Artpaths: Portfolio 2010

In the wake of Strait Art Twenty Ten, our annual exhibition of 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 2010. Now an established annual event in its fifth year, Portfolio presents opportunities for young local artists to step into the limelight. The exhibition features two-dozen 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 Quillayute Valley — to guide the student artists in developing their work to exhibition standards. At Port Angeles High School this year’s focus was somewhat dampened by the serious illness of beloved art teacher, Jenny Steelquist, who has prodded and inspired consistently exceptional results with her charges over the years. Veteran mainstays, Martha Rudersdorf and Jake Reichner at Sequim High School, continued to sharpen their AP and ceramics programs; and Wendy Bennett, at Quillayute Valley High School, proved once again that there is art after “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 enouogh command over their materials to enable them to realize their intent.

Each participating artist is presented with $50 gift certificate for art supplies, supported by long-time ArtPaths underwriter The Hastings Trust of San Diego. Olympic Stationers also contributed portfolio cases and drawing kits to each and Karon’s Frame Center contributed labor in matting and glazing more than three-dozen art works.

The exhibition includes veterans of past Portfolio exhibitions and newcomers, underclassmen as well as seniors. Torrey Jakubcin (PA) appears for a third year with work that shows increasing sophistication in its response to art historical precedents. With a post-modern hubris for appropriation and re-contextualization of other artists’ work, he emulates imagery from the medieval world.

His acrylics-on-masonite triptych, titled Interference, cleverly mimics pre-Renaissance painting styles and is populated with characters, who might have escaped from the Unicorn Tapestries or a canvas of Breugel’s. A child of the dot.com age, Jakubcin superimposes the maze patterns of microchip logic boards across the painting’s surface, imbedding them into the fabric of the scene like a phantom subtext. It was the magnetism of faith that originally unified these Biblically charged subjects. Replacing that unseen force with an infrastructure of cyber circuitry, Jakubcin poses some intriguing questions about the nature of God in the 21st century.

The largest work in the show has again been provided by Mike Wiley (PA) and it, too, has a philosophical, if somewhat mystical bent. The central figure is clearly an avatar of redemption, rising above a kaleidoscopic landscape, exorcising addictions represented by a corona of cigarettes and snorting straws. Perhaps at root a self-portrait, it embodies the universal teenager — the Unknown Soldier — grasping for a true identity in the battlefield of youth.

Real battlefields are sensed in the expressions of Sara Schade’s (Sequim) sculpted clay heads that portray characters caught in the war zones of Darfur, Vietnam and Iraq. Her bust of a desert storm trooper, eyes pressed shut and face contorted in a wide-mouthed scream, is a powerful monument to the agony of war.

Four other artists from the vibrant Sequim ceramics program prefer to use the clay to more abstract ends. The rolled sheets used in the handbuilding process is like a skin or membrane that easily lends itself to organic forms. Lindsey Hintz creates tentacled branchwork suggestive of the sea floor that could double as vase or candelabra, while Sarah Donahue uses delicate fluting at the mouths of her hollow stems to suggest rippling tidal life.

Zane Carey has multiplied tubular fingers into dense fields of sensory papillae that seem to sway in currents that could easily be gigantic or microscopic or somewhere between. Giving her tall cylinders chiseled edges, Zoei Zbaraschuk creates the impression of a dense city skyline of office towers genuflecting before gale winds or some other great natural force.

The blocky geometry of the building facades in Sage Brown’s (Sequim) acrylic street scenes are clearly drawn and brightly illuminated, creating a strong sense of public space. Her sparsely populated streets and squares convey a starkness and mood of urban anomie reminiscent of the Depression-era existentialism of Edward Hopper.

Melissa Estrada (Quillayute) inflects her landscapes with a subtle political tone. In one, two buckets heaped with strawberries stand alone amid the straight receding rows of berry plants. There is no other sign of human life, perhaps commenting on the threatened state of migrant Mexican-American workers who work various harvests on the Peninsula’s West End, where her family has settled.

Heavily influenced by media culture, no doubt, fantasy narratives motivate many of these millennials. Bryanna Gentry’s (PA) aggressive character studies evoke moments of high drama. Like preparatory drawings that bring a screenplay to life, or like cartoon frames destined for a graphic novel, her graphite rascals are sketched with a fluid hand that deftly controls line and light to draw bold, almost hyperbolic expressions from these actors.

Anna LaBeaume (Sequim) and Sheldon Johnson (Sequim) move into a more virtual space reminiscent of animated movies and video games. Their creatures and personages are drawn with hard edges and bold lines that gives each element a solidly symbolic identity.

The comic realm is obsessive home turf for Brett Crump (Quillayute) who, in his second Portfolio appearance, continues his prolific cartooning, letting a coterie of creatures and anti-hero aliases tumble from his fertile imagination, filling the page edge-to-edge with the lessons of life thus far.

The exhibition has much more to offer with the works of Trisha Abbott and Jamaica DeLuna, (PA), Julianne Miller, Taylor Roads, Austin Becker, Emily Carel and Amie Griffith (Sequim), Devin Chastain (Quillayute).