Current Exhibition

May 22 - July 3

ArtPaths 2011

In the wake of its annual Strait Art exhibition that showcases Juan de Fuca region artists, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center follows with its youth version of North Olympic fare under the banner of ArtPaths: Portfolio 2011. The show opens May 22 with a reception for the artists from 2-4 pm and remains on view through July 3.

A well-established annual event in its sixth year, Portfolio presents opportunities for young local artists to step into the limelight. This year’s exhibition features twenty-three promising high school student artists, selected by PAFAC education director, Barbara Slavik, from nominations made by their teachers.

Slavik worked closely with the art instructors in the county’s three largest high schools — Port Angeles, Sequim, and Forks — to guide the student artists in developing their work to exhibition standards. At Port Angeles High School first-year art instructor Joanna Keller replaced the convalescing Jenny Steelquist as mentor and guide into the mysteries of art. Veteran mainstays, Martha Rudersdorf and Jake Reichner at Sequim High School, continued to sharpen their AP and ceramics programs; and Wendy Bennett, at Forks High School, proved once again that there is culture beyond “Twilight.”

The aim of the show always is to instill a sense of professionalism in ambitious students and to stimulate the production of a coherent portfolio that will demonstrate their talents, and hopefully launch them along future art paths. In weekly sessions, from February up to the show’s opening, Slavik mentored and critiqued students in collaboration with their teachers, helping the young artists refine their work and prepare it for an effective display. PA Running Start students also received guidance from Peninsula College art instructor, Michael Paul Miller.

The exhibition is comprised of paintings, drawings, collage, ceramics and mixed media works that express a host of ideas and emotions. Portfolio is not meant to be a competition, but a vehicle for expression and communication.

“My biggest goal is always to help them try to find a voice of their own,” said Slavik. “I think that is the great challenge and reward of art, and in a larger sense is intrinsic to their development as aware human beings.” Slavik guides the young artists to clarify their intentions of what they find important to communicate, and then works with them and their teachers to further develop the students’ design skills and achieve enough command over their materials to enable them to realize their intent.

At the May 22 opening each participating artist will be presented with $50 gift certificate for art supplies, supported by long-time ArtPaths underwriter The Hastings Trust of San Diego. Olympic Stationers also contributes portfolio cases and drawing kits to each and Karon’s Frame Center contributes labor in matting and glazing a dozen and a half works on paper.

The exhibition includes veterans of past Portfolio exhibitions and newcomers, underclassmen as well as seniors, and a range of media from the traditional (acrylics, ceramics) to the unconventional (toilet paper).

Jamaica DeLuna (PA), returning from Portfolio 2010, offers the largest paintings in the exhibition. The boldly drawn imagery in a pair of canvases is inspired by photographs taken by her father while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps in Somalia during the ‘90s. In Boy with Monkey, a young villager is hunkered down petting a small monkey rising from a crouch. The stark desert landscape is sparely rendered in loose, dripping brushstrokes that conjure the shimmering broken light of a mirage. Over the boy’s shoulder we see the loosely sketched and truncated legs of two soldiers, faceless phantoms advancing through the haze of war that lingers all around his childhood.

Also moved by politics and world events, Devin Chastain (Forks) turns her adulation for the Pop Art-inspired silkscreen portraits that she exhibited last year to the subject of political dissidents. Painting bold swaths of color on ceramic tile, she assembles a mosaic grid portrait of Myanmar’s Nobel Peace laureate Aung Sann Su Kyi, her personal hero, in a manner that recalls Andy Warhol’s portraits of Mao and Che.

Forks classmate, Isaiah McDonald, employs images drawn from mass media in search of youthful political idealism. Using a stenciling technique he transfers news photographs of non-violence icons such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. onto rough wooden tiles that are then cobbled together into a rickety structure that suggests the precariousness of the path to peace.

“The passion of youth to look for justice in art is often equally trained on the self, with a yearning for solidifying identity,” observed PAFAC director Jake Seniuk. “Social concerns are often mirrored in the artist’s internal landscape.”

Alex Durant (Sequim) finds the ocean “frightening and captivating” and her dreamy triptych follows a long-tressed avatar as she overlooks the sea, dives into the waves and drifts weightlessly underwater in successive frames. A lover’s suicide or a metaphoric transcendence from child to woman swimming into the depths of the self?

Andrea Morris (Sequim) offers a different kind of triptych that looks at time spread over decades not moments. With clear-eyed assuredness she builds bold self-portraits of herself in the past at age four, in the present at fifteen and in the future at sixty-four.

“There is a good dose of the fanciful, as well,” promised Seniuk. Miranda Robertson’s (Sequim) “Landscape” melds a jagged mountainous landscape with a reclining female form. Sergio Chase (Forks) offers whimsical robotic assemblage sculptures that invent cartoonish characters made up of salvaged machine parts and kitchenware.

Probing the boundaries of found object art with tongue planted in cheek Joseph Heuring (Forks) creates very formal white-on-white soft sculptures by cutting and shaping rolls of toilet tissue.

The exhibition has much more to offer with the works work of Port Angeles’s Madison Kuss, Courtney McMonaghy, Megan Perrizo and Darian Waltenburg, Sequim’s Jake Bonifazio, Sage Brown, Emily Carel, Patrick Carpenter, Julianne Miller , Cole Morgan, Sarah Spray and Grace Trautman, and Forks’s Rachel Harner and Whitney Ray.