August 3 – September 2, 2023

Gina Ariko and Marie Okuma Johnston‘s collaborative exhibition ダブル • Daburu features oil and acrylic paintings that explore their bicultural identities and experiences between the United States and Japan. Daburu is the Japanese hepburn spelling of double, a rising identity of mixed-race Japanese. Traditionally, mixed-race Japanese have been called “hafu” or half, which only places value on the Japanese side of identity rather than embracing the entirety of a person’s experience. The title of Daburu is also a play on the double feature of the artist’s stories, identities, parallels, and bicultural experiences.

During the reception of the Emerging Artist Program in 2022, both artists had discovered they had family, childhood memories, and close ties to the City of Kitakyushu, Japan. Upon further conversation and development of a friendship, Ariko and Johnston realized they had a unique opportunity to showcase their bicultural identities and experiences of being “too Japanese” or “too American” through this collaborative exhibition at Gallery 110.

Gina Ariko’s figurative work is inspired by old family photos, at once familiar and distant, and the way these shared memories can almost start to feel like dreams. Gina loves lingering in those hard-to-grasp moments, and creates work that stirs feelings of comfort and curiosity in others. Gina also features Japanese household objects and pattern work into her paintings to highlight and share her heritage. For this exhibit, Gina is intending to paint artwork based on her street and interior photography as an homage to her feelings of belonging and homesickness from Kitakyushu, Japan. Marie Okuma Johnston’s work explores their Buddhist and Shinto spirituality and the internal conflict between their bicultural identities. Their artwork features traditional Buddhist and Shinto figures, objects, and architecture within Westernized and Modernized settings. As a way to pay homage to her childhood alternating between the U.S. and Japan, Marie’s art takes inspiration from underground art and cartooning to create feelings of playfulness and whimsy. In ダブル • Daburu, Marie’s work depicts the legends, Shrines, and Temples of Kitakyushu and the energy of the Wards of Kokura and Moji. 

Gina Ariko and Marie Okuma Johnston’s exhibition ダブル • Daburu allows visitors to reflect on the ways in which we process memories and experience cultural identities. ダブル • Daburu will be on display at Gallery 110 from August 3 – September 2, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on August 3, 2023 from 4-8pm.

See the Preview highlight here.

July 27 – 30, 2023
Booth B18

Gallery 110 is proud to be a part of the Seattle Art Fair this year. Come visit us at booth B18 and see the work of ten member artists:

Michael Abraham
Kurt Erickson
JW Harrington
David Haughton
Bonnie Hopper*
Marie Okuma Johnston*
Julian Peña*
Kathy Roseth
Li Turner
Brian Vu*

*Winners of the 2022 Gallery 110 Emerging Artist Scholarship Competition

Additionally, Present Perfect, Finding Form in the Invisible and the New Members Show are on display at Gallery 110 from July 6 – 29, 2023. The gallery is open to the public from 12pm to 5pm on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays and by appointment.

July 6 – 29, 2023

Gallery 110 presents a New Members Show featuring Tabitha Abbott, Ruth Kapcia, Sanjida Mity and Ingrid Sojit. All four artists have joined Gallery 110 within the last five months and continue to explore their diverse subject matters, including nature, the afterlife, music and preservation. Each artist presents up to three pieces for the first time at Gallery 110 this July.

Tabitha Abbott is a contemporary mixed-media creator who lives and works in Seattle, WA. She paints vivid insects and integrates them with organic elements to create delicately positioned specimens for the viewer’s assessment and analysis. Abbott’s high-contrast compositions reflect the harmony she has found between her dichotomous worlds of art and regulatory corporate auditing.

Ruth Kapcia has always been creating from an early age and began her love of oil painting and oil pastels at the University of Texas Austin, College of Fine Arts, eventually moving from portraiture to abstract expressionism. Using her photographs from her travels around the US as a foundation, she interprets them into landscapes with bold strokes, texture, and color. Her paintings explore motion, space, and how elements work together (or against each other) to create energy, all resulting in distinctive imagery.

Sanjida Mity‘s passion for art has been a source of comfort and joy since her childhood days. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Mity draws inspiration from her multicultural upbringing. She employs glass and ceramic tiles as her canvas and uses various mediums such as alcohol ink, acrylic, oil pastels and more to create textures and experiment on different levels. She visualizes the colors flowing like ragas of classical music and considers her canvas to be not any less of a musical instrument. 

Ingrid Sojit was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and has worked mostly in paper collage. In 2020, Ingrid returned to painting, now choosing to work with oils on cradled wood boards. Recurring themes of transcendence, regeneration, decay and ultimate justice are present throughout her work as well as the occasional exploration of her life-long interest in nature and the landscape.

The New Members Show will be on display at Gallery 110 from July 6 – 29, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on July 6 from 4-8pm.

July 6 – 29, 2023

Artist Saundra Fleming‘s work echoes her profound orientation around a philosophy of Absurdism. Thinkers such as Kafka and Camus embraced Absurdism in their struggle to make sense of death and evil in the world. As convincing as these two thinkers are in affirming this philosophy, Fleming’s own work will always reflect a powerful instinct for transcendence.

Some of the pieces in Finding Form in the Invisible are visual descriptions, in paint, of her own personal epiphanies over the span of her life—uncanny experiences from age five to her current age of sixty three.

Expressing a kind of quintessential paradox, Finding Form in the Invisible will, for now, determine Fleming’s non-logical and rather mystical philosophy of life. Albert Camus’ belief that “human beings are caught in a constant attempt to derive meaning from a meaningless world” can be said, for her, to approximate only a part of humankind’s big picture. It is in the conception and painting of Fleming’s paradoxical philosophy that she attempts to reveal where her heart lives today.

Fleming finds this project to be the hardest concept she’s ever worked with as a painter. The form wants to show itself; it wants to exist in paradox. She finds herself working with the concept of ellipsis — implied movement and form, but unresolved imagery that is part way existing and part way not existing. And this is as it should be.

Each piece contains the metaphysical substrate of matter, and of energy—a relationship of the two in Fleming’s intuition. This is the first work in ages that is calling her to slow down, to paint night after night toward an approximation of what exists and does not exist at the same time. In her words, “this work is frankly absurd and 100% necessary to move on with my philosophy of living”.

Finding Form in the Invisible will be on display at Gallery 110 from July 6 – 29, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on July 6 from 4-8pm.

July 6 – 29, 2023

Artist Nathan Vass‘ chosen medium, analogue color photography, will be remembered as one of the shortest-lived art forms; it came of age in the ’70s, the populist sibling of B&W (itself the awkward stepchild of painting) and part of a medium invented too late to be taken seriously. It died out in large part on August 30th, 2018, when the last large professional-grade, public-access color darkroom in the US closed its doors. The timing is unfortunate: film, though no longer the norm for image-making, remains the premier avenue of approach for fine art photo work and is the fastest-growing trend in photography today. After two decades of experimentation with digital cameras, there can be no arguing that film yields a better image. In so doing, what else does it tell us?

Photography is a preservationist’s medium. We photographers seek to capture, freeze, save the past. We strive desperately to stop time, and we always fail. Or do we? Film photography is the physicality of a moment. You are looking at paper coated with silver halide crystals which have been burned by photons at a precise moment in time, causing them to change color. The light’s alteration of a print surface’s structural composition more closely resembles sculpture than digital photography, which interprets reality as colored squares instead of reshaping– quite literally– the material residue of a split second. It is the closest we can come to freezing the physicality of a moment, and somehow it feels appropriate that it’s achieved not with brushes or ink but something as ephemeral as light itself. Should we forever mourn life’s passing, or shall we instead rejoice in its qualities, and those of the things we have also lost?

The pieces in Present Perfect are handmade, analogue prints from a discipline Vass trained in which no longer exists, depicting spaces and people which will never quite be as you see them here.

Let us nurture the skill we will need ever more as life progresses. Let us celebrate what was. The past need not be looked at solely through the lens of sorrow. We own our memories, and are lucky to have them. “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad,” Hugo wrote. Let us therefore revel in what we can no longer touch, rejoice in what we once so easily knew.

Life is too glorious not to celebrate.

Present Perfect will be on display at Gallery 110 from July 6 – 29, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on July 6 from 4-8pm.

Dramaturgy by Quinn Hallenbeck.

 June 1 – July 1, 2023

Founded in 2018, Gallery 110’s Emerging Artist Program provides visual artists exhibition opportunities, subsidized gallery membership and other resources to help grow their art career. With this year’s launch of the Emerging Artist Program, titled EmergEAST, eligible applicants were those emerging visual artists who live in Eastern Washington without significant solo exhibitions and/or gallery representation. Gallery 110 sought to support artists from predominantly rural regions in WA who are not afforded similar access and opportunities to connect with larger audiences in metro areas. 

Fifteen artists from east of the Cascade Mountains were selected as semi-finalists by jurors Rosie Saldana, Artistic Director at Tieton Arts and Humanities, Tieton, WA, Christie Tirado, Artist/Educator, Yakima, WA, and Gregory Pierce, Professor of Art, Chair Fine Art Department, Heritage University, Toppenish, WA, for a group exhibition at Heritage University in Toppenish, WA in March 2023. Ten Finalists were then jury selected from the Heritage University exhibition to participate in this group exhibition at Gallery 110 in Pioneer Square, Seattle from June 1 – July 1, 2023. Up to three finalists will be selected from the exhibition at Gallery 110 to be offered an Emerging Artist Membership Award (which includes a two year fully paid Gallery 110 membership, gallery representation, a solo exhibition, mentorship, and more).

Congratulations to the ten EmergEAST finalists:

Becky Anderson
Sarah Barnett
Manuel Cruz Jimenez
Ana Li Gresham
Nena Howell
Kayleigh Lang
Jiemei Lin
Dan McConnell
Peter Nawrot
H.R. Emi

Artists selected to receive the Emerging Artist Membership Award:

During an inspiring reception celebrating these ten finalists, jurors selected 3 membership awardees (1 core, 2 affiliate):

Sarah Barnett, Core membership
H.R. Emi, Affiliate membership
Nena Howell, Affiliate membership

Congratulations to Sarah, H.R., and Nena as we welcome them into the gallery community!

Each of the 15 artists that originally exhibited at the Heritage University exhibition in Toppenish, and the 10 finalists chosen to exhibit in Seattle, were all very deserving artists and are to be commended for their efforts in creating and exhibiting their artwork in each venue – congratulations to all!

This exhibition is a collaboration with the Heritage University Art Department and Gallery 110 in Seattle and generously supported in part by the Robert McMillen Foundation, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and generous donations from the community.

The EmergEAST Finalist Exhibition will be on display at Gallery 110 from  June 1 – July 1, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment.

May 4 – 27, 2023

The 15 oil paintings in artist Kathy Roseth‘s exhibition celebrate the beauty of domestic crafts – rugs, weavings, ceramic tiles and embroideries from many cultures.

Roseth first became interested in domestic crafts in the early 1980s, when she saw a show of Amish quilts at the Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington campus. She was stunned by the austere power of the geometric shapes, their pulsing colors, and the exquisite craftsmanship “that made every square inch worth looking at”. She spent the next twenty years making traditional American quilts, exploring how a simple geometric pattern establishes a framework through which fantastic color progressions and light effects are possible. Two of the paintings in the show feature her own quilts.

Roseth’s interest in artisan works intensified in the 2010s when she traveled through Mexico. The first painting she completed for this exhibition was “Talavera Onions” (2021), featuring a blue bowl full of vegetables against a background of hand painted yellow and blue Talavera tiles. The tiles were made in Puebla, Mexico, in a Mexican craft tradition that dates to medieval Spain and its Islamic-influenced culture of the 10th-15th centuries. The painting is mostly about the vegetables, as is its companion piece, “Talavera Turnips.” Both are traditional still-life paintings featuring objects on a tabletop, with the intent to represent an actual space, or something close to it. The artisan tiles contribute as decorations.

In her subsequent paintings, the compositions moved away from the tabletop and toward the creation of imaginary spaces that concentrate attention on the artisan objects themselves. “Mayan Shawl” (2023) features a densely embroidered shoulder wrap made in the Mayan town of Zinacatan in Chiapas, Mexico. In the painting the shawl hangs in an entirely imaginary space, with images of flowers and corn brocaded into the black background. The painting “Norwegian Hardanger Embroidery and Eggshells” also represents an imaginary space, with the delicate cotton embroidery implausibly bearing down on hapless eggshells.

Many of the items represented in these paintings are connected to Roseth’s past and her family’s history. She was born in Iran and grew up surrounded by Middle Eastern rugs. The painting “My Mother’s Sari” features the sari Roseth’s mother wore as a child in Nipani, India, the daughter of missionaries. The African textiles were acquired by her sister and a friend in their respective sojourns as Peace Corps volunteers in West Africa. The Norwegian Hardanger embroidery has hung on her bedroom wall for decades. She bought it in the 1990s at a fundraiser for the Lutheran-based housing nonprofit where she used to work.

Roseth seeks to capture the presence and mystery of her subjects in a spirit of deep respect for their makers and the cultures that nurtured them. She knows from experience that the impulse to make a painting is the same as the impulse to make a quilt. Artists and artisans alike want to make something beautiful, to make a home for themselves in a cold world.

Artist and Artisan: Still Life Paintings will be on display at Gallery 110 from May 4 – 27, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on May 4 from 4-8pm.

May 4 – 27, 2023

When looking at the beginning of our universe from the time of the big bang, theoretical physicists allow themselves to ponder the unanswerable question of why life exists in the first place. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Artist Dorothy Anderson Wasserman‘s photo collages are informed by ideas like this, concerning the nature of existence from a non-scientific, philosophical point of view. Questions about time, dimensions, gravity, and entanglement have helped fabricate the imagined spaces where these narratives take place. The thin veil between her inner experience and outer life is explored by having seemingly unrelated images commingle to create new connections and relationships. Photo collage is an agile vehicle for this kind of inner storytelling.

For six years Wasserman worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC in their membership department. With her staff card, she had access to the galleries in the building outside of public hours. Wasserman would visit her favorite works as often as possible, spending intimate alone-time in quiet reverence. The photographs she took of these artworks and others from the museum’s permanent collection are integrated into her collages, as well as the sculptures she has made in the past.

Wasserman’s long career in dance contributes to the movement, rhythm, and physical gestures in the work. She bought her first camera in 1968 and has maintained a practice of documenting her life by photographing the people, places, and activities around her ever since. It has long been her desire to create photo books using her extensive archive. On display are the efforts made in this direction.

The collages are exclusively made from Wasserman’s own photographs, which are assembled by hand using scissors and glue. In this exhibition she presents only original work, with archival pigment prints on rag paper available as open editions.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? will be on display at Gallery 110 from May 4 – 27, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on May 4 from 4-8pm.

April 6 – 29, 2023

When artist Bonnie Hopper was a little girl one Christmas, she received a box of 100 Crayola color crayons to share among the five youngest children. Bonnie was eight at the time and the oldest of the bunch and therefore the undisputed leader. A born artist, she was incensed as she looked on and watched her two sisters and two brothers wear the tips of the crayons down to nubs or simply break them in half. This careless abuse of what Bonnie considered a precious gift had her running to Mama in tears as she complained that some of the best colors were ruined. To her surprise, Mama just laughed- which made her cry even harder.

After wiping her tears, she bent down and held Bonnie’s face between her palms and said simply: “Don’t you know broken crayons still color?”

At the time she had no answer to the question that did little to ease her frustration. However, much later it occurred to her how significant that question was and how it applies to so many things in life. Broken crayons -like people- are no less useful or colorful than whole crayons. We come in all races, sexes, shapes, and sizes. We continue to enrich each other’s lives by providing glimpses of our culture and lifestyles through art that delight, encourage, and educate.

Broken crayons still color is a series of paintings based on that memory. They remind us that our imagination has no limits and can take us anywhere we choose to go, which lead to other questions such as, what if popular fairytales depicted people of ethnic backgrounds, and what that would look like. Then there is the reality of Black culture, which consists of a large part of the day spent prepping in anticipation of sharing a great time with family and friends or a long Sunday morning worship service with little or no time constraints. These are all part of the Black experience Bonnie seeks to share through artistic expression. In Broken crayons still color, Bonnie Hopper reimagines Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and other fairytales – then threw in some reality for good measure.

Broken crayons still color will be on display at Gallery 110 from April 6 – 29, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on April 6 from 4-8pm.

April 6 – 29, 2023

Matthew Behrend invites us to a space beyond time in Timeless Light. His work connects to the divinity of nature and the dimensions of existence where universal consciousness is found.

Matthew’s patinas are meditative works of otherworldly forms and landscapes created with electric fields under water. His work is about the joy of creating with nature, experiencing dimensions beyond the five senses. The Electric Patina is a unique medium he created with influence from darkroom photography, semiconductor lithography, and the electrochemistry of neural prosthetics. Electric fields are invisible to the eye, but predictable, fluid, and responsive to the 3D world. A 3D sculpture of electric fields is composed in front of copper or brass to form the patina. The patinas are imprints of an ephemeral conversation of the artist with natural forces.

Matthew’s work is questioning perception. It deals with turning around beliefs of our existence in time and space and offers an experience of curiosity through forms defying concepts of separateness. Gradients replace object edges and where edges are placed in the work they reference a lack of edges. Contours of form are signed in the mathematics of electrophysics. His process of developing images includes the physics that life unfolds and creates with.

Timeless Light will be on display at Gallery 110 from April 6 – 29, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday – Saturday from 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please join us for the First Thursday Art Walk on April 6 from 4-8pm.