“Wordless Stories,” a group exhibition featuring evocative works that invite the viewer to explore their underlying personal narratives, opens Saturday at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner.
Also opening is “Poetic Intentions,” a glass installation.
Meet the artists at a reception from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday.
| Exhibits open Saturday at the Museum of Northwest Art, 121 S. First St., La Conner.
Meet the artists: reception from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday. Admission: free for members, $5 general, $4 seniors, $2 students. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily during exhibitions. |
Featured artists for “Wordless Stories,” which runs through July 8, are Mark Bennion, Pat De Caro, Drake Deknatel, Randy Hayes and Catherine Eaton Skinner.
Bennion is a painter and sculptor living on Vashon Island. His frescoes and sculpture evoke the uncovering of an ancient innocence. Bennion’s work reflects a simple, geometric and quiet beauty. It interacts with the changing world that is around us and within us.
Pat De Caro works in oil on glassine. Her paintings hover on the edge between two- and three-dimensional art and toy with both illusion and actual space. Her effective use of transparency and layered surfaces creates narratives that express time and motion, in psychological and emotional context.
Deknatel, who had studios in Seattle and Germany, died unexpectedly last fall. After years of working abstractly, in the two years before his death he began a series of paintings based on photographs from his childhood. Featured works draw from a photo of him at about age 4, wearing his father’s military jacket. Deknatel found that by repeatedly working from the same photograph, he could enter into a dialogue with it, similar to that which happens between model and painter in portraiture. Inexorably reworking the same image, he could interrogate it and find new layers of meaning.
Hayes uses a carefully assembled grid of actual photographs as the ground on which he paints. Hayes fuses aspects of photography and painting inn a formal and innovative way. He provokes the viewers to reconsider their relationship to each other, and to times, both as something passing and as something stopped.
Skinner studied art with Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobell at Stanford University. The figure, human or animal, remains an important element in her work and acts as a source of inspiration and exploration of identity, spirit and the paradoxes of human existence.
The Benaroya Glass Gallery at MONA will feature “Poetic Intentions,” an installation by Jeff Crandall. Crandall began his career as a poet and turned to glass art while working at Pilchuck Glass School. In this installation, created specifically for the gallery, Crandall explores the transparency and fragmentary nature of language. The exhibit begins with “Exploded Sonnets,” a mobile-like glass curtain of words that divides up two original sonnets into their even syllables, each floating like a bubble of sound.
Plays on words, containerization, advertising and religion are explored through glass-mounted collages, sandblasted glass spheres and bottles. “All Bottled Up” is a display of 85 cobalt blue wine bottles each with a different human emotion. The “What Lies Within” series uses hanging glass panels on a steel backdrop with light and shadow to point out the “lie” within “believe” and other ironic words within words. Crandall works in Seattle as both a nationally recognized poet and glass artist. “Poetic Intentions” runs through June 4.
Both spring shows compliment the Skagit River Poetry Festival, which takes place May 19 and 20 at various locations in La Conner.
ABOVE: Mark Bennion, “Fresco 1,”2006.
LEFT: Catherine Eaton Skinner, “Kyi,” 2005.
BELOW: Randy Hayes, “Blue Car in Field,” 2005.
Drake Deknatel, “Nightwatcher,” 2005.
Jeff Crandall, “All Bottled Up, Faith, Hope, Truth,” 2006.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
