The Evergreen State College
Dana Schutz, whose vibrant, large-scale paintings are collected by many major museums, gives a lecture at the CFA School of Visual Arts Contemporary Perspectives Lecture series, which brings professional artists, including painters, sculptors, printmakers, graphic designers, and art educators and critics, to campus to share their experiences.
Hosted by College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts on November 3, 2008.
Jennifer Combe is an Evergreen alum, artist and teacher. She graduated from Evergreen with both a Master in Teaching with a focus on art education in 1997, and in 1995, a Bachelor of Arts focused on anti-bias education, cultural studies, and art. In 2009 she earned a Master in Fine Art from The Vermont College of Fine Arts.
“Over the past fourteen years, I’ve engaged in an art practice investigating the cultural contexts of how meaning is derived from mark making both on the canvas and in the classroom. When I began with that first class of bright-eyed five and six year olds I compartmentalized these two acts. This was partially a knee-jerk defense to protect my studio practice from the monumental heap of work that teaching in a public school has become in this time and place. But now that the first decade of mark making and the teaching of mark making have passed, I take comfort, satisfaction, and find a deep joy in these inseparable acts.”
Her visual work has been exhibited in a range of venues, including galleries, homes, state buildings, restaurants, book stores, LGBTQ festivals, and colleges in Portland, Seattle, Olympia, Montpelier, VT, Salt Lake City, and Missoula, MT.
Female heroism is undersung, but Ellen Lesperance is determined to sing it—not only so it’s not forgotten, but with the hope that it might be catching. Go to her web site, and you immediately hear the chants of the Women’s Peace Camp at the nuclear testing site Greenham Common.
Look at her paintings, outside the elevators at Seattle Art Museum, and you see they’re dot patterns in a grid on brownish paper: patterns for sweaters that, when worn—and however soft—might transform the individual wearer. Lesperance, originally from a hippieish family in Seattle’s U District and now living in the latter-day utopic city of Portland, is both wedded to and critical of collective idealism. She knows how it can hollow out over time, and how dogma or compromise can take over. But she plainly still believes in the sheer power of individual action. How to make it happen? That’s the spur of her work.
The tone of inspiration has become pretty rare in art. It’s fairly rare in the culture at large. Radical acts may remain, but the rousing spirit of radicalism is hard to find. Lesperance’s art actually includes everything from the archival photos she starts with to the titles she writes to the pattern paintings that hang on the wall to thesweaters she wants to be worn. One of her own inspirations was visiting the Asylum for Radical Feminism in Santa Fe, which she found harrowing: The feminists were very few in number, and essentially impoverished. But they had stories to tell; that’s where she learned of Greenham Common.-Jen Graves, The Stranger
“I like the idea that, for example, through the recreation of a Greenham sweater, a new ‘wearer’ might be beckoned. I also have a particular interest in assigning valor to young women from the Pacific Northwest like Rachel Corrie and Beth Horehound O’Brien, women who have sacrificed their lives fighting the good fight.”
Victoria Haven lives and works in Seattle. She received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from Goldsmiths College/University of London. She was the 2004 recipient of ‘The Stranger’ Genius Award as well as the Betty Bowen Memorial Award from the Seattle Art Museum. She also received a Pollock-Krasner Award in 1996 and in 2000. Her work has been exhibited at the Frye Art Museum and Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle; PDX Contemporary Art, Portland; the Austen Museum of Art, Texas; the Drawing Center, New York; and RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, among many others.
“I always think that abstraction is slipping away, that people just aren’t looking…Abstraction, to me, is that fuzzy place, that place between things, where a lot of conflict happens, where a lot of connection happens. Just looking at that building over there and going, okay, this line is in front of that one, but what if it weren’t? Those are really basic observations, but I would like to believe that they could help you open yourself up to ways of thinking that are not so black and white.”-The Stranger
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).
http://www.platformgallery.com/artist_pages/Eley/Eley_main.html
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