Drawn to the Wall III

It has been six years since Director/Curator

Scott Patnode first developed the idea of having regional

artists use the walls of the Jundt Art Museum as a drawing surface.

Initially it was a clever and loaded

curatorial idea, but, with the passage of time, it has become something more -

an important triennial

celebration of what some of the area's best visual artists do. In addition, by limiting each artist to a drawing, the exhibition extends and highlights the Jundt Art Museum's well-known collection of drawings and prints.

Yet these Drawn to the Wall exhibitions are unique in that each work is created in situ,

specifically for the exhibition, and destroyed afterwards, raising questions about the idea of archiving itself.

Just as the artist, Ed Keinholz, renowned for his room sized tableaus, termed the rather complicated sculptures assumption

that acted as inspiration for his larger work, "drawings," Patnode makes the unspoken that all artists "draw."

As in past years, Patnode asked five accomplished

artists

from a variety of disciplines to work in the gallery on one eleven and a half foot by eight foot panel each.

The pieces will be completed

over a two-week period.

Few stipulations

are given, except

that after the exhibition is finished, the drawing is finished and each panel repainted gallery white.

Gina

Freuen

is

known

for

her

ceramic

sculpture

which

has

been

shown

throughout Washington State, California, Oregon, Kentucky, North Carolina (where

in

exhibitions

she received a

NICHE award) and elsewhere. Like Ken Price or Ron Nagel who built their careers on ceramic sculpture set in deliberate dialogue with the traditional vessel, Freuen uses the teapot as a starting point or a parameter. She then loads each piece with beautiful glazes and various coli aged elements, and lets

the body of the pot morph into alarming proportions,

effectively changing each from a symbol

domesticity into something wilder, funnier, and more psychologically sculpture, Freuen has always made drawings.

subterranean.

Freuen has incorporated

photography

In addition to her

Large and loose, their lines compliment

of her ceramic work but are usually rendered in black, white, and gray or beige. and digital technologies

experimenting with collage, both actual and on the computer.

of

the curves

In recent years,

into these two-dimensional

These pieces are complex.

works,

A pastiche

of imagery, they carry a psychic weight that differs from the quick, quirky humor of her sculpture, yet they never lose the graceful sense of form and composition that is key to both bodies of her work.

Michelle Forsyth received her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and came to the USA, obtaining her MFA from Rutgers University. recently awarded an Artist-in-Residence

Recipient of several Canadian Council awards, she was

at the University of Southern Maine for Spring 2009 and an

Artist Trust GAP grant. While her primary medium is painting, Forsyth is decidedly a conceptual artist.

The youngest of the five artists, she has already developed several strong series on public violence using media images or photographs as a starting point. What sets her use of the photograph apart from others is how she manipulates it to change its initial effect.

First, Forsyth isolates a small part of the

original photograph and then deconstructs that image in actual terms by breaking it down to its smallest component, sometimes, tiny squares, sometimes little pixels or star bursts. These thousands of shapes are either painted in brilliant color or cut out of paper or felt and attached to the surface of the wall with pins. The artist states that these painstaking processes are a reaction against contemporary

apathy

•

toward media images of suffering. She wants to "make surfaces that are tactile and intimate so that the viewer gets caught up in [the pictures] ...." The end result is pleasurable and confrontational

in equal

measure. As soon as the beauty of these isolated bits of color is asserted, we realize that the original intent of the image has been stunted.

Kevin Haas, who received a BFA from the Chicago Art Institute, an MFA from Indiana University, and studied at the Tamarind Institute, comes from a printmaking background.

Like Forsyth, Haas is a young

artist who works easily with digital images and video yet also has an affinity for traditional media, and his approach is as conceptual and exacting as hers. He may photograph images through glass, or photograph video images, or re-photograph photographs themselves.

In his series Chicago Scribed, Haas used the

scratched and often dirty plexiglass found in public transit shelters as a filter for his photographs of the city. The results are loose but careful, as the scratches themselves turn into calligraphic marks over the decaying urban image.

Haas claims that his "work deals with memory, movement, presence, and

perception in the urban landscape." And there is a tinge of deliberate nostalgia, not only in his subject matter but also in how he marries twenty-first century technologies to older processes.

Scribed was photographed,

Haas chose to print it in photogravure, a mid-nineteenth

After Chicago century process

where transparent images are etched into metal plates. The results are beautiful, old and new, with both photographic detail and lush etched line.

Richard Schindler's work reflects his experiences as both an intellectual and a craftsman in the truest

•

sense of both words.

Upon receiving his MA in painting and drawing from Stanford University, he

was awarded a residency at Roswell Art Center.

After a decade in the Bay Area, he moved to the

Northern Idaho, where he cleared land, milled his own lumber, and built a home by hand.

He points

out that because Nancy and Ed Keinholz lived in the area during the summers, he wasn't completely isolated from art, "There was a touchstone to the outside world and the US." However,

people came from all over Europe

nine years later, Schindler moved to Spokane and began making rough hewn,

but decidedly elegiac sculptures composed of wood, metal, animal skins, and other found objects.

These often enormous pieces have the kind of contemporary Keifer or Julian Schnabel -

a bravura use of coarse materials that ends up suggesting nostalgia or

heroics gone slightly to seed.

Arneson,

Schindler

never

romanticism found in work by Anselm

Like many sculptors from Robert Hudson, to Terry Allen, to Robert

abandoned

the two-dimensional

world and has consistently

produced

paintings and drawings, not only to augment his sculptural pieces but as works in their own right.

Ken Yuhasz' work, while differing from Schindler's in material and style, shares certain sensibilities and influences from West Coast 1970s assemblage, to Bay Area funk, to pop art. In Yuhasz' case, this turns into a kind of easy populism which is obviously genuine and reflected in his background. The artist grew up outside of Los Angeles and began his career as a draftsman for architects and manufacturing, eventually ending up as an art director for the Appaloosa Journal in Idaho during the early 1980s. He became frustrated with the changes in design technologies, how, in his words, "the work wasn't in my hands; it was in someone else's hands or a computer." In order to reconnect with manual processes, and under the influence of neon artist George Ray, Yuhasz began making neon signs. He went to Portland to

study at the Neon Art School there, and in 1991 he moved to Spokane and opened Acme Glass Works while working at his sculpture.

If Yuhasz has a signature process, it is how he attaches neon to objects

from daily life. If he has a signature style, it is his ability to find fantasy in the everyday world: where a toaster is given propellers and a kerosene lantern, wings.

The pleasure of writing for this exhibition is that after considering each artist's work, there is still no way to imagine how the five walls will look. If a valence of disparate talent creates a strong show, this one will do that. If there is something else short amount of time -

some magic that happens when five individuals work in one space, in a

we'll see that too. For those of us lucky to be there when it is up, the immediacy

and temporal nature of a Drawn to the Wall exhibition is that it demonstrates what artists actually do, highlighting process and privileging completion over collecting.

Frances DeVuono Frances De Vuono is an artist, Professor of Art, EWU, and contributing editor for Artweek

This publication is funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign, 2007-2008 Š Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-0001