2006 Painting
Jaq Chartier
"For the past seven years, I’ve been developing a series of paintings that I collectively call Testing. This work explores the interaction of materials, such as water soluble stains migrating through layers of paint and acrylic resin. Each painting is an actual test, chart, or some other form of documentation which often includes notes written directly on the front or sides of the piece.
"A few years ago I began a thread within this body of work called Sun Tests to investigate the idea of permanence. I’m currently using over 50 different white spray paints, and many stains and dyes which are not commonly used in painting (science lab stains, furniture stains, fabric dyes). These materials are complex in how they behave and interact with each other, and their lightfastness varies. While I used to discard materials that were especially fugitive, I’ve become curious about them. I’m also interested in challenging the “all-at-onceness” of the way we view a painting, and how paintings are seen as permanent, static objects."
David C. Kane
Over the course of his career, Kane produced an astonishingly wide variety of work in both 2 and 3 dimensions. The sheer heterogeneity of it all was apparently the source of some criticism among those who wished to safely pigeonhole him. Nevertheless, he continually garnered praise in the local press, and his work continued to be sought by discerning collectors, each phase of his career having its particular partisans. How are we to judge such an artist? His own writings, aside from occasional personal correspondence, are rare and tend to be restricted to bland though eloquent descriptions of various series of work. Little can be gleaned from them of his artistic philosophy. The rumored surrealist novels over which he supposedly labored in secret have never been found, and probably never existed. One cannot ignore the prophetic nature of much of his work. In the end, one sees the scope of his explorations, the interior logic of his stylistic development, the mordant wit, the erudition (in the fine old sense), the depth.
– Charles F. Burwand III
David C. Kane has been active in the Seattle art community for more than twenty-fi ve years. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington. He has shown his paintings in many of the city’s most noteworthy galleries, including Linda Cannon and Esther Claypool as well as alternative spaces such as the Two Bells Tavern. His paintings also have been shown at Center on Contemporary Art and Vox Populi Gallery, Seattle, and Laura Russo Gallery, Portland. Kane received a Krasner-Pollock Foundation fellowship in 1993.
*Full Caption: Harvest Time from the series The Garden of Cyrus The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered Improvisatory Meditations on the Work of Sir Thomas Browne
Brian Murphy - 2006 Fellowship Recipient
"I’ve been doing self-portraiture for over ten years, and I see it as a renewable source for exploring my identity. My goal is to discover an accepting environment, both internally and externally. As both artist and subject, I feel a connected sense of responsibility for the final image. When I paint, I try to ask questions that allow for an organic process to occur rather than focusing on results. I work this way because I am interested in the potential of the studio process to reveal connections between subject and audience. I am interested in the idea of self-reflection and self-consciousness and in the potential for chance. Essentially, while the process itself is isolating, the product, due to its community presence, becomes public domain. Using myself as a model transforms the private investigation into an open interaction.
Brian Murphy earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington in 1999. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions in Seattle galleries and at Suyama Space, a key alternative arts venue also in Seattle. In the Northwest, his paintings have been included in group exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum, SOIL Artist Cooperative Gallery, the Bellevue Art Museum, and Marylhurst University’s The Art Gym. He has received grants from Artist Trust and King County Arts Commission, and, in 2001, he was awarded the Betty Bowen Memorial Award. His paintings have been collected by the City of Seattle Portable Works Collection and the Boise Art Museum.
Barbara Earl Thomas
We too are born naked and helpless. If we survive it is not certain that we will become wily or wise. What good is it then if we can from a china fragment imagine the whole of a cup? What good is it if from scraps of a letter we can reconstitute the longing of lovers or from a twig see a verdant spread? Or if we can imagine the love of a child who is not our own? What good is it? It makes no difference to the black bird if he eats from our table or scavenges from our discarded piles. The future of his kind may not be altered. But that is not our fate. We’ve inherited the burden of knowledge and the grief of failed intention. We are not born blind but we can choose to live that way.
If the cup is fragile and the only vessel from which we can drink; take care in its handling. If the words are precious; do not squander but spend them with prudence. If the child is not our own but we can see and love him in this way; guard and keep him well. These are the seeds buried in summer upon which our future forages in winter.
2006 Printmaking
Dawn Cerny
I base my art practice largely on cultivating historical “facts” (assumptions) from various sources and then paring down this information until I can start to bend or twist the viewer’s assumptions about what is real and what is fictionalized. Recently, my work has been rooted in the 17th to18th century tradition of satire and the cautionary tableau. I have been trying to invent new methods of moving etched and engraved images outside their “plate mark” boundary in order to create a more sweeping sculptural experience.
Dawn Cerny graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts in 2001. She has had one-person exhibitions at Crawl Space, 4Culture, and Soil Gallery in Seattle, and she has been included in the group exhibitions Help Me I’m Hurt and Capture and Release at the Kirkland Art Center. She received an Artist Trust Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in 2004. Her work has been published in Seattle Weekly, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the on-line literary magazine Monkey Bicycle.
Blake Haygood
Through my art, I create a universe in which things are falling apart and coming together while connected to something else outside the picture plane. Without a horizon line or “real” objects for comparison, the sense of scale is undetermined. The objects themselves are vaguely recognizable
forms in constant states of decomposition and regeneration. To me, life—whether human, plant, animal, or mechanical—is a combination of growth and decline; bittersweet and sad on the one hand, but always hopeful and tinged with an underlying sense of humor. Death and deterioration yield other things: the possibility of new meanings arising from what is left behind and the potentiality of function beyond an object’s original purpose, now long forgotten.
Blake Haygood is a self-taught artist, who moved to Seattle in 1992. His prints have been included in group exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, and Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle. His work was also selected for the 77th Annual International Competition: Printmaking in Philadelphia in 2003. His work has been published by Seattle Art Commission and New American Paintings. His prints and paintings are included in important regional private and public collections, including Safeco, Microsoft, and Tacoma Art Museum. Haygood is co-founder of Platform Gallery in Seattle.
Barbara Robertson - 2006 Fellowship Recipient
My mixed media work on paper is inspired by my fascination with current scientific inquiry in the fields of physics, astronomy and biology, and the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. The compositions juxtapose and layer traditional printed and hand-drawn forms with painting and digital imagery, exploring relationships between space, motion, and light. My images are drawn from mass media sources, scientific journal, websites, and my own photographs to create a space-scape of materializing and dematerializing forms. The expressive potential of the innate tensions between photographic and hand-drawn images and symbolic and diagrammatic forms are the foundation and the focus of the work. Ambiguities of space and scale, the dynamic between the virtual and the actual, and the relationship between the micro and the macro create a dialogue about these oppositions within the work.
Barbara Robertson has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington. She is president and cofounder of Seattle Print Arts, an organization that fosters and expands knowledge and appreciation of print arts. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for Pratt Fine Arts Center, Seattle. She has exhibited her prints throughout the Pacific Northwest and in group exhibitions in China, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and England. Her work is included in the collections of Tacoma Art Museum, King County (Washington), City of Seattle, and State of Washington. Robertson also teaches, curates, and organizes international cultural exchanges.