Gabrielle Wambaugh at the Traver Gallery: Discontinuity

Glance                             Conversation

Gabrielle Wambaugh! She creates most of her work in ceramics, then adds various other materials.These are not like any ceramics I have ever seen. In these two pieces we have contrasts shiny, smooth, textured, cloth  (or is it ceramic imitating cloth), chalk drawing, balloon etc.

All the work was produced on a residency at Seattle University in 2026. She is an internationally known French artist. We are fortunate to have this exhibition.

Gap 2026 Ceramic and nails

Right away as we look at this extraordinary ceramic sculpture we see Gabrielle Wambaugh is willing to experiment, to play with ideas, scale, media.

Nails in ceramic?? they are opposites, one is pliable or hard, the other is straight, one is baked the other is forged. Apparently she works the clay, then inserts the nails, then bakes it.

But look at the clay, it could be an organic form, it is bent a little like an undercooked fat noodle with that space between the sides, the gap.

Wambaugh has talked a lot about space in her work, “As a sculptor I am concerned the space and in-betweens, such as gaps and interstices…. For about thirty years I have questioned sculpture through the density of its materials, its  limits and the scale of its periphery.”

Black also has ceramic and nails; it is slightly smaller. than Gap, 6.75 inches as opposed to 9.75 for Gap. Wambough’s earlier work often emphasized feet, but these knobbly shapes take it much further into the abstract, at the same time suggesting something a little creepy. And then the nails, many nails in the top, what do they suggest?

Wambough does not go in for explaining her work in terms of layered meanings, she mainly talks about materials, but I really need to interpret them.  Here goes.

Stands  as a verb, this foot is a real foot,  an animal foot.  A copper chain hangs down, and the foot is on a copper disc. Again I find this a little scarey. the distinct sharpened toe nails trying to grasp the shiny copper disc. The loose chain which we can imagine can cause pain if it is tightened.

Anchored ceramic and nails here is a definite large animal foot with five toes and pieces of legs laid on top. Then there are the nails in the calf. Not so many. These feet will not walk!

Trilogy  – this time the leg/foot is roughly treated in the glazes but juxtaposed to a perfect shiny ball. These types of textual contrast frequently appear  in Wambaugh’s work. Does it make us feel the materials more intensely? Can we create a metaphor from it? The ball is a balloon, filled with air. Wambaugh has said the balloons make her happy, they appear frequently as a counterpoint to her strange shapes

Corner 6.75 inches, I include the measurements to emphasize how small the work is. The work includes nails also but the main impact is the shiny, bumby green glaze and the pooled green areas that accent the corner. I see this as a fragment of a landscape. Gabrielle visited the Hoh rainforest while she was on the residency in Seattle and was bowled over by it, the mosses, the rains .

Here is a tree with white chalk drawn on it and nails inside. We can easily recognize the inside outside quality of the tree!

Together ceramic nails sponge  7.75×9″

I will conclude with this provocative three part piece. Why is it so pleasing?

It is the unexpected contrasts of textures, colors, and shape. I think it opens up our imagination to see these contrasting pieces that go together so harmoniously. It feels like a resolution to me.

Artnauts : Art Not as Usual

The Artnauts, under the direction of Dr. George Rivera, Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado-Boulder,  are a changing group of artists who create exhibitions in various countries including Palestine, Bosnia-Herzogovenia, and the Amazon (Columbia, Peru, Brazil). They usually have a theme that focuses their work and enables them to address social and political issues in a broad range of materials and aesthetic perspectives.  Over its years of existence ( 30!) hundreds of artists have  participated.

Here are some current statistics

2026

74 members

-60 USA from 10 States

-14 from 7 countries

220 over the 30 year history

256 exhibitions

27 countries

5 continents

Above  is the cover of one of their early exhibitions featuring the work of the well-known Nahan B. Zenil on the cover. If you look closely you see two lizard-headed men arm in arm. The exhibition featured gay and lesbian atrists from Mexico showing in Colorado in 2001 and 2002. It was a radical idea then and now

Exhibitions in Bethlehem in the West Bank near Jerusalem are full of poignancy.

Home/Land (2013) includes work that gives us a close up view of the anguish of Palestinians as well as the artists feelings  about it

in collage, digital prints and drawings.

Another exhibition  in Palestine was  Mahmoud Darwish An Art Homage to a Poet of Resistance (2014). In most cases the artists chose a line from  the famous poet to inspire a painting.

In  2018 Artnauts created an exhibition with the theme Wounds

The catalog includes personal staements by the artists that describe their own feelings as well as a larger grief.

Also   in 2018 Hegira and Other Passages, seen in Bosnia,  included statements by each atist that specifically state the connection of their work to the idea of passage, flight or journey. But this exhibition was held as Trump was coming into power, so one of the passages is of course the passage from light to darkness.

Post Tractatus Art In Amazonia in 2008

A confusing title!  according to Dr. George Rivera “Wittengenstein propositions were ‘pictures of reality. It is a visual journey into the Amazon… This is where science meets tradition. The universities in the Amazon seek to bridge this chasm by educating the local population and others from around the world who come to study the ecology of the rain forest”

In addition to this clear statement there are two pages of Wittensteinian quotes  and another summary of his thinking.

This exhibition from 2008 “Insurgence” in Colorado is subtitled “A Discourse on Social Change”sponsored by a different collective Art Praxis, “a group of Colorado artists who believe immediate attention is vital in order to bring awareness to the injstices taking place in our nation and around the world”

2019 Croatia The second amendment appears on the cover in a painting by Barbara Arnold

“When the second ammendment was written there were no AR15 weapons in existence, like the ones that massacred students,techers, coaches and police guards who tried to protect them.

But

“the theme addressed personal psychological, community, cultural social, national and international. The idea was to connect links between individuals and countries, Though this exhibition  emphasized the positive aspects of connections, some artists wished to focus on the consequences when connectioins are broken.”

In 2025 the collective created Shelter: Ark DO Tito’s Bunker”

in an incredible underground space.

Today Dr. George Rivera is hoping for another exhibition in Palestine

H wrote to me as follows

“Regarding your inquiry if we have any plans to return to Palestine, I have just submitted an exhibition proposal for an exhibition at the Walled Off Gallery at Bansky’s The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, Palestine. The exhibition will have artists address the theme of ENDURANCE. You might not know that Bansky, the famous street artist, purchased a hotel in Bethlehem in the West Bank that he donated to Palestinians to help bolster their economy. You should know that Bansky donated $100,000 to Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture which hosted all of our ARTNAUTS in Palestine.

“Here is an excerpt of what I wrote in my proposal:
I am herein submitting a proposal for an exhibition date of sometime in 2027 (date to be mutually determined if you host our exhibition). We have 65 artists in the collective. Each artist would create one work, and each work would be limited to 8.5 inches by 10 inches. We would all address a common
theme that I propose to be ENDURANCE. This theme is derived from William Faulkner’s Pulitzer Prize Address wherein Faulkner said:
“I decline to accept the end of man… I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

Hopefully, this exhibition can be scheduled in Palestine as soon as the IDF Israeli Army pulls its troops out of Bethlehem, which is located in the West Bank where at least 85 Palestinians have been killed.”

Dr George Rivera and the Artnauts are s shinng example of artists who engage with the problems of our contemporary world. What they have done over the course of thirty year is truly phenomenal. The art that they create for these exhibitions varies widely but all of it is provocative.

I gave a talk at one of their exhibitions in 2016

Rally round the Flag of Justice, 20th anniversary Here are a few examples

Andrew Connolly Palestine A way to Perpetrual Conflict

Sandie Ceas Palestine

Trine Bumiller Flags

I have twenty more images, but I will end there giving you a brief look at the enormous creativitey of the Artnauts. They have pullled  off something amazing. Here’s to another ten years.

Dr. George Rivera told me he in an email he is

proposing another exhibition in Palestine

Olive Ayhens : The World is Shaking

Olive in her studio.

Olive with  me, my daughter and grandaughter

She is holding her Grand Central painting.

Olive:

The Grand central piece was a commission celebrating the hundred year anniversary. I was over joyed to do it & hang out in such a gorgeous place. It is for everyone in their travels. I love it!

Olive Ayhens painting is extraordinarily detailed, at the same time she conveys a sense of emergency through instability that courses through all of her paintings. As you see here the cars flow through  the station and there is an inside outside that is purposely iuxtaposed

Simultaneity is a key aspect of all of Ayhens paintings

Olive:

“The Grand Central piece was a com mission celebrating the hundred year anniversary. I was over joyed to do it & hang out in such a gorgeous place. It is for everyone in their travels.

Let  us begin at the beginning

Nutty Woman and Calm Man 1971 dates from Ayhens early work in San Francisco. The artist provides this context:

“Nutty Woman and Calm Man, an early work from my mid twenties. I was raised in the middle ages,  Dutch Reformed. I denounced it around age 17. This painting is a garden of lush love.  I wanted to make sex beautiful after all my oppression.”

Incandescent 1981 If you look closely there is a woman impaled or trapped on an odd shape ( another figure?)The glowing yellow streams in all directions as she is immersed in its force. On the left side of the painting are several other figures swimming helplessly,

The artist:

“Incandescence is a later piece 1982, the beginning of my relationship with Joe. Again the theme is love between men and women. An erotic piece.”

In the mid 1990s Olive moved to New York City on a fellowship These two landscapes were done in 1996

City Moves In

Olive: “the second oil I did after I moved to NYC . I had taught in Montana(for an academic year) then back to S.F. still working from Montana inspiration then I received the free studio in NYC. So the painting has NYC on one side and Montana on the other. I really like the layering of the water.”

Metabolic Landscapes.

In the second one we see a line of cars driving across the water passing a flooded urban island of skyscrapers.

Olive:

“Too many cars in NYC! I am sending  Rapid Commute perhaps the best oil of that series, skyscrapers instead of cliffs on the sides.

A few years later (2005) she painted a shopping mall with soldiers guarding it. It seems eerily predictive today.

In 1999-2000 Ayhens had a residency in the World Trade Center, and she painted from on high looking down, but always with her own imagination. That habit persisted

Lamb 2006 This is one of Ayhens characteristic juxtapositions, the coffins are placed in the midst of a luxury environment with a swimming pool, as well as a crazy line up of computers  suggesting who ever might work there isn’t paying any attention ( there are no living people in this painting)

Another ongoing fascination in her painting is extinct mammals They appear frequently as in this work, an extinct “camelid” standing on the shore in NYC.

Camelid in the City 2019. The poignency of this painting, of the lone creature standing on the edge of the East River with our city in the background, tells us how different our world is from that of these prehistoric beasts.

Olive: I was fed up with the human species. We can’t stop killing each other, sadists! So I got into the mammals that came before us, put a camelid in the NYC estuary.

We see Ancient fauna  in these two sketches

Critters in the Cathedral Here- they are really taking over our paltry civilization

One of my favorites is Amphibian Emergency 2007. The frogs have moved into the highrise, obviously here humourously commenting on loss of habitat.

Olive: “I do work with our ancestors the big mammals.., endanagered and extinct  animals, an example Amphibian Emergency. It has humor as the frogs are taking over the luxury condominium.”

Memories of Beasts

In this work: the beasts are inside a Moorish structure on a blue tiled floor

Olive:

“Memories of Beasts is a totally positive painting. These are animals from my past life experiences who I loved, some are my pets, some from art history, &some from my imagination, I put them in Moorish architecture(had just been to Spain & worship the Alhambra) & medieval architecture.”

the Bristolcone Pines

Olive: “about the Bristlecone Pines, oldest living trees on our planet average age about 4000 years, they can be found in CA, Nev. & Utah.. It was absurd that I placed them on a balcony over looking NYC.”

The City is shaking

Interior Wilderness 2008 : the wind is blowing through the space and everything is falling down.

Olive Interior Wilderness, Nature in juxtaposition to a luxury condo, maybe hotel, two endangered frogs, nature seems to be winning.

Here the artist holds Long Summer night 2024

Long Summer Night 2024

The painting suggests that everything is going in different directions, like a force is shoving the boats bridges and buildings. Here is a view from her studio that tells us how much she is capable of shaking things up.

This painting was done while she was in a residency in Europe. It is very funny, with the ducks heading toward the city that is   ( as usual) tilted.

Flying Intersection 2018

Hyper urban 2017

Olives enjoys the visuals of computer labs led to several memorable paintings.( See left side of Lamb ).

Painting of computer lab by a river called Computer Zone. . As we look now as technology is running amok using our water resources with AI, the next generation of horror is happening but it is much less dramatically visible. And of course there are no computer labs that look like this.

Computer Lab 2017.  Olive: “I thought all the wires were vast & fun resembling the denseness of NYC when I worked from the former World Trade Center. ”

Genome Lab 2007

Another theme is deluges, in which our buildings and cars float helplessly in rising waters:

here the library is flooded

The Streams Return the rivers are overruning the city as it sinks into the sea, what could be a clearer predicition of climate change!

Rapid Commute 1996-97  is another favorite of mine, rapid yes, because the water is sending the cars down the river out of control, while the buildings collapse around them

Rising Waters engulf the city

This sense of water overcoming our structures is out of control here in paintings of Manhattan, everything is shaky .

Skyscraper in Yellowstone

Skyscraper in Yellowstone is a humorous piece, putting NYC in Yellowstone. It’s like the Bison is trying to get permission to get into the condo, haha. Those are geysers on the ground behind them not water. One would be dead if one walked through the area

We can remember that Manhattan Island is small and surrounded by water. but apparently all the skyscapers were built on bedrock , so Ayhens has taken some liberties in suggesting that everything is shaky. But it makes its point!

These crowded man made structures defy logic in building so many skyscrapers in such a small space.

Olive: “When I was working from the trade center & China town that is when the dense city watercolors began. They are Zen pieces as I am totally in the now when I do them”

Downstairs Deluge 2019

Parallel Strata- the immense modernist building lays on top of, and  seems to merge with, the natural landscape like a huge creature

The artist:

“Parallel Strata, this is from the Badlands in South Dakota. Frank Lloyd Wright said they are great architecture, agreed.  So I placed the Bad Lands park formation merging into contemporary architecture. ”

Sometimes she looks at nature on a smaller scale

Dry River

Ezra and Suzanne’s pool

Polluted Swamp We see the green algae taking over

Olive: “in Tampa, FL there is a protected swamp in the middle of the city. It’s beautiful!. The swamp I painted was very polluted, people sunk their used cars into it.”

St  Joseph Indians In the Swamp

Olive:

“Spooky New Orleans and Saint Joseph Indians in a Swamp were influenced by my residency in New Orleans through the Joan Mitchell Foundation. With Spooky N.O. I roamed the residency at night, the light was very inspiring & I thought of much danger I had been in throughout my life but they had a guard so I didnt feel felt

threatened”

Saint Joseph Indians were indigenous native Americans that work on beautiful beaded outfits in groups of different colors.”

Spooky New Orleans

Deep Time Malta

Olive has been awarded many residences. Here is a painting she did while in Malta. the urban development of all the land masses is countered by 8 underwater statues..

Olive:”Malta has tombs way under ground a 1000 years older than the Egyptian ancient structures. The little figures in my Malta piece were found in these tombs. They were not in the water. If they were they wouldn’t have lasted. I painted them submerged for visual reasons.”

Overpop Jamboree with a detail of the crowd with umbrellas. One of the rare examples of a close up crowd of people. Olive said ths was painted during Covid

Sometimes Nature is “protected” by man made structures but it looks  skimpy in Sheltering Nature.

Olive:”Sheltering Nature is a violation, horrible images, with the tedious forms & surveillance over taking the landscape, not structural.

Outskirts.: leaving the urban landscape behind. The cars are still out there!

Carletta Carrington Wilson: Object Lessons

Carletta Carrington Wilson’s large exhibition at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. “Carletta Carrington Wilson: Object Lessons” highlights all phases of her career!! It closes on Sept 20. The Museum makes a perfect day trip with a bus to downtown Seattle, a beautiful ferry ride and a short walk to the museum. She will be in the gallery on August 26 11-1

In the large window on the outside of the Bainbridge Museum of Art, Carletta Carington Wilson created a  two story  installation. If you look closely you can see the word “Utopia” spelled in giant letters ( It is hard to see in this photograph- the golden squares contain the letters. I sketched it in on the right))

Going upstairs to the Beacon Gallery we are greeted by a poem called “Lessons of Possession” It begins

“To make sense of the possessive tense it is crucial to understand that the object of an object is to be had held kept adhered to by right of possession . . .”. All of it is an ironic but heartfelt  statement about slavery.

The Feferman gallery downstairs creates a dazzling effect with multi colored fabrics, but as we approach the individual works we see there is much more at stake than aesthetics.

The works divide into distinct series: “constellation of shadows and leaves” (2006) the “Mingus Series” (2008) the “book of the bound,” (2011) in honor of slaves who could not read, “knot my name haint my house” ( 2015), “kNot free, kNot human,” (2023).

Wilson is a poet as much as a visual artist, and her wonderful sense of the multiple meaning of words flows through all of her art.

She creates stunning aesthetic objects to  educate us to the horrors of slavery. In this case the escape of a female slave

These are two works from the field notes series: “wrap my right hand tight” and “woke fore day”. We see the collage of many fabrics. Twisted and knotted paper lines constitute a unique form of connection between the field notes. Each letter-sized collage’s message is signed with an X, the universal signature of an illiterate person.

On one wall hangs “the knotted line  of cloth cord, thread, bones, wire.  The knotted line is a genealogical chart of names of people listed as property from plantation records in the 19th century. Each embroidered name is preceded by the word
k/not.
The lines represent African, European and Native American bloodlines and how they are genetically knotted. These tangled  knots speak to the mixture of blood lines among slaves and the impossibility of tracing ancestry

Another pair of hanging works represent a male and female runaway.

“resist dying” describes

both the technique and the action; below it is a “blood knot,” a tangled rich red colored cloth.

“book of the bound”

There are six examples from the” book of the bound” series. above is one of the most powerful., actually called “book of the bound,”  closed with chains.

One of the covers is made of bones attached with lace called “abduction”

The artist comments “Most of my work is not distressing to the eye. “abduction” is one of the last books
In the “book of the bound series”. I thought about people who died on the way to the coast, died
in the forts, passed away in the ships or jumped into the sea, expired soon after reaching dry
land, were murdered and/or killed themselves. It is a memorial to those who lost their lives.”

Others emphasize cotton, as above “forget me not”.

Some are covered with beautiful fabrics. Carrington Wilson uses fabric as the means of suggesting the connection of trade, money and the “thread-bare body”:  the wealth of the traders was based on the bodies of the slaves.The fabrics throughout the exhibition are  decorative but painted with words that speak to the slave trade. Because European slavers often traded fine fabrics like silk and velvet in exchange for bodies, Wilson believes the stories of their bodies remain in the cloth.

Her collaged covers become a song to those who could not fill these books with their stories.

In this example we see an ad saying “speaks good English, French and Dutch” and  an illustration of slaves carrying an elephant tusk The artist explains “In the trade the term “black ivory” was used to describe Africans who brought elephant tusks
down from the deep interior to the coast. After they delivered, not only were the tusks sold,
but Africans found themselves sold into the trade.”

“I am bound to go there” Here you see a mother and baby elephant inserted as well as an image of two white youths inspecting a necklace on an African boy. The artist wants to bring attention to how enslaved African children and English indentured children

are a little recognized part of the transatlantic slave trade.

“letter to a laundress”

“letter to a laundress,” a letter to her great great grandmother, dominates the exhibition as a poem and a series of 1930s photographs mounted on fabric and hanging from a clothes line .

It has two texts, the large and the small

Here iin small letters it says “mothers of the blue blue waters who hung from those knotted lines” ( you can easily understand the multiple meanings here)

Written on the photograph below is one step in doing laundry: Wash, Soak, Starch, Wring, Boil, Pin, Rub, Scrub, Hang Press.

The WPA photographs of laundresses reveal the different background of the women, some are wearing rags, others are in dresses and heels.

As the artist explained

“Each photograph, dating from the late 19th to mid-20th century, reveals a woman frozen by the lens of time who has been, largely, unseen in works of history or photographic essay. In addition to its visual narrative of tools of the trade, architecture, geography, labor and clothing, history, this work reconfigures the figure of the laundress and the washerwoman as witness. It
sheds light on the unique position these women held as a result of their occupational tasks during an era where African Americans were summarily lynched throughout the United States.

letter to a laundress is an immersive installation that mirrors a ubiquitous and familiar form from a bygone era, the clothesline.

“Viewers enter this work, moving through time while, simultaneously, reading lines of a poem whose verses are written upon various
panels of photographs of laundresses and washerwomen”

“You taught her well they say she had the touch took wrinkled soiled shirts made them like new especially collars and cuffs”

“What to do with foul language, rank stench, some shadowy shame remais even after all that scubbing”

In these two examples you see differences in dress that suggest one woman is better off.

The layers in Carletta Carrington Wilson’s words inscribed and pasted onto these art works give voice to the silent women of the photographs. If you want more discussion of “letter to a Laundress” see my blog post

Carletta Carrington Wilson’s “letter to a laundress”

“Joe’s House” from the series “knot my name, haint my house”

We see a simple house evoked with collage on its walls.

In addition the exhibition includes recent work such as No Way Out, 2026. An ironing board covered with black fabric and bearing a vertical row of red x’s’ is paired with two irons painted with red hand marks. And the title of the” letter to a laundress” above

It is a powerful statement .  The x’s represent the signature of illiterate people but may also be a reference to writing in blood. The title and  shrouded ironing board honors

as the artist put it: “No way out is a memorial symbolic of six lives of unknown individuals lost by lynching.

Carletta is standing under a paper garland made by visitors who have written  on pieces of paper calling out to the distant slaves

An installation view of the exhibition suggesting its coherence and beauty. The many works come together as a powerful statement about slavery and a testament to Carletta’s strength as both an artist and a poet.

Here is another blog post about Carletta.

Carletta Carrington Wilson “Unchain My Heart”

Rising Voices Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific

According to the Victoria

and Albert Museum these

artworks give us a different perspective on contemporary Asiam  art. Indeed I felt as I looked at them that they were entirely different from Asian Contemporary art that I have seen previously. The artists draw on

recent political events, mixing them with age old mythmaking, contemporary materials  and tradtitional practices.

Such as these pieces by Ken Thaiday senior,  they combine the idea of a headdress with a black bamboo hamerhead shark. The second piece shark with bait fish is also an elaborate headdress.

Hi

Amura gives us the llast royal family of Tahiti. It combines hand stiched applique and  nama”o a sewing technique inspired by woodworking, and taken from French Polynesia.bThis type of media experimentation is truly extraordinary, resulting  in the blending of various sources.

Matthew Kauge is an example of an artist who is innovative in his use of color and style, He is “a leading figure in the develoopment of contemporary art in New Guinea”! His stunning painting gives us the joy of independence.

Captain Cook By Elizabeth Kauge gives us a straightforward frontal representation of the Captain  Cook sailors on the top and the slaves on the bottom of the ship. The enslaved people who are not dark may represent the slaves on their way to Australia from England. They are wearing Melanesian ceremonial headresses. The artist is honoring the slaves.

John Siune looks at the Revolutionary Civil War caused by enrionmenatl damage  in Papua New Guinea by  the occupying force. extracting copper. The vivid painting depicts soldiers shooting and poorly armed PapuanNew Guineans .

this terrifying image of genocide ( Lamentation of the Innocents) uses Mughal forms to present a world of hate and death for both humans and animals.

Again a reference to war annd inhumanity through Mughal miniatures

This artist Adeela Suleman  refers to a specific painting  and medieval event as a metaphor of contemmporary violence.

The hero with wings, Rustam, here as seen from the perspective of an Hazari who had to flee as a persecuted minority in Afghanistan. He is suggesting that the Taliban took on t

his identiy of the Hero of the Book of Kings Shahnameh) Rustam

Boonma is actually familiar to me from  contemporaray art shows in the West. He is Thai and this piece evokes temple bells and lotus growing into enlightement. It has a spare aesthetic that fits with western artk although he is steeped in Buddhism.

Ah Xian moved to Australia after Tiananmen Square but then went beck to China to learn traditionsl porcelain techniques, These three heads are compelling and original  each one expressin a distinct emotion,

This work by Iwasaki Reflection Model Perfect Bliss is an iconic wooden temple with its reflection. in the Byodo- in temple complex in Kyoto, It is called the Phoenix pavillion perhaps because it looks like it could take off.

This is not all the works in the exhibition, there was other media and paintings . Since the museum did not send me a checklist I am relying on my own pictures. I included the extended captions because they are eloquemtly detailed.

As you can see the artists draw on many traditions to create strikingly original expressions. Some might say it has a folk look in some of the works.  I find all of them deeply compelling and worth more than a cursory look. They are complex and layered between myth and the contemporary world.

Ellen Sollod : An Intriguing Artist

There were four distinct types of artworks in this exhibition.

That is what intrigued me.

It demonstrates Ellen Sollod’s experimental approach to photography

Above you see an overview of the installation. The large bw digital image below “La Flaneuse” has a ghost image of  the artist. the artist explained to us that ” I place myself in the scene and the shutter opens based on a time delay. I stand in the scene for about half of the exposure and exit while the camera continues to record the image. When the shutter closes, based on the time that I have set, my image is ‘ghosted’. ”

Flaneuse of course takes us back to the male flaneur of late 19th century, the idea of walking the streets of a city dabbling in this and that. In Sollod’s photographs the artist is invisible to others, a ghost that wanders freely.

La flanêuse (Hotel de Ville), 35 x 44”, archival pigment print, capture 2024, print 2026

La flanêuse (Lugdunum), 35 x 44”, archival pigment print, capture 2024, print 2026

The works below are taken by a pinhole camera . They are much smaller and have incredible nuances of shades of gray

Tete D’or

See the bronze branch above!

And finally this amazing group of intimate photographs of flowers gel transfered onto old book pages.

Three completely contrasting works, different techniques, different scales, different sensibilities. And the bronze branch!

Hats off to Ellen for being willing to tryso many types of work

Below are public art works called“Collection and Transformation from the Brightwater Treatment Plant by Ellen Sollod showing yet another aspect of her work.

Ellen’s work is illustrated in my chapteron “Water Cycles and Water treatments included in my book Setting Our Hearts on Fire. I descirbed them as glass microcosms set into a stainless steel honeycomb structure incased in blue mirrored glass and lighted from above.” Pretty astonishing!

The great contrast to the works on exhibit demonstrates Sollod’s versatility as an artist.

During her artist convrsation with Liz Brown

Sollod is holding her small pinhole cameragla

Future Geographies at Vancouver Art Gallery

Teresita Fernandez Island Universe 2

This amazing exhbition at Vancouver Art gallery (BC) ( up until January 10) begins with this challenge and this image

“As new ecological realities reshape the planet, what role does art play?

Artists are not scientists, but they invite us to think differently and imagine new futures. Journalism too addresses the same territories. This exhibition offers no singular answer but rather a plurality of responses, from poetic to urgent.”

The exhibition had four themes; Consumed Earth , Living Knowledge, Material Memory, and Speculative Worlds

The art was more or less evenly divided but there was no sense of strong demarcations. Some of the artists were in more than one category.

The entire catalog for the exhibition is online at https://futuregeographies.nationalobserver.com/

 

 

This was addressing climate change by not using paper.

 

Included in the “catalog” are links to excellent videos about the individual artists. there seem to be many women of color, appropriate for an exhibition that was addressing the crises of the planet.

 

 

So each artist can be viewed often with in depth interviews  or articles in The National Observer, an online climate magazine. So the only glitch was that several of the exhibits refer to articles in  the magazine which we couldn’t read unless we subscribed to the magazine for $100 a year!

 

But this was part of the radicality of the exhbition that some of the exhibitors were actually climate journalists:  Rory White, John Woodside,  Cloe Logan, Natasha Bulowski, Jennifer Cole. Each of these writers were represented by a photograph of the issue they were addressing and a lead to their article in The Natioanl Observer

 

“Ontario First Nation battles Australian-owned company over Ring of Fire mine” by John Woodside

 

“World’s biggest carbon capture project could ‘essentially drain Alberta’, experts warn”  By Darius Snieckus & Rory White

 

One data centre or one million homes? Mapping Ontario’s proposed hyperscaler boom

Fish are flooding back into Toronto’s Don River
By Cloe Logan

 

 

Critical minerals an ‘ace’ in Canada’s hand ahead of trade negotiations.
By Natasha Bulowski

Massive mine expansion looms over calls to halt thermal coal exports
By Natasha Bulowski

Unpacking Big Oil’s fierce pushback against new truth-in-advertising rules By John Woodside

A US climate conspiracy has spread to Canada — and local politicians haven’t been warned
By Rory White

As ice road melts, a First Nation eyes solid ground
By Cloe Logan

this is only some of the articles. the combination of journalism and art was really effective. Clearly the imagery that went with the articles ranged from imaginary ( Trojan Horse) to  docmentary.

 

These articles with their single photograph did not eclipse the art at all rather they  expanded the breadth of the exhibition.

Theme 1 Consumed Earth

 

For Consumed Earth  it is easy to have photographs,  unfortunately. Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill #10, Oil Slick, Gulf of Mexico, June 24 (2010)

Edward Burtynsky has been photographing the effects of industrial projects and thier impact on the land for decades. He was an obvious choice.

But my favorite work in Consumed Earth is by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun,

The Impending Fire Storms (2024)

 

 

This incredible painting gives us the full flames of destruction with animals afire and other creatures and trees about to be devoured shortly. But the wall of fire also suggests that the creatures behind it are resisting.

 

 

“These paintings are history paintings, and when you look into these paintings, you are looking into a mirror. The environment, land title, being native in this country, it’s all there.”

—Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun

Another work about consumed earth by Liz Larner, Meerschaum Drift (Blue) (2020–21), created from plastic, also speaks direclty to us clearly ( plastic is a particular obsession of mine)

 

this sculpture made from plastic waste assumes a lovely wave like quality from afar.

Judy Chicago ! is part of the consumed earth section with her multi part piece   The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015–16). Here are three of them

Gorillas (Collected)

Frogs ( Disappearing) and Birds (Silenced)

John Akomfrah Vertical Sea ( three screens changing )

“The sea has its own independence, its own power and ontology, and it is ‘playing’ the space in which these dramas are unfolding…The sea is enormous, but it doesn’t care much who we are. It is not there to form a backdrop to our becoming or unbecoming.”

—John Akomfrah

Ths piece was shown a few years ago  at the Seattle Art useum as part of an Akomfrah show that closed after one day because of the outbreak of Covid.

La Toya Ruby Frazier

Also part of Consumed Earth La Toya Ruby Frazier

A Flint Community Member Holding Her Water Jugs at the Atmospheric Water Generator on North Saginaw Street Between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan,

Frazier has been addressing the toxic effects of industry in Braddock Pa where she grew up and documentedher family there. In Flint there are huge toxic water problems.. She herself funded the water generator in the photo.

Also in the category of Consumed Earth

Reena Saini Kallat, River Drawing electric wires, nails and pigment

“Our connection to water lies both internally and externally, water being the origin of all known forms of life and our bodies primarily being composed of it.”

—Reena Saini Kallat

“River Drawing is an in-situ work that traces the borders of nations locked in conflict over shared river systems. Using electrical wires as a drawing tool, Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973, Delhi, India) maps geopolitical boundaries that cut across waterways, revealing the tension between fluid natural forces and territorial claims. In her rendering, that typically separate seem to loosen and conjoin, echoing the flow of the river rather than the authority of the state.”

Living Knowledge

Carolun Cayceda’s fishng net To Drive Away Whiteness/Para alejar la blancura with detritus attachedis in the category living knowledge

“created from handmade fishing nets collected by Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, London, United Kingdom) along river communities in Latin America affected by the privatization of those waterways.

Each Cosmotarraya is linked to specific people, rivers, traditions, and cultures, just as each net is linked to the individual who wove it. The resultant sculptures are talismanic embodiments of local resistance to corporate and governmental attempts to control the flow of water.”

—Carolina Caycedo

 

 

we see the toxic bottles in the river here, but the living knowledge has to do with the people who fish.

Also in Living Knowledge is Andrea Bowers

Andrea Bowers, Eco Grief Deforestation Series (Old Growth Stump 2) (2024)we see the stump with the artist crouched inside it.

“This work calls attention to old-growth forest logging practices in Northern California, where the stumps of 1,000- to 2,000-year-old trees exist as shadows of a once-thriving rain forest. Bowers was arrested in 2011 for tree-sitting in Arcadia, California.”

Bowers is intensely politically active and sees her art as embedded in activism.Cerainly this image of her inside a tree stump gives us a sense of the intensity.

“Alberta gets its way in deal with Ottawa”
By John Woodside & Natasha Bulowski

is part of Living Knowledge

Is the phtograph is “art” ? but the comment as the lead of  an article refers to a crucial issue highlighted by all these ridiculously smiling faces as they decide to tear the earth apart further Alberta of course is alreadynotorius for their exploitation of tar sands, and the horrendous environmental conditions that have resulted.

So against these clean orderly smiling faces is the ghastly polluton in Alberta.

In another version of Living Knowlege you can just see the human body under the ricks

The artist is buried under there

asinnajaq, Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition) (2018)

This is a still from a video

“The weight of the stones as they pile on your body is an opportunity. . . I refuse to let the weight keep me down. Pushing myself up from the stones slowly and carefully. As I rise from underneath the weight of the stones the stones fall and slide away. It takes effort from the body and mind to be out from under the pressure of the stones but, as they fall, my body I must accept that I’m in a cycle.

—asinnajaq

What we  heard was the rumbling of the rocks , but we never saw him emerge- this is certainly an example of living knowledge!

“Pathways Alliance’s flagship project looks like a big money loser
By John Woodside

Living Knowledge

This odd photograph is obviously constructed. I think it shows carbon exploding out of a pipe. The reference is to a carbon capture project and piping carbon to an underground stoage that is runnng way over budget.

Living Knowledge Teresita Fernandez’s work.

Teresita Fernández, Island Universe 2 (2023)

“I often use the word landscape because it’s a word that is perceived to be passive—as opposed to territory or country. But place is an entirely social construct, always attached to narratives of power and dominance. The places are named by the winners, by the oppressors. Maps are drawn up in the same way.”

—Teresita Fernández

The  map of the world created in charcoal invokes the continents but they are all connected and recognizable even as they have been rearranged and reshaped.

Material Memory

Clarissa Tossin, Future Geography: Cosmic Cliffs (2023)

This work which gives the show its title is emtirely made from Amazon boxes. It is a very amusing title and to put it in the category of material memory is also funny.

The piece, like so many of the works in the exhibition, looks like an attractive abstract work until the meanng of the title and material sink in.So our future is Amazon boxes, creating lanscapes of rubbish.

Also in Material Memory is this piece, which I found fascinating

Firelei Báez, Unbound (one way ashore, a thousand channels), 2024

the large female figure in the foreground partially obscures

the print behind it which is identified as an “early nineteenth-century map—titled “Picture of Organized Nature as Extending over the Earth” and composed by British cartographer Charles Smith (1776–1854). Smith’s chart reflects the drive to categorize and contain the natural world, compressing the Earth’s oceans, polar ice, mountain ranges, flora and fauna into a single, totalizing image. ”

By placing a huge body in front of it, the artist contradicts and cancels that endeavor: the body is blue green, a marine color, her pose is temporary, about to go forward, so the overall effect is that we are with her as she balances on one knee.

Another example of Material Memory

Rebecca Belmore, nindinawemaganidog (all my relations), keeper (2017)

This unassuming image is a recreation of performance art work. the actor ( artists sister) is cleaning a clay floor with a claysoaked rag.

the artist is Asishinaabe ( a group of indigneous peoples from various tribes) from the Great Lakes area. The idea is labor, especially women’s role in caring for the land.

Another favorite from Material Memory

Jean Shin’s Huddled Masses

Guess what, they are all cell phones that have been discarded!

This really works as an indivual sculpture and a big comment.The Huddled Masses have also been referred to as Scholars Rocks!!

as in China.

The final category is Speculative Worlds.

Rose B. Simpson Co Pilot  A

Another work with clay and other sacred materials, this proud guardian figure is going to lead withut fear.

Rose Simpson is from the Santa Clara Pueblo. and she has transformed the traditons there. There is a long tradition of transforation among Pueblo women, her mother is Roxanne Swetzell

another well known artist.

Another  Speculative Worlds

Josh Kline, Desperation (2024)

“Scientists and politicians do a very poor job of making people understand what sea level rise means for them. . . Art has the ability to place people inside a story and help them understand those connections emotionally.

—Josh Kline

we saw this piece with the video recounting two paople marroned without any place to go. The raft suggests the travel, the video gives us an imaginary situation of someone adrift on a raft, who have been turned back by immigration authorities. and are the victims of sea level rise ( two actors played the part).

Speculative worlds:

Huma Bhabha, Lifetime (2013)

“Monsters are beautiful to some of us, depending on how we were informed by different experiences in our upbringing. For me, I have always had a passion for extreme visual imagery which responds to the horror and science fiction films I have watched.”

—Huma Bhabha

By way of grand conclusion there was an installation ouside the four themes.

On another floor was this amazing full room installation

Sanctuary: the Ancient Forest Experience

Curated by Dr.T’uy’t’anat Cease Wyss with filmakers Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux

Inside the replica  of the oldgrowth tree stump is a video that immerses us. the forest we see is on the Sunshine coast where some forests have survived since the last ice age, and others have been clear-cut.

In the video we see Dr.Wyss wandering through the forests and the clearcuts with the music of birds, and waterfalls as she narrates what she is harvesting in the way of small plants. Logging was stopped after a decade of activism in this foresst, but many other ancient forests still need protectiion

So what conclusion can I draw from the exhibition?

Future Geographies  is amazing in its breadth and detail. It covered so many approaches to addressing climate change.

But of course there is so much more to say.

Zadie Smith in an article titled “Art for Our Sakes” in the New York Review of Books started with “why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets?”

She concluded “Such art is made by us and for us. It is for our sakes. Its power is not the kind ths president recognizes, but it has its own kind of force. It will outlast both him and his regime. It will outlast us all.”

Don’t miss it Future Geographies. Or at least access the online catalog with the artists interviews. We can all take some steps to save our precious planet.

A Clockwork Raven: Preston Singletary

As we enter the exhibition of Preston Singletary’s  “A Clockwork Raven,” we  first  see  this extraordinary construction with Raven lying under a contraption that is dripping oil rendered from salmon heads, a traditional healing oil  for the Tlingit.

We  stand shocked as we  look  down on Raven and wonder what ths is about.

A Clockwork Orange was  a  film  about gang violence in  the early 70s. So how do we  see  it  applyig here.  Raven goes  through several iterations  in the  exhibition,  each of them  representing a side of R aven we have not  seen before,  enmeshed  in greed and violence.How can we understand it??

The answer lies in the stories that Garth Stein wrote to accompany  the exhibition. He begins :

“It began as a  way to save the world from itself. Or rather to  save the People of the world from  their own self destructive nature. For the People hd  groooooown sick  verily- they were pale, bloated, hairless  thngs covered  wth rashes, bags under their eyes…”

Raven’s plan was to provide healing for his people through feeding them rendered oil  from fish heads.

But the plan didn’t work.

Raven built a rendering faciltiy but when it was finished he lay under it and became intoxicated. “Raven lolled on his back, bloated, the fish oil pumping  ceaselessly into his belly. He couldnt move, couldnt  think and the contraption pumped .”

But  then he woke up and grabbed a seal who ignored  him  because he  was  so fat.

Lazy Raven/Strong Raven (below)  suggests  he is  regaining  his power

So he jumped  into the water and got hold of a log and floated and drifted.

“The sea carried  them”

Eventually they landed and dried  out and Raven flew  up and over Seattle where  he  has several adventures . First he meets a man who looks like a homeless man  who says he is Raven.

He is shadow raven  .

They are going between worlds!

Underneath Pioneer Square  is a whole world Raven and the shadow raven go into a nightclub  underneath pioneer square

Two other works give us the backgound on Raven . Both called “Upon the Mountain Top: Raven started as  a whie bird,  but as a  result  of  stealing the sun  ( Box of Daylight) he was singed  black.

Finally we have Inner Dialogue” This is a piece  that suggests the two sides  of  Raven, the trickster, the violent  and  the  greedy as opposed to  the caring. 

the final piece in the story is “noble truth” in which Raven talks to  Killer Whale. He says to Raven

“Raven the cycle of violence  can be stopped if the Will is present. If there is no will, the poeple will become like cannibals  and eat each other until there are  none left”

But raven slept on.

At te opening of the exibition Preston told more animalstories, not this one,  that encompassed the oter animals in the exhibition. while he was talking, the technology misbehaved,  but he never paused.He continued to tell his story.

It was a moving  experience.

The exhibtion ended this weekend, I am sorry to say, but the book with the story is available through the gallery.

Although Traver’s new gallery is not as atmosphereic as the old gallery on Pioneer Square,  the new expansiveness givess space for  each sculpture to breathe.

But I can’t resist ending wth ths photo of his last exhibition at the old Traver, about which I wrote on this blog.

AMcE Creative Arts Brings A New Vibe to Seattle

A.McLean Emenegger! That is the name of the dynamic director of the unusually titled AMcE Creative Arts gallery. As  I walked along 19th Street, its small storefront popped out with bizarre ceramics by Sonja Peterson.  The director herself was explaining the significance of several offbeat cookie jars by Ryan Kelly.

It was clear that this dynamic woman was articulate! She told me she came from Los Angeles and had worked in all aspects of art for over 20 years.  She began in  television, ran a gallery, curated, career coached artists, edited an art magazine, marketing, and she also makes art. And writes about it. Whew. Her goal is to bring people together for a shared human experience.

The current exhibition is edgy, although its title would not suggest that.

“Sacred” includes five artists: painter, Niki Keenan, painter and ceramic artist Kendra Larson, ceramic artist Holly Hudson, experimental mixed media photographer Christine Nguyen and mixed media, Io Palmer.

The theme of the exhibition is the intersection of humans and nature, but more than that the idea of sublime, the sense that nature is overwhelming and uplifting. The paintings in the exhibition seem to most directly express the sublime.

Kendra Larson’s Tree of Knowledge  Niki Keenan ‘s Sunbeam Marsh are both landscapes  but emphasizing trees with strange colors and  light.

Keenan’s painting in particular emphasizes the sun breaking through a forest that is dense with tangled trees . Larson’s Astral Slugs feels more like swamp trees. In the sky are “astral slugs” large slugs curling around the blue sky!

I just came from the new exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum “Mystic Modern” which suggests the intersection of especially surrealism with the earlier well known “mystics” like Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan. I see the same intersection here, only more removed from classical surrealism. These artists are surreal in their own original way.

Christine Nguyen creates magic with a unique technique. She draws and paints on both sides of a negative (her background is in photography). She overlays the two sides and photographs them, then prints it.  She then immerses it in a salt bath which adheres serendipitously to the surface The result is a sparkling image.   My favorite is Deer Spirit in which the deer’s antlers become a tree and echo in the tree-like form nearby. As articulately explained on the website “The pieces fluctuate between the micro and macro-worlds while connecting the flora and fauna to the celestial heavens of stars and planets as part of her ongoing investigations of our connection to the natural world.”

Holly Hudson  is a bigger stretch to connect to the “the Sacred” or the sublime. Her oddball ceramics are pure fantasy though:

Jerome’s Lion is a young lion covered in flowers No sign of a thorn as in the story of Saint Jerome.

Rooted featuresa ceramic foot with a thick tangle of roots growing out of its sole. G

The Seer is a large eye surrounded by flowers. What these ceramics have in common ( they are both glazed and unglazed) is a sense of eerie fantasy.

Io Palmer’s work achieves the “sacred” in an entirely different way. She creates a combination of glazed ceramic shapes that become clusters of organic forms as they almost seem to move in clusters across a wall. She has spoken of her open, winding forms as transforming and liberating, overcoming the restrictions she has experienced as a woman of color.  The work speaks of flowering branches that are clustered in segments. They do not relate to a specific natural form, but to a sense of nature as freeing. She lives in the Palouse ,a Professor of Art at Washington State University where the landscape is open and has few trees or shrubs: she seems to be providing that in her work.

To return to the gallery and its director, the location of AMce Creative Arts, far from other galleries, seems to liberate the owner to pursue her own path. She said people drop in all the time – her neighbors are her friends, but she does not participate in art walks because no one came.

In short, you are in for a treat when you visit this gallery. The next exhibition is a selection of artists with the title “Ad-Lib”

You can preview them on the gallery website. I am not familiar with most of them but it is clear that A.McLean Emenegger is bringing an entirely new vibe to our small Seattle art scene.

Esther Ervin

Esther Ervin: Sculptor, Jeweler,  Curator

Esther Ervin was born in a small town in New Jersey, but moved to California at the age of 16. Her house was near the Irvine ranch where she actually saw cowboys herding cattle, now, of course, developed with housing. She went to Palestine /Israel as an undergraduate in high school in California and after college with a BA in Biology she went into the Peace Corps for three years from 1977 to 1980. She was assigned to Columbia where she worked with street boys who were wild  and poor and sometimes homosexuals. She gave them language training in both art and science. From there she went on to work at a Catholic school and then to Bogota. Finally she was home economist part for the families of a coffee grower committee where they did food canning and created mats from fique ( a type of grass).

In 1980 she returned to California and went to Graduate School at Cal State Long Beach where she studied art and science medical illustration. In 1994 she came to Seattle where she pursued another career in insurance and securities. She connected to the Festival Sundiata where she had seen an art show and began  meeting artists  in the late 1990s. She first met Al in 1997. Meanwhile she began making jewelry.

She went to a Native American workshop where they used gourds to make art . She was inspired to make her own gourd art. (Her father was raised on a Cree reservation). She is holding one of her gourd pieces n the photograph at the top)

A major turning point in her career was receiving a residency at Pratt Fine Arts Center where she learned jewelry making, metalsmithing and welding.

Another important honor was a residency at the  Dr. James W. Washington, Jr. & Janie Rogella Washington Foundation where she made  sculpture  from materials that were in the house.

Ervin was also Acting Director of the Washington House 2013-2018.

In 2016 she collaborated with Doggett on the extensive Liberty Bank Building artist project. On Union Street near 24^th avenue  Esther created drum shaped seats with a tiled basketweave pattern and

above them transparent  window designs of the redlined area of the Central District.

In the central courtyard of the building are several bronze salmon struggling to go upstream. There is a sporadic flow of water that does not support them, a metaphor for the struggles of African Americans to succeed.

Ervin has created other public art works in the neighborhood, most visibly at Jackson and 23^rd street, an abstract design based on cowrie shells.

And at Boren and Yesler, in the Wayfarer complex. As Ervin explains “The Wayfarer building works are large jewelry art pieces with one having a cedar tree and the other having a Douglass fir tree. The works speak to the deforestation of the CD. They are made of glass and semi precious beads, potato pearls, bronze chain, steel support structure, laser etched wood trees.

Even as Ervin creates more public art, she also works as a curator for an exhibition with Black Arts West Alumnae Association and the Garfield Super Block. In addition she continues to create exquisite art in many media, ceramics, jewelry, metal, and sculpture. Her work is imbued with a sense of history. One of her missions is to celebrate the work of lesser known black artists and history .