Guest Artist
Classes Family Day: Origami Creatures with Mitsuru Brandon
Storytelling Through Collage with Vicki Fish
Tue, Wed, Thu, Jan 25–27, 5:30–8:30pm $200 / $250 nonmembers $25 supply fee The Center, Hailey Registration deadline: Tue, Jan 11 Karen Jacobsen will present an introduction to the rendering techniques and style of scientific illustration. In this kind of illustration, learning to draw is learning to see. Participants will work on observational skills and interpreting subjects with a discriminating eye. Students will experiment with a variety of media, working in black and white, as well as color, improving personal drawing skills while working with biological subject matter.
Teen Workshop: An Introduction to Scientific Illustration with Karen Jacobsen
Jan 14 – Mar 12, 2011 Sun Valley Center for the Arts Fantastical creatures have occupied the human imagination for thousands of years. Gorgons, the Minotaur and Cyclops all played central roles
Mar – 4 1 Jan
in Greek myths. In the middle ages and early Renaissance, as Europeans began to explore the world beyond their continent, stories and images of monstrous beasts filled maps and books. Our interest in legendary beasts didn’t end with the advent of the modern era. In fact the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a boom in reports of “cryptids,” creatures whose existence has been reported but unconfirmed by the scientific community, like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or Sasquatch, Yeti and Chupacabra. While true believers insist on the existence of creatures that most dismiss as fantasy, scientists continue to identify new species of plants, animals and insects, discovering specimens we never knew existed. Some of these are so unusual that it can be hard to believe they are real. This multidisciplinary project explores the defy our common understanding of the natural world. We hope to get at both the universal questions about legendary creatures and how we project our fears, anxieties and fantasies onto them, as well as more local issues: habitat, biodiversity, the interdependence of species.
NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION U S POSTAGE
role of creatures both legendary and real that
PAID
Sat, Feb 12, 12–4pm $10 pre-registration required The Center, Hailey Registration deadline: Fri, Jan 28 This one-day student workshop will introduce observational techniques and scientific illustration, where learning to draw is learning to see. Students will explore perspective, light and shadow, value, rhythm and pattern, and how best to present the subject matter.
t o o f g i B m Fro e h t to rab C i t e Y 11 12, 20
BOISE ID PERMIT NO. 679
Thu & Fri, Feb 10 & 11, 10am–4pm $150 / $200 nonmembers The Center, Hailey Registration deadline: Thu, Jan 27 Create your own fantastical creature in this mixed media workshop where we will explore the ideas of transformational myths and personal storytelling. Students will combine collage, drawing materials, gesso, paint, transfers and found objects to transform an old photograph into a work of art where the subject is part human/part animal. Topics to be discussed include selection of materials, transfers, integration of materials, adhesives, and creative ways to attach found objects. Instruction will include demos and lots of hands-on time with personal attention.
Combining Art and Science: An Introduction to Scientific Illustration with Karen Jacobsen
From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab
Sun Valley Center for the Arts P O Box 656 Sun Valley, ID 83353
Sat, Jan 22, 3–5pm The Center, Ketchum FREE Origami is the traditional Japanese folk art of paper folding. Join Mitsuru Brandon as she teaches families how to transform these delicate pieces of paper into real and mythical creatures inspired by Creatures: From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab. Families will bring their paper creations home while also taking with them basic paper folding techniques for future paper creations.
Naturalist and illustrator Karen Jacobsen captures creatures most people can only imagine. She was the first person to record the yeti crab and is among a select few who have viewed deep ocean vents from a tiny submersible. While her illustrations are included in the Ketchum exhibition, Karen will lead a teacher workshop addressing new ways to integrate science into classrooms, an observational drawing class with adult artists and a drawing workshop for middle and high school students.
Visual Arts Hailey
Lectures
Film
Richard A. Young: The Godzilla Series
Roland Smith
Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie
Thu, Jan 13, 6:30pm The Center, Ketchum Free Smith is the award-winning author of the Cryptid Hunters series of young adult books. His work is widely read and taught within the Wood River Valley. In the series, two teenagers are sent to live with their uncle, an anthropologist who has dedicated his life to finding cryptids, mysterious creatures believed to be long extinct. These exciting stories, in the spirit of Tarzan of the Apes, follow the kids on adventures around the world as they search for mysterious creatures.
Thu, Jan 20, 6:30pm The Center, Ketchum Free Jay Delaney’s 2006 documentary about two Bigfoot researchers provides a look at the trials and triumphs of life in the Appalachian foothills. Through the experiences of Dallas and Wayne, two amateur Bigfoot researchers in southern Ohio, we see how the power of a dream can bring two men together in friendship and provide hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town.
Jan 21 – Mar 25 The Center, Hailey, hosts a solo exhibition of Richard A. Young’s Godzilla paintings, a selection of which will also be in the Ketchum exhibition. Young places Godzilla in settings that evoke landscape paintings by Hudson River School painters like Frederic Edwin Church or Thomas Cole. Marrying classical painting technique with 20th-century popular culture, Young’s Godzilla paintings offer amusing insights into our preoccupation with monsters and legends.
Creature from the Black Lagoon a part of the Ketchum Cinema Club Sun, Jan 23, 2:30pm Magic Lantern Cinema, Ketchum
Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum
Visual Arts Ketchum Scott Fife makes sculptures and paintings on p aper of both real creatures that have become legend and mythic ones. He pairs, for example, paintings and life-sized sculptures of Tyrannosaurus Rex skulls with the imagined head of a werewolf. Fife’s artwork explores the role creatures play in popular culture and how we use them to define ourselves. Matthew Groves’ sculptures of figures like the Sasquatch and the Wooly Man (a creature of his own invention) are finely crafted ceramic artworks. Groves’ attention to detail seems incongruous given his subject matter; he gives his works a high polish appropriate to fine china. He sees the creatures he portrays, however, not as the stuff of popular culture but as symbolic for larger ideas about our separation from nature, our attitudes towards immigrants, and our general fear of the other. KAREN JACOBSEN is a scientific illustrator who works alongside marine biologists to document the sea life they encounter on deep sea expeditions. She works on ships and in submersibles creating images directly from live specimens, some newly discovered. From sea cucumbers to the
yeti crab, she depicts creatures with biological structures that seem the stuff of science fiction despite the fact that they are very real inhabitants of our world. Stephanie Metz makes needle-felted wool sculptures she calls Amorphozoa, animals without mouths or internal organs, like sponges. Her irregularly shaped sculptures look soft and cuddly but may possibly be prickly or dangerous. Metz’s sculptures get at the ambivalence we feel toward animals that may or may not exist: our fear of beasts and our desire to believe that they are in fact real. Megan Whitmarsh uses fabric and embroidery to create images drawn from late-1970s video games and early computer graphics. Blending handicraft, technology and nostalgia for the era that produced Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of, a show that often featured legendary monsters, Whitmarsh makes art in which disco dancers and lasers meet Bigfoot and Yetis. Her work explores the integration of fantastical creatures into our popular culture and how we have taken something imaginary and given it a kind of reality. Richard A. Young has created an entire
body of work devoted to Godzilla. Made with a dry sense of humor, these paintings pair classic interpretations of the American landscape with a creature created by the Japanese and quickly adopted into American popular culture.
Opening Celebration Fri, Jan 14, 5:30–7pm Free at The Center, Ketchum Join us for the opening of Creatures: From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab! Artists Karen Jacobsen and Richard A. Young will speak about their work at 6pm.
Evening Exhibition Tours Thu, Jan 20 and Thu, Feb 17, 5:30pm Free at The Center, Ketchum Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour Creatures with The Center’s curators and gallery guides.
Gallery Walk Fri, Feb 18 and Fri, Mar 11, 5–8pm Free at The Center, Ketchum Enjoy a glass of wine as you view the exhibition.
Free Exhibition Tours Tue, Feb 22, 2pm and by arrangement Free at The Center, Ketchum Trained gallery guides offer insights into the artwork on display in free tours of our exhibitions. Favor de llamar al Centro de las Artes para arreglar visitas guiadas en español.
Images exterior right to left: Karen Jacobsen, “Ika” Gonatus sp. Squid, Sagami Bay, Japan, 2006, courtesy the artist; Stephanie Metz, Amorphozoa #3, 2009, courtesy the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, New York and San Francisco; Matthew Groves, Wooly Man (Bennington Type), 2008, courtesy the artist. Images interior left to right: Scott Fife, Wer Wulf, 2007, courtesy the artist and Platform Gallery, Seattle, photo ©Mark Davison, 2009; Megan Whitmarsh, Shining Mountain (detail), 2010, courtesy the artist and Michael Rosenthal Gallery, San Francisco; Richard A. Young, Disturbance in Echoville 1, 2008, courtesy the artist.
Thu, Feb 10, 6:30pm The Center, Ketchum Free Meldrum is an Associate Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology and Adjunct Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology at Idaho State University. He is also Adjunct Professor of Occupational and Physical Therapy and Affiliate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. He has discovered several extinct species and published widely on the evolutionary history of South American primates. However, his recent studies have shifted to the study of footprints left by an unrecognized North American ape. His expertise on foot morphology and locomotion in monkeys, apes and hominids brings a level of scientific inquiry to the search of Bigfoot that is new. He is the author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, a companion volume to the Discovery Channel documentary of the same name. He is considered by many to be the nation’s leading expert on Sasquatch.
King Kong a part of the Ketchum Cinema Club Sun, Feb 13, 2:30pm Magic Lantern Cinema, Ketchum
Center Hours & Location in Ketchum: M–F 9am–5pm, Sats in Feb & Mar 11am–5pm 191 Fifth Street East, Ketchum, Idaho Center Hours & Location in Hailey: W–F 2–6pm 314 Second Ave. S, Hailey, Idaho 208.726.9491 www.sunvalleycenter.org