PAST EXHIBITS | TERRAIN GALLERY
EVERYWHERE THE SUN TOUCHES
ARTIST: DUSTIN BRINKMAN
DATES: APRIL 2024
‘Everywhere the Sun Touches’ is a solo show by Columbus, OH artist, Dustin Brinkman, exploring the liminal spaces between departure and arrival. Using Midwestern iconography, Brinkman's work speaks of the connection between personal identity and collective spaces, evoking a sense of nostalgia and introspection. In this body of work, boundaries are blurred between home and house – offering a unique perspective on the journey of coming, going, and belonging.
“I am interested in how we create and blur these boundaries of the interior and exterior, the home and house, the body and space.”
– Dustin Brinkman
STATE OF AWE
ARTIST: VANESSA SWENSON
MARCH 2024
“From my walks in this world, I’ve found there are no boundaries to awe. It is a state of our own creation that we define with our expanse to see and feel. Awe can be felt on grand scales such as setting up camp beside soaring peaks deep in the forest. And oftentimes, awe can be felt in the surprising and seemingly small, everyday occurrences such as a flower petal, a patch of moss, a bird song, a reflection on water.”
– Vanessa Swenson
Vanessa Swenson invites us to marvel at the majestic landscapes and wonders of everyday life in her solo show, "State of Awe." Through her heartfelt exploration of Northwest scenery, from soaring mountains to tranquil lakes, Swenson captures the essence of awe-inspiring moments. Using recycled materials, her vibrant brushstrokes convey the depth of her experiences, encouraging us to pause, observe, and reconnect with the beauty of nature. This exhibition reminds us that awe is not just a feeling but a shared experience that beckons us to explore and cherish the world around us.
The Way in Which We Live
ARTIST: Spencer johnson
February 2024
“When something is created out of stone, it takes on qualities of both divine and mortal. Divine because of the pure nature that is the stone itself - seemingly as old as time. Mortal because even the smallest mistake or slip of a chisel can bring the entire sculpture to ruin.”
Step into Spencer Johnson's transformative world of stone sculptures, where the divine and mortal converge in a delicate dance of creation and vulnerability. In an era where stone is often overlooked, Johnson's art stands as a modern tribute to historical traditions. The juxtaposition of rigid chaos transforming into soft elegance is a source of amusement and inspiration for the artist, which can be seen in his work. Each sculpture incorporates the stone's raw crust, revealing a captivating interplay between the natural and sculpted. Johnson's deliberate inclusion of raw stone highlights the impossibility of replicating its innate qualities, creating a striking contrast with the meticulous carving, and inviting viewers to appreciate this harmonious discord.
LISTENING FOR AN ECHO: SOMETHING ABOUT FARMING
ARTISTS: PAM DEUTSCHMAN, ABIGAIL EVANS, KAREN MOBLEY AND MEGAN PERKINS
JANUARY 2024
This show explores the profound intricacies of farming – encapsulating its struggles, beauty, mortality, and ambiguity within a nuanced artistic narrative. Blending documentary realism with aesthetic contemplation, four regional artists create a visual dialogue that is both aspirational and memorial, personal and universal.
Pam Deutschman: Combining photography, sewing, and quilting, Deutschman weaves a visual narrative that captures the magic, loss, solitude, and toil on a small family farm, expressing awe at the simple beauty and tragedy of life cycles.
Abbie Evans: Through digital photography, Evans documents farmland in the Palouse, WA, and southern ID, delving into the tension between idealism and realism, nature and human, growth and decay, capturing the grittier reality and cycles of the American farm.
Megan Perkins: Perkins captures the Spokane landscape through exuberant mark making and vigorous use of color. Inspired by the mythical and legendary elements of Spokane – ghosts, old West tales, ancient floods, altered landscapes, and the area's mining and industrial history, the artist uses a mix of watercolor, gouache, pastel, ink, pencil and charcoal to capture the poetics of the Inland Northwest.
Karen Mobley: Inspired by her travels around Lincoln and Whitman Counties, Mobley works with oil paint to depict her favorite regional landscapes. Her work, though representational, maintains an essence of abstraction, evoking nostalgia for the wild spaces and agricultural landscapes frequented in her younger years.
BETWEEN KNOWING AND BEING
ARTIST: ALEXANDRA IOSUB
DECEMBER 2023
Alexandra Iosub's solo show, 'Between Knowing and Being,' encapsulates the culmination of her 8-year project, 'Making Room,' which explores creating personal space in the world. Beginning with the construction of a tiny house, the project investigated the interplay of body and space through relationships, rituals, and restrictions, ultimately leading to the house's destruction. This gallery show highlights all stages of 'Making Room,' with a focus on the rituals stage, examining how daily habits evolve into a spiritual practice, posing the question of a sweet spot 'between knowing and being.' More than just art, this show is a reflective journey through navigating our unique realities.
FLOWERS
ARTIST: TOBY KEOUGH
NOVEMBER 2023
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Art in this climate of the world is essential. There is so much to be overwhelmed and detached about. Through my paintings I want to bring a smile on people's faces with beautiful flowers.
I am a local artist who specializes in large-scale muraling, featuring floral and botanical pieces.
I find that in life I must always be content with what I have while working for what I want. My journey has been one of striking a balance between artist and mother. I have learned that there are times for contemplation and times to create. One constant pulse has pulled me toward my true passion, painting. Creating large-scale impact and transforming small spaces with just a simple paintbrush and vision have kept me centered. If the trials of 2020 have taught me anything, it is that creating in the calm, and quiet brings us all a bit of joy. Something as simple as a flower mural can bring one the most pleasure and remind us of the beauty that surrounds us. Painting these images is a form of pure love for me. My constant need to express has driven me to one truth; I was created to create.
Helen Keller stated, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” I believe that art continues to adapt and change through life and the need to express and bring visions to life in a tangible way will always be what makes humanity come to life. Art speaks where the words cannot. Visit Toby’s Instagram.
WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM? SPARK + PROVISION = ART
ARTIST: DEB SHELDON
OCTOBER 2023
ABOUT THE SHOW:
This collection of artworks represents an exploration of the origins of ideas and their manifestation in Deb's art. Within this collection, Deb has pursued these concepts using various mediums like paint, paper, coffee, stencils, and sculptural materials. The range is as diverse as the spectrum of ideas themselves.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Deb has painted throughout her life, primarily self-taught. Her artistic evolution mirrors the stages of her life, from launching a business in her early twenties to marriage, motherhood, and the recent loss of her friend and husband, a sculptor. Art was the core of their collective existence and Deb believes this shared artistic focus has heightened her sensitivity to ideas and "sparks" that eventually become art. She's known to collect discarded scraps for her creative process, even dreaming about her current projects upon waking. What continually astonishes her is how the necessary elements for a work always seem to appear - a specific paint, an unfamiliar paper, or even a reclaimed piece of text. The art in this show embodies the entire journey from spark to provision, ultimately becoming art.
LAYERS AND TEXTURES
ARTISTS: RENÉE OBERDORF & JUN SOO OH
SEPTEMBER 2023
Artist Statements:
Jun Soo Oh demonstrates his own language exploring texture and color aiming to expand boundaries between two dimensional surface and three dimensional space. He crosses lines of Color Field and Abstract Expressionism by using recognized color, gesture, form and mark in the work. His work includes manipulations of canvas using thermal paper used by credit card terminals which reveals philosophical functions of imagery, political, religious, and self-reflection.
Visit Jun Soo Oh’s website.
Renée Oberdorf: Each painting represents an expedition into uncharted territory. Renée has no idea where she is going when she starts out. She trusts her instincts and allows her hands to lead, adding and deleting. Renée thinks of her creative process as improvisational music or dance. Striving to free her mind of thoughts and proceed intuitively. Slowly something emerges from the layers. Many risks are taken along the way. Many doubts and frustrations are overcome. Each painting may shroud dozens of paintings underneath. She keeps working until the composition resonates.
While Renée draws inspiration from various sources, the seasons, and places lived, visited, and imagined, hold special significance. Currently, her focus lies in exploring the interplay between defined shapes and their deconstructed counterparts.
Visit Renée’s website.
CONSUMER CULTURE
ARTIST: CHANCE LUCY
AUGUST 2023
Show Description:
Consumer Culture is a solo show of painting, sculptures and woodcuts by Chance Lucy. Lucy depicts logos of brands we consume throughout our daily lives through a contemporary art lens. By using recognizable logos as iconography, Lucy provokes the viewers perception of these brands. Through this body of work, the artist seeks to explore the notion that these brands hijack our thoughts and spending habits, while also creating mass pollution in our world.
Artist Statement:
As an artist, my objective is for the viewer to be confronted with their own ideas and emotions based off of personal preconceived notions upon looking at a specific artwork. My work consists of a variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture, and wood work. By elevating the logos into a work of art, it forces conversation and reflection. As well as connecting people with the everyday logos we all see throughout our lives. With these pieces, I hope to get people thinking of the past and future of these companies, and to challenge the thought of why we buy from them. Possibly, it is because we align our own identities with one brand over another, or is it the logo that’s associated with the product?
Follow Chance on Instagram.
THE ILLUMINATED BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES
ARTIST: HANNAH CHARLTON
JULY 2023
Show Description:
Inspired by The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan (originally published in 1405), local artist Hannah Charlton honors the heroic ladies of the 15th century through her painted illuminated manuscripts. Through her artwork, Charlton celebrates the accomplishments of these women and uses traditional medieval illuminated manuscript techniques to bring their stories to life.
Artist Statement:
“And as long as women’s achievements were excluded from our understanding of the past, we would continue to feel as if we had never done anything worthwhile.” (Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage 12) The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan tells the stories of famous women in history and myth, and was written to encourage Christine’s 15th century contemporaries. Depressed with the misogynist stories of her time, Christine was inspired to make a grand counter-argument, a rhetorical city from where women of the past, present, and future could defend themselves. Christine argues against vague theories about women’s faults with specific examples, using each story to build up the city. Some of the ladies were talented writers, great scientists, and great witches. They were brave, gentle, faithful, and strong. The stories of many women featured in the City have survived. Circe has found a new life with Madeline Miller’s 2018 book, and Sappho is as beloved today as she has been for thousands of years. Other ladies in the City, like Anastasia and Leontium are more obscure. Researching some of these was an exercise in frustration and academic paywalls. I want to bring these ladies back to people’s imaginations. Like the artist Anastasia, I do this by making illuminated manuscripts. Like Christine de Pizan, we will all build the City of Ladies together.
You can find more information about Hannah’s work at her website: www.hannahcharltonarts.com
YOU WERE ALWAYS HOME
Artist: Kristen morley
JUNE 2023
Show Statement:
Unearthing our most intimate relationship, ‘you were always home’ is a series which examines the complexity of existing in a marginalized body. Using saturated colors to create vivid contrasts, these works seek to reframe our relationship to our physical form as an extension of our connection to the natural world. In developing these works, I engaged in a conversation with my inner-most critic, the one whose voice echoes the messaging of a cultural upbringing which rejected the beauty of queer and non-conforming people of color. As a youth in the borderlands of eastern Washington, my experiences as a mixed-race individual were often defined by sense of other, and my work aims to confront the dysmorphic reality of existing in a world without representation.
This series reflects deeply on my experiences coping with body dysmorphic disorder, with these pieces serving as the product of a therapeutic practice to heal warped perceptions of self. My process has involved capturing nude self-portraits throughout quarantine, documenting phases spanning exercise and injury, feasting and fasting, depression and mania. Turning my physical form into my creative muse, I reference these photos as source material for new compositions and create designs that allow me to see my own form as part of a larger cosmic story. Where do I end? Where do you begin? I aim to remind myself and the viewer of the beauty inherent to all bodies, and the ways in which our connection to our physical selves is merely an extension of our relationship to the natural world.
Artist Statement:
Through my creative practice, I find solace and inspiration in the principles of universal connection as I delve into themes of reframing our relationship with the physical form and its intrinsic extension to the natural world. I aim to capture the shifting self-perception influenced by body dysmorphic disorder, simplifying and fragmenting physical forms to invite viewers to create their own associations. My creative process involves merging diverse elements, blurring boundaries between human and natural shapes, and repurposing studio waste. Through this emotional excavation, I connect with the notion of home within self, shaped by collective experiences.
You can find more information about Kristen’s work at their website: www.kristenmorley.com
Choices Made by Ghosts Reflect My Sensibilities as Well & 3 TapestrieS
two solo SHOWs
MAY 2023
Choices Made by Ghosts Reflect My Sensibilities as Well | Rachael Zur
Artist Statement:
Traces of us linger in the physical world, even in our absence. There is an evocative nature to domestic objects and spaces—items within homes hold the residual energy of lives lived long after people are gone. My work depicts ordinary objects from living rooms belonging to people I have loved and lost. However it is not grief that I am interested in conveying, but the residue of the affection that is left behind. Texture becomes a way of communicating touch—my own touch held in my work, and what my viewer imagines feeling with their own hand. My touch is held in the work, similar to how a room or object holds the essence of a person when they are no longer present. Contour lines move across the surface of the works like phantoms; other times a contour line defines the edge of a work, (articulating a wing or hand), as a fully present body.
Show Description:
We leave more of ourselves behind in the objects in our homes than we anticipate; and in these dated pieces of furniture is the sublime reality that our lives create an echo that lasts beyond our lifetime. The gentle care that allows a 1970s floral pattern sofa to look almost new in a thrift store makes me believe that its owner was gentle in all of their actions. Perhaps the small indentations in a cushion are where a person frequently sat when they sat to watch a favorite TV show while holding a grandchild. To this ghost whom I do not know: I value the tenderness that remains from your lifetime and I pay homage to these actions through my expanded paintings. Choices Made by Ghosts Reflect My Sensibilities as Well, uses familiar themes of domestic spaces coupled with unexpected painting strategies to explore the delicate nature of what remains when a life is over. Hints of the body hug and haunt the humble furniture and domestic objects depicted in this series of work. The viewer is left with fragments that suggest both presence and absence of an individual; the color palette suggests the warmth felt from the individual who is no longer present.
3 Tapestries | Anna Reynolds Wallis
Artist Statement:
These pieces were started around 2012 as practice patches. My husband and I were busy parenting and getting me through nursing school. In scraps of free time, I learned to knit and crochet because it was something creative I could do when I was tired. With memories of my mom’s crazy quilt, a sweater I had as a kid, and semiconscious Gee’s Bend quilt images in mind, I started arranging the patches on the living room floor. Sometimes I put it away for months or years, and that continued for six years until the first piece was finished.
Over the course of the last ten or eleven years this body of work was made on my living room floor with acrylic yarn, and the most basic of stitches, as gradually I thought less in terms of knitting or crocheting, and more of yarn as a medium in a drawing or painting. In that time, I graduated from nursing school, started my nursing career, had miscarriages, joyfully had a second child, watched scary political times unfold, bought a home, found out our youngest was diabetic, lived and worked through COVID, and lost my Dad. These tapestries have all been spread out on our living room floor in everyone’s way in front of the TV. My kids and cat crawled around on them, messing up my measurements scratched into the carpet. They’re fun and meditative to make, and fulfill my basic need to create visual things. They’re made from humble materials and stitches. They came to be in my home, with all their imperfections, in the midst of my life and family, and I like to think that they hold some of the energy of all those thousands of hours of my life within them.
Show Description:
From afar these tapestries look like paintings, but as the viewer draws near they are presented with the texture, depth, warmth, and the finished but imperfect edges of knitted and crocheted yarn. Viewers are encouraged to stand up close and examine the rows of stitches, how patches are joined together, where it is tidy and where there are flaws.
Completed during the pandemic, there is a visual learning curve where you can see a progression in the stitching from the first tapestry to the last. But whether the neater and tidy stitching improves the quality of the work, is up to the viewer to decide.
TRANSMUTATION
GROUP SHOW
APRIl 2023
Show Description:
Featuring a selection of printmaking work from national graphic and book artists responding to the concept of "Transmutation." Curated by Carl Richardson and Reinaldo Gil Zambrano, this show is part of Spokane Print Fest which seeks to educate and inspire the local community on the traditional and contemporary practices of printmaking through curated gallery shows, artist demos and print workshops. TRANSMUTATION opens on Friday, April 7th and will include a live printing demo.
Featured Artists:
CURSE OF THE NOSTALGIC AMNESIAC
ARTIST: CHAD YENNEY
FEBRUARY - MARCH, 2023
Show Description:
Focussing primarily on collage based mixed media, I hope to tell the story of a yesterday that never was. To embrace a fictionalized past as seen through the advertisements and idealized narrative laid out in the publications of yesteryear. Utilizing vintage ephemera, I will explore how much we have learned, stayed the same, and how much we have to grow as a society.
Artist Statement:
My work deals with social and environmental issues that I package in surreal or abstracted veils in an attempt to lure the viewer into a world worth exploring. Whether my pieces are simple or complex, I try to create narratives that have a depth to them, some mystery, excitement, and beauty. I feel it’s possible to combine activism in a cloak of escapism to achieve an experience that can suggest one emotion while hinting to another. As humanity marches forward, I’m inspired to dive into the past to remind us where we’ve been, to help guide us into the future.
COLOR FORMS
ARTIST: MICHAEL SONNICHSEN
January 2023
Show Description:
Mike Sonnichsen is an artist who employs geometry and color to dazzle the eyes and evoke wonder and nostalgia. This exhibition of prints and objects offers new ways of seeing the familiar through novel and surprising combinations which delight viewers through the play of color and form.
Screen-printed works with an emphasis on moiré interference patterns vibrate visually and may be challenging yet rewarding to look at. A long-running exploration of relief-printed etched plates printed in seemingly endless tiled combinations evokes the patterns seen in quilts, textiles, and sacred geometry. Lego flat finishing tiles have been cleverly combined with older letterpress printing approaches and technology to create previously unseen arrangements and blended color combinations. These too resemble weaving or textiles while also reflecting play, game boards, and the formal systems of Lego tiles.
As an artist who works constantly in the realm of color printmaking ink, Mike also has a keen eye for the colors of things in our world that often go under-appreciated or unnoticed. Like a bowerbird, he gathers colorful objects (buttons, Melamine dishes, & ice cube trays for example) until the accumulation of them can find suitable sculptural form. Their source or original elements are still recognizable as parts of a whole, yet the peculiar groupings and transformations result in both a new “object” and a revision of how we regard the familiar.
In a season with a shortage of naturally brilliant color, this exhibition creates a space filled with newly wrought but familiar “Color Forms” that resonate symbolically with viewers while challenging and engaging optical sensibilities. It celebrates and reconsiders the colors of everyday materials along with the richly layered color possibilities and tantalizing forms of printmaking.
REMOTE
Artists: STEFANI ROSSI, SHANTELL JACKSON & HEATHER BERNDT
December 2022
Show Description:
"Remote" is a collection of works exploring themes and experiences common to many during COVID lock-downs. The works connote physical, social, psychological, political, and economic distance, and the rituals and practices people used to navigate those and sustain themselves through the early months of the pandemic.
Artist Information:
Shantell Jackson | Multimedia Visual Artist, Shantell Jackson has spent 18 years in the Pacific Northwest, by way of Buffalo NY, where she was raised. Jackson began doing acrylic paintings over 10 years ago and have been creating, and exploring ever since.
Curiosity & Wonder are hallmarks of Shantell's artist process, her work is often created in process. In other words each project is a journey that may have an overall theme, be it color, texture or other mediums the result is that of a process that was born out of a creative flow.
Stefani Rossi | Stefani Rossi uses her creative practice to contemplate rituals–sacred and mundane–that people use to navigate life as individuals and communities. The series, Wreckage, exhibited at the central branch of Spokane Public Library (SPL), explored the social customs of minimizing or obscuring pain to cope with disappointment, loss, and death. In the fall of 2021 she joined SPL’s inaugural cohort of artists at The Hive, an initiative to increase access to the arts, and integrate the arts into spaces of public engagement. In this residency she continued a series of paintings entitled kəˈnekt, visual metaphors interpersonal change in communities, and the rhythms of isolation, connection, and belonging. Rossi approaches painting as visual storytelling. Whatever the media, her hope is to invite viewers to slow down, enjoy looking, and meditate on larger narratives of human experience in which we participate.
Heather Berndt | Heather Berndt is a graphic designer, mixed media artist and certified spiritual director who has a passion for inspiring others to experience the divine through creativity and soulful living.
Heather believes wholeheartedly in the power of play for accessing the imagination and she approaches her art-making with curiosity and wonder, finding inspiration in the intertextuality of music, color, natural rhythms, and embodied movement. While she is still finding her “voice” as an artist, with her work Heather hopes to bring just a bit more healing, love and delight to the world.
When not making things, Heather offers professional spiritual direction and facilitates workshops integrating themes of creativity, spirituality and archetypal psychology.
MISSAPPROPRIATE MYTHOLOGIES
ARTIST: CRISTA ANN AMES
NOVEMBER 2022
Show Description:
Missappropriate Mythologies gives a new spin on feminine monuments and sculptures from art history. Using contemporary models and symbolic animals from a different and paradoxical pagan mythology, traveling artist Crista Ann Ames reclaims the female bodies historically created through the lens of the male gaze and recreates new female monuments that are less one-dimensional depictions then their predecessors.
As a sculptor who works primarily in ceramics, textiles, and wood, Ames finds that the integration of both permanent and impermanent materials conveys her interest in approaching memory, loss, and transformation. Just as the act of remembering transforms an experience into something different, time degrades some elements and leaves others to endure.
Through the layering of mythology, iconography and personal narrative, Ames’ work explores how our own animal nature relates to the ways we establish and sustain personal relationships. The artist draws on her own experiences to explore pastoral life, animal husbandry, women’s craft, and fertility.
In bridging the gap between myth and experience, Ames utilizes her artistic practice to create altogether new stories that tell contemporary tales of trauma, joy, and womanhood.
sojourn
Artist: Mardis Nenno & Carl Richardson
OCTOBER 2022
Artist Statement:
This is an exhibit of artwork that was created during a six month residency at the Hive in 2022. Thanks to this opportunity, artists Carl and Mardis had the space and time to explore individual ideas in their chosen areas of ceramics, printmaking and drawing, and also to seek out ways in which to collaborate and share their processes. They have used the image of rope as a starting point and it serves as a visual device in both form and concept to connect their two bodies of work.
The artists wish to thank Eva Silverstone, Arts Education Specialist with the Spokane Public Library, for her tireless direction and support of the Hive Residency program and to the Spokane Public Library and Spokane School District 81 for creating an extraordinary space for artists.
Relative Fictions: Revision
Artist: Andrew Somoskey
September 2022
Artist Statement:
The activity of encoding and decoding information is central to our contemporary existence and my artistic practice. While the systems I reference within my process center around textual and symbolic language, they also refer to the history of abstraction and the disruptions, complexities, and migrations of meaning that occur when languages and systems interface. Specific texts, graphs, and symbols are used in conjunction with personal notational systems including the idiosyncratic strategies I developed to mitigate my dyslexia and dysgraphia. My ever-growing vocabulary of forms and open process often blur the line between process and product. While acknowledging my complicity in this constant process of encoding and decoding, I question the fixedness of language, while simultaneously making more visible the role language and similar systems have in shaping our conception of the world.
Gallery Fundraiser
August 2022
What is the gallery fundraiser?
A few years back, local artists Carl Richardson and Mardis Nenno came to us with a proposition. They wanted to find a way to help raise funds to keep Terrain Gallery open. We’ve played around with a couple of different concepts, and this year, we are selling 50 pieces of artwork for $200/each. Each artist has chosen to donate 100% of the proceeds directly back to the the gallery — THANK YOU!!! — and now we're hoping you will help us reach our goal of $10,000 by purchasing their beautiful creations!
Thank you to all the artists that donated work to our Gallery Fundraiser. If you are interested in donating work to future fundraisers please contact team@terrainspokane.com.
LIving Laboratory of Art & Ecology
July 2022
Show Statement:
Living Laboratory of Art & Ecology (LLAE) is an art project by Posie Kalin that integrates art into school science curricula by illustrating ecological interdependence using arts exploration to encourage self-awareness, a richer sense of connection with peers and our surroundings. The exhibition will feature a curated selection of youth artworks created during this program residency at Pratt Academy High School alongside artworks of professional regional artists that complement and support Living Laboratory's visual and conceptual themes. At the heart of Living Laboratory of Art & Ecology is the idea that the gallery serves as a kind of living laboratory investigating and exploring through art - self, social and community awareness within our environments and surrounding landscapes. There will be artist lectures to support viewers, participants, artists, and community members alike to further engage and connect with the exhibition. LLAE was fully funded by Spokane Arts Grants Awards (SAGA) 2022.
Featured Artists:
Anna Czoski, Annie Cunningham, Melissa Lang, Daniela Molnar, Posie Kalin, Pratt Academy
BEFORE US THERE WAS YOU
JUNE 3RD - JUNE 25TH, 2022
Show Statement:
Before Us There Was You: Honoring the Flora and Fauna of Earth's Forests is a group show of work by women and non-binary artists. Our main interest in this theme has to do with biodiversity and biocentrism/ecocentrism. We want to celebrate and commemorate the living things that each maintain the balance of the ecosystem in their own way. We are grateful for the rich array of organisms on this planet and we are desperate for their preservation. We stand in opposition of the patriarchal, anthropocentric way of existence that has dominated our lifetimes.
Featured Artists:
Karli Ingersoll
Mary Weisenburger
Megan Martens-Haworth
Tiffany Patterson
Tess Beshcel
Mariah Boyle
Sarah Torres
Hazel Miller
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: A VISUAL ANTHOLOGY ON THE COMPLEXITIES OF ASIAN IDENTITIES
Margaret Albaugh and Frances Grace Mortel
MAY 2022
In partnership with APIC Spokane, with the support of the Amplifying Community Stories grant, artists Margaret Albaugh and Frances Grace Mortel share visual narratives that amplify Asian American community stories. Through their diasporic lens, they examine the unseen – the complexities of cultural identity hidden in visible spaces.
Indivisible (photography, Margaret Albaugh) explores racism on a human level, allowing participants to explore identity development. Intimate portraits reveal vulnerable but strong individuals whose lives have been shaped in one way or another by racism. margaretalbaugh.com/indivisible
Diaspora Recipes (multimedia, Frances Grace Mortel) takes a closer look at the intersections of food culture, migration, colonization, and identity. It follows two Asian American women as they talk about their journey and passion for food and cuisines while navigating the challenges of integration in the US. mortelmedia.com/diaspora-recipes
ESTAMPA
Spokane Print Fest Group Show
NOVEMBER 2021
A selection of printmaking work from regional and national printmaking artists curated by Carl Richardson and Reinaldo Gil Zambrano. The show is part of Spokane Print Fest which looks to educate and inspire the local community on the traditional and contemporary practices of printmaking.
Her words to life: A Celebration of Black Women's Voices
Shantell Jackson & Tracy Poindexter-Canton
OCTober 2021
“Her Words to Life” is a celebration of Black American womanhood. Spokane artists, Shantell Jackson and Tracy Poindexter-Canton, will exhibit a new collection of mixed media art pieces inspired by personal poetry, the work of local Black female poets and the poetry and/or literary prose of activists Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, Sapphire and other notable Black American female poets and writers.This exhibition illustrates the beauty, resilience and strength of Black American women in both a historical and contemporary context.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Shantell Jackson | https://shantellrj.com/
Multimedia Visual Artist. I have spent the last 15 years in the Pacific Northwest, by way of Buffalo NY, where I was raised. I began doing acrylic paintings seven years ago and have been creating, and exploring ever since. My works include acrylic abstract paintings, ink drawings, digital illustration; with a recent exploration of printmaking, watercolors, and hand-lettering. My hope is that while my work may not be for everyone that someone connects with a piece on a deep and almost spiritual level. My current focus is the exploration of the human condition, our histories, and stories through writing and visual installations.
Tracy Poindexter-Canton | www.tracypoindexter-canton.com
I am a mixed media artist, born and raised in Spokane, Washington. Through collage, vibrancy and portraiture, I examine Black American identity and melding literary imagery with visual art. An eclectic assortment of media and materials are incorporated into my work – often including acrylic, oil pastel, ink, feathers, beads, magazine clippings, bubble wrap, scrapbook paper, nylon cord and found objects. My 2019 series, “To Shalimar,” celebrates the literary greatness of Nobel Prize-winning author, Toni Morrison and Morrison’s famous novels, “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Song of Solomon,” and “Beloved” while examining identity, trauma, self-love, sisterhood and beauty in relation to the Black American experience.
Black Universe | Hazel Miller
June 2021
This series is inspired by the Eleusinian Mysteries, Egyptian goddesses, and ancient human life; its themes include womanhood, rebirth, botany and altered states of consciousness.
Artist Bio |
Hazel Miller’s large, figurative paintings reference art history, botanical life, and the body to raise questions about selfhood and womanhood. Her work often finds connections between Zen Buddhism, psychedelics, and feminist ideas. Originally from San Antonio, TX, she now calls Spokane, WA her home. She holds a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant.
Learn more about Hazel: https://hazelthepainter.com
Wounded DeeR | CHris otten
September 2020
Chris’s concerns as a photographer centers on the relationship between the rural lands of the American West and its loss within an ever-expanding society. Society has sacrificed memory and its artifacts to the concrete giants of civilized growth. There are many overlooked histories that are embedded within this frontier. It is his hope that audiences not only appreciate the meaningful documentation of these arid lands but will also consider how the original inhabitants were affected by manifest destiny. By documenting sites in conjunction with constructing fictional tableaus Chris invites viewers to reimagine the American West.
Artist Bio |
Chris Otten’s work deals with issues of identity and place, the relationship between the two and how memory plays an important role in how we remember home and who we were while we were there.
Chris Otten holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Central Oklahoma and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of South Florida. He has exhibited nationally, including galleries in Annapolis, Long Beach, Minneapolis, Tampa, and Wichita. He lives and works in Yakima, Washington.
Express Yourself
JuLy 2020
Express Yourself: A Call to Action Through Art
Virtual Finale - July 31sT, 6-9 PM
Join us for a 3-hour LIVE event streamed right to your living room. We're celebrating a month-long show in the gallery, Express Yourself: A Call to Action Through Art.
You can watch this LIVE right from the comfort of your couch from 6-9pm via Terrain's FB Live, Instagram Live, and our Twitch account @terrainarts.
Black artists from Spokane showcased their work and their creative processes throughout the month and aired on our IGTV. On July 31st, we will celebrate their work, experience live music and have a virtual tour of the gallery show.Â
Artists Involved Include:
Kung Fu Vinyl
Jango
Shantell Jackson
Carl Richardson
Hallie Heil
Tom Tarpley
and so many more....
Plus see an original film debut from Edward Casto and Garret Goetzinger
SHAPESHIFTERS
May 2020
This is a group exhibition about contemporary artists rethinking the medium of painting. Art history in the West often gives oil paintings on canvas an outsized importance. This is an exhibition that looks at the ways contemporary artists are disrupting this narrative by exploring the complicated history of painting by deconstructing the materials of painting or by using unconventional substrates or processes. The exhibition includes four artists that are attempting to push beyond paint on a rectangular canvas and canvas stretcher, yet maintain a dialogue with the history of painting and a reverence for what paint can do. This exhibition was curated by Joe Hedges (www.joehedges.com) with Terrain Gallery in Spokane, WA and is supported by the Washington State University Center for the Arts & Humanities.
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS:
Lien Truong - lientruong.com
Elise Thompson - elisethompson.com
Mica Smith - micasmith.com
Azzah Sultan - azzahsultanstudio.com
Watch the Zoom Gallery Reception:
TAKE A LOOK BELOW AT OUR VIRTUAL GALLERY
ARTIST: LIEN TRUONG
On love and reformation, 2020, oil silk, acrylic, lacquer, bronze pigment on canvas, 84”x72” dibptych
Painting can be understood as an expression of power. In the United States, various art movements and styles have aligned themselves with particular imperialist agendas. The paintings of the Hudson River School, heralded as unique visions of new lands with untapped resources, also functioned like propaganda in support of westward expansion and manifest destiny. In Lien Truong’s painting presented here, the artist revises themes in painter Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire. Whereas Cole’s paintings from 1833–1836 were moralizing, celebrating an American pastoralism, Truong’s paintings use multiple materials and modalities, pointing toward a more complex and transcultural understanding of the world.
The Peril of Angel’s Breath, 2018, oil, silk, acrylic, antique 24k gold-leaf obi thread, 19th century American cotton, antique obi mourning cloth on canvas, 96”x72”
Truong is undoubtedly a highly skilled painter, working through several different approaches at once and handling each with uncommon finesse. In addition to the masterfully handled paint on canvas, areas of hanging silk and bronze pigment extend into the viewer’s space, creating a delightfully confusing combination of materials and approaches that defy gravity and logic. Truong’s surfaces are the most exciting art history lessons you’ve ever had, at once evoking the drips of abstract expressionists, the large bold strokes of asian screen calligraphy, tightly rendered moments of flora and fauna, all with highly sophisticated design and color sensibilities. Through all of this she retains a contemporary eye toward deconstruction, rebirth and reflection.
That incident under the Pink Palm, 2020, oil, silk, acrylic, lacquer, bronze pigment on canvas, 84” x 72” diptych
The toxic cleanse of warm rain, 2020, oil, silk, acrylic, lacquer, bronze pigment on canvas, 84” x 72” diptych
While artists themselves have generally seen painting as not an expression of authoritarian power but as a means for individuals to stake out unique ways of seeing and being, the historical ground has been laid and is not easily ignored. While American landscape paintings promoted manifest destiny, the Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950’s were also state-sponsored displays of masculine American power abroad. Elise Thompson's works are abstract surfaces that playfully deconstruct the materials and approaches of abstract painting, skating somewhere between irreverence and deep love.
ELISE THOMPSON
Frame of My, 2018, acrylic on clear vinyl, 36”x23”
Cover Up, 2018, acrylic on clear vinyl, 36”x23”
Scalloped, 2018, acrylic on watercolor paper, and clear vinyl, 44”x30”
Window (pink icing), 2016, frost vinyl over acrylic on wood, 48”x35.5”
Rather than embracing the flatness or mimetic potential of a surface, Thompson’s works are non-surfaces—by utilizing translucent materials they invite the viewer inside, becoming voids and spaces rather than protrusions or barriers. At the same time, by using thick globs of dripping clinging paint, the materials of each work become a corporeal, sometimes violent commentary on the connection between art and the body.
Give Me Sugar, 2017, acrylic on gray tinted clear vinyl, 26”x23”
Through sensual delicate materials juxtaposed with heavy tar-like application, materials push and pull; inside is outside. All of this seems to mirror the dance between painting as an expression of authority and painting as an expression of the personal. Thompson’s structural shifts questions the artifice and the very point of painting itself, while paradoxically offering the viewer gooey, oozing rainbows of optimistic color. Is this metamodern?
MICA SMITH
Are U Real, 2019, digital painting on satin with crystal beading, 45”x50”
Painting today resists attempts to wring it dry of romance or history, and it's in this resistance that contemporary painting thrives. Mica Smith’s current work is nothing if not romantic, foregoing canvas altogether, often using smooth silk as a substrate and ink like paint to create largely abstract compositions that play with notions of feminine sensuality and digital passion.
As I Reside (Before You Go), 2019, digital collage on satin, 40”x30”
Feel a Girl Like Me, 2019, digital painting on satin, 40”x30”
Of Origin and Belonging, 2020, digital painting on satin, 40”x30”
Of Desire (2), 2019, satin collage on pinned on wall, approx. 30”x40”
These surfaces seem to float and wave in the air, dislodged somewhat from the solidity and certitude of the white cube, instead becoming open reflections on relations between bodies. Musical compositions are made up in part of private, sensual moments swirling in complex places and spaces that seem suspended in time. In Mica’s words, these works focus “on the power of femme aesthetics – specifically those connected to trans female self-preservation and survival.”
AZZAH SULTAN
Melipat (to Fold), canvases, batik fabric, acrylic paint, 24”x87”, 202
Azzah Sultan's recent works also forego canvas, instead using patterned fabrics that draw from her Malaysian heritage to create personal, wall-mounted works that reference painting and the body. For Southeast Asian viewers, Azzah’s choices of patterns will likely be recognizable as Batik, a millennia-old technique for dying patterns on fabric. Being unique to their particular region, these patterns tell stories.
For Sultan, the stories are personal, honoring her Muslim heritage generally while providing an opportunity to make specific formal artistic choices. Her three recent combines feature figures that seem to step out of their rectangular picture planes as if to say “I am here. I have arrived”. Especially for young artists from underrepresented groups, presence and visibility is not only welcome, but may be a matter of survival. In her statement, Sultan says her work “strives to transcend the fallacy that Muslim women like herself are oppressed by the nature of their religious customs.”
Each of these artists revel in the ways disruptions of materials and processes signal toppling of old orders and a shifting of traditional forms. Together, these artists call for a wider acceptance not only of art forms and material processes but acceptance of a greater diversity of ways of being in the world, a greater acceptance of various communities that are often excluded not only from art history but from contemporary art and culture. Drawing from traditions around the world but pushing into the newcentury, these artists invite audiences to reflect on paintings' entanglement with a myriad of problematic historical and contemporary ideologies and to envision a brighter, more colorful future. With part devotion and part skepticism on display, these artists are devotees and pagans, sentries and shapeshifters.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lien Truong
Through a hybridity of painting materials and philosophies, Lien Truong’s practice examines influences that form belief systems in a transcultural context. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery; North Carolina Museum of Art; Station Museum of Contemporary Art; Oakland Museum of California; Nhasan Collective and Galerie Quynh, Vietnam; Art Hong Kong; SEA Focus, Singapore; Turner Carroll Gallery; Patricia Sweetow Gallery; 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel; and Southern Exposure. She has received reviews and mention in Art Asia Pacific, The San Francisco Chronicle; Houston Chronicle; Oakland Tribune; New American Paintings and ARTit Japan. Her awards include fellowships from the Institute of Arts and Humanities and the North Carolina Arts Council, and most recently, the 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Elise Thompson
Elise Thompson (b. Cincinnati, OH) received an MFA at Florida State University in 2016. She was awarded the Brian Andrew McLaughlin Award in ’14 and ’15, and the Mary Ola Reynolds Miller Scholarship in Visual Arts in ’16. Thompson attended the Boom Gallery Fellowship + Residency in Cincinnati, OH, in ’15 via an Exceptional Opportunities award from FSU. Additional residencies include Vermont Studio Center ’16, The Wassaic Artist Residency ’17, and The Maple Terrace Artist Residency Program ’17. Thompson was published in New American Paintings South in ’16, and Friend of the Artist vol. 8 in ’19 with an interview by artist Tampa-based Taylor O. Thomas. She served a year's tenure as Co-Director and Curator at the non-profit 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, FL, from ’16-17 and taught drawing, painting, and contemporary art history at FSU. Recently, Thompson exhibited in a two-person exhibition with Dallas-based artist Scott Bell at 500x Gallery in Dallas, TX. Recent group shows include The Spartanburg Art Museum in Spartanburg, SC, Abrams Claghorn Gallery in Albany, CA, and The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. Thompson’s solo exhibition, Below Ground/Above Ground, was featured in July ’19 with Also Gallery, an online gallery and publication platform supporting women-identifying artists. For 2020, she was in a two-person show at Mantle Art Space in San Antonio, TX, with artist Brittany Ham and was included in a three-person show at BS Projects curated by Bret Shirley in Houston, TX.
Mica Lilith Smith lives and works in Lubbock, Texas as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at Texas Tech University. Smith earned an MFA in 2-D Studies at The University of Cincinnati College of DAAP, a BA in Studio Art and a BS in Design/Fine Arts at Fairmont State University. Her works are comprised of fabric installations, paintings, drawings, and video.
Azzah Sultan received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and is currently working towards an MFA at Washington State University. She was born in Abu Dhabi and is a Malaysian native who grew up in Malaysia, Saudi, Finland, Bahrain and has spent six years living in America working on her artistic practice. She has had her art exhibited in The New School, Parsons Paris Gallery, S.A.D. Gallery, The Bushwick Collective, BUFU Studios, The Ely Center, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Blackfish Gallery, Chase Gallery, Terrain 12, KMAC Gallery and was as well a panelist for Muslim Women Reclaim Their Identities at Amherst College, MA. While living in New York she was a program coordinator at Triangle Arts Association and an artist assistant for Artist of Color Block. Before starting her masters she worked as a graphic designer at the Islamic Art Museum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her work also speaks on the issues about finding her identity through culture and immigration.
Sqilxw Woman: She Brings Bundles.
March 2020
Sqilxw Woman: She Brings Bundles. A collective exploration of Indigenous women in the marsh is an evolving audio and photographic series focused on visions of reclaiming sqilxw‘dreamer of the land’ identity and embodying Earth married to her oppressor, escaping back to her way of life. Projections on a 4ft x 5 ft tule mat of photographic scenes follow artist Mariel Belanger as she embodies Sqilxw Woman:the Dreamer, a contemporary sqilxw woman who has given up on her vow, the bankrupt society controlling her and is making the long walk home. Through the waterways of the Fraser and Columbia, to the confluence of the river at the gathering place where she finds the implements that carry her back to the village. Searching for self, becoming Sqilxw Apna: The People Now, She finds a collection of people. This collection reflects those relations.
Tules or schoenoplectus acutusare nature’s water filter. Our water is dependent upon the marshlands and natural plants within them. Marshlands provide a key housing material and harvest location for Interior Salish Columbia Plateau nations. Without apology sqilxw, dreamers tend the land from the end of July until October or November if needed, harvesting, weaving and making a living from scratch. Family/Communal transfer of knowledge occurred within these locations that ensured the survival of our people. Matrilineal societies flourished. The advent of ‘private property’ and ‘bird sanctuary’ reduced our capacity to maintain these survival practices, reducing our knowledge of the water filtration systems we helped manage. They threaten us when we make attempts to do as we’ve always done, calling us trespassers on our own land, or destroyers of habitat. They forget – these places need us as much as we need them because we are of this land, doing as the land has instructed us to do.
Contributing Artists:
Conversations in Cloud Formations
Feburary 2020
“Conversations In Cloud Formations” is a collaboration between Jessica Earle and Morgan Rose free. Living on opposite sides of North America has become a challenge for our collaborative practice, but not our friendship. Facetime, iMessage, Instagram, Email, and Facebook have allowed us to remain close. And we can prove it. We can retrace the steps of our communication and go back and see all the things we’ve said, all the gifs we’ve sent to express our emotions and all the cute animal videos that cheer each other up. We can see how long we talked on the phone, we can measure the gaps in communication and we can point to our moments of vulnerability. All evidence of this long-distance friendship is recorded and documented in the Cloud. Yet this virtual communication lacks substance and texture and can never replace the intimacy of spending time with a person in real life. We compartmentalize these interactions and lose sight of the complexity and clutter that is The Cloud. This collaboration is a way of reconciling this loss. The digital is neither good nor bad, it just is…and we are in it.
SEQUENCE
JANUARY 2020
A set of related events, movements, or things that follow each other in a particular order. January’s show includes the works of Carl Richardson, Mariah Boyle and Garric Simonsen.
ADORNED DEATH | RUTH KAZMERZAK
PUNCTUM | MARCLEO FONTANA
December 2019
PUNCTUM | The exhibition relates the concept of impermanace and photography - impermanence, also knows as Anicca or Anitya is one of the essential concepts o Buddhism: all of conditioned existence is transient, evanescent, inonstant. All temporal things, whether material or mental, are in a continuous change of condition, subject to decline, Destruction or transformation.
Photography, like the human body, has a lifetime, is impariment. The print/blow out is already born with confirmation of its death. It could be a “almost life” inside a film shelf, the 24 hours of Instagram posts or a long life in an archive. The matter of ace is that photography has always been a fragile material. Its main quality isn’t in surviving time but in freezing it. After this process the image will only exist for a determined period, as little by little it will be transformed and then disappear.
The arts on the exhibit works with an idea of transformation or disappearence, they are pictures that are dying and have a second chance, a volcano in constant transformation or a whale that has never been seen. THey are all impermanent representations that are either fading away and becoming vestige, or vestige that is becoming representation.
AN ADORNED DEATH
Ruth Kazmerzak’s sculptures are constructed objects consisting of found items (including marine debris and other discarded materials) and concrete. The objects ask the viewer to consider the ways in which the items, especially their materiality and utility, have been affected by their respective environments. Kazmerzak implored you to consider life histories and what shapes and forms not just someone, but something. The structural rethinking of things* proposed by these objects hypothesizes a challenge to our basis of understanding as well as the study of our environment and its residents.
*an intimate material object as distinct from a living sentient being (Oxford English Dictionary).
Hybrid Landscape | Sean Caulfield
November 2019
Through installation, sculpture and printmaking my work explores themes of environmental transformation. The visual images and environments I create blur boundaries between the biological and the technological, the organic and the mechanical, and challenge viewers to consider the implications of this merging.
Central to my work is the role that society, community and the individual has in the moment of change. Focusing on broader themes of mutation, metamorphosis, and regeneration involving both the landscape and the individuals that inhabit it, I aim to raise challenging questions for viewers about the role they play. Ultimately, my work focuses on the idea that crisis and change - whether it be environmental, political, or personal - can be a significant and positive catalyst for rebirth, growth and courage.
The prints in this exhibition draw on a number of sources for inspiration including natural and industrial landscapes, as well as historic sources including German woodcuts from the 1500-1600s and historic scientific/anatomical illustrations. The work also looks to contemporary graphic traditions (graphic novels and manga) for further visual inspiration. Taken together this group of prints, which were produced between 2009 and 2019, follow my ongoing exploration into the impact of technological advancements on our environment and call into question our own role in shaping a future narrative for our ecosystem.
A Stroke of Nature
October 2019
A Stroke of Nature is a group show that reflects six artists interest in nature – descriptive, abstracted, and stylized. All of these artists live in the Spokane area and are professionals. The show includes paintings, drawings and fiber works. Artists include Lila Girvin, Louise Kodis, Karen Mobley, Melissa Lang, Caren Furbeyre, and Megan Martens-Haworth.
Things Change | Factory Town
September 2019
The Jacob’s Ladder was a toy we forgot. We flipped it, watched its cascading blocks fall as if they could forever, then we threw it in a box and left it for decades. It was a puzzle we couldn’t solve - a simple mystery and an unanswered question.
As adults, we were confident we could comprehend it - reverse engineer and calculate the coefficients, deconstruct it and build it over-sized, watch it closely in slow motion. We thought we would understand, and yet it has left us equally bewildered.
Things Change is a brand new collection of work by Spokane based Factory Town.
It consists of over-sized Jacob’s Ladders and is inspired by the nostalgia of childhood and the modern world’s constant reminder that things are forever changing and forever the same.
WORRISOME: SHORT STORIES | JAMES GOULDTHORPE
August 2019
Worrisome: Short Stories, an exhibition of new work by Bay Area artist James Gouldthorpe. Operating at the intersection of literature and visual art, Worrisome is an immersive installation of narrative paintings. Inspired by old photos, vintage magazines, and film, Gouldthorpe tells stories through his carefully edited collection of original works on paper. Viewers are invited to make connections within the densely pinned and layered drawings, following narratives that are rich in character and setting.
Worrisome: Short Stories features narratives that invoke a rural noir. With titles like The Night Susan Krueger Disappeared, Busted Knuckles, and Breakfast at Wildwood Trailer Park, these visual tales have a cinematic quality in their comprehensive vision, suspenseful mini-dramas, and tightly executed moments. Gouldthorpe creates immersive graphic novels through a process he describes as “writing a painting.” The exhibition includes a wall of “edits” which feature characters and scenes that were cut from the short stories’ primary narratives.
Learn more about James Gouldthorpe’s work at http://www.jgouldthorpe.com
Signs of Feeling | Katharine Spilker
July 5th - july 27th, 2019
July’s gallery show is a solo exhibit of Katharine Spilker.
Signs of Feeling is a gathering of the artist’s recent work that explores the relationships that occur among different materials, the forms they take, and the emotional resonances that these new bodies can imbue. Katharine’s sculptures attempt to hold up and navigate the contentions found in human feeling—our desire for connection, as well as the forces both within us and outside of us that complicate that desire. She is interested in exploring this “in-between” space in physical form in order to better understand how relating these polarities can signal to the emergence of new ways of being. Within her practice she uses natural and found materials that are mutable in nature and can visually inform this duality, something hovering between fragility and density. Form is intuitively built by combining materials and observing the way they react and influence one another, until an undoing approaches. Reaching this point of balance between surviving and unraveling is where we learn to let go.
TAKE PRIDE
JUNE 7TH - JUNE 29TH, 2019
In honor of the first-annual Spokane Queer Art Walk, and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, we are thrilled to open Take Pride featuring the work of:
Casey Doyle
June T. Sanders
Makayla Miracle
Tiffany Patterson
Kat Smith
Israel J. Gonzales
Cody Magee
Kayleigh Marie Lang
Apostrophe
May 3rd - May 31st, 2019
An apostrophe represents missing information while uniting related elements. As a demographic women, LGBTQ+, and persons of color are marginalized in commercial galleries across the country yet this group is the predominant artists entering the market. 80% of students enrolled in studio art courses or art history courses are women while less than 10% of women are represented in galleries. LGBTQ+ and persons of color are not even tracked.
This months Terrain Gallery exhibit encourages and promotes emerging student artists in this demographic from Whitworth University, Spokane Falls Community College, Gonzaga University, and Eastern Washington University. We are an Apostrophe, we are that missing information.
Tangible Gestures
April 5th - April 27th, 2019
Curated by Reinaldo Alexander Gil Zambrano and Carl Richardson, and created in collaboration with the first-annual Spokane Print Fest, Tangible Gestures showcases the artwork of 35 printmakers (full list below) both local and national. The exhibition highlights an array of printmaking styles including relief, intaglio, silkscreen and lithography.
Opening festivities occur on April 5th from 5PM-11PM and includes music, beer and live artist demos.
Terrain Gallery will also host corresponding artist-led workshops each Saturday throughout the month from 10AM-12PM.
GALLERY SHOW: FREE
SPOKANE PRINT FEST: FREE
WORKSHOPS: $50 per person (limited space)
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE:
April 6th • Reinaldo Gil Zambrano • Relief
April 13th • Margot Casstevens • Dry-point
April 20th • Mary Farrell • Monotype
April 27th • Kevin Haas • Smart plate lithography
WORKSHOP TICKETS AND MORE INFO: bit.ly/SpokanePrintFest
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Kera
Erin Johnston
Carve Your Heart Out - Art by Natalie K Ricciardi
Margot Casstevens
Jamie Carlin
Krystn Parmley
Emma Sheldon Stokoe
Erin Wheary
Roberto Torres
Jace Laakso Art
Kerstin Graudins
Lyell Castonguay
Sidney Westenskow
Megan Culbertson
Todd Herzberg
Carl Richardson
Michael Sonnichsen
Brad Schwartz
Amalia Fisch Art
Mary Farrell
Kevin Haas
Reinaldo Alexander Gil Zambrano
David Janssen
MIDNIGHT SUN & RE-LATIONSHIP
March 1st - March 20th, 2019
Midnight Sun | Todd Mires
After midnight most people are asleep and the buzz of the world is quiet, I become open and awake. Midnight Sun represents this feeling and the work I produce as a result.
Artist Statement
Painting abstract art is my addiction and meditation. I’m addicted to the smell of blank canvas, to the infinite possibilities within it. When I paint there is the feeling like I’m desperately searching for something. I don’t necessarily know what I’m looking for but it’s the search that keeps me coming back. It is a mystery I may never solve, but this addiction tempts me to compulsively continue my search. In my meditation I try to balance spontaneity and restraint’s let things flow and evolve, while simultaneously trusting my judgement to know when to stop. My process follows this practice. I paint organically, non-linear and devoid of a plan for the outcome. While painting there’s a feeling of digging and searching for significance to reveal itself. My job is to then capture it, but using restraint and self-control to stop in the right moment is the most difficult part of the process. Some of my paintings resemble nature, space or organic material, but I always approach a piece from a non-representational standpoint. Texture and its relationship with light fascinates me and there is an elusive and mysterious quality to the depth and contrast that texture creates. My aim as a painter is to structure the colors, shapes, texture and light in a compositionally significant manner to highlight this mystery through ethereal and mystical imagery.
Re-Lationship: Mixed Media Sculpture | Aleeta Renee Jones
Relationship: the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or state of being connected
Artist Statement
Aleeta Renee Jones presents her large scale mixed media sculpture on the theme of relationship: to self, others, and the environment. This is her first exhibition in nearly a decade and her first ever in Spokane.
Her layered pieces utilize unconventional materials such as glass, steel, encaustic (beeswax & damar resin), and fiber, in combination with found objects to evoke the intended feeling. Using organic materials set against hard materials such as glass and metal, she finds a metaphor for life - its strength and fragility. She simultaneously explores the corporeal as well as the ethereal.
Her works are personal and emotional narratives yet also universal in theme. The titles give clues: Re-birth from the Marrow. A Magical Re-connection After Many Years and Dark Waters. Dark Water was inspired by the horrific Deep Horizon oil spill. It’s essentially a prayer for our oceans.
Each is suspended from the ceiling giving a quiet poetic and mysterious aura. Each piece can be viewed as a poem or a song, evoking feeling rather than words.
Renee holds an M.A. in Sculpture from San Francisco State University where she studied with several well-known sculptors: Stephen DeStaebler, Douglas Holmes, and Kathy Goodell. After graduating, she created and ran a small organic farm in Portland, Oregon, while continuing to pursue her art. She recently relocated to Spokane. Renee is influenced by the artists she studied with and inspired by Eva Hesse, Petah Coyne and many others.
Scrutineasrsighted
January 4th - February 21st, 2019
Scrutinearsighted responds to the current wave of “Toxic White Masculinity” evident in the Trump administration, the UK’s accidental “Brexit” referendum and the deluge of sexual misconduct revelations that inspired the #MeToo movement. Combining the notion of the “scrutineer” (an official appointed to ensure that various competitions’ rules and regulations are meet by their combatants) with the condition of “nearsightedness” (or myopia where the eye can focus upon nearby subjects but blurs when greater distances are observed), the project reflects a milieu of biased, opportunistic ideologies and coercive discourse. The installation’s unpredictable mix of drawing, painting and textual components provides audiences with a complex and condensed view of our contemporary predicament; rather than representing easily recognizable contemporary figures, however, the project considers socio-political ills as systemic and stretching beyond their contemporary manifestations, so its caricatures blend a number of power-mad authoritarian tropes from across time and around the globe. The imagery’s palette (a black, white and grey tonal range) is used to invoke both the extremes of opinion and action, and all the ambiguous and ambivalent compromises and equivocations that are part of contemporary life.
The amassed imagery forms unstable and unpredictable continuums and hierarchies on the gallery’s walls, with the imagery seeming to spill from surface to surface before abruptly shifting tone and direction as it offers divergent and dissenting perspectives. Resembling a corrupted tableau, a tattered scroll or a violently undulating graph, the installation envelops the viewer, situating them within an unfolding incident. This installation format offers its audience a paradox echoing the project’s title—the details of various struggles are visible up-close, but obscured as one tries to view the series’ full breadth and absorb its full implications.
Cointagious Cointerventions WORkshop
Can’t get enough coinage? Artist RICHard SMOLinski is hosting a hands-on workshop that employs portmanteau word-coinage technique that is evident in the installation’s title and throughout the imagery. The workshop offers participants the chance to explore language’s malleability and potential for creative renovation as they devise their own unique “Cointerventions.” Like a non-permanent and non-damaging form of “portable graffiti” or a decidedly low-tech form of “social messaging,” participants invent and produce personal “community improvement” signage to share with their community stimulate “social discourse.” This divergent signage does not monetize or commercialize common public space like advertising, but instead establishes it as a site for creative communication and generous sharing of perspectives.
IL-LU-MI-NA-TION
DECEMBER 7TH - DECEMBER 28TH, 2018
In "il·lu·mi·na·tion", The PORTAL Collective invites the viewer to step into a highly immersive site-specific installation. Using interactive projections and audio recordings, Shantell Jackson, Roin Morigeau, and Asia Porter have rendered their individual pen + ink work into imagined digital topographies. It is largely taken for granted how entrenched white hetero-patriarchy has become in our day-to-day lives. From the clothes we wear, the sidewalks we walk down, to the very buildings we inhabit. PORTAL’s "il·lu·mi·na·tion" answers the question, “What else?”. Wielding poetry, visual art, digital design, and contemporary storytelling methods as tools, we are not dismantling the master's house, we are building a home of our own.
PORTAL is the antidote to creative isolation.
"Il·lu·mi·na·tion" is the threshold.
CAGE DOLL
November 2nd - November 24th
The work in this exhibit explores two underlying themes - the barriers that we experience as women that have held us back as well as the personal power that we draw on as women when we flourish. Historically power has been associated with force but is now undergoing a transformation and is being seen as the ability to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others. Artists Kimber Follevaag and Sylvia Darcy hope to promote conversations that further the definition of what it means to be powerful and what it means to be free of cages.
More About the Exhibit:
HISTORY Santos Cage Dolls take their name from the Spanish word for saint. Priest of the l7th century carved and later brought the dolls to Latin America. They were used in processions during holy days to aid in the conversion of Native Americans to Catholicism.
CAGE DOLL SERIES The dichotomy of women being put on a pedestal while still experiencing suppression is what inspired the Cage Doll Series. The term itself “Cage Doll” reflects the lengths women go to in the name of beauty and self-image
CORSET CROSS STITCH SERIES The Corset Cross Stitch Series is an abstract representation of the corsets used in the l800’s to slim the body and make it conform to a fashionable silhouette. Women were so tightly laced that they could breathe only with the top part of their lungs, causing the bottom part of their lungs to fill with mucus. Side effects included a persistent cough, as well as heavy breathing, causing a heaving appearance of the bosom. The smallest waist on record is l3 inches.
EMPOWERMENT SERIES In these times of tumultuous women’s issues, potential exists for great change. The Empowerment Series is about recognizing and claiming the power that women already possess. Power is not bestowed. The making of quilts has been a way for women to bond in support of each other. Women are awakening to the realization that true power is an inside job.
THE WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE This collaborative piece represents how women are literally in the middle of great change. We invited women in the community to express their own personal experience with regards to empowerment. They were asked where have you found it, and where have you missed it? The skirt is made up from their responses. Thanks to Kraig Lysek and Gizmo for their help in making the exhibit come to life.
Land/Escape
September 7th - October 24th
Touching off the Spokane River and environs, these works are based in nature, observations of streams, ponds, and creatures, architecture of plant, rock or building. The work is contemplative and subjective, not purely representational. While the work is diverse, there is a sympathy between us and the works we create.
Artists Featured in Show:
MARIAH BOYLE | mariahboyleart.com - Mariah Boyle holds an MFA in Painting & Drawing from Washington State University and a BA in Art, Eastern Oregon University, La Grande, OR. Mariah has been an artist in residence at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Vermont Studio Center and Centrum. She is an Artist Trust Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) recipient. She teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.
JOHN DeROULET | johnderoulet.com - John graduated from Gonzaga University with a BA in Fine Arts. He has exhibited extensively including at Kolva Sullivan, Terrain, Dodson’s and at the Chase Gallery. His work was exhibited at the Music City Building with Window Dressing.
KAREN MOBLEY | karenmobley.com - Karen holds an MFA from the University of Oklahoma and a BFA from the University of Wyoming. She was artist in residence AIR Studio Paducah, Jentel Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation, and for the Spokane County Library District at the Lab. She has participated in Spokane’s Window Dressing installation program, Terrain, and over 100 exhibitions throughout the US.
ROIN MORIGEAU | roinmorigeau.com - Roin graduated from Prescott College with a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Political Ecology. They exhibited at Emerge Gallery and Terrain. They participated in the Window Dressing Creative Enterprise Program | Spokane, WA. They also participated in Terrain Bazaar.
ELLEN PICKEN | ellenpicken.com - Ellen has created murals in Spokane, Coeur D’Alene and Seattle. Ellen is an Artist Trust Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) recipient. She has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center, St. Gertrude’s Monastery and GlogauAIR in Berlin, Germany. She holds a BA in Visual Communications Design and a BFA in Printmaking from Eastern Washington University.
CX30: CREATIVE EXPERIENCE/THIRTY COLLABOARTIONS
AUGUST 9TH - AUGUST 30TH
August's show is brought to us by Helveticka.
How does a creative firm celebrate 30 years in business? Creatively.
Curated, designed, written, and installed by CK Anderson and his team at helveticka, CX30 pays tribute to 30 talented collaborators the firm has worked with over the last three decades – and shares their unique perspectives on the creative experience.
Artists, photographers, illustrators, programmers, videographers, media buyers, printers, animators, fabricators, composers – even a cartoonist – share insights; recall interesting, funny, or challenging circumstances; reveal breakthrough moments in their careers; offer business philosophies; and, at times, describe poignant moments. Work from commercial visual artists will also be on display.
If you work in or around the creative industry, you’ll find these stories compelling and relatable. If you’re thinking about a career in the arts, or new to the creative profession, you’ll find them inspiring and informative. Even if you’re none of the above, you’ll still discover some amazing local talent – the sort of creativity most people just don’t realize is out there.
HOME STUDIES
JULY 6TH - JULY 27TH
July's show features the solo exhibit of Julie Gautier-Downes.
In installations and photographs, Julie Gautier-Downes leads us on a journey through abandoned homes, creating both the visual and emotional experiences of the scenes she constructs. These mediums offer a unique angle of inquiry that feeds her pursuit of connection to absent figures.
Each installation represents a real or imagined trauma or failure and allows Gautier-Downes the ability to engage her audience in a multi-sensory, self-directed experience. These fractured environments become monuments to failed relationships, lifestyles, and dreams. In her work, she continues to question the seemingly inherent physical stability of a house and the different ways that houses decay over time.
PINK {SPEAK}
JUNE 1ST - JUNE 29TH
June's show features the work of: Mariah Boyle, Meghan Flynn, Meghan Hedley and Lisa Soranaka. Each piece is centered around the color pink, as the hue maintains a strong presence in contemporary culture and has become an economic color or millennial.
Pink is associated with ideas such as intimacy, felinity, and love, bringing to mind anything from thoughts of childhood, adulthood, flowers, to fashion brands.
pink {speak}
pink
adjective
1. of a color intermediate between red and white
noun
1. pink color, material, or pigment
2. any group of colors with a reddish hue that can usually reflect a large amount of light
3. the best or finest condition or degree
4. any flower of the Old World plants of the genus Dianthus
verb
1. to ornament, to adorn, to embellish
speak
verb
1. say something in order to convey a thought, feeling, emotion
2. have a conversation
3. communicate or relate to
Fusion & Fibrant | Lou Lou Pink & Margaret Mount
May 4th - May 26th
Fusion - A Gift for the White House
The process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity.
Performance artist Lou Lou Pink invites you to donate an article of clothing — preferably one you are wearing — which she will use to create a large narrative scroll. You can participate by placing your article of clothing into one of the wooden trunks.
The articles of clothing function as surrogates for the individuals contributing to the developing narrative. The narrative representing the underlying connectedness of humanity, while embracing an exchange of human experience and unity.
Lou Lou’s goal is to travel across the U.S., visiting several other locations along the way, continually adding to the scroll at each destination. Her final stop will be Washington D.C. where, in front of the White House, she will unroll the scroll — now a massive beautiful visual landscape — as an important reminder of the fusion that exists within us all.
Fibrant
This group show combines the work of five artists: Anna Carpenter, Remelisa Cullitan, May Kytonen, Margaret Mount, and Eva Silverstone as well as the community group Craftivists of the Inland Northwest. Each of the artists are working in their own way to remix fiber traditions in order to explore a variety of concepts including identity, femininity, body, community, and fiber itself in the role of art.
Throughout, there is a stretching of the concept of stitching and fiber arts as “women’s work” in order to push that further into the realm of art and communicate that women’s voices in art are strong and important. While this “push” exists and strives to communicate, there is also the presence of honoring the long tradition of fiber as “women’s work” and the history of the stitches that came before. It is the hope of these artists that we can balance between pushing the art of fiber and acknowledging the work predecessors.
Neighborhood | Michael Dinning
April 6th-April 28th
Join us April 6th for the opening of the month long show Neighborhood by Michael Dinning.
Michael believes that our lives are assemblages of the people, places and events that we choose to hold close, and that we need to return to, again and again, as we navigate the world around us. Our identities are constructed with these intriguing little bits and pieces, because they compel us, bring us joy, and define the way that we want to see ourselves, and how others see us.
Neighborhoods are eclectic, messy, chaotic. They are the places where we interact with others, and they are the places where we keep our secrets. They keep our history, give us a sense of place, intrigue us with light and sound, movement and music. Life can be as mundane as a morning commute, or as joyous as a dance to drive away the rain.
Our neighborhoods are filled with secrets, and often strife, but in the end there is a beat of life, a rhythm of existence, that keeps it all compelling, intriguing and lled with light. This is a light of life which illuminates the world around, and glows within us all. More than anything, “Neighborhood” is his homage to this light, which he keeps returning to, constantly entrancing, perpetually present and a never-ending source of energy and joy.
http://www.michaeldinning.com
TEN YEARS OF TERRAIN
Feb 9th-March 24th
Remember Cabby Barnard’s and Tiffany Kendrick’s balloon room from Terrain 4? How about Alan Chatham’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure pay phone from Terrain 7? Or Terrain’s youngest artist ever, 8-year-old Olive Pete’s series from Terrain 8? What about Divine Jewels' Scapeskin performance from Terrain 5? Or Chase Halland’s debut of his now nationally renown bucks from Terrain 6?
In honor of Terrain's 10th Anniversary, we’ve put together a gallery show looking back at noteworthy pieces/performance from past Terrain events.
Representing at least one piece from every year and featuring the work of 33 different artists, join us as we replay some of the most memorable moments of the past decade.
This show will run from February 9th to March 24th. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday, 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM. This is a FREE show.
James Oxford
Rachel Smith
Travis Chapman Art
Olive Pete
Melissa Sunford Rackham
Joseph Tomlinson
Jason Bagge
Reinaldo Alexander Gil Zambrano
Chase Halland
David Waters
Tiffany Patterson's Art ♥ ♥ ♥
Cabby Barnard
Tiffany Leigh Kendrick
Juventino Aranda
Kiyomi Chadwell
John deRoulet
Christina Courtney
#weallbuildthis
Lou Lou Pink
Mariah Boyle
Scott Kolbo
Christopher Dreyer
Lisa Soranaka
Remelisa E. G. Cullitan-Stillinger
Kiefer Jones
Robert McKirdie
Teresa Dixon
Alan Chatham
Stiggy Austin
The Divine Jewels
Rajah Bose
Bruce Maurey
Lindsey Merrell
Kat Smith
SNAPSHOT | July 7-September 30 2017
A Look at Spokane Right Now
A place, like an image, is a composition of elements connected in time and space. These elements can look drastically different spending on your angle of view, and of course, things change over time.
From almost any angle, Spokane is changing incredibly quickly.
Our hope with Snapshot was to capture this moment in the life of our city from many perspectives, so that we can see as comprehensively as possible the way Spokane looks to its people.
We wanted to celebrate the Spokane we saw emerging — the tremendous growth, the pride, the enthusiasm — but we also wanted to challenge ourselves as a community to ensure this change makes Spokane a more hopeful place for everyone.
To that end, we asked local professional photographers from all walks of life to shoot the Spokane they see every day. With the help of a Sponsorship from the Smith Barbieri Progressive Fund we were able to give away 15 digital cameras to Crosswalk of Spokane and to Global Neighborhood to add to the perspectives of how we see Spokane. We also encouraged the entire community to contribute to the project by using the hashtag #snapshotspokane to be featured on our community wall.
We are hoping to revisit this exhibit again the future so keep using the hashtag #snapshotspokane and you might end up in our gallery.
Framed photos by Young Kwak, Rajah Bose, Robert Lloyd, Grace Lindsey, Kristen Black & Laree Weaver, community wall photos by you.
Heather Hart
Art and Social Practice
Heather Hart, an interdisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, NY will be featured in the Terrain Gallerywill participate in a number of community events from February 21 to 24 that showcase her talent of combining art with social practice. She is interested in creating site-specific liminal spaces for personal reclamation. Her work questions dominant cultural narratives and offers alternatives to them. New stories are created through Hart’s thoughtful proposed interactions, these experiences are a starting place for rebuilding history – a renewed platform to reshape or strengthen cultural identity. Her work makes use of large immersive sculptures that invite a very physical level of interactivity or can provide a more intimate experience with secluded spaces and participatory drawings. For her, this interactivity is key to the message of transition and change that is embedded within her art.
Rally
Hey. You. How’ve you been feeling the last couple of days? Despondent? Emboldened? Terrified? Relieved?
Terrain wants to hear from you. All of you. We’d love for you to create something that reflects these emotions. It can be a poem. A drawing. A song. A letter. Collage. Dance. Sculpture. Anything and everything is welcome. Each person gets a 1’x1’ space. Open to everyone.
“Thanks to Rally Spokane for giving the people of Spokane a safe place to express their feelings in this uncertain world of ours! ”