Current Exhibition

SAFE HARBOR is the title of a new thematic exhibition opening at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center on July 11 with an artist’s reception from 2-4 pm. Featuring the works of Northwest regional American and Canadian artists, the show uses Port Angeles’s role as a harbor community to serve as the vehicle for exploring broader implications of that identity, both locally and on the larger world stage.

As a noun harbor connotes a sheltered port or a place of refuge. As a verb harbor means to secretly shelter some one or thing or to maintain and sustain thoughts, perceptions and feelings internally.

“In an age where new threats captivate mass consciousness without pause,” observed PAFAC director and exhibition curator Jake Seniuk, “the theme of Safe Harbor is especially ripe for a broad range of interpretations, many of which have no direct connection to marine moorage, yet maintain a metaphoric link to the sea. We offered the rubric safe harbor as a catalyst for artists to take off from and offer visions related to shelter from the storms of personal experience and collective fate.”

Seventy artists using a range of pictorial and sculptural media responded to the artists’ call, and Seniuk selected one or more works by thirty-seven, sampling the breadth of ideas and approaches represented in this field.

“With the current attention on Harbor Works and on the future of the Port Angeles waterfront in general,” said Seniuk, “it seems like a good moment to think about harbors. The north Olympic Peninsula’s remove from many metropolitan pressures gives further dimension to notions of sanctuary that safe harbor implies. Given the limits of our exhibition space, the short timeline leading up to the show and the vastness of the theme, we have no doubt just begun to scratch the surface of the deep notion that is Safe Harbor.”

The show includes literal marinescape depictions such as Sequim pilot/photographer Dave Woodcock’s aerial view of Crescent Bay, a largely pristine and quintessential Northwest style harbor.

In contrast the muscular geometry of the workaday harbor in Seattle watercolorist Suze Woolf’s glowing views of the industrial waterfront celebrates the economic lifeblood brought by marine commerce.

The harbor takes on more Romantic dimensions in the fog bound waters subtly captured by Port Ludlow photographer Michael Berman in Luminous Morning, and in Olympia painter Jeffree Stewart’s Night Radiant River, Father and Son, which presents an archetypal fishing scene, with swirling woodcarving-like strokes that conjure an earlier and more innocent Northwest epoch.

Sculptures range from Mark Twain Stevenson’s (Port Townsend) stainless steel connect-the-dots figure paying homage to the constellation Cassiopeia, which guided him to safe harbor in a youthful sailing incident, to David Eisenhour’s (Port Hadlock) HMS Progress, which brings the ongoing BP Gulf Coast debacle into the gallery with a pithy tableaux wherein a human skeleton paddles across the fouled waters in a 55-gallon oil drum, like some nautical horseman of the Apocalypse.

A number of other artists address safe harbor through its antithesis. Karen Hackenberg’s gouache Watershed series calls attention to the despoilment of the ocean with the detritus of consumer culture. In each panel a trash artifact, which the artist has found washed up on the beach near her Port Townsend home, is blown up to monumental size and posed against the tide line that delivered it.

With her installation, Distilled, Polly Purvis (Seattle) suspends from the ceiling a collection of vintage glass laboratory equipment filled with contaminants (antifreeze, motor oil, plastic bag shards) gleaned from a typical modern harbor.

There is the safe harbor of parental love, too, in works such as Bainbridge Island bronze sculptor Roy Peratrovich’s series of bonding poses between a she-bear and her cub, which through the artist’s sensitive modeling and luscious patinas avoids the Hallmark kitsch that this subject so often invites. And Redmond painter Susan Melrath evokes the safe harbor provided by the nuclear family with a birthday scene populated by boldly painted faceless revelers who stand in for all families.

Then, of course, there is the safe harbor of financial security. Seattle conceptual artist Alan Lande addresses the ongoing viability of non-profit cultural institutions by purchasing a $100 government I-Bond, purported to be the safest of investments. Framed on the wall with the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the certificate, it serves both as a precisely quantified investment gift to the Center and as a symbolic incentive to others to support the dreams and visions that art brings to the heart of a community.

There is much, much more with works by Bryn Barnard (Friday Harbor), Paul Blake (Sekiu), Mary Coss (Seattle), Robert Dash(Indianola), Pat De Caro (Seattle), Karen DeWinter (Seattle), Cosette Dudley (Port Angeles), Kathleen Faulkner (Anacortes), Jack Gunter (Camano Island), Melinda Hannigan (Seattle), Aaron Hartzell (Seattle), Anne Hirondelle (Port Townsend), Iskra Johnson (Seattle), Kelly Lyles (Seattle), Heather Joy (Vashon Island), Kiefer Klein (Port Angeles), Terry Leness(Port Townsend), Maxine Martell (Coupeville), Holly Martz (Bremerton), Michael Paul Miller (Port Angeles), Harold Nelson(Port Townsend), Matthew Olds (Vashon Island), Frank Samuelson (Port Townsend), Grant Watson (Victoria, BC), Eva Sköld Westerlind (Kirkland), Al Williams (Victoria, BC)

Read Jake Seniuk's complete SAFE HARBOR essay