Some artists are world-describers, tirelessly reconfiguring surfaces, objects and spaces to resonate on a particular frequency. That’s how it is with Nancy Tobin, whose installation CRy-Baby is on view through March 1 at College of the Redwoods. Subtitled “A comedic installation exploring the connections between space, past and future selves,” the work delivers. “We’re very […]
Gabrielle Gopinath
Gabrielle Gopinath is a critic who writes about art, place and culture in Northern California. She lives in Arcata. Follow her on Instagram @gabriellegopinath.
Posted inArts + Scene
Truth Units
Working for the past 15 years on the site of the former Synanon cult compound in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Bachrun LoMele has built his art practice into a self-perpetuating exploration of the vexed notion of personal truth. The artist solicits anonymous volunteers to record what they believe to be true statements in privacy. He […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Ruth Arietta’s Illusory Interiors at Morris Graves Museum of Art
Ruth Arietta paints both outdoor and indoor scenes, but it’s the paintings of domestic interiors that showcase the particular strengths of her approach. In these works, densely patterned surfaces negotiate new relationships with the rectilinear volumes set up to contain them. Sometimes they abide within the constraints imposed by floor tiles, window casements, picture frames […]
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You Hurt My Feelings ‘ White Lies
YOU HURT MY FEELINGS. Sometime in the future, a forensic anthropologist trying to understand human society in the year 2023 will wonder how it felt to identify as “bougie” in a world on the brink of collapse. How did people dance on the edge of that abyss? Did they really sublimate the pervasive sense of […]
Posted inNews
Moderne Beauty
Living inside a movie theater is a fantasy many cinephiles have surely entertained, but few have indulged. George M. Mann, builder and original proprietor of the Eureka Theater, was one of the few. Mann worked from the 1920s through the 1940s to build a chain of movie theaters that would eventually span from Klamath Falls […]
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Louis Marak’s Visual Riddles
Louis Marak’s illusionistic ceramics stretch the capacities of clay in unexpected ways. Fired ceramic slabs become surfaces to draw and paint upon. Images are full of illogical juxtapositions. Even when this is not the case, the way the pieces play at being both objects and images yields surreal results. Glazed bowls, reliefs and ceramic slabs […]
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No Spectators at Outer Roominations
Outer Roominations, Humboldt’s first outdoor, time- and site-sensitive art festival, took place on a Memorial Day that started out cool and shadowless. By midmorning, Table Bluff remained overcast in shades of gray and green, foliage draped in dewdrops. On a hillside meadow, people who’d made the drive wandered in pairs and small groups. Apart from […]
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Mapping Seven Artists, Seven Paths
The exhibition Seven Artists, Seven Paths is back. The exhibition reopens this week at the Morris Graves Museum of Art after a months-long virtual interlude due to pandemic restrictions on social gathering. The seven Humboldt artists whose work it features — Leslie Anderson, Becky Evans, Mimi LaPlant, Sanderson Morgan, John Pound, Emily Silver and Karen […]
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Grace under Fire
Artist and blacksmith Monica Coyne works in steel and her sculptures are riddled with reminders of the forge. That’s enough to make them strange. We’re used to thinking of steel as a substance that comes in identical prefab units, from I-beams and girders at construction sites to the machine-finished tools hanging on the wall at […]
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History and Mystery
Zooming from London, W.E. Roberts said of his new novel The Rivers, which is set in Humboldt County, “The book was written because I’m an actor, because I like a good story and I thought there was a story there,” Roberts explained, leaning forward into the screen. “I’m really an actor who came to writing […]
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Public Art as Community Care
The Eureka Street Art Festival galvanized the Henderson Center neighborhood with new visions and unfamiliar words. Quarantine kept the focus of this year’s renewal local, which presented an opportunity for organizers to assemble an eclectic group of local visual artists and poets. The 12 new murals and eight poetry installations they produced over the course […]
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Beats from the Underground
The artist known as Knox the Dog just dropped a mixtape tailored to sync with the 1988 sci-fi epic Akira and it could scarcely arrive at a better time. Anime and electronica fans have been starved for diversion since the pandemic hit, and Knox’s new release, Akita, brings the sustenance they crave. Akira, the landmark […]