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 […]
Art Beat
Artists, galleries, museums, arts nights and shows around the county.
Posted inArts + Scene
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 […]
Posted inArts + Scene
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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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 […]
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The Dirty Canteen
A ceramic mug rests in an anonymous space on a flat white surface. The mug inhabits the shot. We get to eyeball its glazed surface for approximately 1.5 seconds before it explodes. A different cup reappears in the same spot. The sequence repeats again and again in Marine veteran and ceramicist Ehren Tool’s 2007 video, […]
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Put a Bird on It
Sometimes pictures draw us in for reasons that are hard to explain. The unthinking attraction they induce is sort of like what Liz Lemon on 30 Rock was describing when she said: “I want to go to there.” Ken Burton’s full-frontal photograph of an Anna’s hummingbird is like that. It compels attention, even glimpsed in […]
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What Lies Beneath
“Turf Spiral” occupies the front room of Humboldt-based land artist Becky Evans’ new show Water Lines at Piante Gallery. It makes an impression there — it’s not what you expect to see, this mute obdurate hillock in the middle of gallery space, rolled inside out with its brown earth crust on display. The human concept […]
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Ocean Views
In McWay Rocks Big Sur (2013), we view the scene from on high — lean in and a twinge of vertigo might seize you. The diagonally oriented composition yields a striking contrast. The looming headland, with its cloud-like formations of low shrubbery rendered in a wiggly violet line, is balanced by its paired expanse of […]
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24-hour Arty People
This solstice, 24 Eureka photographers came together to document the day’s passage for 24 Hours, 24 Photographers. Humboldt State University photojournalism professor (and freelance photographer for the Journal) Mark Larson, who organized the project, invited each photographer to shoot during a prearranged hour-long time slot. Any type of film, digital camera, and/or lighting was permissible […]