Artist Residencies at Centrum

The Inspiration of the Natural World

Whenever they are away from their New York City studios, painter Rebecca Allan and her partner, composer Laura Kaminsky, spend as much time as they can hiking. They work together in the same place, but take different things from it. Allan might set up to paint on a rock overlooking river rapids, and Kaminsky might put on headphones and compose. They experience a specific landscape more richly through the other’s creative endeavor.

Growing up, Allan lived near the Great Lakes. The seasonal cycles of Lake Erie and the gradual erosion of a familiar shoreline along that lake became visual touchstones of her early experience of the world. A position at the Seattle Art Museum led her to the Pacific Northwest, where, as a painter, she initially found the size and scale of the Northwest mountains and forests intimidating. “I was overwhelmed by the scale,” Allan says, “especially compared to the Northeastern woodlands. But I became close to two painters, who helped me come to terms with the scale of this place.”

The Via Media...in Vegas, baby!

[Post by guest blogger Martha Carey]

This summer, the Episcopal/Anglican church is holding its every-10-years-lets-review-ourselves Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, while a separate conservative group of mostly African and South American Anglicans are meeting on their own in Jerusalem as a protest against the western church's acceptance of homosexual pastors. These separatists feel the need to fight against the serious problem (as they see it) of homosexuality before it takes their church over.

Because, really, what is faith without sex?

And what is Vegas without faith?

As I wander in boiling Sodom (a lovely 107 degrees outside, but who goes outside?) looking at the overweight casino men praying on a good hand, and at the sparkly hookers adorning those men, I find myself wondering yet again about why people need what they do, and about what awful things can spring from expressing those needs.

On a scale of visual awfulness, the local art in Vegas is fairly high up there. There are on display showgirl fantasies in soft oils, bright digitally enhanced blobs of color printed on canvas, over-bright photographs of Strip kitsch, and shiny copper paint on boards that express the artist's "abstract meanings". The hotel art is mostly color blobs or forms generated in what I imagine is the Vegas Discount Abstract Hotel Art Factory (Free Gold Leaf with Bulk Framing Orders!) The restaurant art can be sensuous (cleavage, ass, ripe red peppers that look like cleavage...or ass), making dinner a mental cacophony of Freudian half-theories. One attempt to enhance the accessibility of "real" art here, the Guggenheim extension at the Venetian, closed due to lack of interest more than a month ago.

So, one is left to people watch and to wonder about needs and what they get you into. The need to express oneself as an artist in such a completely imaginary place seems to result in rather cheesy, rather conservative artwork. The expression of other needs - - to gamble, smoke, screw, drink, what have you - - all take place in a city that is cleaned, pressed, repaired and repainted each day in readiness for the next night's happenings, so one can never actually see the results very clearly.

And that is the power of conserving the norm, of maintaining a public "middle way" in Vegas. Seeing it in action it is truly remarkable. It is Westworld, it is Victorian England, and there are no consequences. You just go on and do what you do, whatever that need may be, and we will work to maintain the slot-machined-filled communal order that allows each to his own. The placid subject matter of the art will not offend, either.

In Canterbury, they will be wringing through what they believe regarding homosexuality, and in Jerusalem the offended Anglican separatists will be shouting out against it - - but participating in both meetings will be gay pastors, and polygamous pastors, and adulterous pastors. Silent pastors.

It seems the separatists are forcing the church to act in alignment with specific thoughts about sexuality, and the sacred. Yet Anglicans have built the modern church on the idea of the via media, the idea that public lives and actions should conform to the church standards, but that conformity of thought is not required.

Over time, of course, one infects and informs the other...resulting now in a stated need that the church narrow itself to align with historically/socially accepted norms, that participants in the church all think the "right" way. And so it is in Vegas - - with all the shiny and color and hypnotic casino bells (and belles), everyone winds up thinking Vegas, and praying in the same way everyone else does, sooner or later.

Printmaker Elizabeth Dove at Fort Worden June 20-21

Printmaker Elizabeth Dove will speak June 20th at Building 204 at 7 pm as a guest of Corvidae Press, the Port Townsend printmaking guild. The talk is free and open to the public. The next day, June 21st, Dove will give an in-studio demo-workshop at the Press in Building 205, beginning at 8:30 am. The cost of the demo-workshop is $45 per person.

Ms. Dove is a printmaker and photographer currently residing in Missoula, Montana. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art, University of Montana. Professor Dove is responsible for undergraduate and graduate students, teaching all printmaking disciplines, photography, and special courses integrating printmaking, photography and digital media.

She has conducted extensive research into non–toxic printmaking processes, taught dozens of workshops at colleges and universities, received funding to study the integration of digital technology and traditional printmaking practices, and has published her research in the books The Contemporary Printmaker and Non–toxic Intaglio Printmaking, and the British journal “Printmaking Today". Elizabeth received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, and her MFA from Vermont College.

Ms. Dove’s own work is based on traditional printmaking practices (concerns with repetition, imprinting, and the matrix) but has expanded in media to include earthworks, site specific sculpture and installation. Her main interests are investigating the passage of time, subjective scientific methods, and how one's body can register and can communicate history and memories.

Corvidae Press, in residence with Centrum, is a guild of some 35 members working on various printmaking techniques in their newly renovated studio in Building 205, Fort Worden. Contact: Bill Curtsinger 360-774-0750

http://www.corvidaepress.com/CorvidaePressNews.html