Stretching. Clay Burnette, artist
By Natasha Anderson
Blue Spiral 1 hosts four new exhibits opening Friday, July 7, and running through August 23. In the Main Level Gallery, Summer Salon features artists working in a broad range of styles and mediums including glass, paint, collage, basketry, metal and mixed media sculpture. The viewer is invited to celebrate the artists’ various styles, techniques and concepts explored within their latest works.
Examples include Clay Burnette’s colorful, free-form pine needle baskets and Andrew Hayes’ sculpture, which balances the interplay between paper and steel.
“My works explore shape, texture, color and the relationships to paper and steel in our lives,” says Hayes. “I look to find a harmony between the two materials, allowing the viewer to appreciate them as a unified whole.”
Other participating artists include Alex Bernstein, Robert Burch, Thomas Campbell, Isaac Payne, Jeremy Russell and Jon Sours.
Searcher. Rickie Barnett, artist
The Small Format Gallery features Akiko Sugiyama: Paper Play. Sugiyama, who was born and raised in Japanese culture, manipulates painted rice or parchment paper. She rolls, folds, cones, curls, crushes, pierces, cuts or rends the paper to create compositions that highlight the endless possibilities of the versatile medium. The materials and detail in her work are a study in perfection, both delicate and spiritual, while they also exhibit elements of Western expressiveness.
“The magic of the forms and colors of the semi-tropical plants that flourish around my home stir the impulse to play with variations of what starts as a simple flat sheet of paper,” says Sugiyama.
In the lower level gallery, Ambidextrous showcases works by Eleanor Annand, Rickie Barnett, Casey Engel, Lynne Hobaica, Julian Jamaal Jones, Christopher Kerr-Ayer, Yoonmi Nam and Corey Pemberton. Each artist possesses an ability to explore multiple mediums with dexterity; one maker simultaneously works with clay and fiber, another concurrently explores glass and painting, while another investigates printmaking and three-dimensional still lifes. As these artists oscillate between different mediums, it becomes clear that their synchronized creative processes set out to inspire and enhance one another.
Keeping. Yoonmi Nam, artist
The Showcase Gallery houses Julyan Davis: American Ghosts with ceramics by Matt Repsher. American Ghosts combines Davis’ lifetime of painting the vanishing American landscape with his storytelling skills as a novelist. Following in the tradition of fellow British artist William Hogarth of A Rake’s Progress, Davis presents three characters as they travel westward during the Gold Rush. Betsy, the pioneer; Belle, the jilted Civil War belle; and Nancy, the strongwoman from a dustbowl circus, begin their journey across the palimpsest of America’s past, their paths meeting again and again.
“As with my novel, I use gentle humor throughout American Ghosts: a trick I learned to balance an underlying sadness in my work,” says Davis.
The story of land, people, hope and discovery is not told sequentially: the paintings jump back and forth, responding to each other. Davis lets the characters drive the plot of the paintings, much as in his fiction.
The exhibition also features ceramic vessels by Santa Fe artist Matt Repsher.
Learn more at BlueSpiral1.com.
