David Zdrazil’s gnarled, earth-toned vessels stay close to the ground, while Shannon Sullivan’s sleek ceramic discs cluster like tethered balloons on the gallery walls, pushing back against their own intrinsic weightiness. The Eureka-based ceramics artists, who show new work this month at Humboldt State University’s Third Street Gallery, exhibit, live and work together — they […]
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
Tapping into Wire
Elizabeth Berrien makes sculpture from tensile wire, crimping, twisting and winding silvery filaments around a central void. Her gossamer sculptures take the forms of living things — mostly animals and birds but also, increasingly, abstract natural forces. Berrien’s wire constructions may repeat the shapes of waves or diatoms. Scale can shift: Whales and stags share […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Low Life and High Times
Jesse Wiedel paints moments when the down-home, corn-pone, howl-at-the-moon strain of crazy that burbles beneath the placid surface of Humboldt life rears its head. And he owns the niche. The 17th century genre painter Jan Steen made such a splash with his scenes of household mess that to this day in the Netherlands, any next-level […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Erica Botkin’s Mail Art Valentines
Erica Botkin’s long-running mail art valentine project involves the artist posing for pin-up photographs to be sent through the mail as valentines. The photos feature Botkin posing seductively in attitudes ranging from corny to kittenish to risqué. The dose of zany running through it all testifies subtly to Eureka native Botkin’s affinity for deep Humboldt […]
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Private Icons
A visual journal and a scattering of open letters kick off the Sanctuary’s 2017 exhibition season. Concurrent exhibitions by Luke Forsyth and Molly Schaeffer provide a chance to contemplate the evolution of second-wave feminist catchphrase “the personal is political.” Both artists are prepared to blur the boundary between public and private in some arenas, while […]
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Reality Show
Humboldt State University’s Third Street Gallery takes on the topic of transgender identity with two concurrent exhibitions running through March 5. One features New York-based Lorenzo Triburgo’s photographic portraits of trans men; the other is a collaboration between recent HSU art alums Megan May and Marval A. Rex, artists and romantic partners whose multimedia collaboration […]
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Winter Break Walking Tour
Winter break in a college town is a good time to seek out exhibition spaces that may fly under the radar during busier times. This month, I revisit the art on display at the Humboldt State University Library. Not everyone realizes that paintings, drawings and sculptures mingle with the books that populate the library’s three […]
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Crossing the Tracks
Paul Rickard’s early morning painting expeditions favor the intrepid. “I like to go out painting before dawn,” he told me. “I end up scrambling down past the No Trespassing signs. A lot of times I have to go over and under fences, across railroad trestles … through mudflats, river channels. I’ve encountered quicksand and other […]
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Studio Space
If you missed the annual open studio event at Arcata’s StewART studio spaces last week featured new and in-progress paintings, prints and drawings by Carol Andersen, Joyce Jonté, Patricia Sennott, Laura Corsiglia and Peter Lisle, don’t worry. The artists’ work is available for viewing by appointment through next month. Sennott’s studies of flora and fauna […]
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High Tech, Hands On
Suk Choo Kim’s solo show at Black Faun Gallery represents a reckoning with the past. The large-format photographic images presented here resolve a project that began 40 years ago as a series of Polaroids. Kim learned how to manipulate Polaroids in and around New York City circa 1970, as a photo-obsessed, self-described “flower child” and […]
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All the World’s a Stage
Local author Doug Ingold’s new novel Rosyland is a tautly narrated thriller that uses Shakespeare’s theater metaphor to convey duplicity: “All the world’s a stage.” It’s not a new conceit but it gains something staged afresh in the 1980s among a colorful cast of Bay Area theater professionals, high rollers, drug dealers, cops and lawyers. […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Traditionalist
Artist George Blake has used needles finer than a hair’s breadth to sew brightly colored songbird feathers into intricate patterns. He has strung bows, carved elk antlers into traditional Hupa spoons and shaped second-growth redwood trunks into dugout canoes. The things he makes document moments in a lifelong encounter with the old ways of believing […]