Schedule


Fall 2009: September 28 - November 25, 2009


"The Sound of Cells Dividing"

cellular
©Gerri Ondrizek, Cellular - film with set of prints and drawings, 2008		 Sound Wall
©Gerri Ondrizek, 3 room installation, 2009

Geraldine Ondrizek is an artist and professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. For the last twenty years she has created architectural scaled works which house medical and biological information. Since 2001 she has worked with geneticists and biologists to gather images of human cellular tissue and genetic tests relating to ethnic identity and disease.


Sound Wall, an installation first created for CAMAC, the Center for Art and Technology, housed in a 17th century monastery in France, has been recreated for the Western Gallery. The installation comprises three spaces, each layered one in front of the other. Each room is made with handmade paper walls embedded with the sound recordings of cells dividing. This work makes direct reference to the physical space of an actual monastery cell and to biological cell division. Andrew Pelling, a Biophysicist at UCLA, made the recordings of healthy and cancerous cells. As viewers move in and out of the illuminated spaces, they see their own bodies and the revolving shadows of other bodies pausing to listen to the sounds and passing over the embedded cellular shapes.


Ondrizek's recent work, Cellular, is a film and a set of drawings of a blastocyst or a multiple cell embryo. A colleague at Reed College, Steve Black, Professor of Developmental Biology and Zoology., provided Ondrizek with the raw films of the blastocyst. The blastocyst stage is the most significant in the growth of an organism and if disrupted, the organism is permanently damaged. Ondrizek edited these films, stopping each embryo just prior to gestation, and repeated them over and over to mimic the process of cell division and as a gesture of endless "potential".


Ondrizek was the recipient of a Mellon Foundation Faculty Development Award in 2008. While on sabbatical in 2008/09 Ondrizek exhibited her work and lectured at Columbia College in Chicago, The Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College, both in London, University of Washington in Seattle, and The Conference for Art and Society in Venice, Italy. In 2006 Ondrizek won the Oregon Council Award. Ondrizek has been an artist in residence at CAMAC in France, Gasworks in London, the Women's Studio in New York, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.



Winter 2010: January 18 - March 13, 2010


"Transformations 6: Contemporary Works in Glass "

Glass phone
©David Fox, She's Ready to Pop, blown glass, mixed media, 2007		 stitched
©Amy Hunter, Hindrance, glass steel sutures, pig intestine, 2007

The theme of "transformation" unites the work of 28 internationally recognized and emerging artists who are using a wide range of techniques and materials - forms rooted in traditional craft materials and processes, as well as art that explores relationships between craft and painting, sculpture and installation - to transform glass into contemporary art. The methods associated with glass - blowing, casting, slumping, hot sculpting, etching and painting, etc. - are combined with materials such as aluminum, bone, gears, and found objects. The Raphael Founder's Prize is a biennial award established in 1997 to showcase artists who are expanding the boundaries in their field through new techniques, ideas, and approaches to their medium. This Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder's Prize Exhibition was organized by the Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


Glass embodies an idea about communication - "transparency" especially relevant in our society today. The artists demonstrate shades of clarity through social, political and personal reflections, for example: Jen Blazina's full-scale, glass school classroom; Dan Cutrone's meditation on Michelangeleo's Sistine Ceiling seen through contemporary science; Michael Crowder's evocation of enshrinement and decay in ghost-like insects; Michael Roger's homage to Nabokov within a free-standing display case with an old fashioned typewriter, butterfly collection and writings; Tim Wagner's rats bloated by "government cheese;" and Amy Rueffert's curios conflating Victorian and sixties domesticity.


Five artists from the Northwest star in the exhibition: Robert Carlson, Bainbridge Island; Paul Marioni, Seattle; Kait Rhoads, Seattle; Robert Snyder, Vashon; and Mark Zirpel, Seattle. Pair by Zirpel, the Raphael top award winner, evokes the fragile nature of interconnected relationships through a Harlequinesque installation involving machinery, water and body parts.


Spring 2010: April 12 - May 29, 2010


"Artists Speak: Environmental Issues"


The National Endowment for the Arts has granted the Western Gallery partial funding to present "Artists Speak: Environmental Issues" (tentative title), a multi-media, multi-venue exhibition exploring how artists are responding to the natural, diverse Pacific Northwest in the context of a rapidly changing environment and gathering crisis of degradation. The artistic theme of an ongoing dialectical relationship between man and nature in the Northwest in the past has ranged from the early, mystic painters of the 1940s-1950s to the land-based art of the late 1960s-1970s, climaxing in the 1979 national symposium "Earthworks. Land Reclamation as Sculpture" (King County Arts Commission). While attention has been paid to land-based art and public art involving community based-ecological projects, it is time for critical analysis of artists who are newly engaged in a dialogue on the environment in more traditional places as galleries and museums.


Environmental issues today climax in two key strands: (a) developments in critical art practice and (b) sustainable design. While some artists reflect on issues of sustainability through art-making or process itself or by creating intricate links of natural and industrial materials, this exhibition will primarily showcase viewpoints expressed through traditional media of painting, sculpture, photography, installations and craft. There will be artists who celebrate nature but who present their contemporary concerns through visions of the past. Others address the complex and the uneasy balance between the natural and constructed environment, calling attention to the conflicting patterns between human production and the desirous side of consumption. Several artists specifically concentrate on the land use, development and ownership that have resulted in reckless stewardship of the earth. In all media, participating artists focus on the conflicted nature of disasters so that the poles of natural and manmade destruction no longer exist.


Using the transformative power of art in a more intimate setting, we hope to provide a unique forum in which to engage the broader community and future generations in a dialogue on the individual's personal relationship to the environment and a commitment to protect and preserve the precious resources of the Pacific Northwest.


Organized by Sarah Clark-Langager, Director, Western Gallery, and John Olbrantz, Director, Halle Ford Museum, Willamette University, the exhibition will have a catalogue with essays by the curators and award winning environmental journalist, William Dietrich.