Gretchen Frances Bennett’s (American, b. 1960, Portland, Oregon) recent projects include a solo exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2019); the exhibitions Becoming American, San Juan Island, WA (2018); Fire in the Mountains, Jackson, WY (2018); and The Rough Draft of Everything, Bridge Productions, Seattle, WA (2017). She has read her writing at the Holiday Forever Gallery, Jackson, WY (2017) and as part of the series This Might Not Work at INCA, Seattle, WA (2016). In 2014, Bennett received the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award and completed postgraduate work at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is presently at work on her first collection of essays.
Identifying himself as a “gay folk artist,” Jeffry Mitchell creates work that deals largely with dualities. Using a variety of materials and methods, including ceramics, printmaking, and drawing, Mitchell manages to juxtapose seemingly disparate ideas into beautiful, fragile, and startling works. Using sweet, furry animals and soft, pastel colors, Mitchell transforms kitsch subject matter into a study of complex human experiences, including death, sex, religion, and loss. His work, at times appearing clumsy and hand-wrought, remains approachable and innocent, engaging viewers with his child-like curiosity and ungainly re-creations of recognized subjects. While highly sophisticated in his technique, Mitchell chooses to display vulnerability in his work, allowing both himself and his viewers to negotiate frightening realities by couching them in the comfort of the familiar and a faith in innocence. His work is suffused with a desire to welcome, accept, and even love the disconcerting and flawed aspects of ourselves and others.
Jeffry Mitchell was born in 1958, the fourth of nine children of working-class parents. After experiencing a largely itinerant childhood owing to his father’s career, Mitchell continued this nomadic lifestyle in his young adulthood. Although his family eventually established a somewhat permanent residency in Seattle, he decided to attend the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas, and spent a semester in Rome, an experience that had a profound effect on his work. After graduating with a BA in painting, Mitchell moved to Japan to teach English and landed an apprenticeship with a production potter in Seto (known as one of the “Six Old Kilns” in traditional Japanese pottery). Impressed and changed by his experiences abroad, Mitchell returned to Seattle in 1984 and enrolled in a printmaking class at the Cornish College of the Arts. This spurred his decision to pursue an MFA in printmaking at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. During his studies he returned to Rome, setting up a studio in the basement classrooms at Villa Caproni. Notable solo exhibitions of Mitchell’s work include: Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell, 2012-2013, Henry Art Gallery; Some Things and Their Shadows, 2009, Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA; Shiny Happy Pretty (with Tina Hoggatt), 2008, Missoula Art Museum; Hanabuki, 2001, Henry Art Gallery; My Spirit, 1992, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; and Documents Northwest: The Poncho Series, 1990, Seattle Art Museum. (from the Henry Art Gallery website)
Emily L. R. Adams is an installation artist living in Olympia, WA. Her work often combines arrangements of altered found objects, with large-scale photo based screen prints. Her work examines issues of femininity, counter-culture, and war in a syntax that brings a quieting awareness through the power of the multiple.
Adams earned her BFA from the Columbus College of Art & Design (2005), and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin (2015). She is a recipient of the David and Edith Sinaiko Woman in the Arts Award, and her work has been featured in New American Painting Magazine. Adams has a breadth of printmaking experience; having worked with artists and master printers at the highly respected Pace Editions and Tandem Press.
Adams currently works at The Evergreen State College as the printmaking technician, and adjunct faculty, teaching evening classes in printmaking and drawing.
Amanda Davidson writes, draws, and makes performances in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Her prose chapbooks include Arcanagrams: A Reckoning (Little Red Leaves 2014), The Space (Belladonna 2014), and Apprenticeship (New Herring Press 2013), and she is the founding editor of Occasional Remarks: Prose Chaps and Audio Tracks. Davidson’s fiction, reviews, and comics appear in the Brooklyn Rail, the Believer, and Weird Sister, where she’s serializing a graphic novel called The Conditions of Our Togetherness. She’s been a writer-in-residence at MacDowell, Art Farm Nebraska, Millay, and I-Park, and received a 2014-2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, and a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in poetry.
Wendy Red Star is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Red Star received her B.F.A. from Montana State University-Bozeman and her M.F.A from UCLA in 2006. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her exhibitions include shows at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Hallie Ford Museum, The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2009, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Missoula Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, National Museum of the American Indian-New York, Portland Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bockley Gallery, and Haw Contemporary gallery. She has been a visiting lecturer at a range of respected institutions, including The Banff Centre, CalArts, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Portland State University, Dartmouth Hood Museum, Figge Art Museum, Fairhaven College, Fine Artworks Center-Provincetown, and I.D.E.A. Space-Colorado College.
JOHN FEODOROV
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Navajo (Diné) and Euro-American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land near Whitehorse, NM. The time he spent with his mother and grandparents on their homestead near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon continues to inform and impact his work.
John has been called a conceptual artist, a political artist, as well as a Native American artist, but he is still not sure how to define what he does. His work includes painting, drawing, assemblage, installation, video, music and songwriting. He also has engaged in experimental performance in the past, but not lately. Currently, he writes and performs with his art/pop band, The Almost Faithful.
John’s work as been widely exhibited and has been featured in several publications; most recently in Time and Time Again, by Lucy R. Lippard, and Manifestations, edited by Dr. Nancy Marie Mithlo. He was also featured in the first season of the PBS series, “Art 21: Art for the 21st Century”.
John has also worked with the Seattle-based afterschool arts program, Artscorps, and served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College.
SARA SIESTREEM
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos and American, 1976-) is from the Umpqua River Valley in South Western Oregon. She grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a Master Artist and Educator. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators and her training in both fields began in the home. Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. Siestreem is the weaving student of Greg Archuleta, Greg Robinson, and Nan MacDonald. She is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland and her work has been shown in museums and figures in prestigious private and public collections nationally.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and traditional weaving.
She teaches Foundations in Studio Arts and Indigenous Studies at PSU and Traditional Weaving Practices for The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. She works as a consultant and free lance educator for museums and cultural groups regionally. Siestreem also serves various youth organizations and individuals in the role of mentor, workshop leader, promoter, public speaker and volunteer.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon.
CORWIN CLAIRMONT
Corwin (Corky) Clairmont is a contemporary artist and enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Living in Los Angeles, Corky pursued a contemporary exhibiting artist career as well as teaching and becoming department head of printmaking at the Otis/Parsons Art Institute located in Los Angeles, Ca. Upon his return to Montana in 1984, Corky began administrative work at the newly credited Salish Kootenai College located in Pablo, Montana on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation. This included the creation of the SKC Fine Arts Department and art degree program. Through work as a printmaker, conceptual and installation artist, Corky’s images discuss and explore situations or issues that effect tribal people such as sovereignty, colonization, giving a cultural and historical perspective. Corky’s artwork has been exhibited through out the United States and in several Countries including Germany Norway, New Zealand, France, and most recently at the US Embassy located in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa. Awards have included Ford and National Endowment of the Arts, the Eiteljorg Fellowship Award, and the 2008 Montana Governors Award for Visual Arts. He currently serves on the State Board of the Montana Arts Council.
Born in Peekskill, NY, Dannielle Tegeder currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. She received a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase (1994), and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (1997). For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has recently begun to include large-scale installation, sculptural objects, video, sound, and animation.
Since receiving her MFA in 1997 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dannielle’s work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. She has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her drawings have recently been purchased as part of the Contemporary Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC.
Stephen Hayes was born and raised in Washington D.C. where his earliest memory of an interest in art is of a drawing he made with silver crayons of John Glenn and his “Rocket Ship” in 1960 something. He was about six.
The mature artist, Stephen Hayes, received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1980, having focused on drawing and specifically on drawing the human form. His studies took him as far as a full dissection of the cadaver via the University Medical School, culminating in a thesis on portraiture.
Immediately following graduate school, Hayes moved to the Middle East for nearly four years where he was overwhelmed by the awesome beauty of the Cypriot landscape. It was there that his interest in the land as a vehicle for expression of human condition began. His travels and work in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain and Cyprus planted a seed that is still bearing fruit in his work today. While his landscape paintings are rarely populated, there is always the sense that we have knowledge of the place, or the mood, or the potency of place. This quality is a result of years spent walking alone through natural and often rugged beauty, and drinking that quality in to the core.
In 1984 Hayes moved first back to Washington for a brief stint at the Phillips Collection as one of their Museum Assistants, and then within six months decided to go somewhere unknown. He headed west and settled in Portland, Oregon where he currently lives. He continues through his painting and print work, to translate, viscerally, the physical and emotional experience of places of nature.
In the roughly 25 years that Hayes has spent working and teaching in Portland he has participated in scores of exhibitions and produced dozens of one-man shows of his paintings, prints and drawings. Hayes has received awards that include a WESTAF Individual Artist Fellowship, an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and is a 2011 recipient of the Hallie Ford Fellowship for Individual Artists.
He is represented in Portland by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery and his work can be found in numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Japan and South America.
Storm Tharp builds his strange and beautiful characters by first drawing contours on the page with water. Before the water has a chance to dry, he applies drops of mineral ink, resulting in unruly and expansive bleeds on the paper. Tharp takes his inspiration from a wide-ranging set of influences including 1970s American cinema and Japanese portrait prints. His characters have names, histories, and narratives, but they suggest multiple interpretations. Is the woman clutching a knife in Pigeon (After Sunshen) defending herself or is she a vengeful murderess? In these enigmatic portraits Tharp investigates the performance of identity and the point where the myth of a person supersedes reality and becomes truth. -Whitney Museum. “My work can be distilled in two distinctive points of interest. One would be the tradition of the hand made object and its inherent ability to reflect nature. ” His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Reed College, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.
Carolina Silva (b. 1975, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Seattle. She uses installation, drawing, animation and film to contemplate the body and the passage of time through both figurative and abstract work. Her last show at Lawrimore Project entitled, Against Gravity, was part of a series of shows called Has Art? where each month, artists are paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés.
Carolina has had one-person shows in 2010: Galeria Travesia Cuatro, Madrid; La Conservera Center for Contemporary Art, Murcia, Spain (with Lili Duourie, Elena del Rivero, and Lily van der Stokker), (catalog); 2007: La Casa Encendida, Madrid. 2006: Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; Art Space Tetra, Fukoa, Japan. 2004: Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco. 2003: Fish Tank Gallery, New York. 2002: Next Gallery, New York. Her work has also been seen in 2009: Explum, Puerto Lumbrera; Becas Generación 2008, Madrid; Doméstico09, Madrid, 2009. 2008: IVAM, Valencia; Museo de Pollença; Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca. 2007: Planes Futuros. Baluarte, Pamplona; Aquí y Ahora, Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid; Destino Futuro, Jardín Botánico, Madrid. 2004: The Line Up. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco.
Eric Eley’s resin drawings, works on paper, and sculptures are informed by his fascination with the rational language used in physics and higher mathematics. His analytical use of lines and points allows him to arrange elements in space in order to provide a unique way of seeing. His materials are deceptively simple—string, wire, wood, dry pigment, graphite, resin. With these materials, the artist confronts the limitations of time, space, and physical effort while incorporating or discarding the benefits and drawbacks of those limitations. In his practice, Eley balances physical labor and intellectual work. He is truly an “analog” artist, one who physically moves in space, up and down a ladder, back and forth from wall to wall, rather than plotting elements on a computer screen. He is a thinker, delighting in the usually unseen connections that exist in any given atmosphere. His work is both landscape and architecture. Not a natural landscape but a landscape of articulated space. Not static architecture, but an exploded view of perspective and scale.
Eric’s work has been included in group shows in the Kunsthaus Hamburg and the Outdoor Sculpture Projects at Volta03 in Basel, Switzerland. He has also had solo shows at Gallery4Culture, the Hedreen Gallery at the Lee Center for the Arts, both in Seattle, and the Kolva/Sullivan Gallery in Spokane. He mounted a solo show at Art Agents Gallery in Hamburg, Germany in 2008 and his work was included in the group show “Unnatural Presence” at Platform in 2006. His solo exhibition, Prospect Fields, was shown at Platform Gallery in 2008 and his solo exhibition, Look Out, in 2010. During January 2011, Eric will be creating an installation in Suyama Space (Seattle, WA).
