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,
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
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 (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
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
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
Shop: www.theislandgallery.net/shop
Blog:
www.theislandgallery-artblog.blogspot.com
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http://www.facebook.com/The-Island-Gallery-114673935258715/
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GALLERY HOURS
Tuesdays - Saturdays 11:00
– 6:00 pm
Sundays Noon – 5:00 pm
Closed Mondays
