2013 Painting
Emily Gherard
Emily says, "My work explores the idea that painting and drawing have the ability to present inanimate objects in ways that allow the viewer to empathize with them. There is a quiet conflict in my paintings between the characters (rocks and walls) and their surroundings. Walls crumble and Rocks huddle together for shelter. Their tenuous relationship both defines and is in conflict with the space around them. This tension is reinforced by my painting process. I alternate between painting boldly and picking away at the surface, causing my paintings to contain strong, direct clarity underlined with wavering doubt. The color is often muted and limited, revealing a heavily worked surface of incised lines, thick paint and sanded, bare canvas."
Emily
lives in Seattle, Washington. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2002) and her MFA from the University of Washington (2004).
Andrea Heimer
Andrea calls herself a "self-taught painter of suburban mythologies" and says, “Everyday settings are where life happens.” She told The Huffington Post. “I have been devastated at kitchen tables, awestruck on car roofs while staring at the sky, and haunted by things I saw in backyards.”
Heimer’s paintings hum with commotion, mixing mundane occurrences of suburban life with occult imagery and magical messages. She paints a world of séances and block parties, orgies and barbeques, healing waterfalls and slumber parties, all of them creating a personal mythology based on her childhood in a suburban Montana neighborhood.
Matthew Offenbacher - 2013 Fellowship Recipient
Matthew would like to replace the notion of artist as self-reliant genius with the idea that artists, like everyone, are embedded in a matrix of relationships, influences, communities, personal and institutional forces, public and private modes of address, situations, economies, family. He wishes to make this matrix more visible in artwork.
Making paintings, publishing a fan-zine, drawing, collaborating on experimental exhibitions, writing, sculpting, community organizing, cooking, throwing parties, loving, reading - of all of these things, making paintings remains the most intractable, stubbornly autonomous, historically rich and sensuously difficult activity. Because of this, it remains central to his art making.
Robert Yoder
Robert Yoder is an artist living in Seattle, Washington. His paintings and collages have been shown across the country and internationally and are in numerous private and public collections including Boeing, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, Twitter and the Seattle Art Museum. His work is included in the book-arts collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York City Library System. Robert has received many awards including the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work is represented by Frosch & Portmann in New York and Zurich, and Platform Gallery in Seattle. In 2010 Robert opened the gallery, SEASON to promote local artists to the world and introduce international artists to Seattle. SEASON produces at least four shows a year and participates in art fairs.
2013 Open Medium
Julie Alpert
Julie Alpert is a Seattle-based installation artist whose work addresses domesticity, decoration, illusion and nostalgia. Julie has a BA from the University of Maryland and an MFA from the University of Washington. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Award, New Foundation Grant, MacDowell Colony Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, VCCA residency, two GAP grants and was a 2013 Neddy Award Finalist. From 2009-2014 she was a member of SOIL Gallery. Julie often collaborates on animation and performance with her husband, Andy Arkley, of the art collective LET'S and the band The Bran Flakes. She teaches teen programs at Cornish College of the Arts and Gage Academy.
Jack Daws
Jack Daws is a nationally-acclaimed visual artist, designer, and woodworker. He was born in Kentucky in 1970, and lived there until 1991, when he moved to Georgia to attend the Atlanta College of Art. He soon realized he didn't need to amass a huge student loan debt to make art, and dropped out of school to spend the next four years hitchhiking around the American Southeast and Southwest. Drawing on what he learned from his father and grandfathers, he dedicated himself to a life of primitive ingenuity. During those few years he started thinking he just might end up living the rest of his life outside.
Much of Daws's work reflects his interest in socio-political issues, particularly those of racial and cultural identity. Some of his most controversial works play on stereotypes of African American, Native American, and Mexican American culture. Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic, Regina Hackett writes: "In Seattle, no white artist has pushed the edge of racial outrage as clearly as Jack Daws, who is hardwired to go over the line... He's not expressing hatred or taking a fast ride on any one hot button. All hot buttons are dear to him. Jack lives and works and drinks beer in Seattle, Washington, USA.
Victoria Haven - 2013 Fellowship Recipient
Victoria Haven’s work speaks to rapid change of the landscape, like the nearby construction that feeds the watchful artist’s work. Looking like curiously manmade frameworks for a mountain range, her paintings such as The Lucky Ones- Pressure Drop or Bolt often demonstrate an active state of spatial change, either in the form of a developing neighborhood or the split-second burst of a lightning bolt. Space is also investigated in works such as the Rabbit Hole series, in which Haven asks herself how far lines can be pushed until they disappear. She explores this by using glazes to control the way in which a painted line fades to near total invisibility. The effect of these disappearing lines is the creation of an impossible space—a kind of portal that allows one to slip into another realm.
Victoria Haven earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1999. She has received numerous grants and awards including two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, two Artist Trust grants, the Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award, a Neddy Artist Fellowship nomination in 2004, and The Stranger “Genius Award.” Most recently, her work has been included in group exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, the Art Gym, Portland, the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, the Austin Museum of Art, and the Drawing Center, New York. Her exhibitions have been reviewed frequently by Northwest critics and in Art in America, Artforum, and New Art Examiner, and she has been selected twice for New American Paintings (1996, 2004). Her work has been acquired by the Henry Art Gallery, City of Seattle, and Safeco Insurance.
Dan Webb
Dan Webb has won numerous awards including a Pollock-Krasner award, the Betty Bowen Award, and an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection of Contemporary Art at the New Museum in New York. He has also been commissioned to create public art works for the cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Burien and Pike Place Market. Dan received his BFA in 1991 from Cornish College of the Arts. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.