Frowny-face graffiti sprouted all over Eureka and Arcata last month. The message was a buzzkill, but anyone could admire the economy of the streamlined bummer emoticon: two vertical slashes of spray paint over a judgmental upside-down banana curve. The effect was striking — suddenly the city thronged with this silent chorus of bad attitude, so […]
Black Faun Gallery
Posted inArts + Scene
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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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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Art in the Streets
Stock Schlueter dips his paintbrush in a deep forest green and pit-pats leaves onto a tree in the far-right corner of his painting in Opera Alley. His piece is an ode to a spot along Madden Creek he’s grown fond of. Beginning Aug. 11, more than 20 local and visiting artists transformed walls along Opera […]
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Laura Corsiglia’s Interior Landscapes
Where do pictures come from? Laura Corsiglia’s paintings proceed as directly as possible from the subconscious — the part of the mind that exists outside the grasp of the self and that we only perceive in those infrequent moments when it breaches the surface of waking life via Freudian slips and fragments of remembered dreams. […]
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Gimme Shelter
Lori Goodman’s new installation centers on two large, contoured forms that protrude from the wall. These vaguely tent-like structures are spaced so that they almost touch at their shared boundary. Their rugged surfaces are fashioned from handmade, hand-dyed paper dressed over flexible armatures, the material Goodman has long favored for her constructions. Scale lends these […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Perfect Fall Trips
Winter is coming … but activities still abound. Get fired up in front of old outdoor hearths surrounded by ducks and redwoods. Fuel up where young royals dine and old whalers pick perfect crab. Or feast your eyes on Yurok art and color saturated murals. Afterward, two trip trifectas await. On the Humboldt State University […]
Posted inPerfect Trips
Perfect Fall Trips
Winter is coming … but activities still abound. Get fired up in front of old outdoor hearths surrounded by ducks and redwoods. Fuel up where young royals dine and old whalers pick perfect crab. Or feast your eyes on Yurok art and color saturated murals. Afterward, two trip trifectas await. On the Humboldt State University […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Painting on the Wall
The lift parked in the alley behind the DePaul Building is down low enough for Duncan Jago to chat. The Bristol artist’s black pants are spattered with the same pink, lavender and aqua paints he and assistant Joe Murdter have been putting up on the building’s south wall, just across the street from the mural […]
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The Faraway Nearby
Old Town Eureka twanged with the shock of the new last week when street artist Dan Kitchener unveiled an enormous new mural in its midst, the first to grace the city in several years. “Electric-City” is executed entirely in freehand spray paint on the east side of the Buhne Building at the corner of G […]
Posted inPerfect Trips
Perfect Spring Trips
How better to start a cultural exploration than an inspirational pilgrimage, whether to a monastery with water colorists or a writer’s hideout on the Lost Coast? For the visualists, art walks and open studios abound in Humboldt, known as one of Northern California’s art meccas. Kids can follow the slime trail of SpongeBob Squarepants’ creator […]
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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 […]