Current Exhibition

Envision Cascadia
July 5-NOVember 29

33 Pacific Northwest artists imagine a homeland

The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens a new exhibition titled Envision Cascadia on July 5 with an artists’ reception from 2-4 pm. The show includes the works of Pacific Northwest artists who responded to a call to ponder their homeland — the emerald territory that lies between the snowy ramparts of the Cascade Mountains and the rugged shoreline of the blue Pacific.

“Artists from Oregon, Washington and British Columbia submitted work related to a state of mind that we’re calling Cascadia,” said PAFAC director and exhibition curator, Jake Seniuk. “Cascadia won’t be found on a triple-A road map, because road maps are gridded out in compliance with political logic. Cascadia’s boundaries are defined not by contracts and laws, but by the human imagination and by the natural ecology that comprises this bioregion.

The notion of Cascadia can be traced back to the fabled Oregon Territory that beckoned to the restless in the early 19th century. Inspired by its powerful and sublime landscapes, it is often regarded in a Utopian light from the idealistic Puget Sound Colony. which was the predecessor to modern Port Angeles, to Ecotopia, the “green” breakaway republic in this northwest corner described by Ernest Callenbach in his 1975 futuristic fantasy novel of the same name.

“The projected year (1995) of Callenbach’s idealized state has come and gone,” mused Seniuk, “but the conditions, which spawned the invention of a nation based on sustainability rather than endless growth, have resurfaced in the public consciousness with a vengeance. Because of its remoteness and its location at the very heart of the Cascadian zone, the Olympic Peninsula still embodies the lingering promise of such a place.”

The exhibition includes a range of media from the classical: exemplified by a never-before-exhibited painting, Bay of Dreams Cascade, by Northwest visionary master Charles Stokes, depicting a luminous abstracted waterfall alive with ancestral spirits; to the totally improvisational, as in Karen Rudd’s life-size hyper realistic tree stump sculpted completely from recycled cardboard.

The landscape plays a prominent role in the show in works such as the detail-rich large format photographs of Eirik Johnson and John Anderson that provide carefully selected windows on forest and peak, while Nealy Blau aims her camera at natural history museum dioramas to probe the artifice of idealized nature.

The human element interacts with nature’s abundance in some curious ways. Nicole Dextras’ elaborately posed fashion photographs present Ecoman and The Queen of Cascadia outfitted in whimsical costumes created by the artist with plant “fabrics” woven from large leaves and blooming flowers.

The old axiom that “when the tide is out, the table is set” is colorfully embodied in a ceramic feast of Northwestern abundance in Anna Wiancko-Chasman’s life-scale dinner tableau.

Not all is milk and honey. A strain of satire is prevalent in paintings like Bryn Barnard’s Disneyesque depiction of the gathering of the beasts in a north country Eden. Jack Gunter’s aerial view of a Housing Development on Hurricane Ridge brings a dystopian warning to the mix.

Several artists use the dramatic vistas seen through the hilltop Webster House’s fish bowl windows to engage the real landscape of Cascadia. Rebecca Cummins has built a brickwork of nearly 200 water-filled wineglasses in one window that serve as lenses to create a fractured fly’s-eye view of upside down images encompassing the vista that stretches out below and in the nearby Webster’s Woods.

There is much more to be seen and digested here. However, “this exhibition is not suggested by any means to be definitive treatment of the meaning of Cascadia” cautions Seniuk. “Rather, it is a first step meant to stimulate conversation, both private and public, about who we are. Here in the “Northwest’s northwest,” I hope that notions of Cascadia will play prominently in developing Port Angeles’s identity in this new century.”