Gallery 110

2009

January 8 – 31, 2009

Artists’ Preview Reception: Wednesday, January 7, 2009; 6-8pm
Exhibition Opening: January 8, 2009; 6-8pm

Gallery 110 Hours, Wednesday – Saturday, 12-5pm

Main Gallery:

Landscapes and Stories

Susanne Kelly and Michael Dailey

Michael Dailey and Susanne Kelly, father and daughter, are painters who are also stimulated by the more graphic media of prints and drawings. This exhibition showcases their lesser known work: Kelly's prints and Dailey's drawings; witty narratives and insightful landscapes.

Susanne Kelly creates large scale woodcuts pulling imagery from an imaginary world where beavers are bossy, cats wear Mary Jane's and a certain Princess Pink Petal reigns supreme. Kelly's narrative, in contrast to the work of her father, is highly subjective with a strong concern for formal relationships.

By suggesting rather than defining, Michael Dailey leaves much for the viewer to imagine. The work requires the viewer to complete the experience with the memories, stories and perceptions he or she brings to the piece, rather than offering them directly. A grand stage has been set for a performance to commence.

Loft Gallery:

Maylee Noah: Souvenir

In French the word souvenir is a verb meaning to recall or to remember. In English it is a noun for a token of remembrance, a memento. On one level Maylee Noah's photographs from around Paris are just that: objects to jog her memory of trips abroad. But they are also images of the embrace of memory; places and things preserved to recall times past.

Left: Maylee Noah, Hotel de Cluny Staircase, Selenium toned silver gelatin print, 6 x 9 inches

Photographs of the gallery in January

February 4—February 28 , 2009

Artists’ Preview Reception: Wednesday, February 4, 2009; 6-8pm
First Thursday Public Opening: February 5, 2009; 6-8pm
Gallery 110 Hours, Wednesday—Saturday, 12-5pm

Main Gallery:

Joan Kimura—Excerpts: Art from 1996-2009

Joan Kimura’s work is her journal. It reflects her experiences past and present. As life changes, so does her expression of it from day to day, and Kimura has been a working artist for 53 years. Kimura has gained national attention for her work exhibiting in New York, Connecticut, Washington and Alaska. She is represented in three major museums in Alaska: Alaska State Museum, Juneau, Alaska State Museum, Fairbanks and Anchorage Museum of History and Art and has been recognized in numerous publications nationwide throughout her career. Kimura was Professor of Art at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and retired in 1994 to concentrate on bringing new changes to her work. Gallery 110 is proud to include Joan Kimura among its member artists, and to present a rich and diverse retrospective exhibition of her work.

Image above: Joan Kimura, #18, Acrylic on canvas, 27 x 16 inches, 2008

Loft Gallery:

Couplings:

Art by Seattle artist Li Turner

With Valentine’s Day in February, Couplings is a show depicting a wide variety of couples: women & men, men & men, women & women, old & young, all in a dazzling array of environments. The contexts of the couples vary widely; as far-flung as our solar system, as immediate as an umbrella. The individual pieces depict a wide range of activities: an embrace, a mutual smile, a flirting glance in the other’s direction. Pieces include Turner’s hand painted etchings, watercolor and gouache paintings.

Image above: Li Turner, Her Eyes, watercolor & gouache, 9” X 12”

Photographs of the gallery in February

March 5-28, 2009

Preview Reception: Wednesday, March 4; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: March 5; 6-8pm

Main gallery:

Sarah Dillon and Jason Sobottka, URBAN MIGRATION:

Understanding of the natural world and how it collides with a man made environment is rooted in the opinions, politics, cultures and social experiences of human beings. Realizing our own imperfections allows us to de-centralize and see reflections of ourselves in life around us. We then find the wisdom to parallel natural order rather than contradict it, and discover truth through experience—humor, mystery, and stories waiting to be told.

Sarah Dillon embraces the notion of looking through a window, watching everyday events that tell stories about life around us, or perhaps more specifically tell stories about us.  Through her newest series of paintings, prints and mixed media assemblages of sewn collage and drawing, Dillon has developed an artistic language through seemingly ordinary narrative subject matter presenting her contemplation about social reinvention, social interaction, urban habitation, the political climate, migration, immigration and freedom of passage as well as the idea of encapsulation or immersion in an environment. As a final thought, contentment and/or confusion to be where we are. In this new series, Dillon projects these thoughts on the common, often overlooked and sometimes comical urban creatures of similar pattern, adaptation and survival—birds.

Jason Sobottka’s mixed media imagery centers on personally significant animals and landscape references. The initial inspiration for most images comes from the memory of a particular place or the animals associated with that location. As memory is deeply personal, so too is every person’s relationship with the natural environment and the animal kingdom; therefore, Sobottka’s animals cannot be "complete" or fully rendered. Instead, they are the memory of an animal, the skeleton of an animal that once lived or the silhouette/stencil of an animal that is now missing. Sobottka’s maps and landscape references are topographical representations of personally significant places: The Puget Sound, the Rattlesnake Wilderness in Montana and the suburban neighborhood landscape.  To a certain extent, Sobottka is exploring a correlation between the ambiguity of memory and the fluctuating nature of understanding.

Image top left: Sarah Dillon, Under the Viaduct, Graphite, ink, charcoal, and gesso on sewn maps and collage, 2009
Image bottom right: Jason Sobottka, Nisqually Wildlife Refuge: Stellar Sea Lion., Acrylic, housing materials, and real estate sign, 2009

Two original works on paper by each artist: Sarah Dillon and Jason Sobottka will be raffled off during the opening. Purchase your raffle ticket during the preview opening or on First Thursday to participate, or call the gallery: 206-624-9336 to purchase. Tickets are $5.00

Loft gallery:

Ann Maki, WATER: PAST AND PRESENT

Fiber artist Ann Maki has a long interest in the way that rocks are shaped by moving water over time. This environmental process inspired a series of fiber works which will be on exhibition in the Gallery 110 Loft. Capturing the lines and shapes found in the dry creek beds and sandstone walls of Zion National Park, these two-dimensional abstract assemblages of hand-dyed fabrics, fibers and machine stitch are explorations of the process and effects caused by the movement of water as it travels through a landscape.

Above: Ann Maki, Sandstone II, hand-dyed fabric and sewn fiber, 11 x 18 1/2 inches

Photographs of the gallery in March

April 2 - May 1, 2009

Preview Reception:  Wednesday, April 1; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: April 2; 6-8pm

Main Gallery:

UNDER THE SKIN: Jenny Kemp, Gordon Nealy, Rosemary Powelson

Like the earth’s landscape, human bodies have visible, outer contours and surfaces that surround a deeper, hidden core that we can only see with the help of scientific technology. By investigating the landscape under our skin, artists Jenny Kemp, Gordon Nealy and Rosemary Powelson examine our physiological and psychological inner-workings in order to find a poetic and ethereal topography that may be closer to the truth than science.

Rosemary Powelson: “Inspired” by her husband’s heart attack and the medical science that kept him alive, Powelson’s ongoing series probes the uneven terrain of the human heart. Between his broken heart and his healing heart, time and space were suspended. Powelson uses materials and techniques that allow the color to bleed, soak, run, pool, gather, and clot. Like cardiac bypass surgery, she cuts and borrows from one source and adds it into a new environment to create fresh, alternative meaning.

Jenny Kemp: Working within the theme "Under the Skin" has been an opportunity for Jenny Kemp to skim the surface/touch on ideas of human anatomy. More specifically, it has been a personal journey through examining the illness that has taken the past fifteen years of her father’s existence—Hairy Cell Leukemia. Hugely descriptive to the ear, the words "hairy cell" demands from the artist an immediate visual clarification. This body of work has been a visual study of these words. It is the artist's intention to create a perpetual visual that resonates with the viewer - similar to how the disease will never exit it’s victim.

Gordon Nealy: Nealy's intention is to provide palpable forms and topography (resulting from the bas relief) that suggest familiar structures. He once described this work as ethereal demonstrations of thought, but in this series, he has moved from mind to body and put focus on the anatomical. In the pursuit of understanding our composition in all aspects, Nealy integrated allusions to calibration and analysis. Overlaid with these markings, one is reminded of periodic assessment; the valuation of life.

In the Loft:

David A. Haughton: Kindertotentanz

Twenty-three years ago, David Haughton began work as a pediatric resident for a cancer ward. Doctors and parents pursued the faint hope of newer medicines, more aggressive modalities, and novel combinations of treatments. When the children bled, grew feverish, or gasped for breath with overwhelming disease, Haughton was there to witness. The senior doctors seemed unavailable, tied up in meetings or presenting research proposals. The mothers held their dying children, facing the reality of disease.

Anger and helplessness compelled the artist and pediatric doctor, David Haughton to begin Kindertotentanz (Children’s Death-dance), a series of over 100 works that explore the darkness of disease and dying in children. The series title melds the names of two great Germanic works: totentanz and the Kindertotenlieder. During the time of the great plagues in medieval Europe, the “dance of death” was a popular theme for many artists. Only death leveled the inequalities of medieval society. A totentanz was a series of paintings or engravings that portrayed Death as a skeleton embracing, in turn, peasant and Pope, cobbler and King. Also inspired by the pain of man's mortality, Gustav Mahler composed the song cycle Kindertotenlieder in memory of his dead younger sister.

From the Te Maori of the New Zealand, Haughton borrowed the two talismans: the frightening bird-like creatures that seem to embody the malevolence of disease, and the lizard - a symbol of death and life. The infant holds the struggling lizard near his open mouth; if he swallows it he will die.

Image above: David A. Haughton, Kindertotentanz: Title Plate, etching on Arches rag paper, limited first edition of 25 prints, $250

Photographs of the gallery in April

May 7 - 30, 2009

Preview Reception: Wednesday, May 6; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: May 7; 6-8pm

Main Gallery:

Gallery 110 Artists: Unbridled Narcissism?

Nearly every artist has attempted a self-portrait. Whether it is as simple as being the only available model or as complex as the need to explore our own psyche, what we see in the mirror (or want to see) ends up in our art.

For some the self-portrait is abstract: shapes, colors, and patterns represent emotion, revealing the inner self. For some it is literal: a perfect likeness with an intentional message in our expression or the setting. Often it is something in between.

The act of creating a self-portrait can be a cathartic release of emotions. It can be a revelation of insight about one's self. Or it could be just unbridled narcissism.

This exhibition features work by Gallery 110 artists: George Brandt, Julie Cattin, Monika Dalkin, Sarah Dillon, Mistie Erickson, Maria Frati, Robin Harlow, Tori Karpenko, Susanne Kelly, Jenny Kemp, Joan Kimura, Molly Magai, Ann Maki, Gordon Nealy, Maylee Noah, Amy Oates, Rosemary Powelson, Eddy Radar, Jason Sobottka, Natalie St. Martin, Li Turner and Stephanie Wilken

Image: Maylee Noah, Self Portrait #10, Inkjet Print, 9.5 x14.5 inches unframed

In the Loft:

Ellen Wixted: Etched

Because etching is deeply process oriented, Bainbridge Island artist Ellen Wixted finds herself turning to it when she needs a break from other projects. In all her work, she focus on looking hard at whatever is close at hand; Wixted has a stubborn conviction that if she "can’t find something there, she's not seeing clearly enough."

This Loft exhibition of etchings includes images of a superfund site on Eagle Harbor before they tore everything down. Others are views of Eagledale that you might catch out of a car window or suburban developments you’d rather not see built. The images catalogue places Ellen Wixted lived in, puzzled over, and struggled with.

Image: Ellen Wixted, Trees in Snowy Yard, etching

Photographs of the gallery in May

June 4-27, 2009

Preview reception: Wednesday, June 3; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: June 4; 6-8pm

Main Gallery: NEW MEMBERS: NEW WORK

New perspectives and ideas abound at gallery 110! George Brandt, Julie Cattin, Monika Dalkin, Maria Frati, David Haughton, John Horton, Tori Karpenko, Jim Matthew, Eddy Radar, Andrew Reed, Natalie St. Martin, and Stephanie Wilken join the gallery. We are pleased to introduce them with an exhibition of their work together.

Image: Tori Karpenko, In Search of the Sacred, acrylic on board, 48x48, 2009

Loft Gallery: Mistie Erickson

Visual Explorations–A Response to Landscape

Visual Explorations makes visible "felt experiences" of being in the natural world. Conscious and unconscious awareness of the natural environment stimulates Mistie Erickson's artistic efforts. With marks, lines, color, light/dark contrast, and image, the work transforms the literal into the symbolic. Wind blowing in trees, long afternoon shadows, rocks, bird flight, bare winter branches stimulate the creative process. Layers, adding/subtracting, opaque/transparent, response to emerging images, staying present, the moving hand, all allow her work to unfold.

Image: Mistie Erickson, Stream Flow, acrylic on canvas 15 x 30 inches, 2009

Photographs of the gallery in June

July 2- August 1, 2009

Reception: Wednesday, July 8; 6-8pm

Main Gallery: WORKS ON PAPER

Riding the coat tails of the First Thursday PULP Event theme, Gallery 110 will present a group exhibition of works on paper. At some point in their career or regular practice, every artist endeavors to speak their language on paper, whether it is a sketch on a restaurant napkin or extensive exploration of drawing, printmaking, painting or collage. Every artist has their own individual technique, process and approach to this ancient and also contemporary media. This exhibition represents a wide variety of possibility when it comes to work on paper, and will have you considering the role of paper in the art making process.

Loft Gallery: ANDREW REED

A class notebook doodler at heart, Andrew Reed's works in ballpoint pen on paper are broad and vary greatly from piece to piece. He sees the simplicity of the media as a personal challenge to make work that pushes its limits to an unbelievably intricate, complicated intensity of natural pattern and personally significant imagery.

Image: Andrew Reed, Chess, ballpoint ink on paper, 18 x 24 inches

Photographs of the gallery in July

AUGUST 6-30th, 2009

Preview Reception: Wednesday, August 5; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: August, 6; 6-8pm

Main Gallery: EDDY RADAR: MANMADE LANDSCAPES

Eddy Radar's stunning Manmade Landscapes series continues the theme of order vs. chaos in the modern world. The hidden beauty of urban constructions (tarmacs, sand traps, baseball fields and dams) is captured in these large, minimalist canvases.

In the last eighty years, advances in science and engineering have allowed us to create, improve, and reshape our surroundings. This has resulted in a radically different environment of urban life. These new landscapes represent a world that affords air transportation, leisure and entertainment, electric power and water.

Within these landscapes is the hidden beauty of industry and formatted space – the minimalist essence, the geometric order, and the quiet presence of huge structures. They reflect the same timeless grandeur, whether the expanse is of concrete or of grass. The colors of this modern world are the many grays of concrete, the light and dark greens of the grass, the carefully laid ribbons of black and yellow.

Image: Eddy Radar, Double V, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 60"

Loft Gallery: PRINTING THE NATURE OF PLACE: MARIA FRATI

Maria Frati uses linoleum relief and reduction prints to explore the nature of place by building prints with layers of color and repetition of simple lines and shapes. Through her imagery in Printing the Nature of Place, Frati wishes to convey the rich transience of her surroundings. As if through the distortion of a kaleidoscope; she captures fleeting animals, the flood and retreat of tides, shifting leaves and light on water.

Image: Maria Frati, Deer with Red Butterfly, relief print and watercolor, 14" x 17"

Photographs of the gallery in August

September 3 - 26, 2009

Preview Reception: Wednesday, September 2; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: September 3; 6-8pm

Main Gallery: Steel and Concrete: Molly Magai and Alec Huxley

Molly Magai and Alec Huxley share a fascination with the bones of the city–the unseen infrastructure that makes the rest of the city possible. Exploring Seattle's industrial neighborhoods, they seek out the fundamentals–light poles and overpasses, concrete, brick, and steel. They depict environments made not for humans but for machines–roads, airports, warehouses, factories. This can be a dark subject, with its implications of decay, ugliness, pollution, and noise, but both artists find beauty and drama in these landscapes, with their huge scale and strong lines, seen boldly against the sky.

Molly Magai paints scenes of urban highway infrastructure: roads, vehicles, overpasses, and bridges. Her work also involves photography, albeit in a more casual way: she takes photographs from her car and creates paintings based upon them. Painting intuitively, without preparatory drawings, she emphasizes the sensual side of travel–vision and motion. In the ultimately mundane scenario of the highway, she finds darkness and decay, as well as positive things–the beauty of light and skies, and a sense of speed, distance, and escape–the pleasures most of us take in being in a moving vehicle.

In his paintings, Alec Huxley offers a series of high contrast snapshots of the traditional structures of transportation and industry and their environments. They allude to scenes from science fiction in a stylized, slightly abstracted realism. These paintings are reinterpretations of photographic images digitally merged with watercolors. The process of transforming the original image–through camera lens, to computer, to paper, then by hand to canvas–reflects the weathering of these locations; the memory of all that have layered upon and re-molded the natural landscape. Still and moody, the brick, steel, and stone, both strong and brittle, stand before gasoline skies as they are worn back into the elements.

Both artists' work is a palpable reflection of Seattle's industrial landscape. It shows the city's present and allude to its ambitious "Jet City" past. The artists document the old infrastructure as it decays, and before it is replaced with something new. These works may be seen as an elegy for the present and the recent past.

Image, above right: Molly Magai, Viaduct Sunset, oil on linen, 20" x 22", 2008
Image, above left: Alec Huxley, Georgetown Landing, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 54”, 2008

Loft Gallery: Stephanie Wilken: Exile and the Kingdom

In this exhibition Stephanie Wilken presents a body of work titled after a collection of stories by Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, illustrating Camus’s ideas of existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd. According to Camus, despite the universal human need for meaning, purpose and refuge, the universe is in fact silent and unknowable. Concepts of teleology and eternal life are wishful thinking, constructions; there are no gods or god-given laws; we have only our finite lives. 
For Camus, the proper response to this state of exile is not succumbing to nihilism and despair but meeting this reality head-on, living with active consciousness of the absurd, reveling in the sun, the sea, the stars, and experiencing the dignity and creativity of human life without the crutches of illusion and false hopes. This is his Kingdom.

The etchings and monoprints in this series evoke the void and ache of the human condition but also offer reminders of those aspects of life that can help transcend that state–human connections, the natural world and the life of the mind.

Image: Stephanie Wilken, We are All and Nothing, Intaglio, 13” x 12”

Photographs of the gallery in September

October 1 – 24, 2009

Preview Reception: Wednesday, September 30; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: October 1; 6-8pm

Main Gallery:

Paintings of the Sea: Recent Works by David A. Haughton

Paintings of the Sea represents the best of David Haughton's recent work: samples from the series Nocturnes (Views of the Burrard Inlet), Paintings of the Wind (Kiteboarders at Nitinaht Lake), Paris in Winter (January landscapes), Island Paintings (Quadra and Tofino), Paintings of the Sun (landscapes of Greece, Provence and Spain) as well as new works in his ongoing series of the Burrard Inlet (Ships, Mountains & the Sea).

Image: David A. Haughton, Nocturne - Foggy Night/Spanish banks II, acrylic on hardboard, 24 x 12 inches, 2009

To see more of David Haugton's work, click here.

Loft Gallery: Landscape Claimed and Reclaimed

This October, Jason Sobottka will transform Gallery 110’s Loft into a makeshift shelter—one that might conjure homeless encampments, environmental refugee shacks or social/political shanties constructed outside the margins of society.

This exhibition, called Landscape Claimed/Reclaimed will focus on the concept of temporary or impermanent shelter, as our environment and landscape change and mankind finds itself physically and metaphorically displaced.

Photographs of the gallery in October

October 28 –November 21

Reception: Wednesday, November 4; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: November 5; 6-8pm

Main Gallery:
MAYLEE NOAH & SPIKE MAFFORD
VIDA MIRADA: Photographs of Oaxaca & Michoacan

Gallery 110 is pleased to present the photographs of Maylee Noah and Spike Mafford documenting the Day of the Dead celebration and everyday life in Oaxaca and Michoacan, Mexico.

As an observer, Noah is drawn in, engulfed in the action, unwittingly a player in the scene. A glance; she’s noticed. A smile, a greeting; she’s not invisible. It would be so much easier if she were. But then, she’d miss the warmth of the exchange, the reward of acceptance, and the opportunity to take the photograph as a gift.

Mafford is a traveler hunting the perfect moment, invariably a fleeting one, and relishing the sense of the elusive 'now' to be captured. It's a game of chance, of waiting for the moment, of chasing shadows in the hopes that they will speak of ephemeral, subtle things. He's inclined to chance upon a place, a frame that intrigues him, and to hang around, waiting to see what happens; waiting for an interesting action or odd juxtaposition; waiting to step back from the moment and catch the image.

Image above: Maylee Noah, Boy in Skeleton Costume, archival inkjet print, 9x13 inches

Loft Gallery: Monika Dalkin: Constructions

Monika Dalkin's work reflects a division of space as well as disparate elements which are connected to form a cohesive composition. This combination reflects the synthesis of different aspects of daily life. Dalkin uses a vocabulary of color, shape, repetition, references in nature and daily ritual to create a type of internal landscape.

Image: Monika Dalkin, Listen to the Quiet, mixed media on paper, 6" x 12"

Photographs of the gallery in November

November 25 –January 2

Preview Reception and Party: Wednesday, December 2; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: December 3; 6-8pm
(The gallery will be closed November 26-27, December 24-25 and December 31-January 1)

Main Gallery: WHITE

This season, we're dreaming of it! Bright white, winter white, invigorating white, spiritual white–it's the Gallery 110's Holiday Show theme.

White is deceptively simple, but highly complex. All colors make white light, but none make white paint. Cold white snow and white hot stars; the Western color of purity and the Eastern color of death. And it's the color of a fresh start for a New Year.

This December, give a gift that's the perfect color for everyone's life. We'll wrap it to go that same day!

Image: Eddy Radar, White Ties on the Horizon 72" x 50", acrylic and ties on canvas

Loft Gallery: Julie Cattin: Distractions

Julie Cattin expresses a manifestation of thoughts. The images paired with each thought form are simple line drawings allowing the colored thought forms to become the subject. The thoughts themselves for the most part remain unexplained, only guided by the text accompanying each piece. Bright, candy colored paintings and sculptures allow serious and personal thoughts to be approachable.

Whether hovering around a simple setting, a figure, or alone, the clusters are physical representations of thoughts set apart from the thinker. Deciphering what each thought formation means is not the goal; it is to simply recognize their presence.

Photographs of the gallery in December