Artist lecture series on some Tuesdays at 3:45 in Lecture Hall 1
Sponsored by Evergreen Gallery and Visual and Environmental Arts
For information, contact Ann Friedman, Director, Evergreen Galleries
867-5425 friedma@evergreen.edu
October 2 Joseph Park
October 16 Beverly Naidus
October 30 Sara Bates
November 13 Laura Alpert
October 2
Joseph Park
Joseph Park’s paintings are characterized by cinematic spaces and lush landscapes bathed in Technicolor hues. Park creates intimate dramas in glowing rooms, seductive landscapes, and tender portraits.
Park’s canvases ransack art and film histories, as well as contemporary pop culture, making a potent cocktail of both Eastern and Western visuality. One finds in his work oblique references to the spaces and characters of classic Japanese film (the quiet dramas of Mizoguchi or Ozu rather than the samurai epics of Kurosawa), French painting (the romance and languor of Fragonard rather than the heroic ideals of David) and anime (more Princess Mononoke than Ghost in the Shell).
Animals are most often the occupants of Park’s shimmering spaces. His characters are made sensual or wise, cunning or languorous under the artist’s brush. In comic books and cartoons, both Eastern and Western, animals reflect certain psychological traits or stereotypes. In Park’s paintings, animals have their own existential concerns and preoccupations.
Although they take advantage of a rich pool of cross-cultural traffic, Park’s paintings are more than a sum of their appropriated parts. They coalesce to tell stories of their own—quietly charged encounters in which the inner life of each character determines the organization of his or her surroundings.
Joseph Park was born in Ottawa, Canada, and graduated with a B.A. from Cornish College of the Arts and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. He currently lives and works in Seattle.
Review of Joseph Park exhibition: http://www.artdish.com/article.asp?ID=63
October 16
Beverly Naidus
For almost three decades, Beverly Naidus’ art practice has intertwined the roles of activist, educator, writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her mediums have ranged from interactive, site-specific installations to digitally rendered artist's books. Inspired by lived experience, she has made art about the ecological crisis, healing body hate, cancer and environmental illness, the alienation of consumer culture, the shame and pride of being “other,” the nightmare of nuclear war, the despair of unemployment, ways to breathe through and find hope in the midst of great suffering, and envisioning a sane, just and ecological future. She is the author of two artist’s books, One Size Does Not Fit All and What Kinda Name is That?.
Early recognition in the alternative margins of the NYC and LA art worlds brought her many opportunities to exhibit internationally, publish artist books and articles, and receive reviews in contemporary journals and art books, including books by Suzi Gablik and Lucy R. Lippard. In 2003 Beverly joined the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program’s faculty at the University of Washington in Tacoma where she is co-creating a studio arts program (Arts in Community) with a focus on art for social change and healing.
website: www.artsforchange.org
October 30
Sara Bates
Sara Bates is a Cherokee artist whose work is both traditional and contemporary, personal and universal. It is about where she lives, both the body she inhabits and the sustaining earth. It is about what keeps us anchored in health, sanity, and compassion.
Bates’ Honoring Circle installations are beautiful, complex, symbolic expressions of the oneness of life, place, and spirit. Using feathers, pine cones, shells, seeds, leaves, earth pigment, maize, and stones, Bates creates these installations in the form of a circle containing an equal-armed cross. The artist states, “In Cherokee symbolism, this is the symbol found on water spider’s back … this form symbolizes the Sacred Fire … Life moves in a circle and all creation is related, so the circle offers a kind of universal truth.” While the motifs of her Honoring Circles stem from Cherokee symbolism, the underlying origin of all her symbols is the earth, from which we all derive our understandings and convictions. Bates’ installations, her process of creating them and our experience of viewing them, are all part of a pan-human drive to seek transcendent truths about the world as a whole.
The process of creating an Honoring Circle is a personal rite that Bates undertakes according to a specific pattern of prayer, rediscovery, and physical involvement. It is a way to come “home,” find balance, and restore health, not unlike meditation.
Works from her “Honoring” series have been exhibited widely in the US, and in solo shows in France, Italy, and New Zealand. From 1990 to 1995 Bates was the director of exhibitions and programs and curator for American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.
Interview with Sara Bates: http://www.britesites.com/native_artist_interviews/sbates.htm
November 13
Laura Alpert
Laura Alpert’s marble sculptures are a synthesis of transitory gestures and geometric patterns. They reflect Alpert’s interest in both ephemeral natural phenomena (frost, flowers, water drops), gestural marks and structured forms (lines, planes, trapezoidal solids). The sculptures are subtle, yet they present extreme contrasts. Pushing the structural limits of Colorado Yule marble, Alpert uses a hydraulic diamond chain saw to create translucent layers of stone. She then uses a myriad of hand tools to refine these cuts and explorations. The results are spectacular thin slabs that both reflect and diffuse light.
Alpert is Associate Professor Emeritus of sculpture at the University of Oregon Department of Art, where she has taught since 1979. She has been co-leader of the University of Oregon Stone Carving Workshop for 12 years and a visiting artist/instructor at numerous stone carving symposia. Her sculptures have been widely exhibited across the U.S. and Canada.
More information at: http://davisandcline.com/Artist-Detail.cfm?ArtistsID=361