even the drops of rain that are all part of the arboreal life cycle. James Lapp’s (Mount Vernon) past works have often had a playful relation to gravity using both found elements and pre-fabricated items set into illusionistic contexts. His levitated stones dangle from tree limbs and his hanging mirrors fracture the continuity of the forest canopy, toying with the viewer’s sense of equilibrium. This year his medium of choice is large inflatable exercise balls captured in the branch works of several trees.
In one, Blue Ascension, four bright blue balls, wedged amidst a tight copse of slim trunks, are inflated to progressively larger diameters as they rise with the spread of flaring trunks. Spaced at increasing intervals and glimpsed against the view of Juan de Fuca Strait in the distance, the whole ensemble seems to be percolating upwards like bubbles rising in water. In a second forest intervention built with the processes of mitering and splicing, Lapp has reconfigured a rigidly straight dead tree limb, into a meandering line of improbable angles that defies any natural growth pattern. In a different round of wood butchering Julie Lindell (Seattle) goes in the other direction, mimicking the natural structure of a tree by cobbling together scraps of recycled lumber into a ten foot high Frankensteinian trunk with leafless canopy titled Recollection. Revealing some of its history in the bits of stenciled text and splintered edges remaining from the wood scraps’ previous incarnations, this maze of skewed angles and monochrome tonalities has the distinct feel of Cubist collage leapt off the page into three dimensions.
Gloria Lamson’s (Port Townsend) Windsong also has a bit of high modernist flair reminiscent of the organic abstract forms of Picasso and Miro. Drawing on what might be an arachnid-flavored hiccup in her genome, motivating her to create complex string webs that tilt and thrust through Webster’s Woods and other forests, she now bridges two tall firs with a column of parallel string lines that suggest musical staves. The allusion is completed by several measures worth of notes and rests, formed by dangling orange painted tennis balls and yellow squiggly steel counterweights that glow in the sunlight and quiver in the breeze.
Multiples — the repetition of forms and/or materials — have always been integral to both the process and aesthetics of Margie McDonald’s (Port Townsend) art. Her Feather Boas that still hang from a high madrona arm are composed of thousands of stainless steel wire bristles, and last year’s densely coiled Sphere is coiled from hundreds of feet of rusty bandsaw blades. In Porcupine Tree she uses a softer yet no less prickly medium — five-inch long wooden spikes painted red, orange and yellow and wired in dense progression to a dead mountain ash trunk, clothing it in a costume of happy thorns like some tropical exotic. Since Shirley Wiebe has retired her pink mesh tree Surroundings that had dulled and frayed over an eight-year tenure, David Nechak (Seattle) reclaims these same lower tutu woods where he had wrapped the slim trees in spandex evening gowns for the inaugural Art Outside season in 2000.
In his new Happenstance he provides fourteen gesturing hands, cast from life in fine detail with hydrocal plaster, their delicate blanched fingers recalling the white Carrara marble used to carve busts of Roman senators. Protruding from the trunks like signaling ghosts, they gesture in crisscrossing conversations and congregate around a central leader, whose pleading palm erupts from the long arm formed by a skinned wind-fallen trunk that’s come crashing into the grove from the ridge above.
Like Nechak, Shirley Wiebe (Vancouver, BC) has created work for every season of Art Outside. A prolific experimenter with materials, she here adapts extruded galvanized mesh normally used as support in stucco house construction, to create translucent scrims on whose waffle surfaces leafy shadows play, and whose overlapping layers create moiré patterns that mince with undulating textures as one observes while walking. The draping form suggests a simple vagabond’s shelter. Or, perhaps, the arching cowl that frames the goodness of a nun or the modesty of a noblewoman in a Renaissance Portrait of a Lady. Karen Hackenberg’s (Port Townsend) Water Shed is a woodsman’s hut constructed entirely from discarded plastic water bottles, continuing a theme from her paintings of washed-up refuse in the Safe Harbor exhibition. Strung together to form transparent walls supported by the steel frame of a discarded greenhouse, its playhouse scale is snugly at home in the elfin charm of Webster’s Woods, while presenting a jarring reminder of the ubiquity of mass consumption in our lives. The Water Shed is the core of a small neighborhood of nearby installations with recycling in their hearts. In a side garden Carolyn Law (Seattle) has created a robotic bouquet of floral forms made of tinted convex mirrors of various sizes and hues mounted on curved steel stems. The fisheye reflections of the organic world, the clean super graphic forms and the industrial consistency of color and shape are a cartoonish intrusion that’s both comical and a little foreboding.
Petroleum-based nature blossoms in a grand old tree nearby in the form of Barbara De Pirro’s (Shelton) Fungo Plastica. Made from recycled plastic grocery bags, stretched into beige yarns then crocheted into spheres of many sizes, ranging from a marble to a softball, they are arranged in cloned progressions and clusters like a parasitic invading life form, nestled into cavities and fissures in the gnarled and ruptured bark. Deanna Pindell (Port Hadlock) has created a front yard garden for the hermit’s hut by clearing away an invasive ivy groundcover and planting a dozen salal seedlings, a small reservoir of native growth enclosed by a straw-stuffed jute tubing used for highway erosion control. Her Squiggle sends 200 feet of this wattle snaking through the woods like a giant anaconda.
With black wool yarn, Pindell has stitched into the mesh snatches of text about salal in eight Northwestern aboriginal languages, including this anonymous poem. Salal grows in the darker places, Like love, and, like love, Takes hold in the shadows That sentiment might apply to the way art works on us, as well — emerging from the shadows of our awareness in a sudden flash of recognition and great empathy.
Some Remaining Works from Past Seasons
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