Saturday, July 21, 2018

You're Invited: PROTEST - First Friday Artwalk, August 3, 2018

Throughout history Protest, in its various forms, has been a tool for expressing opinions, thoughts, and disagreements relating to specific events or policies of governments or societal groups.  The great protests of the 1960s are distant memories for some and badges of honor for others, but the twenty-first century has produced a climate that calls up voices to be heard once again.  In this regard, artists and other free-thinking individuals can lead movements and offer their influence to enact change in peaceful but highly visible ways:  through their music, verse, and art.

Presented on these gallery walls are powerful pieces addressing historical social issues that remain unresolved, and are too often quickly forgotten by the larger society.  They offer a stark reminder that while progress is often the province of the activist, in one way or another, at one time or another, we are all called upon to be activists in our own world. 

We invite you to visit downtown Winslow for August's First Friday Artwalk, for a visit with friends, a sip of wine, and to meet the amazing artists who have put their hearts into their work for this exhibition.





August 3 – September 28, 2018

Andrea K. Lawson, Karna McKinney, Jay Taylor
Earnest Thomas, Carletta Carrington Wilson

First Friday Artwalk, August 3rd, 6-8 pm

In Concert on the Plaza:

The Jenny Davis Jazz Quartet

IMAGES SHOWN IN MONTAGE ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT:

Photo credit:  Carletta Carrington Wilson
Leica M Monochrom (Typ 246;); archival pigment prints


About the Show:  

Featuring the work of Andrea K. Lawson (Port Hadlock), Karna McKinney (Bainbridge Island), Jay Taylor (Seattle), Earnest Thomas (Seattle), and Carletta Carrington Wilson (Seattle).

Opening:  First Friday Artwalk, August 3, 6-8 pm. Reception with the artists.  The Jenny Davis Jazz Quartet is in concert on the Plaza.  

Visit the Gallery in person, as well as our extensive Website and Online Shop.


About the Artists:

Andrea K. Lawson (Port Hadlock, Washington): Andrea was born in Hollywood, California and received her BA from the University of California Santa Cruz and her MFA from Parsons The New School of Design, New York City. Her prize winning paintings, drawings and prints have been exhibited across the United States and Europe. A select list of Andrea’s solo and juried exhibits include: The Painting Center, New York, The Cape Museum of Fine Art, Massachussetts, Gallery K, Los Angeles, Ronnebaekshholm Arts & Culture Centre, Denmark, and Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris, France. In Seattle and the Northwest: Washington State Convention Center, The Corridor Gallery, Port Angeles Fine Art Center, Max Grover Gallery, Artisans On Taylor and Northwind Arts Center. 

Using expressive color and freely roving gestural line, I explore wild spaces as well as dense human spaces. I am intrigued by the interaction between the two, such as electric lights twinkling in a wild nightscape. Painting outdoors overlooking the Puget Sound, I paint abstract landscapes with color that is not a copy but is a direct response to my emotion and experience of the changing light on sky and water as the sun moves along its path. Using sketches from dances, and photographs that I take at political marches and parades, I paint the wild magic of community. I create paintings about how human figures can be entangled in nature, struggling to be part of or separate from their/our surrounding environment.

In light of recent political events, an interesting part of Andrea’s life has been the influence of her grandfather. Andrea says that her grandfather’s “story is a reminder to all Americans to vigilantly fight for and preserve our freedom of speech and civil rights.” Andrea remembers visiting her grandparents and hearing the sound of typewriter keys click-clacking from her Grandpa Jack’s office downstairs. Grandpa Jack was John Howard Lawson, the experimental playwright, screenwriter and one of the Hollywood Ten. Inspired by European Theatre, vaudeville and jazz, he wrote socially conscious, experimental plays in the twenties and thirties which broke down the “fourth wall” (separation between audience and stage). In the thirties, he brought his family to Hollywood to write for the screen. His film titles include: Sahara, Blockade, and Algiers, starring Hedy Lamarr and Humphrey Bogart.  Cry Beloved Country is known as one of the first films to portray a non-stereotypical black character and to question Apartheid. Lawson was the first president of the Screen Writers Guild and outspoken, standing up for writer’s rights and the rights of workers everywhere. During the 1950s (a/k/a: the McCarthy Era), Lawson was part of a group of ten well-known writers who were imprisoned for refusing to name names to HUAC (the House on Un-American Activities Committee.) These ten brave men stood up for freedom of speech and went to jail for it. 

My grandfather was blacklisted and never worked again under his own name. This had a huge effect on his life and career and family.

Speaking on her The Wild Magic of Community series:

I first began painting parades after watching The Great and Terrible Beauty parade in Galway,
Andrea K. Lawson, Women's March
Ireland.  When my daughter and I participated in the Women’s March, Seattle 2017, I saw so much energy and creativity in the crowd around me! Wild Magic of Community series explores political marches and parades with the various
characters, costume and bravado that accompany community processions. While staying in a high rise hotel in Chicago, directly across from an office building, I became intrigued by the miniature stories going on in each office space. Informed by the #Me Too movement, my paintings of buildings invite the viewer to become a voyeur and peek inside. These works are concerned with the energizing creativity and activism of communities that leads to positive change in the world. Incorporated in many of these artworks is the mystery and drama of lighted events shining through darkness or dusk.

I apply paint spontaneously from my own reference photographs and composition sketches. Through playful rendering of figures and environment, the paintings have a colorful, theatrical quality, mixing the painterly with the vaudeville. My expressive process has been influenced by 20th Century Action painters and Figurative Expressionists such as Willem De Kooning, Chaim Soutine, Grace Hartigan and James Ensor.

My paintings invite the viewer to participate in and to appreciate the wild magic of their own and other communities around the world.



KarnaMcKinney (Bainbridge Island):   Karna has been a photographer, specializing in science and medical photography, graphic design and visual communications for more than 40 years. She has held staff positions at the University of Michigan, Department of Veterans Affairs, NOAA, and taught Biological Photography at Bellevue Community College. She is a Fellow of the BioCommunications Association and has won numerous awards for her science and fine art images. Karna lives on Bainbridge Island.


Having come of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, the powerful images and news footage of marches
Karna McKinnney, Women's March

and violent protests of that time seemed to define the face of public dissent. Photographing the 2017 Women’s March, 2017 March for Science and the 2018 March for Our Lives in Seattle, it quickly became clear that these marches were quite different from the angry protests of the 1960s, though the diverse issues presented are equally serious. People of all ages marched. Grandpas wearing pussy hats. Families with kids in strollers. People from all walks of life, united by an opportunity to voice their concerns. Many of the signs displayed wit and humor, and some expressed anger. If there was one theme that bound these marches, I felt it was a demand for respect. Respect for women. Respect for the rights of ALL people. Respect for our planet. Respect for science. Respect for our children’s right to attend school without fear. Respect for individuals as opposed to corporations. A demand that our leaders respect our democracy. When the signs are put away, how do we respectfully move forward?


 
Jay Taylor, Unreconciled

Jay Taylor (Seattle, Washington):   Jay was born in Seattle and earned Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Architecture from the University of Washington.  He is currently working as an architect and has been a semi-professional photographer since 2006. 

Jay works with digital photography in a range of subjects including landscapes, nature, architecture and people in the Pacific Northwest. The process he uses to create a number of works he describes as Artography, which is digital photography combined with digital art. It is a form of computer generated collage that he sometimes combines with traditional printmaking media to create unique imagery. The work is printed on high quality fine paper to emphasize a personal artistic approach to photography.

For Unreconciled in our current exhibition, Jay received a second-place award for watercolor painting in the 2017 Truth B Told exhibition at the Onyx Fine Arts Collective in Seattle.  He has exhibited in a number of galleries in Seattle and Portland and has won awards for his work, including second-place in the 2009 Portland Audubon Society’s Raptor Photo Competition, later selected and displayed at the PDML photography exhibition at Chicago’s DANK-HAUS gallery.

During the past several years Jay has been showing work with Onyx Fine Arts Collective and serving on their board.   




Earnest Thomas (Seattle, Washington):  Earnest was born in Texas where he later received an Electrical Engineering degree. He worked for the Boeing Company where he held various engineering and leadership positions. Earnest has a strong interest in art and architecture and has collected ethnic art f rom around the world, the vast majority of his collection coming from Africa. His interest in old African trading beads and a challenge from his wife inspired him to design jewelry utilizing these beads.

Earnest uses his engineering, industrial design and natural artistic sense with the experience gained from designing jewelry to create his 2D and 3D paintings. He typically uses texture, color and shadow to play together in his images. His artwork ranges from organic to modern architectural in nature while utilizing a mixture of repurposed materials.

Earnest Thomas, Turbulent Times

Earnest is also president of Onyx Fine Arts Collective and manager of Gallery Onyx in Seattle. Both are non-profit organizations whose mission is to challenge the perception of “black art” by showcasing visual artwork of artists of African ancestry created in a wide variety of mediums and featuring subjects which represent a wide spectrum of the Afrocentric experience. Onyx seeks to add to the rich cultural diverse landscape of the Pacific Northwest by celebrating commonalities and differences through visual art. 

CarlettaCarrington Wilson (Seattle, Washington):  Seattle artist Carletta Carrington Wilson fuses literary and visual works around a central iconic theme.  Textiles, text, found objects, beads and paper enhance, highlight, infer and interrogate an image and the ideas it presents and portrays.

A native of Philadelphia, Carletta’s work can be found in the Book Art Collections of the University of Washington, University of Puget Sound, the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, and the Judith A. Hoffberg Collection of Artists’ Books at UCLA.  She has exhibited at ArtXchange Gallery, Gallery 110, the Northwest African American Museum, Coalition Art Gallery, Gallery Rene, Columbia City Art Gallery, Onyx Fine Arts Exhibition, University of Puget Sound, Seward Park Audubon Center, Festival Sundiata, Richland Washington Public Library, and North Seattle Community College Art Gallery. Her literary works, including poetry, fiction and essays have been published widely. In 2011 she was artist in residence at the James W. Washington Foundation. 

The Chain Letter of Debtors is an interactive installation. This piece is part of the series, Book of the
Carletta Carrington Wilson, Chain Letter of Debtors
Bound
, which was first exhibited at the Northwest African American Museum in 2012-2013. The work invites the viewer to write a “letter” on a paper link to thank enslaved people for their contribution in the building of this nation, the Americas and throughout the world.  Each letter forms a link in a chain, a ghost chain, emblematic of the hold, unseen, yet fastening us to the everlasting past that lives in this very present day and time.

Carletta’s mixed-media collages have been described as “decorative with a message.”  Textiles, found objects, beads and paper revolve around a central iconic image.  These elements serve the purpose of enhancing, highlighting, inferring and interrogating the image and the ideas it presents and portrays.

Language is a visual medium, one by which form, shape and color inform an eye and shape a mind. Through the lens of history, I visit and revisit the role language has played in the creation of a past and the scripting of the future.


About The Island Gallery

Established in 2002, The Island Gallery features internationally recognized artists whose work takes traditional art  forms in exciting new directions:  studio furniture and sculpture;  museum quality textile art  and wearables; wood fired ceramics from the finest potters in America; paintings and prints; and unique jewelry creations. Monthly exhibitions include live musical concerts, featuring such genres as jazz, rock, folk, chamber music and performance art.  This, along with its reputation for excellence, makes The Island Gallery a destination spot on beautiful Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, and steps from the new Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.  In 2017 we celebrated 15 years of collaboration with unique and talented artists from near and far.


Event Location/Contacts/Visit:

The Island Gallery, 400 Winslow Way E, #120, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Underground parking is available at The Winslow off Ericksen Avenue.


Web site:  www.theislandgallery.net
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GALLERY HOURS
Tuesdays - Saturdays 11:00 – 6:00 pm
Sundays Noon – 5:00 pm
Closed Mondays