Visual Art at Centrum

An Interview with Susie J. Lee

Susie J. Lee, named Best Emerging Artist of 2006 by the Seattle Weekly, is one of the Pacific Northwest’s rising visual artists. Lee, who creates both installation pieces and time-based video work, majored in molecular biochemistry at Yale before switching over to a career in art. Watch video of Lee’s time-based work here.

Centrum: Does your scientific training help your artwork?

Susie J. Lee: Within the process of developing work there is a constant flux of exploration and analysis. At first, it’s a little like wandering and getting lost, but then some kind of “experiment”  will stand out in its curiousness, and I’ll begin to hone in, quite methodically and rigorously, to create a cohesiveness and language to the work. So it is revealed in the practice; however, the central themes in the work, don't deal with scientific phenomena, and are much more about intimate and personal relationships. 

C: How does the process differ, if at all, from creating time-based works vs. creating installation pieces?

SJL: In many ways the processes are very similar. I think in a very materially-based and three-dimensional way, and concepts aren't driven by the technology. Video, light, and any technological components function in my practice in the same way as wood, paper, or clay to explore an idea. However, time-based work allows me to express the nature of transitions and passing in a much more immediate way.

C: What are your current projects?

SLJ: I have two projects in the works right now. The first one is for the new space of Wing Luke Asian Museum that opens in March 2008. It's a 40k commission to create an installation that incorporates the donors’ names within the entry staircase. It utilizes LED lights with a system of microcontrollers to create a pattern of “footsteps” that highlight names in a pattern that slowly walks up the stairs of the museum. The pattern of footsteps changes each time, so that at some point, each donor is individually recognized as a part of that path upwards. Visually, I was inspired by the imagery of support and guidance in the story “Footprints in the Sand.”

The other project is my first solo show at Lawrimore Project in the

fall of 2007. The work deals with the intrusion of those thoughts that come upon a person at night—regrets, illusions, sudden recollections, and what-if questions. There will be discreet pieces, installations, and possibly, a collaborative project that involves my projections with a movement artist.

C: What attracts you to basic, "earthy" elements in your work, like sand and fire?

SJL: When I switched from a career in science to art, I began in ceramics, which was quite fortuitous. The tactility and immediacy of clay, as well as its transformative properties, hone one’s material sensibilities. I think the warmth of materials is important for kinds of intimate interactions I want to express. I am most drawn to the kinds of sculptural explorations that draw out the inherent properties of materials, rather than ones which insist upon an imposition of one’s will on a material. I’d rather see what happens when a trickle of acid runs down a chunk of marble and use that reaction as a basis for a metaphorical language, than carve a likeness of something else out of it.

Elisabetta Bastai: Painting Nature

Nature served as a constant companion during artist Elisabetta Bastai’s childhood. She and her younger brother would often visit several horses that her parents’ friends kept in a mountain field in northern Italy. When her brother died of leukemia, at the age of seven, she went back to that field. There was only one horse left, a gray mare called Luna. In a subtle, unconscious way, she says, her connection to that horse became a connection to her brother. As Bastai began drawing, her first work was of horses.

After that, her bond with nature intensified. Every summer she explored and hiked in the mountains and snorkeled off the Tuscan coast. Bastai collected plants and seashells and began to take landscape photographs and experiment with oil paint. In her late twenties, she moved to Ireland and ended up working at a riding stable. She kept drawing in her spare time. A year later, she moved to Scotland and began to paint in acrylics.

Nature landscapes feature prominently in Bastai’s work. Experiences as a professional photographer in Bangalore, India, and work in Washington state at the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest led her to start asking questions about how people relate to the landscape. “I’m fascinated by the contrasting ways that people see nature,” she says. “For example, looking at the different relationship that the Native Americans and the pioneers had with the forests. How do people relate to landscape? Why do people interfere the way they do?”

One of Bastai’s art forms is a series of drawings that she called “maps,” a cross between a naturalist’s journal and a personal diary in which text and images intermingle. “When you experience a landscape, you experience it with more than your eyes,” she says. “You experience smells and sounds that trigger thoughts and memories. I found that by including text into my drawings I was able to add things I could not include by painting alone.” Bastai also continues to sketch and paint landscapes in a more traditional way. In 2004, her interest in horses re-emerged in a series of drawings entitled Poseidon’s Horses. In this body of work she explores relationships between landscape and myth, and combines her memories of the Mediterranean Sea with the colors and forms of the Pacific Northwest. 

Susan Silverman: Painting in the Pacific Northwest

When Susan Silverman talks about painting in the Pacific Northwest, she talks about the light. “It’s a filtered light,” she says. “There’s a softness to it, from the clouds. It can rain all day but at the end of the day the light is there, coming through, beneath the clouds, down low.” 

Silverman, a New Hampshire-based potter and painter who studied pottery in Japan, says that “Pottery is held in that culture as a high form of art, like sculpture or painting would be in this country. There’s a sense and sensibility about the functional daily rituals of life, closely related with the vessels that you use. There is a presentation, and textures and shapes, and a certain understated look to Japanese art that is unique. And those are the kinds of things I look for, in my own work. I am trying to say more with less.”

Silverman heard about the Centrum creative residency program from a friend, Mayumi Tsutakawa, whom she had met in Japan. They had both grown up in Seattle, but never met. (“I went to Garfield,” Silverman says. “She went to Franklin. A different world. I would never have gotten to know her if we hadn’t gone to the same study program in Kyoto.”)

Much of Silverman’s work concerns bringing out the feelings that objects and landscapes evoke. “For some reason, the whole time at Fort Worden I was using deep blue or this incredible reddish orange,” she says. “Real emotional colors that weren’t necessarily related to the subject matter of what I was printing.” Silverman adds that “the process of the work is important to me—the little anomalies that come up, the places where you can’t quite control everything. Those are the places that I look for expression.”

Corvidae Press

Centrum is pleased to announce the successful creation of a new printmaking guild at Fort Worden. Corvidae Press has taken responsibility for the print studio in Building 205. Members have worked diligently to rehab the studio, and have added another press to the studio space. We'll post news and information from Corvidae here, and we look forward to great art coming out of the Press.