Current Exhibitions

Strait Art 2008

March-16-May 11, 2008

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The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens Strait Art 2008, its annual showcase of the art of Juan de Fuca country, with a reception for the artists on Sunday, March 16, from 2-4 pm.

An open call to artists generated submissions from fifty-eight painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers and crafts workers on the north Olympic Peninsula and in Victoria B.C. Those were whittled down to thirty-two, with each artist represented by a pair of works, providing the viewer with “a second look” and some familiarity towards recognizing each artist’s developed style.

“Although all who live here are inspired daily by the magnificent landscape that surrounds us, Strait Art is not necessarily about directly depicting the natural beauty of the Olympic Peninsula,” said PAFAC director and exhibition curator, Jake Seniuk. “The subjects and ideas that inspire the artists living here, as with artists everywhere, are drawn from places distant and local, communal and personal, physical and mental, present and past. We wanted to take the pulse of contemporary art, to debut work by newcomers, and to explore recent developments in the work of veterans of past shows.”

Digital photography accounts for an ever-expanding portion of Strait Art entries. For Linda Crow (Port Angeles) the camera is a direct extension of her experiences in far-flung places. The quick reflexes of the seasoned travel photographer are evident in her capture of a burnoose-clad phantom, paused for a moment in an adobe doorway, his blue robe swirling in the hot Saharan winds of mythic Timbuktu.

Seeking out distinctive elements of our own locale, Ed Jaramillo (Port Townsend) reprises familiar Port Townsend sights such as the abandoned military fortifications at Fort Worden, rendered in crisp black and white prints that are solemnly free of human presence.

The fort’s photogenic battlements are rich in opportunities for architectural quotations that aspire towards abstraction. Brian Schroder (Port Angeles) isolates a massive iron ring against the aged concrete wall, like the grim shackle of an abandoned dungeon, whose faded palette surrenders only the barest traces of life.

Bob Kaune (Port Angeles) compresses earth, water and sky seen in reflection into an interlocking pattern that rivals the intensity of stain glass.The play between descriptive landscape and imposed pattern is also evident in Marsha Slomowitz’s (Port Townsend) Romantic black and white Southwest desert photographs.

Jerry Busic’s (Port Townsend) bird silhouettes are deftly written against the sky like some kind of avian calligraphy, while Debra Brochin (Port Townsend) creates expressive nudes with a few strokes of the brush; Gail Larson (Quilcene) and Newel Hunter (Port Townsend) home in directly on painterly gestures that stand only for themselves.

Lynne Armstrong’s (Port Angeles/Victoria, B.C.) watercolors eschew prettiness for mood. The wet chill of her late winter scenes is convincingly conveyed with watery brushwork and transparent washes, wicked into the paper as if into a beach walker’s socks.

Stan Hammer’s (Joyce) sketching trips to downtown Seattle have yielded an outpouring of street scenes rendered with a speedy hand, dancing with confidence over the page and striving to keep pace with the city’s bustle, while Bill Green (Port Angeles) brings iconic dignity to his renderings of some of the sculptures in the Center’s Webster’s Woods Art Park.

The ennui of suburban life lies just below the surface in Terry Leness’s (Port Townsend) rigidly composed views of modest tract homes. Neat and prim, these intimately scaled paintings are constructed with a spare formality that conveys claustrophobic conformism.

Azalea Rees’s (Port Townsend) portraits coax the softest of lights from transparent watercolor washes while Pamela Hastings’ (Port Angeles) unblended brushwork and emotional use of bright colors as skin tones recalls the look of German Expressionism from a century ago.

Karen Hackenberg’s (Port Townsend) double portraits pair humans and wild creatures as the odd couple. Forbearance recalls that bit of folk wisdom, which observes that owners come to resemble their pets, as a bristly grizzly bear is matched with a bearded fellow wearing the ruddy complexion of a park naturalist.

Jeweler Ron Floyd’s (Port Angeles) necklaces, earrings, rings and pendants make references to natural forms such as the lovely fan-shaped leaf of the “living fossil” ginkgo tree, the observed patterns of wind and water erosion, or the crystal structure of a mineral as seen under the microscope, while Ken Campbell’s (Port Angeles) carved and painted fowl decoys present the studied hereditary characteristics of various bird species.

Tammy Hall’s (Port Angeles) collages glimpse fragments of a through-the-looking-glass world inhabited by Renaissance noblewomen, birds costumed in resplendent satin gowns, and airborne plaster Cupids, while Sandra Beck’s (Port Townsend) fantasy tableaux engage the viewer in more developed narratives that retain some memory of illuminated manuscripts.

There is a resonance of Futurism — the early 20th century movement that celebrated speed, technology and warfare — in the retina-popping paintings of Michael Anderson (Port Angeles). He builds his feverish portraits with psychedelic streaks of saturated color that merge into resolved images through patterned repetition, not unlike the scanning lines of an old tube television.

Buddhist sacred tanka paintings have strongly influenced Steve Carlyle’s (Joyce) leaded glass windows, which exploit the transcendental quality of translucent colored glass, known to European cathedral builders as a bridge to the divine.

Paul Labrie’s (Port Angeles) Lidded Pots are smooth glass totems extruded in bright hues and patterns, depicting big game animals like the rhinoceros and Big Horn Sheep stacked into heraldic trophies, while Gray Lucier’s (Port Angeles) columns of found and recycled steel suggest the human figure.

Mark Stevenson’s (Port Townsend) Hollow Man is reminiscent of the invisible man, whose outline is revealed only by the mummy-like wrappings of his bandages. A six and a half foot steel stickman is encircled by coils of thick hemp rope, whose contours imply a torso underneath.

Maria Loe’s (Sequim) clay figurines look as if they might have been unearthed on some rocky Aegean isle. With a diamond-shaped face and elongated alien features, her fragmentary female intimates a prehistoric mystery.

Jan Hoy’s (Port Townsend) voluptuous bronzes have a flawless finish that contains their pregnant volumes inside a lustrous metallic skin. Her works are lovely and complete alone, yet when seen in series seem like subsequent stages of life processes such as cell division.

The sensation of fulfillment embodied in Hoy’s dense forms is turned inside out in Deanna Pindell’s (Port Hadlock) gourd-like 3-D wax encaustics. Standing five feet tall and hollow as a seashell, her Eve is all about potential, about waiting to be filled..

A more conceptual approach is evident in Norma Fried’s (Port Townsend) portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which is overlaid with red type ruminating on her allure and simultaneous victimhood.

The florid text in Claudia Lorenz’s (Victoria, B.C.) Ovid’s Penultimate Loveletter has sunk deep into the underpainting, just as Ovid himself has sunk into the fog of history. Mounting an actual brass mail slot through the painting’s surface Lorenz creates a painting/sculpture amalgam that conflates physical and pictorial space. A kind of spiritual space is implied by Inge Norgaard’s (Port Townsend) Stairs, a tall and narrow woven tapestry that seems to stretch towards the infinite — a stairway to heaven..

Charlotte Watts (Sequim) draws the viewer into another kind of spiritual space with her rotating Buddhist prayer wheel that photographically recreates a panoramic view of Webster’s Woods on a thin sheet of aluminum wrapped around a rotating cylinder. Viewers can write their prayers and add them to the drum and set it spinning to symbolically broadcast them to the universe.

-- Jake Seniuk, abridged from On Center, Vol. XX, No. 2

A small teaser exhibition with works by a half-dozen of the artists will simultaneously be on display at Port Angeles City Hall.