Art on the Road: PaintOut on the Oregon Coast.

Art, Nature
Jul 20, 2022
5 Comments

The email came out of the blue, from someone I did not know. They liked the way I describe my encounters with the world. Would I be interested in documenting how they see theirs?

Of course I would! How can you not take the opportunity to go to the coast and spend a day with an intrepid band of painters who are out there every summer for a 2- week PaintOut, rain or shine? Meeting at various locations, including Seal Rock, Ona Beach, Rocky Creek State Park, Yachatz North Shore and the old Yaquina Head Lighthouse? Painting, critiquing, freshly exploring a familiar landscape every year or being stunned (or stumped) by it for the first time? Receiving instructions from a veteran art professor, Erik Sandgren, as enthusiastic about teaching as about the act of painting itself?

Off I went to Depoe Bay, not knowing what to expect, but curious how such a collective approach to making art would work. Spoiler alert: It works great. And I had the best day. The weather gods were kind, nature conspired to show off as only nature can, bald eagles on their way to lunch, pelicans on patrol and ambling oyster catchers included.

More importantly, I met a number of artists who were not only engaged with what they were doing, but who had nothing but positive stories to tell: how practicing their craft outside was a godsend during the pandemic, because they could interact, talk, escape isolation and nurture friendships. Many of the people who participate in the annual PaintOut workshop, traveling there from all over the place, continue to practice some form of it with likeminded painters back where they live on a regular weekly schedule, ever more improving the facility and skill with the medium.

From left to right: Deb McMillan, Erik Sandgren, Quinn Sweetman

Speaking of which, there were water colorists and oil/acrylic painters on site, spread across various locations, making me feel, while wandering through the park, like on a treasure hunt – you never knew what sight awaited you while rounding the next corner, or taking a fork in the path. All were enrolled in the three-day paid tutorial that Sandgren offers, tackling specific tasks and problems that arise with landscape painting, with lectures followed by painting session and then a late-in-the-day critique round that helps tie theory and practice together.

Starting with day 4, the meetings are open and free to all, with each day having a specific site announced and anyone who is serious about painting, no matter the level of their expertise, can join the fun. There will still be a conversation about work in the afternoons, but more of a free-for-all, from what I understood.

Some of the attendees have been coming for decades – the workshop started in the late 70s, initiated by Nelson Sandgren, Erik Sandgren’s father, long before the “en plein air” movement saw its recent renaissance in this country. Several of them told me that this annual trip is one of the highlights of their year – and I have to apologize that I did not catch every name, or associate it with the right face – I was so busy learning, admiring, photographing and trying not to lose my notebook in the wind that I was remiss about taking detailed notes for everyone.

Look at the shadow of the hand!

Landscape painting evolved from being a backdrop to religious, mythological or historical themes to a genre important in and of itself only in the late 19th century. Instead of inventing a landscape or creating something from memory, people started to go outside, and document their own perceptions of the way the land looked, a sensory reality that was soon imbued with their own emotional reaction, dependent on how skillfully one managed to get those feelings across. En plein air, a French phrase meaning “in the open air,” anchored the painter – and the painting – in a particular place and a particular time, advanced an understanding and often an appreciation of nature. Or the place you lived. Or both. Some plein air painters, like Théodore Rousseau, for example, even became environmental activist, fighting for the ecological preservation of their habitats.

Painting outside is easier, of course, if you live in a place that has reasonably good weather, in contrast to the nordic countries where landscape painters were known to have to tie their easels down and schlepp large umbrellas against the rains. And talking about schlepping: It was chemistry and technology that enabled people to move beyond the realms of their studios. Bostonian John Goffe Rand’s 1841 invention of the paint tube transformed the practice. Rather than grinding and mixing your own pigments with binding agents, you could use directly from the tube, maybe thin it, but there it was. Add to that a portable easel: the French box easel was easily carried, set up on telescopic legs and had palette and paint box attached. Finally, the development of synthetic pigment allowed a whole new palette to emerge, vibrant shades now easily available, and soon incorporated into what we now know as Impressionism. (Ref.)

Modern gear has obviously advanced. But the engagement with nature has remained the same – a desire to describe, but also awe that takes you away from the easel if special admiration is required. As it was when the whale surfaced, even for the smallest amounts of time. I find it always curious how exited I become – and obviously it was shared excitement – when I get just these tiny glimpses of something dark or grey, there and gone in the blink of an eye. Our brain obviously provides the rest of the story – the thought of the humongous body attached to that small curve, the knowledge how special these animals are and how deserving of our protection of waters that see ever more pollution, dangerous increase in temperature and shrinking feed base.

The more immediate, however, also captured my attention – the landscape’s colors, water and cliffs, both, challenging for the photographer’s eye just as much as the painter’s,

the varied flora,

Clockwise: Monkey flower, wild carrot, daisies, have no clue but could be woodruff, salmonberry, false lily of the valley.

the trees so clearly hammered by harsh winds and salt in the air.

And of course, there are always unexpected odds and ends.

Lost hair scrunchie, anyone?

***

Erik Sandgren is a great story teller, something that I have always associated with gifted teachers. He got his B.A. at Yale in 1975, and earned his MFA at Cornell University in 1977. From 1989 until 5 years ago he taught, single-handedly, art at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, WA, with a special interest in a Foundation course that allowed him to convey the basics to students, for many of whom this was the first serious encounter with art. He is widely traveled, and entertained me with an anecdote about an encounter with a museum bureaucrat in Germany, who first insisted on the rules of access (Forbidden! Later!) only to break them five minutes hence by opening the doors for Sandgren, on a short break between trains, banging on the doors, to the holy archives of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. I could not help but adore the big smile with which Sandgren confronted this German, yours truly, with the stereotypes about Germans and the approval that they could be defied, apparently. Even more so since the desired archival visit concerned Horst Janssen, enfant terrible and somewhat famous artist during my young adulthood in Hamburg, known in particular for his uncensored erotic watercolors there, but as a fabulous printmaker internationally.

Self portrait Horst Janssen; Plates from Phÿllis, 1977/78 – a book that contains varied scenes with his innumerable lovers (after three marriages and divorces.) Janssen writes in the introduction:

“The mechanism of love requires ambition, serious effort, patience and wit. The observing eye is then required for the implementation of this mechanism, which divides the whole into its parts, subdivides it, on the one hand increasing it by adding a lustful gaze to the pleasure of the understanding hand, on the other hand for the control of pleasure.”

Seems to me we could apply that to art just as well.

Here is a photomontage of a photo I took of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, for a series, Postcards from Nineveh (2019) calling for the protection of our oceans, mixing 17th century Dutch paintings and drawings of whaling expeditions with photographs of contemporary landscapes, mostly from the US, and some from my native Germany, to show that 400 years later the need for environmental stewardship is still pressing.

I am lingering on this little anecdote because it seems to encapsulate what I glimpsed in this first visit: someone with a deep interest in art, willing to pursue it, a clear understanding of human psychology – including the rule-obsessed German one, and just a lot of curiosity.

Erik Sandgren

Much of it makes its way into his own paintings, particularly the public art murals that embody social issues as well. Ideas about psychology, however, can also be found in his teaching. As always, he prepares for the annual PaintOut by taking notes across the entire year when he runs into problems to be solved while painting, or encounters topics that might be of interest, or tries to find ways to help students overcome obstacles.

This time around he decided to try something new: ask participants in the workshop to sketch what was in front of them while simultaneously listening to his lecturing. By his reports, the resulting sketches were freer, more refined than what had been produced earlier. Why would divided attention achieve those results? Why might multitasking in this way help? Or does it, wonders the cognitive psychologist?

The most straightforward assessment predicts a mixed result. On the negative side, many of us have had coaches, or piano teachers who would admonish us to “pay attention to what you’re doing!” Presumably that advice rested on the idea that, in the absence of focussed attention, we would rely on well established habits that could be implemented without much thought. The result? A mechanical, soul-less performance.

Sandgren sketch used to show the progression of a watercolor

But that concern gets balanced by considerations that point in the opposite direction. Often anxiety and self-consciousness can disrupt and inhibit performance. Distraction can diminish those concerns leaving us less inhibited. Likewise, sometimes we approach a problem with strongly held, but ill-advised presuppositions. Distraction can help us to loosen our hold on those presuppositions, opening the path toward novel and more successful approaches.

I do not know of any clear science that would help us understand how these opposing forces play off against each other. Surely it depends on the details of the circumstances. But even so, the idea that divided attention might help is entirely plausible.

Patty McNutt using a color sampler paper to sketch a coastal pine; progression across the morning.

We should note, though, that there has been some silliness written on the topic. Years ago, various authors advises that you need to “liberate your right brain” in order to be creative, and this meant somehow shutting down your left brain, presumably the locus for analytic thought. I won’t bore you with the details but the conception certainly overstates and distorts the specialized capacities of the two brain hemispheres. More importantly, this perspective completely misrepresents the interaction between the brain halves. The halves of your brain are not cerebral competitors, instead they interact in complex and productive ways. It is unclear, what could possibly be meant by the prospect of shutting down one half or the other. Both brain halves contribute to creative processes.

Jeanne Chamberlain Whalecove

In any case, the best thing, as far as I could see, about that entire workshop was the fact that product – a finished painting – did not score above process, the way of making art in this indescribably beautiful landscape, among soulmates, with a gifted guiding hand. Or brain, as the case may be.

Watercolor by Robin Berry who moved to the coast from Oregon City 5 years ago.

I drove away filled with envy, reminding myself that I can still photograph, and always have the choice of picking up painting in my next life…. in the meantime, what a spectacular view!

Exquisite Gorge II: Of Baskets and Botany – A Biocultural Exploration

Art
Jul 18, 2022
2 Comments

“The arts and humanities have the potential to remind us of past environmental change and positive visions for our environment. What we need, I argue, are narratives of hope…..We need stories that empower us to become thinkers, actors, and activists capable of imagining alternatives in a world dominated by technical and economic constraints. We need ideas that will find their way through the mesh of an ever-tighter net of path dependencies. And we need people who will dare to cut apart some of the meshwork.”

– Christof Mauch. Slow Hope: Re-Thinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear (2019)

I WAS BIASED, ALRIGHT. My interests in art, botany, and communal work were all captured in the installation before me. How could I not be particularly taken? I presume, though, that a more objective observer would be equally excited by Chloë Hight’s contribution to Maryhill Museum‘s Exquisite Gorge II exhibition which will feature a collection of fabric art sculptures, opening on August 6th, 2022 in the museum’s park. The elegance and geometry of her design, combined with her basketry weaving skill, would draw anyone in, is my bet.

Art has the power to remind us about the state of our environment, past, present and potentially future. It can tell us important stories if presenting the right ideas, tales of warning, but also of hope. Hight is a storyteller who is keenly sensitive to issues of place and our history within it, but also of potentialities. Warning and hope.

Her tale begins with the frame that surrounds the sculptural elements she created. The frame is black, and not just any old black. It is black from having been burned with a torch using Yakisugi/Shou Sugi Ban, a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood by applying fire. She then rubbed it with charcoal, ground into powder and blended with pine tar and beeswax. The artist collected the charcoal on the site of the 2017 Eagle Creek fire, part of her section of the Columbia river that begins near the Harphan Creek tributary and ends near the Tumalt Creek tributary, with many draining tributaries including Eagle Creek from its headwaters at Wahtum Lake.

These three photographs courtesy of the artist.

The wildfire, started by a careless teen playing with fireworks, burned more than 48,000 acres in the Gorge and Mt. Hood National Forest. Hikers needed to be rescued; people lost homes and were evacuated. About 121 miles of national forest trails and the businesses of the area were affected during the three months’ duration of the fire and then some. Trails were subsequently endangered by landslides and closed. It is only recent that you can hike there again.

The vulnerability of the eco-system at the juncture between urban areas and the wilderness is evoked with this frame, reminding us of the impact deforestation and climate change had on the magnitude of the fire. But so is resilience: blackened wood still stands, and areas are now open so that charcoal, an important material for man and nature, can be collected and used. Both perspectives, catastrophe and renewal, are integrated into the narrative.

INSIDE THE FRAME flows the river, banked by gently curved steel rods fabricated in collaboration with MacRae Wylde, a local sculptor. The rods provide a metal loom with the metallic material representing the man-made industrial infrastructure along the Columbia River, rigid and constricting. The curvature of the form, on the other hand, echoes the fluidity and resilience of water, a river that seeks its way regardless, created from wood and plant material weavings that represent many botanical species of the Pacific Northwest. Again a juxtaposition of elements that integrates both sides of an environmental story.

The weaving techniques are varied, some shapes hinting at scales and/or fins of fish, so elemental to the river and the people who have lived here for millennia. Some parts contain designs reminiscent of traditional basketry. All are made from plants that play essential roles both in the ecosystem of the region, and the culture of its inhabitants. Diverse techniques, including stake and strand weaving, twining and plaiting introduce texture and patterns. Variations in color, effects created by choosing appropriate plant materials – Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus), willow (Salix), European beach grass (Ammophila arenaria), iris (Iridaceae), day lily (Hemerocallis), and cattail (Typha) – from roots, bark and leaves, mirror the shading and dappled effect of light streaming into the local forests or shimmering on eddies or wavy water. Darkness and brightness, opposing forces here as well, provide the artist’s rendering of a region with ample tension and beauty – and us with ample opportunity to recognize shades of a landscape we so revere.

***

CHLOE HIGHT GREW UP and now lives again in close proximity to the Columbia in Hood River. She earned her BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC, Canada and expanded on her craft with a stay in Oaxaca, México where she learned botanical dyeing and loom weaving. She has been a teaching artist at various institutions, including Arts in Education of the Gorge, Rewild Portland, Wildcraft Studio School, Young Audiences and The Right Brain Initiative (K-12 Arts Education and Residencies,Portland, OR) and the Columbia Basin Basketry Guild.

One of her formative experiences, she told me, was an internship with Vancouver B.C. based artist Sharon Kallis who focuses on environmental art and community engagement and is the founding Executive Director of EartHand Gleaners Society. Hight was fascinated by and adopted parts of Kallis’ approach to site-specific installations: using material found in the immediate environment, from tended or invasive plants as well as discarded materials in fields and gardens. Making due with what already exists is, of course, a profoundly sustainable approach.

Weaving in the water of the river – Photograph courtesy of the artist

There is an additional advantage, though. Much of the material that is ripped out of our gardens and fields are prolific plants that are not indigenous to the region, but brought to us and considered invasive. Think beachgrass, English Ivy, or Himalayan Blackberry. Rather than demonizing these species, Hight approaches them as something that can serve a purpose. She embraces the abundance of these superspreaders for making functional items, once you know how to treat the plant parts best suited. An irritant, if not a danger, now shaped into something useful, integrated into the ever changing biological melting pot.

Materials collected and displayed for the project

***

I HAD PREFACED my observations with the words of Christof Mauch, a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities located in Munich, Germany, because I believe they fit very well with what Hight is engaged in. The center focusses on research in and education about plant humanities, a term that is relatively new, when the approaches it covers are historically pretty established. Think of all the humanities disciplines that have engaged with plants: Anthropology has explored health and biomedicine in different cultures. Environmental archeology has looked at factors that influenced the fate of civilizations. Art history has studied the many glorious plant illustrators who helped science moved along. Plant collections have helped establish taxonomy systems and seeded our modern Botanical Gardens. From philosophers to poets, landscape designers to neurobiologists, questions about plants and their relationship to people have occupied us – now more than ever, I think, given the worries over biodiversity, environmental sustainability and conservation. Biocultural institutions help find answers.

Artists like Hight are telling stories about the places we live in by teaching us about the plants they contain, how to identify them and how to use them. Her small sampler of the most common plants she uses for weaving, cording and basketry is sweet and functional.

It triggered a flood of childhood memories in me. We had large prints of several botanical illustrators hanging in our house, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 – 1717) among them,

Maria Sibylla Merian Iris Flowers (1698)

but also Barbara Regina Dietzsch(1706–1783)

Barbara Regina Dietsch Turk Cap Lily, mid 18th century

and Anne Pratt (1806-1893).

Anne Pratt Flowering Plants Plate 234 Reed Mace, Bur Reed

My mother, who held a PhD in Agricultural sciences and was a master gardener, used them to teach us early about plant parts as much as plant identification, but their beauty alone instilled a lifelong connection. I see Chloë Hight as a great fit for this lineage of women educators, artists and botanists, with an added sense of practicality for schlepping around but a small booklet to have it ready for show and tell!

***

BIOCULTURAL COLLECTIONS – representing the interchange between plants and people – are, of course, not restricted to artistic renderings of our flora. They contain objects made from plants, tools used to process them, medicines derived from plants, and anything else, like archival materials and historical documents, that help us understand both the botany of a particular place and its culture – the art, history and societal traditions of the people who used these plants. There are many of them: The Biocultural Collections Network has over 215 member institutions including botanical gardens, herbaria, natural history, anthropology, and cultural history museums, which span the globe. (Ref.)

One of their major goals is to educate people about plants so they understand the role they play in our world then and now, how important conservation is, and what needs to be done to preserve access to sufficient quantities of food. Which brings us back to our artist.

***

HIGHT IS ENGAGED in teaching at a variety of levels and across domains. She has an interest in preserving and relating ancestral techniques related to fiber arts. She is keen on helping student identify plants and understand their uses. For the EG II project she worked with 7th graders in teacher Adam Smith’s class at Hood River Middle School, using the cordage they produced with her instructions as part of the Exquisite Gorge II sculpture. During the activities she also linked to the 7th grade curricular studies of riparian plants and ecosystems. In previous years she had helped middle schoolers at HRMS to understand the causes and implications of the Eagle Creek Fire. Here is a small film the students produced, including a focus on the fate of the plants. Impressive!

Executive Director of the History Museum of Hood River, Anna Goodwin, on left, with the artist.

When I visited, she was teaching cording to people who had signed up for a workshop with The History Museum of Hood River, one of her two community partners for the project (the other was Arts in Education in the Gorge.) The museum is worth checking out next time you come through Hood River. Small, but informative about local history. They were in the process of putting up objects from their archives relevant to Hight’s piece.

Once the workshop started, Hight explained that cordage was one of the first human fiber technologies that has been practiced across cultures around the globe. It can be an essential skill for everyday survival – think bows, bow-and-drill-friction fires, fishing lines, securing of shelter, and eventually all the ropes needed for sailing ships across the oceans. (A detailed overview of the history of cordage in the Americas can be found here.)

She talked about the process of gathering the materials, splitting, prepping and drying them, and later,when it comes time to use, making them pliable again by immersing them in water.

Clearly the participants had fun, working hard but also together – community in action, under the blossoming, sweet smelling Linden tree in the backyard of the museum.

Actually basswood (Tilia Americana,) a native genus within the Linden family. One of the many things I learned that day, grateful that I got to meet all these interesting, knowledgable, creative people associated with the EG II project. It will be a joy to see the sculptures connected, soon now.

————————————————————————

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

Artists and Community Partners:

Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal
Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett
Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight
Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith
Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista
Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake
Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica
Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher
Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer
Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún
Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore

Exquisite Gorge II: Liminal Spaces.

Art
Jul 11, 2022
3 Comments

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

By Mary Oliver

MAYBE IT WAS the state of wistfulness prompted by the fact that my 6-month project of interviewing the artists of the Exquisite Gorge II project is soon coming to an end. Maybe it had to do with entering yet another world new to me, a world filled with appliqué stitching joined with ceramics. What claimed my focus, intellectually and emotionally, was the idea of transitions. Good thing, too, since it is one of the reference points of Carolyn Hazel Drake‘s artistic vision. In dual ways, no less: the meaning of transition is conceptually expressed in her work, but exceptional attention is also given to the transitional points that connect the many small pieces in her larger installation.

Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project links multiple sections of the Columbia river, represented by as many artists, to each other, forming a giant sculpture made out of individual artworks. Drake’s section 6 covers the stretch of the river that ranges from the Deschutes River to the John Day River, including The Dalles Dam, one of four dams built along this stretch of the Columbia between the 1930s and 1970s that displaced Native American communities and wiped out traditional fishing grounds. Celilo Falls, called Wyam, “echo of falling water” or “sound of water upon the rocks,” in several native languages, had existed for 15.000 years, the river providing salmon, the staple diets for the Tribes, the land a place to live, gather and worship. The historical, political and environmental implications of the erection of the dam and the destruction it wrecked, were enormous.

“HOW DO YOU TELL A STORY that is not necessarily your own? How do you capture a landscape that did not always belong to you? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? These questions pose themselves to any artist, anthropologist, historian who is aware of the limitations of their own perspectives.” I had written these words in relation to Section 6 when interviewing the assigned non-Native artist for the first Exquisite Gorge Project 3 years ago. They apply now as much as then. Carolyn Hazel Drake gloriously rises to the challenge just as Roger Preet did in 2019.

The story that she tells reflects the transitory nature of the river, constricted by dams, the flow that is constrained or enhanced by external forces, the bi-directional migration of the birds that come and go, always in transition. The beauty of the landscape’s colors is captured in a muted scheme that matches the solemnity of remembering the losses of the Tribes, incurred by forced relocation. It is about the river, its fate as well as its strength, the despair imposed on those who call(ed) it home and the resilience that nature confers.

MUCH RESEARCH, both on site and in the literature, preceded the design. Exploration of palette, gathering of materials, choice of fabric to go into a “river” of linked/divided pieces covered with abstract representations of the flight of geese, and lined by ceramic “stones” representing the river banks.

The geese come and go, helping the eye to move along the river, just as they would when observing them in nature.

The stones sway softly, as will the river as a whole when suspended and moved by the wind in the outdoor installation at Maryhill Museum. The somber tones are offset by an occasional striking burst of color. Drake uses Japanese Daiwabo fabrics, yarn-dyed before woven, with nuanced variations. Some are neutral, some muted and some are toned-down, reminiscent of traditional Japanese colors like gray willow (yanagi-nezumi), color of old bamboo (oitake-iro), or time altered celadon (sabi-seiji), leaves in autumn (kuchiba)and the color of water (mizu-iro / suishoku/).

When examining the thought and craft going into the detail work, all I could think of was: Patience, precision and particularity. The dividers of the panels, for example, are sewn into wool fabric that is used to line the woolen blankets produced by Pendelton. Pendelton Woolen Mills has had a longstanding relationship with PNW Tribes since its incorporation in 1909; their first blanket designer, Joe Rawnsley, appropriated tribal preferences for elements in their blankets. The tribal blankets were constructed then as now in the jacquard method, creating woven patterns in a textured woolen fabric. Today they make custom blankets, (not for public sale) “given to honor events on life’s journey: birth, marriage, coming of age, graduation and even death, as well as special celebrations and gifts.” One annual special blanket is created in order to fundraise for the American Indian College Fund. Blankets are produced in Pendelton, but the finishing work is done in Washougal, WA, right at the banks of the Columbia river.

The hand-stitching of the appliquéd work is beyond regular, requiring the patience of a saint.

The knotting of the bands of “stone” is tight and precise with cotton-string dipped into bee’s wax.

The frame was special-ordered by the artist, with wood matched in color to the fabric installation, blending in with shades of muted green.

New frame on left – the provided one next to it.

I cannot begin to imagine what it took to apply the thousands of small dots, with slight color gradations, with a micro-tipped ink bottle after the porcelain beads were made and glazed. As always when I find myself in serene spaces – and Drake’s studio is bathed in serenity, light, orderliness, simplicity and all – my imagination was allowed to run free, absorbing what was in front of me, rather than being distracted.

The many tiny dots danced in front of my eye, grains of sand from the Columbia shores, salmon roe, tears from the trail(s) of tears, even the shorter local trails after Celilo Falls was destroyed, the flocks of geese that disappear into the distance on their migratory journeys. You choose. Then again, why choose at all. Varied reminders of a landscape and its history might be exactly what we need. Each finding a place in the family of things.

Canada Geese I photographed in January

***

lim·i·nal

1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.

2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. – Oxford Language Dictionary

CAROLYN HAZEL DRAKE is a third generation Oregon who acquired her affinity to fabric early on in her mother’s quilting store. She received her BA in English Literature, with a minor in Architecture, and her MA in Education from Portland State University, the first in her family to graduate from College. She taught language arts and art history in Portland’s Public School System for more than ten year and was also a PPS Visual & Performing Arts Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA); come fall, she will be teaching art at Arizona State University. Also in the fall, she will be artist in residence for two month at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. In case you’d wondered how one pulls off a double load, rest assured: she has experience with that! If you look at the number of previous residencies and her role as a member of the Portland Art Museum’s Teacher Advisory Council all successfully integrated with her professional obligations, there is no doubt she will thrive.

The dog and I are, of course, exhausted just thinking about it.

In addition to working with fabric, Drake is nowadays exploring ceramics, particularly smoke firing techniques, and much of her recent work has combined the two in novel ways. One of the things that fascinates her about porcelain or clay is the porous nature of these materials, a mode that allows transition. She is fascinated by liminal spaces, and not just the ones in the geographical world.

Liminal comes from the Latin word ‘limen’, referring to ‘threshold’ or ‘doorway’. Liminal is that which occupies the transitional space at a boundary or threshold, a river being a perfect example of a gateway to new or different locations. Hallways, bridges and crossroads are other geographical locations that link a point of departure with a destination. Liminality is not restricted to a geographic place, though. There can be liminal time, the border between day and night during twilight, for example, or between the old and the new year. Liminal space can also be a cognitive or experiential dimension during times of transitions, when we experience major change, or go through periods of uncertainty. In many religious ceremonies that employ rites of passage, a liminal point is reached in the middle of the ceremony defining a before and after.

I HAD BEEN THINKING about liminal space in a completely different context before I even visited with the artist. There is a fascinating, if strange, development of Artificial Intelligence programs like DALL-E that allow the creation of images from text, having been trained as a neural network with everything art history has to offer – and then some.

“…it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.”

Let’s say you request a painting of Black men drinking coffee in the snow, in the manner of John Singer Sargent. You utter the words and you get this. Made by a machine. (Well, I got it from reports by Brandon Taylor, a perceptive and witty author whose book Real Life was an impressive debut and who has been playing around with the AI program, posting diverse results.)

Or you ask for a Sargent version of James I and the Duke of Buckingham as a couple.

Or here is a machine generated portrait of the Duke of Navarro by Edward Hopper.

I’m bringing this up because the borderline between AI creations and art made by the rest of us will become more and more porous, it’s early days yet. I am not interested in a discussion of what is “real” art, or if we can ever tell a fake from a human original in years to come, or any such topic. (Nor am I interested in losing more sleep over potential dangers of perfected AI programs – if you dare you can read a basic AI 101 horror tutorial here…)

I am interested in how transitions will unfold between what we embrace and what we reject, and if there are aspects of human creativity that simply cannot be mimicked no matter how many neural nets draw on data from infinite exposure to all of our knowledge sources. Or can they?

Take Drake’s interest in liminal constructs. She plans to use her Sitka residency to create urns and altar cloths, combining, if possible, ceramic and fabric art for both. Urns stand for the remnants of someone who has walked on, transitioning into an unknown place (if you are spiritual,) or into dust (old secular me.) They remind us of humans’ transitory nature, or, by the care that someone takes to create beauty across their surface, that we will keep a memory alive, waiting for the pain of loss to recede.

Altar cloths are used during worship, also devoted to something we cannot fully know, but in whom we invest hope for allowing a transition into a better place. They cover the chalice that carries the Holy elements and the altar itself – should a drop of wine believed to be Jesus’ blood be spilled it will be caught by that cloth, not touching the altar itself. (Ref.)

What I cannot begin to imagine how something so thoroughly, deeply human can be incorporated into AI art. But maybe it can – maybe the sense of unease that is so often associated with liminal places, caves, chasm, empty airports at night, you name it, will find justification when AI turns out to be a match.

In the meantime, we have the quiet beauty and search for meaning that is deeply incorporated into Drake’s art. As real and as resilient as the river landscape that she has sought to depict. No further transitions needed. It is a place to rest.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

Artists and Community Partners:

Exquisite Gorge II: A Shoutout to those behind the Scenes.

Art, History
Jun 29, 2022
4 Comments

A shoutout! An accolade! Kudos! Applause! Today’s photographs are dedicated to all who have worked behind the scenes to participate in, prepare for and support Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project in ways large and small.

Maryhill Museum

Beyond the involved community partners there are staff, there are people who host artists in residence, there are folks who compute and design the technical specs of the structures under the windy conditions of the bluff, there are drivers willing to transport the frames. Three Cheers!

Their numbers pale, though, in comparison to the number of people who, across the nation, have become involved in contributing to another part of this fiber art celebration: the yarn bombing of the museum site and creating remembrance poppies for Stonehenge, a World War I memorial that is part of Maryhill Museum.

Crafted squares echoing Romanian folk patterns decorate the outside of the museum, repository of many donations from Queen Marie of Romania, delivered during her visit for the inauguration of the museum in 1926. Queen Marie’s gift of Romanian textiles provided the basis for a collection of Romanian folk dress that now includes 400 items. The creation below was still to be hung at the museum entrance when I visited.

I think Queen Marie (2nd from left) would approve!

Yarn bombing on trees and structures in the surrounding park also pick up the Romanian folk theme, as well as that of poppies to which I will come shortly.

Louise Palermo, Curator of Education, putting finishing touches on the yarn bombing.

Traditional Romanian dolls celebrating spring, called màrtisors.

***

Imagine being a committed pacifist, a Quaker, desiring to build a utopian Quaker community in the middle of nowhere, setting a faux French mansion on the top of a windy bluff towering above the river, and not a Quaker shows up. Imagine tearing down an inn you built in a small hamlet that burned, in order to establish a full-sized Stonehenge replica as a memorial to the futility of war. All based on the wrong idea that you somehow took home from a 1915 visit to England, that Britons used Stonehenge as a spot for bloody sacrifice to the Gods of war.

Imagine the realization that local stone is not up to the task and so you improvise with slabs of reinforced concrete, made to look lumpy by lining the wooden forms with crumpled tins. That’s Sam Hill for you, the visionary and founder of Maryhill Museum, a man who promoted modern roads across the Pacific Northwest and who made a fortune with utilities and railroads. Unstoppable in pursuing his dreams, a strange brew of steely pragmatism and utopian ideas. Providing us with a remarkable legacy.

Stonehenge was the very first War Memorial to World War I in the United States, finalized in 1929, with an altar plaque dedicated already in 1918. Hard for me to find echoes of pacifism in the original plaque:

To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. This monument is erected in hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench.

Back to our unsung heroes, though: the nameless volunteers. They have knit and crocheted countless poppies, remembrance symbols for the fallen, poppies which are now attached, sown on by hand(!) by yet another group of supporters onto netting covering the stones around Stonehenge. Needed to defy the harsh winds on top of the promontory.

Vonda Chandler, a long standing volunteer at Maryhill was a major support and inspiration for this project, at least one name I was able to glean. Another was Gavin McIlvenna, the Society of the Honor Guard for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-founding President, who sent an email to the President of the Daughters of the American Revolution, receiving coast-to-coast responses, and some even from Belize.

The museum posted on Facebook as did Maryhill’s Curator of Education, Queen of the Poppies, Lou Palermo, activating a wide-flung net of contacts in the museum and crafts world. Bravo!

Lou Palermo, Curator of Education, Maryhill Museum

This is the current state of affairs, with more packages and boxes arriving daily, a treasure trove of fiber art, poppies filling each parcel. All in need of unpacking and mounting….

The symbol of the poppy has its origins in a poem written by one of the soldiers in the Great War, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a brigade surgeon.

The war-ravaged landscape of Western Europe sprouted these flowers, really a plant classified as a weed, red like the blood that had been so senseless spilled. And the emotional impact of the words, soon published in both Europe and the U.S., had people on both sides of the Atlantic decide to wear fabricated poppies as a sign that the fallen would not be forgotten.

In Europe, Anna Guérin organized French women, children and veterans to make and sell artificial poppies as a way to fund the restoration of war-torn France. Here is a detailed, moving description of her single-minded efforts with archival photographs of many of the original creations. Millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice.

On this side of the Atlantic we had calls for remembrance as well, although people wear the poppies on Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia at the time the war broke out, vowed to wear red poppies and to produce and sell them for proceeds supporting returning war veterans. Michael’s autobiographic writings and a time line of the adoption of the symbol across the world can be found here.

***

I was looking around at the landscape so beloved by Sam Hill, Mt. Hood visible from Hill’s last resting place slightly below Stonehenge. Thinking about the fact that wars, and the horrors and loss they inflicted, are not a thing of the past. They have continued across the world, often in places foreign to us and thus more easily ignored but for the soldiers and their families who fought them. Got physically or psychologically maimed in them. Died in them.

We now see a war again, on Eastern European fields that sprout poppies, in Ukraine. Even that war, just a few months old, has already slipped from our attentional radar, as much as we are preoccupied with political upheaval and judicial assaults closer to home.

As the outpouring of fiber art poppies for the museum project confirms, that is not the case for the many volunteers for whom these symbols likely have personal significance. They honor the dead. They miss the dead. They cannot escape the trauma instilled by war that trickles down across generations. Louis Menand’s words come to mind, describing what significant memorial art does:

“It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn’t say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die.”

***

On the walkway leading up to Maryhill Museum’s front doors you can spot a sculpture by James Lee Hansen. The bronze is part of his Missive series, which depicts tektites, small meteors, on the front, with some abstract embryonic form on the back. The series incorporated ideas from a book, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950), which advanced the theory (scientifically debunked since) that cataclysmic events in our solar system changed Earth’s orbit and axis and caused numerous catastrophes that were recounted worldwide in mythology and religion. The sculptor himself wrote the stanza above, talking about a missile. (He has a book New Totems and Old Gods a well as another one, Missive Poems, related to this series.)

James Lee Hansen Missive (1976)

I don’t know about missiles bringing life. Perhaps they might, if arriving from outer space. Seems to me they bring death, and death only, when launched by our own planet’s warmongers. The many, many contributors to the poppy project for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project remind us of this.

Let their remembrance be a force for peace.

Let the rememberers be recognized.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

Artists and Community Partners:

Art on the Road: A Change in Perspective.

It was early Saturday morning, heat already rising before 8 o’clock, when I drove through an eerily empty industrial landscape, filled with discarded machinery along railroad lines, dusty and bleak. Then came a long stretch of undeveloped acres of sage grass and sand, endless pylons stretching upwards into a pristine sky.

Eventually I arrived at the gate of the park that has been on my bucket list, yet another site of the Confluence Project’s art installations that, in their words, “connect people to the history, living cultures, and ecology of the Columbia River system through Indigenous voices.”

The gates of Sacajawea Historical State Park, a 267-acre day-use park at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers near Pasco, WA, were still locked, but the sign informed me that you had to pay for access and warned of contact with birds, since avian flu has been making the rounds. A friendly caretaker let me into a green oasis of mature trees, surrounded by sparkling water, filled with bird song and not a soul in sight. I know, Saturday at 8 a.m. Probably a haven for picnics, family reunions and splashing kids come noon, for those who can afford the Discovery pass on land that was a traditional (free) gathering place for the Plateau tribes for 10 000 years. Until the Nez Perce War of 1877, that is, after which large gatherings at the confluence of the Snake River and Columbia River were no longer a possibility.

The site, a land spit reaching out into both rivers, is of historical note since Lewis & Clark and their Corps of Discovery camped there for 2 nights in 1805 amongst gathering tribes, led to the place by a young Lemhi-Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, who served as translator, guide and life saver to the expeditions because of her ability to secure plant food when hunting was scarce and her function as token to announce peaceful intentions – the presence of women was a sign that it was not a war party. (I am using the spelling that is now assumed to be the correct one, but left it as is in the name of the park. I am also hoping to write about how she and her role is perceived by Native Americans at a later point, having learned that it is complex.)

In any case, fast forward to 1927, when colonial settlers, the railroad and saw mill industries were firmly established in Pasco. The Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington, an organization with the purpose to “preserve the history and perpetuate the sentiment relating to pioneer days in the State of Washington, including historical sites, documents, records, and relics,” decided to celebrate the Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea’s contributions by placing a marker with granite slabs and river stones and build a park around it.

They planted trees, (with later WPA funded development adding over 200 shrubs and 500 trees, American and European sycamore, Norway and silver maple, sweet gum, American linden, black and honey locust, oak, black cottonwood, Lombardy poplar, Russian olive, blue spruce, and several species of pine among them.

Four years later, the group deeded the property to the State Parks Committee, and the transfer initiated more building and improvements. Central to the park named for her is the Sacajawea Interpretive Center, built in in Art Moderne style 1938/40. The museum features interactive exhibits on the Corps of Discovery, Sacagawea and the Sahaptian-speaking tribes of the region, and was still closed when I visited the park. Interpretative signs across the park as well as objects and structures outside inform about some of the history of the site.

I had come for something else, however: Maya Lin‘s seven Story Circles, which invite us to understand the site from a very different perspective, that of those driven from it.

I had just arrived in the U.S. in 1981 when the controversy around Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial erupted. Opponents referred to the wall as an “open urinal,” suggested, for an inscription, the words “Designed by a gook,” and described Lin’s memorial as “a black gash of shame.” The National Review referred to Lin’s design as “Orwellian glop.” Tom Wolfe and Phyllis Schlafly called it “a monument to Jane Fonda.” Ross Perot said that it was “something for New York intellectuals.” (Ref.) Her design, sunken into the ground, consists of black granite slabs inscribed with the names of the dead and missing, but her critics managed to dilute the powerful work, with Veteran organizations, her supposed allies, caving: representational statues were added later, although at some distance. I was in awe how such a young woman could hold her own against powerful force; I was also taken by a design that made you not look up at a sculpture in admiration of particular persons or actions, as so much of the German memorial scene at the time consisted of.

Lin’s reaction and her path forward were captured some years back (2009) in a terrific essay based on interviews by Portland writer Camela Raymond in Portland Monthly. By the year 2000 Lin had turned to the Confluence Project, a series of six outdoor installations at points of historic interest along 300 miles of the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the State of Washington. A collaboration with other artists, architects, landscape designers and the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest, it served her interest in what she calls “memory work,” aimed, in her words, at inspiring reflection of the past, rather than simply mourning what’s lost. In some ways it is a project concerned with restoration instead. Finished projects include, at this date, Cape Disappointment State Park, the Vancouver Land Bridge, the bird blind at Sandy River Delta, Chief Timothy Park, and the Story Circles that I was now seeing for the first time.

“Seven cut basalt circles are laid out in the park and etched with texts taken from tribal stories, Lewis and Clark’s journals, and Yakama elders that explore the native cultures, language, flora, fauna, geology, and natural history of the site. Each of the circles graphically describes a different aspect of this place: the types of fish, native plants gathered, traded goods, the geology of the place, the mythic creation story of the place and at the southern-most tip, a listing of all the tribes who came through the area placed within the only form, not of a circle but of the imprint of a traditional long house that was the architectural form used for their lodge-style meetinghouses.”

What is most striking is how little these structures command attention and how much they have you focus on the environment as a whole. Whether sunk or elevated, they are “down to earth,” blending with the land, reminding us of peoples for whom the connection to land is central to their beliefs and culture and for whom the forced removal from their land is a central trauma across generations.

They allow room to be exposed to other factors shaping the environment as well, the industries and man-made structures that surround what was once a site for tribal gathering, exchanges, trade and celebrations. They make you move around, from one circle to the next and around them, to read the inscriptions (in language that did not rely traditionally on the written word,) with each move opening up different vistas. You will see pelicans, fishermen, the local bridges and, lucky me, wild turkeys in “let’s impress” mode.

It is a hallmark of all of the sites I have seen so far that they combine the beauty of an idea or a work or art with some functionality, always educating about what was encountered at the time of the Corp’s arrival, from the perspective of those displaced. The fish-cleaning table at Cape disappointment is a central concept to all the Salmon people, but it can – and is! – also be used for the actual gutting. The bird-blind at 1000 acres has the names of the bird-, fish and animal species encountered by Lewis & Clark at the time engraved on its walls; these walls consist of open slats, though, that allow the environment, the river, the woods, the sounds of the birds to be present for your senses, speaking to continuity.

The erasure of memory that is often concomitant to the forced dissemination of a people is given a counter weight in this land art. The Confluence Project goes beyond that link to the past, however. They have an incredible education library that connects to detailed information for each site. For Sacajawea State Park, for example, you can learn about the history and the environmental concerns from multiple compilations. Besides sections for History and Ecology there is much material on Living Culture, informing about indigenous life ways, sovereignty, tribes today and offering an interview collection.

You can also learn about the consequences of the structural hierarchies that resulted from settler colonialism extending into the present. Here is just one example, from a Confluence podcast featuring three Indigenous scholars and activists, Bobby Conner, Emily Washines and Deana Dartt, discussing the memorializing of history. I learned that the scientific assessment of acceptable toxicity levels of the water in the Snake and Columbia river (both polluted by run-off from the nearby Hanford nuclear reactors and threatened by an underground plume of radioactivity,) is based on the amount of salmon consumed by non-Native Americans. That amount is a minute fraction of what tribal members consume whose diet and culture centers around fish. Toxicity rises to levels that induce cancer and other health problems for this previously healthy population whose dietary customs, driven by economic necessity as well, were not factored into the equations.

It is not all about the past. It is about the long shadows reaching into a present which has not been freed from structural and systemic factors that affect the very existence of the tribes of the Plateau. A shift from White to non-White perspective incorporated in the way that the Confluence Project and Lin’s art tell stories alerts us to the connections across time. We have to show up, though, and listen. If necessary, on a Saturday, early in the morning, spared all distractions.

I was driving back home along Highway 14, parallel to the river, renewable energy sources in sight, but also the dams that so dramatically altered the landscape and the life of its inhabitants. It is a blessed landscape, with all its harshness, in need to be, at least, protected, at best restored in ways that make living here long-term sustainable. For all.

Exquisite Gorge II: A Feat of Translation

Art, Science
Jun 20, 2022
2 Comments

“Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”

— Italo Calvino, NYT Interview with Frank MacShane 1983

Stick with me, folks, even if the mere mention of “scientific data” makes some of you want to shut your ears and avert your eyes. It’s going to be a playful, wild dive into the patterns of wind and water, electricity and pollution, geological formations and human experience around the Columbia river basin. All brought to you by yet another innovative artist, Amanda Triplett, and her team of Lewis & Clark College students involved in Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project, tackling the translation of numbers into pictures or something one can see – data visualization – with remarkable creativity.

Italo Calvino’s words about translation applied to his own work being translated into many languages, exposing his work to the world beyond Italy. One of his seminal books, Invisible Cities, focused on the reverse, bringing the world to someone who lacked access despite being the ruler of endless countries. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo told the emperor of Mongolia, Kublai Khan, about the truths found in his realm, translating foreign concepts into a form that could be easily grasped and universally understood.

We are looking at bridge building then, crossovers between different worlds. In some ways one can think of the domains of science and art in this way as well, as two different countries with different languages that need translation. Two realms in need of connection.

All photographs of individual small fiber sculptures are from the tapestry wall that is part of the project process. Participants were encouraged to “play” with recycled fabric bits and pieces.

Science is a domain ruled by methodic, structurally constrained exploration of data intended to add to a knowledge base that might explain our world. That knowledge base is organized in the form of testable predictions derived from our hypotheses of how our universe functions.

Art is a domain that frequently wants to explain the world as well, rather than just depict it. But the approach is much less regulated. No immutable rules as seen in the scientific method, no constraints on what counts or doesn’t count as fact, no limits to emotional engagement or manipulation. In (admittedly overly) simplistic terms, science wants us to know and understand, art wants to make us think and feel.

Both tell a story, constrained by rigid rules for science, open to unlimited embellishment for art. The language they use to tell their story is shaped by those factors. So how then do you translate from one to the other? And, importantly why would you want to do that in the first place?

You might argue that science and art embrace complimentary ways of viewing reality which are not a substitute for each other. Yet translating scientific data into something other than numbers, or even into art, when done successfully, has major advantages. For one, it might reach many more eyes and ears than any old scientific paper, given the sad fact that a lot of people have negative associations to scientific data or a fear of approaching them. They might not trust them, or they might not understand them, given the lack of science education all around. They might not have the patience to wade through them, or they might not have access in the first place, given that so much has to be gathered to depict a complete story. Importantly, something we can see rather than just reading about it, might deliver much more of an emotional punch which in turn could translate into engagement with the issues, or action. If a picture is worth a thousand words, think what sculpture might do to a million numbers…

This was the impetus for Amanda Triplett’s approach to interacting with her college students, colleagues and assorted scholars when devising a plan to translate the scientific data collected around the Columbia river and NW regions into a visual language. (Her contributors can be found listed below.) She utilized the many resources available on a college campus, access to the folks from environmental sciences, data librarians, tech support and so on, and in the process made connections between the various fields, translating various “languages” into an artistic narrative.

The Edging Plate for Last Year’s Exquisite Gorge Print Project, with Lewis&Clark Artists also covering Section 2, From Mile 110 to McGowan Point

The artist in front of a gallery wall depicting the accumulated data and cut patterns

The process as it unfolded can be currently seen documented on the walls and displays of Lewis & Clark’s Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery. (It’s up until July 28th. Open Monday-Thursday 10:00am-2:00pm except July 4th.) It is still an active workshop, with fiber details being created, and the final sculpture put together. Really worth a visit, parking on the empty campus is easy and free, and public transport available.

“All translation is a compromise – the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.” — Benjamin Jowett

The first steps included which data to look for and to grasp what data visualization implies. It is basically the practice of translating numbers into a visual context, so they are more easily understood and allow us to find patterns or trends or outliers, things that do not conform with what we understand to be the norm.

Here is a simple example: if you look for advice on when there are the fewest number of visitors at Portland Art Museum so you can safely visit, or be least disturbed, all you have to do is go to Google Maps. They offer a picture, a bar graph that shows you in simple form what otherwise would involve reading through hundreds of statistic on daily visitor rates and density. And that still would not allow you to decide in the moment, which is the advantage of these interactive live maps provided by the institutions, coded in red bars. Voila, this Friday at 11 a.m. was the best time to visit.

Google Jam Board from Brainstorming Session

There are tons of ways in which data can be presented visually. Bar graphs, scatterplots, heat maps, box plots, line graphs, pie charts, area charts, choropleth maps and histograms all serve particular purposes. The participating students in this project all learned about these tools with the very concrete goal in mind how to represent the information about the Columbia river region in yet a different modus: using fiber to create art. Due to the pandemic, the initial months of the project took place on zoom, with Google jam boards collecting and displaying information that might be relevant. The digital brainstorming centered on representing data, but also concerned ways of understanding how traditional use, or mis-use, and abuse of data can influence how we see the world.

Once back in person, the group listened to experts, had discussion sections, took a field trip to the river and Bonneville Dam for data collection, and learned from presentations by the Columbia River Keepers about the current state of affairs of environmental facts, woes included. It became clear that all things are interconnected and cannot be judged in isolation. Dams, as just one example, provide hydro-power and regulate shipping. A good thing from a consumer perspective, but they also destroy fish habitats and spawning abilities, affecting not just salmon populations but also the cultures of Native Americans on whose land dams were built and who depend on salmon for existential and ceremonial reasons. Water use, as another example, benefits agricultural businesses, but stands in competition with river health and fishing rights in times of increasing droughts.

But how to translate this into fiber art?

Here are three examples that were generated by the project participants:

1. Energy across Oregon and Washington is drawn from multiple sources in varying amounts. Hydropower, harnessed by the dams, generates about 48%, natural gas base load is next (18%) and in descending order coal, wind, natural gas peak load, nuclear, biomass and solar are filling our needs. Each energy source is color coded.

A distribution of these resources, as seen in the pie-chart data visualization was knitted or crocheted with the exact amount of stitches and colors representing each percentage, surrounding a lightbulb representing electricity use.

***

2. Solid pollutants like fishing lines, mesh bags and other odds and ends were collected from the river and fabricated into a sculptural configuration (photograph below)to visualize what sickens the water and fish. The pebbles beneath represent parts of the carbon cycle. Carbon sinks, like forests and oceans of a certain temperature, absorb emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, yet are increasingly depleted. Carbon sources, on the other hand, like the burning of fuel stored in fossils, and maintaining large livestock operations, are continually in use or even increasing, despite the havoc they wreak on our climate.

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3. Other participants looked at the composition of the river, including the geological history of the Columbia River Basalt Group which consists of seven formations: The Steens Basalt, Imnaha Basalt, Grande Ronde Basalt, Picture Gorge Basalt, Prineville Basalt, Wanapum Basalt, and Saddle Mountains Basalt. Many of these formations are subdivided into formal and informal members and flows. One proposal, in the process of being beautifully executed right now, was to make a topographic map.

And then, of course, there is the river itself with its eddies and currents, its waves and flow, carefully constructed with recycled fabrics, salvaged upholstery, some wool, the center piece of the display.

***

“Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” — Anthony Burgess

I met Amanda Triplett 2 years ago when I first wrote about her work for Oregon Arts Watch.

“TRIPLETT HOLDS A B.A. in Art and Art History from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Starting out as a performance major, she soon switched to visual art, mostly focused on drawing and other works on paper. She credits the fact that she was raised in fabric-rich societies like Egypt and Taiwan, with parents later living in India, with her eventual settling on fiber sculptures. Her intention to work with discarded materials found the perfect source: Shortly after she moved to Portland from California in 2016 she was awarded one of the artist-in-residence spots at Glean, “a juried art program that taps into the creativity of artists to inspire people to think about their consumption habits, the waste they generate and the resources they throw away.” They work in partnership with Recology Portland; Metro, the regional government that manages the Portland area’s garbage and recycling system; and crackedpots, a nonprofit environmental arts organization.”

She most recently exhibited at Shift Gallery in Seattle and is currently working on a project, Morphogenesis, on weekends as an artist in residence at Mary Olson Farm and White River Valley Museum in Auburn, WA.

I was not surprised to see her work now includes an important educational aspect: marrying together aspects of art and science, putting the A into the STEM fields, echoing what is going on in the larger world with the arrival of STEAM. STEAM is an educational approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. The hoped-for end results are students who feel at home in scientific fields as well as the arts and use both approaches to enhance their problem solving and functioning in an increasingly data-oriented world. (Ref.)

Reports on the fruitfulness of collaboration between scientists and artists are more and more coming into view, and much is written about how creativity is a common denominator in the thinking of both professions.

In fact, two years ago, The Smithsonian turned to art to get out a message that scientists had been clamoring about loudly – and in vain – for decades with their tools of data-driven messaging. The exhibition, Unsettled Nature – Artists reflect on the Age of Humans, delivered information with an emotional punch, much of it sensitive photography of man-made ecological disasters, but also Bethany Taylor’s woven tapestries of varied ecosystems. Art was used to communicate the gravity of our planet’s situation established by scientific inquiry.

Science organizations have started to acknowledge the important role that art can play, with some even holding juried art contests like, for example, the Materials Research Society, (MRS) with they annual Science as Art competition. Pictures are in the link – some pretty incredible!)

What I admire about Triplett’s approach is her ability to keep the interconnectedness of the two domains, art and science, in focus, but also remain dedicated to the language of her own field. Even with translation from the science end into the visual arts realm, there is a focus on playfulness that is a hallmark of her artistic practice. One that she shares with her students, encouraging them to experiment with tactile materials of all sorts and, importantly, try out how it feels to break the rules. There is a non-quantifiable, and in some ways non-translatable aspect to making art, one that centers on pleasure.

Not the pleasure of a satisfactory scientific result, or the pleasure of having had the right ideas now confirmed by the data, not the pleasure at one’s cleverness of designing a brilliant experimental design.

Instead it is the pleasure of the tactile exploration of fiber, seeing a fantasy or an imaginary construct come into existence, the freedom to bend the rules, to bring your very own creative impulses into the open. It is pleasure in the process, not linked to outcome. To this purpose, all participants are encouraged to create something with fiber, bits and pieces that can be selected from a basket. The growing display on the walls of the Hoffman Gallery are proof positive how playfulness translates into beauty.

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“The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.” — Leonardo Sciascia

We’ll see the final sculpture, the translation tapestry, in August at Maryhill Museum. Or the other side of it, as the case may be. In the meantime, here is my own data collection during the interview, trying to weave stories out of snippets. Then there’s my data visualization with fiber remnants, translating interconnectedness, flow and play. In the spirit of Lewis Caroll’s remarks:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

— Lewis Carroll

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

Artists and Community Partners:

Section 2 Group featured today:

The Exquisite Gorge Project II: Fiber Arts: Section 2 features the work of the following Lewis & Clark student artists:

Brynne Anderson, Melissa Even, Margo Gaillard, Jones Kelly, Haley Ledford, Ella Martin.

More folks who have been apart of the process and supported the project:

Tammy Jo Wilson, Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager, Professor Matt Johnston, Art History, Professor Jessica Kleiss, Environmental Studies, Professor Lizzy Clyne, Environmental Studies, Justin Counts, Educational Technology Specialist, Mark Dahl, Director of Watzek Library, Ethan Davis, Digital and Data Science Specialist, Parvaneh Abbaspour, Science and Data Services Librarian, Rachel McKenna, Art Department 3D Technical Support, Kate Murphy, Community Organizer, Columbia Riverkeeper, The Columbia Fiber Arts Guild, Lewis & Clark Students: Katie Alker, Francisco Perozo, Gwenneth Jergens, Ava Westlin, Sarah Bourne.

Exquisite Gorge II: Doubling Up – The Creative Power of Collaboration.

Art
Jun 13, 2022
2 Comments

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf’s words above referred to the role one’s gender plays in the act of creating art and the need to stop thinking about it in order to find a voice that is not trapped in bias. They equally apply, I thought, to the problem of making art when more than one person is involved: a marriage of opposites has to be consummated when you are coming from different directions and want the work to preserve the authenticity of each collaborator.

A complex, complicated task, particularly if the partnership extends beyond the work on hand – try sharing an artistic partnership and being actually married to each other, as is the case for Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore, my most recently visited artists for the Exquisite Gorge II project.

————-

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

Artists and Community Partners:

The Exquisite Gorge project has the notion of collaboration built in. The various artists all work together on bringing about the final product, a representation of the river and region comprised of many individual works of art. However, during the process they are completely independent of each other, as is the case with any Exquisite Corpse venture. You blindly link into a collectively assembled chain, your individual creation perhaps guided by a rule (entrance and exit of the river at a specified height location in the sculpture, in the current case), but certainly not derived from direct interaction with the other contributors.

The artist couple and Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Curator of Education, in the Oregon City workshop.

The project also is heavily indebted to what the community partners bring to the venture. In some cases it is a true artistic collaboration, when community members participate in the act of creation, like the members of the various fiber art guilds, the individuals who help crochet and knit for the yarn bombing, the Lewis&Clark students involved in fabrication. In other cases collaboration consists of providing venues for education, hosting artist talks, putting up workshops, supplying all kinds of supports – the project would not work without all the libraries, the art centers, cultural societies, tribal leadership and, of course, sponsors and granting agencies involved – all deserve outspoken recognition for being partners in art.

and everyone…. when it all comes together, it works. Glimpses from the workshop.

It is different, though, when you try to bring two minds, two artists working in different media, 2D and 3D respectively, together to make a single piece of art. By all reports, the process was long and hard for today’s featured artists, yet, from everything I have seen so far, quite fruitful.

It probably helped that the partners shared artistic projects before, though these were often curatorial. Wilson and Premore co-founded Art in Oregon, for example, a statewide nonprofit that intends to “foster culturally rich regional communities through partnerships, advocacy, and investment in artists, businesses, educational spaces, and community spaces.” It has become an invaluable resource: their ArtShine.org website provides a platform for OR artists that extends beyond the metro area, including regions like Lincoln County. You can search for artists by region, by name, by type of media. The curated database, to which artists can freely apply, is like a digital gallery that allows people interested in purchasing or displaying art to contact artists directly, a tool to connect artists to community.

Wilson and Premore also co-curated individual exhibitions, the 2019 An Artistic Heritage in Lake Oswego and You are Not a Robot in 2020 among them. The latter was intended for the Lakewood Festival for the Arts but had to be put online due to the pandemic.

___________________

Tammy Jo Wilson grew up in Madison, WI, and received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and her MFA from San Jose State University. I met her in 2019 when I interviewed her as a participating artist in the first Exquisite Gorge project, at Lewis&Clark College where she has worked in the art department as the Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager for the past thirteen years. I subsequently wrote about her curatorial work here.

In the meantime Wilson was also appointed as Arts Commissioner for the City of Oregon City in September 2021. In 2021 she made a splash in the Oregon art landscape with her curation of the exhibit Black Matter, which features work by a dozen Black artists, with a variety of media: mixed media pieces, sculpture, digital prints, portrait and narrative painting, photography, and more. Oregon Arts Watch’s David Bates ranked the show at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg among his favorites of the year. The traveling exhibition can currently be visited at A.N.Bush Gallery at the Bush Barn Art Center in Salem, OR.

Her own artistic output has not suffered, despite her various occupations. Her most recent solo show, Figure Ground, in the Roger W. Rogers Gallery of Willamette University this spring, was well received. In our conversation she explained how her approach to art unfolds from within, a visual voice that emerges to the outside as a representation of the internal emotions. Organic structures and surrealistic landscapes reflect that.

For the EG II frontispiece she decided to focus on the aquatic plant life that provides protective cover and/or nutrients for fish in the river, duckweed included. Duckweed can be supportive of fish populations and has been of great interest to scientists trying to find more productive, resilient ways to grow food in times of climate change. But the plant is also known as invasive when not properly managed. It deprives the water of oxygen, killing both fish and beneficial algae. It readily absorbs certain toxic metals helping to clean polluted environments, but then it is toxic itself and requires safe environmental disposal, which is costly. Figure ground reversal here as well, depending on what aspect of the plant you look at. Edgings of the plants will be printed on gauzy material that will flow through the frame like the Columbia river water, reminding us of the fragility as much as the resilience of nature that has been exposed to polluting forces for centuries.

The “water” will immerse a life-sized sturgeon, sewn by Premore, and surrounded by river stones covered in moss, fabricated from a substrate felted with raw wool, another important element in a region that has seen an increase in sheep ranches supporting the local economy.

Owen Premore grew up on a farm in the Willamette Valley, near Eagle Creek. He was surrounded by nature, but also by adults who modeled spatial thinking (architects and engineers were immediate relatives) as well as crafting – he learned to crochet as an eight-year old, taught by his Italian grandmother whose own mother had been a textile artisan, well versed in the difficult art of tatting.

He received his BA from the University of Oregon and his MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University, where he and Tammy met. Next he spent a decade or more at OMSI, curating and installing some 13 traveling exhibitions, some as large as 6000 square feet. The job required extensive travel where he lived in hotel rooms for weeks at a time, with his only escape from the stress of the day found in needle arts at night. Many of the crocheted works originated from those times, often depicting the fare at his disposal, from diners to hotel bars. Ready to stay closer to home, Premore has been the Directing Curator of the Art About Agriculture Program at Oregon State University since 2018.

His focus on interactive installations, often with kinetic and auditory components led to enormous skills in building environments with salvaged ore prefabricated materials, providing museums and galleries with technical support. His workshop contains pretty much every tool know to man(kind,) with metal and wood working stations that enable Premore to create his sculptures. His work has been exhibited in several group and solo shows since 2002, most recently at Joan Truckenbrod Gallery in Corvallis.

Where Wilson works from the inside out, Premore’s artistic process often functions in the opposite direction: taking the impressions derived from the environment and letting them feed his creative thought. For the EG II project he traveled along the Columbia river, looking a various sites, lured by the fish hatcheries and the fish ladders at the Bonneville dam. He became fascinated with the white sturgeon, its incredible size, the biggest fresh water fish in the world. These creatures can live up to 150 years, they are beautiful – and dangerous to your health. State health officials recommend that you limit your intake of river fish to a few meals a month because these bottom feeders have ingested so much polychlorinated biphenyls — or PCBs – that the levels in their flesh is exceeding official screening values. Man-made pollution endangering environment and subsequently ourselves. Man-made obstacles damming the river, trapping wild fish to ever shorter spawning journeys.

It is the blending power of things, aquatic plants that protect and harm, fish that nourishes and poisons, that is captured in the installation. It is fiber art as much as environmental commentary, blending a sense of awe with disquiet.

For me the immediate association of envisioning this huge fish in the frame (I only saw a model on a worktable nearby) was that of another, iconic work of art, that had a dead shark trapped in Formaldehyde, slowly rotting until replaced by another specimen, also killed for the purpose, Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Like much of Hirst’s work, it lent itself to outcries, the absurdity of selling a (second) killed creature for $12.000 million to collectors, expressing the obscenity of the contemporary art market. Here’s a fun book that delivers details: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, by Don Thompson. “A Dead Shark isn’t Art!” filled the headlines after Stuckism International Gallery offered a parody.

Why did it come to mind, other than a fleeting visual parallel, when thinking about a carefully sewn fish, stuck within fabricated aquatic overgrowth, surrounded by felted stones? It was the symbolism of a trap, a trapped fish and a thought-trap, inviting us to figure out its meaning and significance. In fact, Premore had shown Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Curator of Education, and me a small fiber installation of a trap earlier during our visit, part of a series of mixed media works, that had already alerted me to the concept of trap.

Red Trap 2, 2012 Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, mono-filament, mahogany, rubber.

On Left: Blue Trap, 2008 Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, monofilament. On Right :Red Trap 1, 2008 Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, mono-filament

And of course, they were things trapped all over the place, some mysterious, some identifiable.

Between that trap and Premore’s kinetic machines that use all kinds of repurposed materials and his sense of playfulness, I was also reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s Trebuchet. Duchamps, who loved puns, called a coat rack that he had nailed to the floor, after forgetting to mount it and constantly stumbling over it, trebuchet – a trap. The term is similar to the word trebucher, a classical chess move where a pawn trips an opponent’s move. And certainly that “trap” on the floor trips up the viewer. Of course the (creative) act of choosing a prefabricated object, ignoring its utilitarian function and giving it a title that implies new meaning, was the beginning of the move towards conceptual art – Readymades paving the path for what we are seeing today.

Original Version:
1917, New York
lost
coat rack nailed to floor
assisted readymade
no dimensions recorded

Replica, Milan, 1964

Much has been written about couples comprised of famous artists. How their intellectual exchange influenced their work, how their relative standing in the art world kept one of them in the shadows, often undeservedly so, how competition affected their creativity. In no particular order, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin., Dora Maar or Francoise Gilot and Picasso come to mind, or Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Lee Miller and Man Rey, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst. There were Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn.

Of more immediate interest are couples who actually worked together on creating a shared (vision for a) piece of art. There are famous ones like Jeanne Claude and Christo, or Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Or some new to me, like Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, who met as art students in 1995 and have been creating politically engaged conceptual works ever since. The way they describe their creative process is perhaps not so far from how Wilson and Premore proceed (speculating here, folks!):

“…they arrive at their concepts by ‘throwing out ideas and free-associating’. However, Allora admits that there is a downside to having two minds working on a project: they argue a lot.” (Ref.)

There are artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble, who often work with trash, literally, shaping piles of refuse into the most amazing shadow representations, frequently of themselves. Obviously not averse to materials signifying the opposite, either. Unless that is sarcasm, telling by their website, not out of the question…

Left: THE GAMEKEEPER’S GIBBET, 2011 Solid sterling silver gilded in pure gold, metal stand, light projector — Right: REAL LIFE IS RUBBISH, 2002 Mixed media, light projector.

Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison have been together for over 20 years, making riveting art based on shared interest in dance, printmaking and photography, focused on the evolution of the anthropocene and our impact on the environment.

First of May (2015)

Red Sun
2022
photolithography

Then there is MINIMIAM, comprised of photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida. Their name is a play on words by combining miniature and “yummy” (in French, it’s “miam”). Their installations consist of food that’s inhabited by tiny people who interact with it like it’s a real world to be lived in. Obvious, why this work came to mind, right?

P’TIT-TOUR (2003) – Bike. cycling. Tour de France. donut. pastry. cake. sweet. coffee. sugar. race. team. sport. spoon. pink. icing.

DELICABAR SUMO-PLOUF (2005) – Sumotori. Sumo. Cherry. chocolate. Sebastien Gaudard. splash. cake. Japan.

Owen Premore Crocheted Doughnut

I do appreciate wit! And I guess the collaborative process in developing art is closely aligned with the process of making a long-term relationship work: it can be demanding, contentious, vexing, inspiring and, let’s be honest, occasionally exhausting. But ultimately it is astoundingly rewarding.

We will see the full artistic results in August.

Flash in the Pan

Art, Politics
Jun 8, 2022
3 Comments

1: a sudden spasmodic effort that accomplishes nothing

2: one that appears promising but turns out to be disappointing or worthless – Merriam Webster

William Merritt Chase Peonies 1897

This was me, last week. Sort of. Make the hair white, make the peony bouquet more modest, make it camera in hand instead of fan, and you’ve got the picture. Peonies have been a magnet for visual artists across centuries. They are lush, come in a range of colors, can be arranged in dramatic tableaux. And when the petals fall, they serve as a perfect memento mori. It doesn’t hurt that they last in the garden only for a short time. The fleetingness spurs desire to create something more lasting.

Here are some of my favorite paintings, as per usual the European fare I grew up with, Dutch, Russian and French masters.

Vincent Van Gogh Roses and Peonies (1886)

Pierre Auguste Renoir Peonies (1880) Eduard Manet White Peonies (1864)

Henri Fantin-Latour Vase of Peonies (1881) Alexander Gerasimov Still live with peonies (1950)

No massive bouquets for me, at $3 per stem, but the five I ended up with held a wonderful surprise in store. I had unwittingly bought Paeonia Coral Charm, a peony variety known for its color transformation while blooming. (Photographs are all of the same bouquet, across a week or so.)

The variety was registered in 1964 and colors switch from coral to cerise, orange and, finally, white across its lifespan, in the vase as much as on the stem in the garden. Quite a spectacle to behold.

Peonies are a flash in the pan – they come and go in the garden in the blink of an eye. That phrase, flash in the pan, has its origins debated. Some say it originated in the 17th century when Flintlock muskets held small amounts of gunpowder in a pan. When the power flared up without a bullet being fired, it was called a flash in the pan. Others claim it has to do with the experiences during the Gold Rush of the 19th century. Prospectors’ excitement when they saw something glint in the pan was dashed when it did not turn out to be gold.

In any case, for a moment I had had high hopes that one could use the phrase regarding UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – alas, he did survive the no-confidence vote on Monday, albeit facing a substantial rebellion and a weakened leadership position. I’m not going to bore you with details of my distaste for the man (and his party’s politics) but instead share something that brightens my days occasionally.

There is someone on Twitter called “Shakespeare Replies” – @TheBardAnswers.

He or she provides appropriate citations from Shakespeare’s works for current political situations and is about as much a fan of Johnson as am I…

I have collected some of the ones that made me laugh across time – hope you enjoy them as well.

And secondary commentary on Nadine Dorries’ support’

Alas, not always are the text sources referenced, but it is just fun to anticipate when the next one will come along.

Or this one:

And finally, other targets as well:

Shakespeare, of course, wrote about practically every plant there is, except for peonies – at least I could not find anything in my go-to-guide, Botanical Shakespeare, which lists and cross-references the names of plants with the plays, sonnets and everything else. Best of all: they offer planting instructions of the flora appearing in any given play. For June you could chose A Midsummernight’s Dream, for example, and learn which of the mentioned plants are good for your zones, how to plant them and a lot of biological information about them. (All contained in link above.)

Might as well go plant some peonies, given that I cannot use Sonnet 29 for a certain Prime Minister quite yet…

Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

And until we can say “So long, Boris,” we’ll listen to “So long, Eric….“

Art on the Road: Correlations in Corvallis.

Art
Jun 6, 2022
5 Comments

cor·re·la·tion – /ˌkôrəˈlāSH(ə)n/

a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things.

the process of establishing a relationship or connection between two or more measures.

interdependence of variable quantities. – Oxford Languages

The carbon-monoxide alarm decided to go off in the middle of the night. Try to figure out what the pattern of shrill beeps means, when you’re cold, rattled, and the dog is howling downstairs. Instructions are on the back of the gadget, in miniature font size, and so with much squinting we learned that a sequence of five beeps in a row signaled that the gizmo had reached the end of its life span. Short altercation ensued of who of us two was privileged to fling it into the garbage. Back in bed at 1:20 a.m., sleep, of course, remained illusory. Luckily, I had additional patterns to sort out, my head still filled with the impressions of the previous day.

“Art is beautiful. Requires a lot of work, though.” Quote by Karl Valentine, found in the artist’s studio.

I had been invited to a studio visit and guided tour through an exhibition at The Arts Center in Corvallis by the artist Hanne Niederhausen. As luck would have it, one of my readers had pointed out the two-person show, A Journey: Hanne Niederhausen & Judith Wyss, and established contact with the artist, otherwise I would have missed it. Which would have been truly unfortunate.

Niederhausen was born in Germany shortly after World War II, we are of the same generation. We both arrived in the U.S. around age 30, and so we share a set of experiences that comes with uprooting as adults, both from the country of origin and the nomadic life of the academic circuit. After years of transitions, she and her husband settled in Boca Raton, FL before they moved to Oregon five years ago after retirement, to be closer to their children.

Glimpses of the current studio.

I am drawing out the biographic parallels because they undoubtedly create some affinity, the familiarity of the mother tongue, the echos of the lived experience of being considered an American when visiting back home, a German when defined here. Neither fish nor flesh, as they say in the old country. More importantly, though, the parallels guided – whether appropriate or not – my reaction to and assessment of the art before me, through the lens of continual reinvention that comes with an immigrant’s path.

Don’t let the occasional impish smile of this slender woman deceive you. Underneath lies a powerhouse creative mind. The artist received her M.A. at the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe in Germany, and a B.F.A. from Florida Atlantic University. During her early career she worked and taught as a fiber artist, but expanded across the years into work with multiple media, book arts, edging, painting and photography among them. Proof of the quality of the work and the fact that the world still occasionally embraces renaissance (wo)men, can be found in the list of her national and international exhibitions, and presence in international art collections.

Sketches on studio wall

As I see it, two overarching principles define the content across her use of diverse artistic processes. One principle is Niederhausen’s sharp observation of her environment and the desire to document the impact of that surround. I believe careful exploration of one’s world is a necessary, though not sufficient condition to adapt as an immigrant or continual traveler. You need to orient yourself in new places, not just out of curiosity or appreciation of novelty, but as a tool for (psychological) survival as much as anything else. With the intense observation comes an appreciation of detail that might well be lost to those who have the privilege of being rooted in a place for good. Documentation helps to keep score of where you are, and place yourself within a context, a counterweight to constant change.

On Left: Uprooted (1995) Edging, Chine Collé / On Right: Sanssoucie (1995) Edging, Chine Collé

The early edgings depict a sense of place, but also hint at the artist’s position within it, a marker for memory, when the next change arrives. The castle on the right, for example, was home in Austria during graduate school, Sanssoucie the French for worry free, the Sorry board game marks a reminder of hours of play with the young children. (The German name for the game by the way is Folks, don’t get angry! Why use one word when you can use many? Today’s photographs are a mix of work from both, studio and exhibition. I particularly liked how conditions of the latter “shone a light” on some of the subjects, like the lamp in the upper left corner of Uprooted, reflections that were not just the typical nuisance, for once.)

Later work employs local materials that have the memory of place imprinted within, to address particulars of the environment. One such example is the use of discarded hurricane shutters as the metallic substrate for engraving with an electric dremel, drawing with ink and painting with shellac. The plates themselves have permanent scratches and scars from frequent exposure during Florida’s hurricane season, occasional labels on the back for placement (e.g. lower left patio window) and invite one’s imagination to interpret the mark making in ways related to anxious morning hours expecting the environmental damage.

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning (2011) Engraved Metal, Ink, Shellac (details below)

From the same environment under duress:

Caution (2007) Starbook

Still other work is focused on the act of letting go, oscillating between the accumulation of inherited objects, the preservation of memory and the freedom of traveling light.

Letting Go (2019) Mixed Media

(The silver tongues were used to lift sugar cubes into tea or coffee cups in every Bougie household…)

The second connecting principle is a mastery of establishing correlations which emerges throughout the artist’s body of work. What she assembles and how she assembles is driven by an eye for connections, parallels, and correspondences. It can be most directly found in used text, where associations and equivalences rule. But it is always integrated in the visual elements as well, if you look for concurrences. Have I floated enough vocabulary to express my sense of interrelationships when looking at this work? It’s pretty striking. It also is prime territory for inviting speculations. Here’s an example.

The flag book Isaac and Simone or The Relativity of the Horizon (2014) consists of pages densely covered with photographs of scribblings or calligraphy, some squares centered in the pages, and the – warranted – question at the outset “Am I really absorbing any of this.” There are lots of numbers, dates and male and female names, maybe a simple referral to favorite kids’ names in any given year? Lovers writing their names on tree branches? Then again, putting Isaac and relativity in one sentence does trigger an association with Newton and his Inverse Square Law. So what’s Simone got to do with it? Perhaps de Beauvoir’s third volume in her biography, The Force of Circumstance, that argues for very different forces affecting us just as stringently as physics, with loss forever on the horizon? I had no clue. That makes it so exciting. Our imagination might or might not be correlated with the artist’s intent, but the search for a tie-in links us nonetheless, particularly if you have an overly-active imagination like mine… (Hint: I learned it was kids or visitors scratching their names on bamboo trunks. Sometimes a name is just a name! Must remember…)

Isaac and Simone or The Relativity of the Horizon (2014) Flagbook

Niederhausen got interested in books at a time when she explored Florida Atlantic University’s collection of special books at the Jaffe Center. She explored assemblages with writing, drawing, prints and photographs, forever changing the parameters that constituted a finished work. I found work mounted in her studio particularly poignant. Here is one that nods to the plight of those incarcerated, counting the days.

another one that gives a tip of the hat to the impact of Duchamp’s 1951 bicycle wheel, and another book that simply caught my eye because of its beauty,

and last but not least one that speaks to all of us struggling with serious illness. Or maybe to shared fears. Who knows.

One of my favorite books at the exhibition (and I say that as someone who loathes cooking and loves eating!) is a two-sided flutter book, In Praise of the Art of Cooking. As the artist explains, the concept was born out of the realization how much art making and cooking had in common, ideas leading to concoction. Photographed images of discarded vegetable matter enhance the drawn art.

Photographs of the tools of the visual artist are juxtaposed with those of the cook, again associating one or more variables. A clever addition of quotes by famous artists, changed by a word or two to apply them to culinary rather than visual arts, stressing how easily they are related, added a bit(e) of fun as well as a dollop of art history.

Miró’s original words were: “I try to mix colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” We might as well add another Joan Miró quote that applies to Niederhausen’s output: “The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.”

Food is a recurrent subject matter. From whimsical assemblages that put constructed meals on place settings reminiscent of Judy Chicago,

Mellow Meal (2011) Assemblage on Table

to picnic baskets that contain bamboo plates covered with assemblages depicting the whims, seductions and dangers of the food industry, Niederhauser again documents the peculiarities as well as quotidian matters of her environment.

Last Picnic Mixed Media and Photography on Bamboo Plates with Hatbox.

***

Generous souls at The Arts Center allowed for entry before visiting hours, so I avoided sharing a public space with many people, for which I am truly grateful. The gallery is located in an old church, within a pleasant setting of green spaces, with ample parking. The space is big enough for both artists’ work to be hung without interfering with each other. I unfortunately could not review Judith Wyss’ installations and glass work as well, since I had come to focus on an artist who has re-invented herself multiple times and with whom I had occasion to have serious conversations. I believe there will be another review of the full exhibit in Oregon Arts Watch in days to come.

What struck me about Niederhausen’s later work – and I wonder how much that is age related – is how she has freed herself from the need to prove something, be it impressive print making skill and etching technique, or important or clever ideas.

I was taken by a series of paintings that correlated simple mathematical concepts, a hint of geometry or Fibbernacci numbers here or there, with a riot of color and bursts of random patterning, really the one exhibit in the hall that I associated with unfettered joy.

Q.E.D. Quod Erat Demonstrandum (2013) Mixed Media. Detail below.

An even more recent series, Dreams and Diversions, is the most fluid of the lot. It felt more wistful than joyous, but true to self and the principles of observation and correlation. The patterns originated in discovering beansprouts on the kitchen counter that had dried up over night (observation/documentation.) They take on a life of their own, however, floating through various constellations, linked to amorphous landscapes, associated with jewel-like shapes that might have naturally blossomed in some imaginary world, correlating with an increasing sense of being untethered. They seemed like visions of entering a different dimension – perceived by this viewer as an intuition of aging and beyond, one that was more empowering than threatening.

Dreams and Diversion Series (2016) Water Media, Graphite on Yupo Paper – Details below

What happens to you when you age, as an artist? When physical factors limit what you can create or what process you can use for creating? What cognitive factors play a role, perceptions of futility, perhaps, or of the need to use shrinking time wisely? Do you frantically produce or do you withdraw? Do you fear that your repertoire of ideas might finally be exhausted, haunted by worry that you only repeat yourself? How do you keep yourself convinced that you have something to say and the means to say it in novel ways? Will the cessation of art making leave a huge hole, or will it provide some freedom in your fatigued existence? Questions I ask myself and plan on asking other artists in their 70 and 80s, Niederhausen included. I hope that the answer reflects an urge to create, in perhaps reduced fashion, but create nonetheless. Lots of time to rest later. Yes, it involves a lot of work, but art is beautiful!

Vacancy # 1 (1992) Edging

A Journey:

Hanne Niederhausen & Judith Wyss

May 19-June 25, 2022 –

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm

The Arts Center – 700 SW Madison Ave, Corvallis, OR 97333

Happy Birthday, Ken Hochfeld!

Art, photography
May 16, 2022
7 Comments

We had it all planned. My friend had an exhibition of his latest work at Lightbox Gallery in Astoria. I was to come on a Monday when the gallery is closed to the public, so I could look at his photographs, safely away from potential sources of infection. Wouldn’t you know it, it did not work out, I was under the weather and the trip had to be canceled.

The work is back in Portland now, and this weekend I got a one-on-one presentation on Ken’s porch, safely outside and yet protected from the endless rain. It was the day before his birthday.

Cape Horn, WA

I want to talk a little bit about this photographer friend of mine and the way I believe he approaches his work. The lack of feedback when you are not a famous artist in the limelight can be anything from annoying to discouraging at times. We all should make more of an effort to share our reactions. So here are some observations, and some guesses.

Historic Columbia Highway at Rowena Crest

If you look at Ken’s website, one thing is immediately obvious: he is willing to take risks, over and over again, by exploring new methods and new subjects with a vengeance. That is not the norm in the world of photography. Most successful photographers have their shtick and stick to it – why fix something if it ain’t broken? It allows the viewers to instantly recognize your work, a marketing plus, among others. It allows you to refine your technique with a particular subject, it keeps you in a comfort zone.

Olin and Hazel Oliver 1972 (From his book They Call it Home – The Southeastern Utah Collection)

In contrast, Ken’s path as a fine art photographer has been variable across the decades. He has tackled portraiture, color photography, both in spontaneous and in staged settings. His work interacts with our natural environment in a multitude of ways, from descriptive, documentary landscape photography, to capturing the mood or essence of a place, to using nature as a symbolic stand-in for more personal exploration, preferably in black&white, often in the sepia tone range, sometimes in collaboration with people who provide text.

Titles of series clockwise from upper left: Madrone Wall Expressions – Rock(s) – Landscape Americana – Unboxed – Whole – The Trees.

As someone myself who gets easily bored and also likes to stretch herself artistically as much as intellectually, I feel quite drawn to work that shares some of those characteristics. You never know what comes next, and so are kept on your toes, wondering about the newest project, both in terms of method and ideas.

I grew here-lump of stone,
settled in my nest of sticks
waiting for an Irish spring,
waiting for a four-leaf clover
to kiss me awake.
(From the series *Waiting, text by Gay Walker.*)

The most recent work consist of diverse series. Ken captures the Columbia river with a nod to the history of photographers who came before us, with fresh eyes, nonetheless. Some of these images were created while he kayaked on the river in order to get vistas inaccessible from land. If you have ever held a camera or/and tried to paddle in those waters you know how daring an approach this is – yet the photographs are nothing but serene. Here is the artist statement:

“Pages: The Majestic Columbia River”

The Columbia River has been a popular subject for photographers since the early days of the medium over 150 years ago. Many wonderful photographs of the river are shown in galleries, museums and the pages of books highlighting the historical importance of the work itself while depicting the beauty of the Columbia River.

The photographs shown here are my own pages of some favorite scenes of this powerful and intensely beautiful resource we have in our backyard. I hope that with the exhibitions at LightBox today, we can celebrate the majesty of the Columbia River and recognize its significance while remembering it as an existential heritage of those who were here long before the first settlers arrived.

Horse Thief Lake, Columbia River Gorge, WA

For the other project, Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River, Ken spent several years photographing the people (some familiar, some met on the road, quite literally) and the landscape of a region resistant to change. Scandinavian fishermen, Chinese immigrants who worked in the canneries, farmers who tried to make a living, make for a hard working populous in a region prone to earthquakes, floods and fires.

“Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River”

There is a special character and history in the small communities found along the Lower Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. This work begins to examine the places and the people who live there.

The communities of the Lower Columbia on the Oregon side along Highway 30 west of Portland and on the Washington side near Highway 4 west of Longview were settled primarily by Swedes and Finns long before roads were built. They depended upon Columbia River tributaries and sloughs for access, so these developments became known as Riverboat Communities. When roads were built the riverboats became obsolete. While fishing and canning were once the primary source of commerce, the canneries are now of the past. Cattle and sheep are raised by many of the locals and fishing is still active. Most importantly the communities depend upon water management of the sloughs via dikes constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and managed by hired locals to minimize pasture flooding, but flooding is still common during the wet season. In Brownsmead in particular, new construction is seldom seen because of the scarcity of available undeveloped higher ground, so changes to the area are rare and most of the locals like it that way.

Clatskanie River

Watermaster walks the Columbia River Dike near Brownsmead

I’ll skip over all the stuff relating to technique that I know nothing about in the first place, given that I still use a point&shoot camera on automatic mode, grateful if I manage to get what ever captures my attention in focus. Seems to me, though, that Ken’s images are flawless, when it comes to the way light was captured and space laid out.

Clockwise from upper left: Ed and Jan Johnson, Brownsmead – Scott Fraser, Midlands District – Ray and Denise Raihala, Brownsmead – and Brooklyn, NYC transplant Carol Newman, Brownsmead (community treasure, heart and soul – and brain! – of the local radio station KMUN/Astoria. I’m an ardent fan, in case you wondered, of her and the show hosted by her, Arts Live and Local.)

Instead, I want to try and express what much of Ken’s nature-based work seems to reflect for me. For lack of a better phrase, I think the images evoke a state of longing. I can’t quite put my finger on what is longed for: establishing a connection between photographer and viewer through successfully communicating what was seen?

From the series Rivers and Streams

Longing to freeze the moment in time when awareness of the beauty of our surround registers, once again, pretending we can make it last forever? Longing to prolong that state where we can focus on the cliffs, the woods, the meadows, the rivers, oblivious to pain or the daily demands on us, our worries and obligations, in blissful isolation? Or, in reverse, longing to belong, while out there all alone, forever wondering if people “get” what one is producing?

From the series Rock(s)

Longing to find a pictorial language that expresses oneself when words fail? Whatever it is, a feeling hovers above the surface of these photographs, or within them, that still believes in possibility – longing can be answered.

Bughole Road

Sometimes the longing is on the melancholy side, sometimes it captures joy about what’s seen, the deep desire to depict and share. Sometimes it is more attached to what is photographed, sometimes it seems more linked to the one doing the photographing. Wherever the scales tip, one thing is true for the work: it does not shy away from, or, really, it comfortably seeks and displays emotion. If I compare it to the traditional (and majority male) landscape photography that I know, that is special.

High Water on Wirkala Rd. Deep River, WA

Surprise me with what’s next down the road! No Dead End for you!

Music today of Finnish origins like many of the Brownsmead immigrants, related to light, appropriate for a passionate photographer.

YDP – your daily picture

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YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Art

Art on the Road: PaintOut on the Oregon Coast.

Exquisite Gorge II: Of Baskets and Botany – A Biocultural Exploration

Exquisite Gorge II: Liminal Spaces.

Exquisite Gorge II: A Shoutout to those behind the Scenes.

Exquisite Gorge II: A Feat of Translation

Exquisite Gorge II: Doubling Up – The Creative Power of Collaboration.

P’TIT-TOUR (2003) – Bike. cycling. Tour de France. donut. pastry. cake. sweet. coffee. sugar. race. team. sport. spoon. pink. icing.

DELICABAR SUMO-PLOUF (2005) – Sumotori. Sumo. Cherry. chocolate. Sebastien Gaudard. splash. cake. Japan.

Flash in the Pan

Art on the Road: Correlations in Corvallis.

A Journey:

Hanne Niederhausen & Judith Wyss

May 19-June 25, 2022 –

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm