Lack of dedicated exhibition space poses a challenge for area artists, particularly students and recent grads. In the case of Humboldt State University photography students Elijah Howe and Jake Langston, deficit became a spur to creativity. In search of a space where their work could be seen, Howe and Langston founded a new photography journal […]
Art Beat
Artists, galleries, museums, arts nights and shows around the county.
Posted inArts + Scene
Salt: Emily Silver and Holly Sepulveda
Since it opened on F Street last year, the nonprofit gallery Canvas + Clay has been staging exhibitions that approach arts programming in novel ways. Canvas + Clay is affiliated with the Eureka Studio, a fine arts center for people with developmental disabilities and the gallery’s two-person exhibitions pair studio-affiliated artists with established locals. Salt, […]
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Art for the Commute
This time of year, as many of us migrate to or from our points of origin, it’s time to consider Arcata’s biggest, newest and most noteworthy piece of public art about the experience of transit: the 256-foot-long, 27-foot-tall painting by Lucas Thornton, “Marvelous Mural of Marbled Murrelets,” sweeping across two sides of the Arcata Bay […]
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Dazzling Camouflage
The new year at Black Faun Gallery in Eureka begins auspiciously with Dazzle Shjips, a solo exhibition featuring sculpture, film projections and two-dimensional works by North Coast artist Benjamin Funke. The show offers up an abundance of recent sculptural pieces featuring Funke’s recent experimentation with new materials. The exhibition title Dazzle Shjips alludes to the […]
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Our Town
The plein-air paintings in the All Things Arcata exhibition hold up a mirror to the city of Arcata, and the city looks good in this light. There can’t have been many occasions on which the streetscapes of a town of 18,000 have been so lovingly, meticulously documented. In plein-air (“open-air”) painting, popularized by the Impressionists’ […]
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The Basket and the Blade
I have reiterated tendencies, certain go-to forms,” Robert Benson said. “It’s like with any artist: You get caught up in your own style. With me, it’s the tension between angles and curves.” The trope has been evident “forever” in art made by Indigenous people of far northwestern California, as Benson, a Tsnung’we elder, observed. In […]
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Ultra Marine
Multimedia artist Jessie Vala transformed Humboldt State University’s Reese Bullen Gallery for her new exhibition, turning the white cube into a blue sculpture grotto. The Eugene, Oregon-based Vala replaced the usual gallery spotlights with blue lamps, bathing viewers in azure light for an oddly calming effect. The marine implications of all this blueness are reinforced […]
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Joan Gold’s Dark Materials
Approaching Joan Gold’s installation of paintings at Black Faun Gallery is like walking into an animated conversation. The walls seem to dissolve into vibrating pattern. Fifty-eight tall, modular paintings on paper feature superimposed registers framing all-over fields of explosive, dancing pattern. Short, rounded, color-laden brushstrokes gyrate in formation like synchronized swimmers. Brushstrokes are layered, so […]
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Room for the Missing
This month Humboldt State University’s Gou’dini Gallery hosts Sing Our Rivers Red, a traveling exhibition that seeks to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women across North America. Organized by a group of 10 artists calling themselves the SORR Collective and sponsored by groups at institutions, including North Dakota State University, […]
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El Maestro en Reposo
In paintings by Anthony “Tony” Machado, people, objects and images from global cultures collide. A young African woman dressed in traditional robes and jewelry stands expressionless in the foreground of one work while a trio of African drummers play. Someone in a furry costume patched in from a different photographic source dances ecstatically nearby. Meanwhile, […]
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Back to Reese Bullen
Maybe geography is destiny. At any rate, the natural world remains a touchstone for Humboldt State University artists: Natural places and their wild inhabitants figure repeatedly in HSU’s new faculty and staff exhibition, which opens this week. Examples range from the inhabited landscapes in Dave Woody’s fine-grained photographs to a tiny cormorant portrait by illustrator […]
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The Figure in Balance
Balance has got a couple of meanings,” Steven Vander Meer remarked, regarding the drawings he had made. “Bodies balance. Stones balance. And there’s another kind of balance in these compositions.” Vander Meer’s new show at Piante Gallery explores balance from multiple angles. A polygonal sandbox hosts precarious looking stacks of vertically balanced stones. Figure drawings […]