December 2008

DIVA offers six galleries of exciting new works November 25th - December 23rd.

 

Main Gallery: Lind Rees, "Putting Content to Color" an exhibit of tapestries.

 

Artist's statement: "The challenge to depict geometric or figurative imagery within the confines of a restricted palette excites me. The use of a limited number of colors for any tapestry, preferably no more than six yarns has persistent throughout my 40 years of weaving. In general, designs evolve directly from the yarn selection. I make yarn wrappings until I have a combination and a sense of ratio to use for the selected colors and let them dictate the style and the subject matter. It seems a very odd way to develop artwork, but it is how I think, how I visualize. The color interaction defines the imagery."
Gallery 1: Jerry Ross, "The View", oil landscape and cityscape paintings.

 

Artist Statement: I have recently been teaching a plein air class and this has inspired a number of new canvases. Some of the Italian scenes have been completed in the studio from quick oil sketches made in Italy. Some are of the Oregon countryside. My style is intuitive but informed by abstraction and verismo and I Macchiaioli influences although I have always painted with a loose brush and with dramatic chiaroscuro. Increasingly I am paying more attention to decorative aspects of landscape painting, the color harmonies, and the effects of rapidly changing light and atmosphere.

Gallery 2: Vicki Fredricks' recent acrylic paintings, "Sheep Scapes"

 

Artist Statement: This exhibition includes acrylic on canvas paintings of sheep. I paint from life and photographs that I have taken at local sheep farms. I consider the sheep to be my teachers and by studying their gentle and passive ways, I have experienced a deeper more intimate knowing of myself. By sharing these painting with others I hope to inspire and move the viewer to a deeper place and also to bring a smile to their heart as the gaze into the images before them.

Gallery 3: Daniel Heila, digital video and electro-acoustic installation, "Mortal TRIO".

 

Artist Statement: These efforts are largely a response to environment, memory and the  mundane. As a full time father, Heila’s praxis is intimately entwined with the ebb and flow of domesticity.

Gallery 5: LB Goodman, "Salvage: Re-Visions on a Theme of Heavy Metal", a photographic exhibit that explores the hidden modalities of Man's machinery.

 

Artist Statement: When my dear friend Ezra Tishman asked me to accompany him on a jaunt to what he termed the tractor graveyard I grabbed my camera and came along. On that day I discovered the beauty of metal and mud, paint and purpose mixed in sweat and muscle.

 

The salvage yard organization is one of like parts and brands, crankshafts, axles, wheels and transmissions. Within this structure I found too the chance of random pitch. Herein the designs in shape and color emerged to my photographer’s eye. Not unlike close-up patterns of nature, I saw the hidden modalities of Man’s machinery.

 

These are not only salvaged tractor parts. They hold the stories of lives lived in the fields, the harvesting of hopes and dreams along with the foods that feed us. I witnessed the remnants and created my own story.

 

Many thanks to Farmland Tractor Supply in Tangent, Oregon for allowing me to roam.

Members Gallery: Michael Northup, Photography

 

Artist Statement: I have been making photographs with more or less serious intent for some 40 years now.  I've never found it easy or natural to talk about this work because it's never been an intellectual process for me.  Rather, it's been one of a deep esthetic and emotional recognition and a process of selecting the parts of a landscape that represent and concentrate the essence of the whole.
 
These images show variations on themes that have always drawn my attention: water, wind, gravity, light and time. Scales vary from the minute to the vast, but the effects cohere.