The Back Country

July 10 - October 9, 2011

The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens its new summer exhibition, The Back Country, on Sunday, July 10 with a reception from 2-4 pm. The exhibition contains the work of 32 artists, selected from 52 who responded to a call for submissions that explored themes engendered by their notions of what “the back country” might be.

For PAFAC director and exhibition curator, Jake Seniuk, the theme and title was inspired by the 1971 book The Back Country by the seminal Cascadian poet Gary Snyder, a writer who gave eloquent voice to wilderness and has been at the literary vanguard of growing environmental awareness for more than half a century.

“Along with the Center’s 2009 Utopian-themed exhibition, Envision Cascadia, and last summer’s insular Safe Harbor,” said Seniuk, “The Back Country completes a trilogy of exhibitions probing a contemporary identity for our little corner of Paradise. It is particularly poignant at this moment in time as the impending demolition of the Elwha dams focuses attention on the connections between the wild Olympic interior and the zone of habitation.”
The exhibition sets out to explore hinterlands — physical, mental, spiritual and political— and aims to draw connections between those realms of experience.

The physical splendor of wilderness is manifest in Sequim pilot/photographer Dave Woodcock’s misty aerial view of the rugged Olympic high country. The jagged alpine massifs of Mt. Anderson, Mt. Constance and Chimney Peak roll across the panoramic frame like stone waves rising and falling across eons of geologic time.

In a pair of small canvases by Mitchell Albala (Seattle) mountain peaks are barely visible, blasted with golden sunshine blindingly bright in the thin-aired “heavenly” back country above timberline.

Sequim photographer Charlotte Watts locates the back country “out back — the back door into the forest that surrounds [her rural Sequim home], up small roads and smaller animal trails, finding solace, refuge in small spaces and intimate nature.” The gossamer tones and textures in her photograph at the fringe of the back country have the soft glow of a vision inhabiting a dream.

The spirit of the back country takes on aboriginal resonance in Erik Sandgren’s (Aberdeen) large painting titled “Journey.” Laying on swirling brushstrokes in transparent layers, he concocts a nebulous atmosphere alive with totemic spirits imbedded in the clouds and sea. On the indistinct horizon a Native long canoe emerges on a journey that appears to span the mists of time.

Tom Schworer (Seattle) often works with dancers and choreographers to create photographs of nudes interacting intimately with the landscape. Here he flanks a great fir in the Elwha valley with a pair of figures, one static and one in blurred motion, to evoke an archetypal presence, as if we are looking at a blanched spirit who has penetrated and reemerged from the trunk of this Olympic forest giant.

Christian Swenson, the Seattle-based performance artist who has often combined sound and motion to enchant Juan de Fuca audiences with his own brand of human jazz, here ventures into the world of self-portraiture with Feets. Presented as a looping slide show he unfolds a photographic chronicle of his bare peds touching and being touched by the natural textures of a wide array of remote paths that he has trod upon in his travels as an entertainer.

A number of artists present “the back country” under siege. The bright blue spray painted lines and numbers blazed on gnarly tree trunks in Michael Berman’s (Port Ludlow) lush photographs of the DNR forest adjoining his Port Ludlow property mark the path that chainsaws will soon take.

Suzanne Lamon’s (Port Hadlock) Blue Axe loudly announces the scene after the saws have passed. Her large canvas reads like an amputation splashing a massive freshly cut tree stump against a field of almost solid red.

Karen Hackenberg (Port Townsend) takes on environmental distress with a bit of prickly whimsy. The surfaces of her Hand Basket are thickly encrusted with a logjam of matchsticks. A forest of green-tipped matchstick trees grows from a rolling topography of red-tipped matchstick earth. The landscape is populated by tiny HO scale miniature humans, farm animals and wildlife engaged in scenarios of outdoor life amidst a sea of match heads that could explode from a spark.

Probing the edges of what he sees as a political back country, i.e. political philosophies predicated on a desire to turn back the clock, David Eisenhour (Port Hadlock) has created an icon rife with irony reminiscent of the Pop Art of the ‘60s. The name brand on the string label dangling from his gargantuan teabag is Plutocratea and promises trickle down aroma and herd brewing. To emphasize the point the artist has filled the bag with dried horse manure as the secret ingredient of the teabag movement.

The vision is darkest in Michael Paul Miller’s (Port Angeles) monumental canvas, The Migration, which unfolds a dystopian allegory of civilization adrift. Four young men of varied ethnicities float above a ravaged landscape in a gondola dangling from a hot air balloon that we assume is aloft beyond the edge of the frame. With their scant possessions, each with its own symbolic import, lashed to their craft, they are the disgruntled survivors of some catastrophe that has turned the whole earth into an unpopulated backcountry.

The Back Country roams wider with more intriguing works by David Berger (Seattle), Jean-Marie Clarke (Staufen,Gemany), Newell Hunter (Port Townsend), Bob Kaune (Port Angeles), Alan Lande (Seattle), Counsel Langley (Port Townsend), Peter Malarkey (Port Angeles), Holly Martz (Bremerton), Jeremy Mangan (Seattle), Pablo McLoud (Carlsborg), Randall Page (Port Angeles), Polly Purvis (Seattle), Ken Smith (Riverside, WA), Jeffree Stewart (Olympia), Sharon Strauss (Bainbridge Island), Harry von Stark (Quilcene), Eva Skold Westerlind (Mercer Island), Anna Wiancko-Chasman (Port Angeles), Steve Wilson (Seabeck), Helga Winter (Port Townsend), and Suze Woolf (Seattle).