This is the JundtArt Museum's second Drawn to the Wall exhibition. In 2001, Museum Director Scott Patnode asked five artists to draw on five separate walls in the Jundt Galleries. For two weeks, at various times of the day and night, the museum was turned into a studio. The artists worked on their individual pieces within the communal setting of the gallery. The results were wonderful. Not only did the exhibition highlight work by important regional artists, there was an immediacy to viewing works so recently completed, and so specifically created-not
only
for the space but also in it.
Now, three years later, Patnode has selected a new group of artists. The parameters remain much the same. Each artist is assigned to a 12 foot tall, 8 foot wide, utterly white wall. Each can do with it what he or she wishes. The selection again is diverse. Because these artists customarily work in media ranging from intaglio to computers, from found objects to paint, one is tempted to arrange them in groups. Kurtz Vogt and O'Rourke are known as painters. Skubinna is a sculptor, and Kolbo and Kirishian are printmakers by training. But the aesthetics, styles, and concepts are so individually
varied-from
the rhythmic abstraction
of Skubinna, to
Kirishian's dark coats of color, to Kolbo's appropriated images from popular culture-that grouping seems irrelevant. As you read this, after fourteen days of work in late August, Jeanette Kirishian, Scott Kolbo, Allie Kurtz Vogt, Kay O'Rourke, and Bradd Skubinna will have once again transformed the Jundt.
Jeanette Kirishian's personal history underpins her warm yet expressive paintings and prints. Her father escaped the infamous 1915 massacre of the Armenians and came to this country as a young man to set up an oriental rug business. Kirishian's childhood was filled with family
lore about both weavers and the Armenian tragedy. A printmaker by training, she received her MFA from the University of Iowa, studying under Mauricio Lasansky, who urged the young artist to investigate rug designs as a basis for her work. Years later, Kirishian still uses the word "weaving" as a'sirnile to describe what she does. The term is apt, not only because she adapts traditional images from rugs, abstracting them to create new visual arrangements, but also because she uses multi-directional lines mimicking the weaving process. In addition, like traditional weavers, Kirishian sees these iconographic abstractions of animal and vegetable life as a way of layering visual information to communicate. Yet her work is never didactic. She says, "I really try to keep references metaphorical. I use [these images] to deal not just with the past, but also [for] more contemporary issues-such
as destruction, war and the
environment ... " She does that well, blending folkloric images with modernist painting and printmaking techniques to create a contemporary form of expressionism.
Scott Kolbo, also a printmaker, received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His work has been shown throughout the western United States as well as in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities. An enormously popular professor of art, Kolbo's proposal to develop a collaborative project among departments at Whitworth College, was recently awarded an NEA grant for the academic years 2004-6. In addition to Kolbo's success in linking disparate disciplines within the academic community, as an artist he shows an equally savvy willingness to mix and use every kind of print technology. His work easily straddles the very contemporary world of intermedia while remaining grounded in the long established world of social satire. Like artists Sue Coe or Enrique Chagoya, he is interested in themes of justice and access. While he uses all print tools available-from
intaglio, lithography, web based art,
video and computer manipulations-Kolbo's
application of multiple media never gets in the
way of his ideas, his loose lines, and careful rendering. He creates slightly mysterious, usually provocative, narratives that retain an uncanny visual grace. Ordinary people in awkward situations share the picture plane with advertising icons and biblical figures. Mixing his visual metaphors grandly, he raises unsettling questions about what he describes as "our media-soaked, self-absorbed culture."
Allie Kurtz Vogt produces the most autobiographical
work of all the artists here. She re-
ceived her MFA from Colorado State University and is currently represented by the Chris Kraisler Gallery in Sandpoint, Idaho. Conceptually, Kurtz Vogt has long focused on rituals in her work, gathering objects and reconfiguring them into actual altars. Citing her Catholic childhood as a source of inspiration for this, she describes collecting as central to her working process. She emphasizes that it is small observations, such as "the curve of a chair leg, or the pose my dog takes," that give her ideas, and that reassembling these fragmented personal records is what informs her work both conceptually and actually. The results, whether it is her small pastels, her paintings, or the large installation seen at the Chase Gallery this past fall, are inevitably marked by complicated symmetry and brilliant color. Kurtz Vogt sees the time frame of this project with its two-week schedule as a challenge. She is doing some preparatory drawings, arranging visual ideas in her studio, but also very much wants to respond "to the immediacy of the space ... " adding, "Of course it will have color."
Kay O'Rourke has built a reputation in the Inland Northwest for her loose, painterly scenes of people, animals, and lush vegetation. Educated at the University of Washington as well
as Gonzaga University, she exhibits regularly with the Lorinda Knight Gallery in Spokane. Strongly influenced by myths and folktales, she points out that the things of every day life take on magic and become mythical. One sees that in her paintings, where beautifully drawn gardens and domestic scenes are undercut with intimations of fantasy, often as disturbing as they are alluring. O'Rourke sees herself as a storyteller, stating "I like to ... take a story that interests me and push it in all different media." In addition to her painting, O'Rourke is also a sculptor. A number of years ago she developed an alternate persona, Wake Robin, to claim authorship for these works. In 1997, O'RourkelWake
Robin won an award at the
Bellevue Arts Fair in Washington. Reflectively, O'Rourke describes the process of working in different media, separated by an alter ego, "I think this did several things. For one, it made me a better artist, [but] it also took on other meanings. It's like being a kid, being able to play with toys-it
gave me an opportunity to make an entirely new environment for myself."
Of the five artists here, Bradd Skubinna's work is arguably the most abstract, the least referential to external ideas and motifs. Skubinna's work typically focuses inward, directing our attention to its materials and his working style. Originally from Spokane, Skubinna spent a number of his adult years living first in Seattle and later in New York City where he received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Represented by the Lorinda Knight Gallery locally and by Francine Seders in Seattle, his work is a contemporary form of minimalism. Constructed with acute attention to detail and pattern, initially it has an ephemeral, fragile appearance. The Oregonian art critic Jonathan Raymond compared Skubinna's light touch to the "warm whispering voice [of the late] Gonzales-Torres." Skubinna, like Felix GonzalesTorres, Wolfgang Laib, and others, makes art that creates a sense of quietude. Using scraps
of plastic bags, bits of cellophane, discarded envelopes, or tape, he carefully, painstakingly transforms this refuse into unlikely elegant sculptures, tapestries, and tableaus. Skubinna works with materials that would be considered detritus in anyone else's hands. Part of a rising tide of artists, Skubinna's work reclaims formerly discarded notions of beauty and decoration and renders them both moving and relevant.
There is something enormously satisfying about this project. Although not unique (it has historical precedents in exhibitions by artists such as Jim Dine, Sol Le Witt, GRONK, and others), it nevertheless remains an idea antithetical to traditional museum practice. Instead of curating specific, already completed works, this time the museum privileges what artists actually do. There is an element of trust that the works will be successful, but even more startling for museums (with their habit of archiving and collecting), is, that at the end of this exhibit, like rabbits returning to a magician's hat, the artists' efforts will be painted over and returned to their former status as simple gallery walls. That this is done for us, the public to witness, and that the work is not designated as a commodity for later trade, sale or collections, places it into the category of performance. It is a performance piece based on the most fundamental studio practice: artists making marks and exploring ideas. Frances Oe Vuono Contributing Editor, Artweek, Professor of Art, EWU, and artist.
This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2003-2004 ŠJundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258-0001.