Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Young Alumni-2013, on exhibit from July 2nd through August 4th, 2013. This exhibition celebrates the diversity and skills acquired by Humboldt State Art majors during their enrollment at the university. Attracting art students throughout California and beyond, with over 400 Art majors, the Art Department is one of the largest departments at the university.

Annually, HSU First Street Gallery mounts an exhibition to showcase the creative culmination of these aspiring artists and their transition from their studio practices into their professional careers. The Young Alumni-2013 exhibition celebrates a selected group of graduates’ work, which has been recommended by a professor or fellow art colleague. The works on display reflects the breadth of courses offered at the university including sculpture, jewelry, painting, graphic design, mixed media, photography, printmaking, new genre and ceramics.

“I’m excited to get the opportunity to show work with so many talented alumni,” commented Natalie Schoch, a Studio Art Major graduate exhibiting work in the show. Shawn O’Connor, another participating alumni added, “After going to school with all these individuals for a couple years, it’s interesting to see how we’ve developed and grown artistically.” Erin Grady commented, “This is the first time I have shown in a professional gallery, along with most of the other artists as well, so it’s an exciting opportunity to get our art out there and seen by the public.” Aaron Morris poetically remarks, “Make with the fireworks! Each diploma's a lit match. And each of us a fuse.”

“The alumni participating in this show have all developed to a point where they are working at a professional level as artists,” states First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley.  “All 29 participants demonstrate real evidence of artistic success.  Crucial to their success, however, are the less tangible qualities they all share—a dedication and commitment to making art as a way of life and a deep engagement with their work on poetic and intellectual levels.”

Participating artists are:  Jeremy Farrell, Keith Fleury, Rhianna Gallagher, Erin Grady, Kelsey Hardwick, Nurelle Harrigan, Nicholas Hunt, Nickolas C. Hurlbut, Hannah Jacobs, Kasey Jorgensen, Bobby Latona, Greg Lysander, Jamari Montgomery, Aaron Morris, Shawn O’Connor, Amelia O’Dell, Clárissa Pezone, Hannah Pierce, Anna Schneider, Natalie Schoch, Maccabee Shelley, Justin Skillstad, Ryan Spaulding, Michael Sutter, Sean Sutter, Rosalie Thomson, Kiersten Travis-McKittrick, Sara Jo Wolf, Sarah Woodard.

There will be a public reception for the young alumni artists on Saturday, July 6th, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive program.  HSU First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5:00 p.m. The gallery will be closed on July 4th.  HSU First Street Gallery is located at 422 First Street in Eureka, California and admission is free to all. Groups are encouraged to call ahead to arrange tours. For more information call 707-826-3424.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present A Holiday Exhibition, which will open on November 25 and will continue through December 23.  Featured in the show will be artwork by fifteen artists who work in diverse styles and mediums.
  
The participating artists will display ceramics, sculpture, and paintings.  “We're very excited to bring together these artists, many of them HSU alumni, during this holiday season," says First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley. "This exhibition will remind those of us who live here, how fortunate we are to live in a community that is also the home of so many wonderful artists."

The exhibition will feature a number of talented artists in the ceramic medium. These prominent ceramics artists continue to place California’s North Coast as a center of innovation in ceramic art. Beautiful and unique works will include artists such as Nancy Frazier and Ted Okell, Kit Davenport, Peggy Loudon, Scott North, Clarissa Pezone, David Jordan and Mike Pearce.

Additional artists participating this winter will contribute a wide range of artistic styles that create an overall lighthearted tenor to this holiday exhibition. Many of the works freely use colorful color with abandon and employ unique approaches to their subjects. These include works by Cija Bellis, Lush Newton, Malia Penhall, Clark Donovan, Jeremy Hara, Mimi LaPlant, Rachel Schlueter and Gwen Thoele.

There will be a gallery reception for the artists, whichwill take place at HSU First Street Gallery on December 6 from 6-9 p.m. during Eureka’s Arts Alive program. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call (707)-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project.  The exhibition features six observational documentary videos and accompanying essays by interdisciplinary artist Cynthia Hooper and a monumental, to-scale, sculptural, Humboldt Bay model by ceramic artist Mary Mallahan. This multimedia exhibition explores the physical and cultural geography of Humboldt Bay—California’s second largest estuary. The exhibition will be on display starting September 30, running through November 2.

Artist Cynthia Hooper interprets varied water, waste, energy, agricultural and urban landscapes.  Her videos and essays examine how regional and national political policies reorder these environments. Her project examines Humboldt Bay’s natural resource economy, including the timber, fishing, and mariculture industries, as well as its transportation and power infrastructure. Her project also documents the bay’s natural and human-made watersheds, as well as its varied conservation zones and shoreline.

Focusing her creative lens, each video features visually poetic, unusual, and graceful views of the bay while accompanying essays include narratives that honor the diversity of perspectives and experiences of the bay’s many stakeholders. Hooper hopes that her audience will gain a greater understanding of how overarching global forces are tied to economic and environmental impacts on Humboldt Bay.

Hooper states that, “Our bay’s diverse geographical terrain includes many sites for community interaction and dialogue and some of these landscapes can trigger earnest public debate.”  She also states that her project “seeks to encourage participatory evaluation of the bay’s complex issues by its many engaged local residents, with the intention of bridging the diverse communities of the Humboldt Bay landscape.”
 
Cynthia Hooper has worked with the complex urban environment of Tijuana, Mexico and has examined contested and politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border. She has also produced other projects about water and land use issues in California and Ohio. Hooper’s work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, El Centro Cultural Tijuana, and MASS MoCA.  Hooper has also been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She earned her BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Cynthia Hooper has been a Professor of Art at College of the Redwoods since 1991.
                                                                                                                                               
Mary Mallahan interprets natural and anthropogenic processes with large-scale ceramic and sculptural media. Having lived on California’s North Coast for twenty years, Mallahan has developed a connection with Humboldt Bay after experiencing it recreationally and later found it to be a source of inspiration. Mallahan’s model describes the unseen geology of Humboldt Bay and examines the bay’s varied surface features including its unique undulating, subterranean morphology. She states that, “This model demonstrates my longstanding interest in interpreting local scientific inquiry through the lens of personal aesthetic expression”.

Using clay to merge and reconstruct her own observational information with satellite images and topographical maps, Mallahan creates an immersive, research-based representation of Humboldt Bay that is also theoretical, speculative and visually dynamic. Her sculpture represents continual tectonic change, the same process that makes Humboldt Bay and the surrounding region geologically unstable.
 
Mallahan uses scale and dynamism in topography to illustrate the relation between the timescales of human life and that of ever-present geologic and biological processes. Mallahan seeks to not portray the bay as we know it, but instead in a way that represents the various geologic, biological and human interactions with the bay. Through the use of texture and color, Mallahan employs various materials, such as the use of ceramic shards to simulate shells and wood textures for nearby industrial sites. The subtle and unexpected nature of her work, Mallahan hopes, will open discussion about the issues surrounding the bay.
 
Mary Mallahan has collaborated with Seattle’s architectural firm McVey-Petterson to design and construct a ceramic installation that incorporates illumination for the lobby of Youth Theatre Northwest, and her monumental outdoor figurative work enhances the campus of Western Washington University.  She has also created models of the subsurface stratigraphy of local brownfields and landfills, describing these sites’ complex contaminants with a polychrome precision. Mallahan has thirty years of experience in ceramic media. She is an adjunct professor at College of the Redwoods, and holds a BFA in Studio Art from Western Washington University and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Mississippi.

The work by these artists in this exhibition has been made possible by a grant to Hooper from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and by a grant to Mallahan, who is the 2013 recipient of the Humboldt Area Foundation’s Victor Thomas Jacoby Award. Additional support comes from Humboldt Sate University, generous community donors and from the HSU Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities Fund.

A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project is produced by students enrolled in the Humboldt State University Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program. A public reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, October 4 during Eureka Main Street’s monthly Arts Alive event. 
  
On October 18 at 11 a.m. the artists will host a free tour of the Humboldt Bay on the historic Madaket Ferry, featuring interpretive guides who will discuss the geology, history and environ­ment of Humboldt Bay. Those who wish to attend the tour should sign up in advance and in person at HSU First Street Gallery. Seating is limited.

On Saturday, November 1, the artists will give a gallery talk and tour at 3 p.m. at HSU First Street Gallery. The talk is free and the public is invited to come meet the artists as they guide attendees through exhibition. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street in Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call (707) 443-6363.

My videos and essays interpret varied water, waste, energy, agricultural and urban landscape scenarios, and examine how regional and national political policies relentlessly reorder these types of environments. My work is generously observational, analytically engaged, and proposes a nuanced, reflective, and often sympathetic reception for the sites I examine. A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project features six short observational documentary videos and accompanying essays that explore and interpret the built environment of our bay—California’s second largest estuary. This project examines the bay’s natural resource economy and infrastructure (including timber, fishing, and mariculture), its transportation (including our roads, rails, and ships), as well as the bay’s power infrastructure—including fossil fuel and renewable energy. The project also documents Humboldt Bay’s natural and human-made watersheds, as well as its varied conservation zones and complicated shoreline. Each video features visually poetic, atypical, and unexpectedly graceful views of the bay that are patiently and often incidentally captured. Each accompanying essay includes evidence-based narratives that honor the diversity of perspectives and experiences that index these compelling environments.

Our bay’s diverse geographical terrain includes many sites for community interaction and dialog, and some of these landscapes can trigger earnest and even adversarial public debate. My project clearly advocates for some of our bay’s more culturally potent places, but it also carefully navigates the conflicts these sites can attract. This project also honors the many stakeholders and everyday place makers (including seafood, timber, and dock workers, recreationalists, activists, and researchers) that spend a great deal of time on Humboldt Bay, and understand it deeply and experientially. With inclusive analysis and steady observational strategies, my project presents a both comforting and counterintuitive picture of our bay, and both celebrates and complicates our shared and intimate experience of it.

Cynthia Hooper
Autumn, 2014

Cynthia Hooper’s six non-narrative observational documentary videos examine and interpret the built environment of Humboldt Bay. Her video Water documents the bay region's water infrastructure, and indexes water quality issues unique to an agricultural, postindustrial, and natural resource-based economy.  Her video Conservation inventories the many extensively mediated conservation zones that encircle Humboldt Bay, and meditates on the varied strategies deployed to restore lost wetlands and watersheds, battle invasive biomass, and remediate toxic industrial legacies. Her video Power examines the energy infrastructure of Humboldt Bay, including its recently upgraded and formerly nuclear power plant, its electrical grid and natural gas infrastructure, as well as this region's principal renewable energy resources. Natural Resourcesdocuments how specific populations of laborers and their infrastructure—including timber workers, dock workers, fishermen and oystermen—configure this region's built environment, and how this type of work gracefully and often informally shapes architectural space. Her Shoreline video inventories the more than one hundred miles of shoreline that encircles Humboldt Bay, and her video Transportation describes the region’s roads, rails, and shipping, as well as some of the complex components of the bay’s unexpectedly globally-networked terrain.

Cynthia Hooper has worked with the complex urban environment of Tijuana, Mexico and has examined contested and politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border. She has also produced other projects about water and land use issues in California and Ohio. Hooper’s work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, El Centro Cultural Tijuana, and MASS MoCA, and recent publications include Arid: A journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology. Hooper has also been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as well as grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Gunk Foundation. She earned her BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Cynthia Hooper has been a Professor of Art at College of the Redwoods since 1991.

My functional and sculptural ceramic work interprets dynamic natural processes such as deposition, lithification, deformation, and erosion. Using clay, I merge and reconstruct observational information to create a sculptural substitute of these systems, fashioning a visual depiction that is as much conjectural as it is empirical.  The monumental ceramic sculptural interpretation of Humboldt Bay that I’ve created for this exhibition transfers the geographic features of the bay’s surrounding landscape onto the tidal footprint we are typically more familiar with. This reimagining of our bay is dynamic, speculative, and certainly unexpected. In my interpretation, the water of Humboldt Bay has been transformed into the land that currently encircles it. The notion of Humboldt Bay itself as a level, largely horizontal space is reconsidered—instead I reveal its subterranean, “rumpled carpet-like” tectonic landscape. The result is a monumental and undulating sculptural form that conveys the morphology of regional uplifts and subsidence—the very same tectonic processes that make our local landscape (and the bay itself) so geologically mutable and even unpredictable. The visual effect of my work is a representation of change: the form of a wave, dynamic and yet frozen in time, as well as the transformation of water and sediment (like clay) into an alternate description of time.

This model demonstrates my longstanding interest in interpreting local scientific inquiry and discourse through the lens of personal aesthetic expression.  My formal choices, including shape and color, were influenced by the empirical information I found in regional maps and reports, as well as my own field observations. The edges of individual pieces of this model, for example, align to suggest the tidal channels found in Arcata Bay, and the model’s surface treatments imply fragments of shell or jettisoned wood—hinting of layers of anthropogenic origin. In my model, Humboldt Bay becomes a massive, swelling sculptural form: a vast lithic remnant of a varied, diverse past, or—equally intriguing—a reimagining of our bay’s possible future. 

Mary Mallahan
Autumn, 2013

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters: Paintings by Andrew Daniel, Mimi LaPlant, Kathy O’Leary and Stock Schlueter. This exhibition of Humboldt County, California artists will open on September 30 and runs until November 2.

As part of First Street Gallery’s series addressing the subject of the Humboldt Bay, these four artists have focused their attention to the regional estuary and its environs at the center of the place they call home. They depict its beauty and unique features in a variety of oil and acrylic paintings. The Humboldt Bay, the second largest enclosed bay in California, is an intersectional landscape where industry, recreation and wildlife meet on the shore and in the water. In light of this dynamic setting, the artists of Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters offer viewers a refreshing and intimate perspective.

The paintings of the Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters invite contemplation and consideration of the environment. Relying on direct observation, these four artists use the immediacy of their surroundings to inspire their paintings, which are often painted on location. Each painting exemplifies a process of settling the mind and connecting with the natural world—becoming sensitive to the moment, the light and the subtle movements of a landscape. Their intention is to depict something transitory, sublime or momentous and beautiful for the viewer.

As Humboldt County residents, these artists have found inspiration through personal connections with the bay and its surrounding environment and express it through their individual painting styles. Andrew Daniel relocated to Arcata from Maine in the 1990’s to finish his degree at Humboldt State University and has since established himself as a fine arts painter in the area. Daniel enjoys observing Humboldt’s scenery, plants, animals and people and uses them as a source of inspiration and as a way to remain connected to the simplicity of nature. “I have to remind myself to slow down and take in our lovely natural environment, to quiet my mind enough to be receptive to the constant flow of silent stimuli, the beauty of our surroundings. Painting provides me with a vital tool for slowing down.”

Mimi LaPlant, a Marin County, California native, received her MFA in Painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was a long time instructor in Art at Humboldt State University.  Known primarily as an abstract painter who works in an improvisational, bright and colorful palette, LaPlant’s landscapes disclose many of her observational sources of color. In this show, LaPlant presents a body of acrylic landscape paintings that showcase her stylistic impulse and her strong connection with the natural world.

Kathy O’Leary moved to the area from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 and was immediately struck with the natural beauty of Humboldt County. The constantly changing atmosphere, light, and colors of Humboldt Bay create a “visual feast” for O’Leary who states that, “Humboldt Bay enriches our lives every day. Where else in this country does so much beauty, richness of culture and nature exist in one place?”

Born and raised in the area, Stock Schlueter has long been familiar with the attraction of Humboldt County. “I always loved the adventure of discovery and finding new places. Plein air (outdoor) painting involves all of these things I loved so much as a youth.” Beginning his career as a watercolor painter, Schlueter began showing in local galleries in the early 1970s. He started working with oil paints in 1985 and since then his work has been featured nationally in galleries in Washington D.C., Indiana, Ohio, Washington, Oregon and California.

Humboldt Bay Landscape Painters is produced by students enrolled in the Humboldt State University Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program. A public reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, October 4 during Eureka Main Street’s monthly Arts Alive event. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, noon-5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is always free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead at (707)-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, A Joyful Eighty, a large collection of new paintings by artist Joan Gold, which will be on display July 5 through September 7. Gold’s exhibit will occupy both rooms at the gallery, affording visitors a comprehensive experience of the artist’s work at this stage in her eightieth year.

Joan Gold draws from her childhood memories and various life experiences to create layered, vibrant, colorful compositions that elicit joy, balance, harmony, beauty and serenity. She traces her need to create a safe place, a sanctuary, back to the 1940s as she became aware of the larger world, especially the violent impact that the Second World War and the Holocaust had on humanity.  She believes art can steady one’s soul.

The artist states that, “The focus of my work is luminous color. The emotional and spiritual can be made visible in painting in much the same way it is made audible in music. In painting it is light, color and form that make it happen. I use an abstract and minimal format to work with the color and paint application, which are my primary interests. I employ a variety of media but the basis is acrylic paint. Important aspects of my process are underpainting, and glazing with transparent paint layers, both techniques that date from the fifteenth century. A few years ago I started incorporating found materials such as wallpaper and other commercially printed papers into my paintings. Now I make my own printed materials; recent work integrates traditional painting techniques and imagery born of modern technology.

I owe great gratitude to Courtney Cross who assisted me in producing this show. Her careful attention to detail, her talents and intelligence and patience with my foibles have been invaluable. I am going to miss her dearly now as she goes off to further her education as an artist.”

Joan Gold hails from Brooklyn, New York. She began taking art classes in high school and went on to study as a full scholarship student at the The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan where she earned her B.F.A. Gold then continued her studies in studio classes at the Brooklyn Museum, which were followed by a fellowship to study painting in Venezuela where she enrolled in the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Caracas. Settling in Caracas, she married and raised her four children while working as an Associate Professor at the Universidad Metropolitana. In 1979 Gold retired from the university and re-settled with her four children on California’s North Coast where she continues to live and work. Her paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are held in numerous public, corporate, and private collections including those of Melinda and Bill Gates and the Morris Graves Museum. 

Joan Gold: A Joyful Eighty is partially funded by a grant from the Humboldt Art Council Beverly Faben Artist Fund and by generous community donors. A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, July 5th from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The event is free and open to the public. On Saturday, August 16, Joan Gold will give a gallery talk and tour at 3 p.m. at HSU First Street Gallery. The talk is free and the public is invited to come meet the artist as she guides attendees through exhibition.   The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street in Eureka, California.  Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Laughter in Darkness, a group exhibition featuring paintings by Seana Burden, Jeff Jordan and Jesse Wiedel. All three artists currently reside on California’s North Coast.

Each artist uses contrasting elements of familiarity and imagination in order to create thought-provoking, humorous experiences for the viewer. A common thread tying their work together is the mash-up approach of blending imagery drawn from direct observation, contemporary media, traditional landscape and fictional spaces. The artists often combine realistic approaches with dream-like passages that yield images that are at once familiar yet unsettling.

Seana Burden’s paintings address two subjects, sometimes blending the two: romance as portrayed in Pop Culture and the dichotomous role of women and how they are portrayed in contemporary and traditional society. Her romantic and socially conscious paintings have a folk-art quality that is enthusiastically detailed.  With the use of glitter in her paint, storybook references exemplifying our culture’s attachment to stereotypical female ideals and consumer culture, she makes paintings that project trenchant, yet whimsical social commentary. 
Jeff Jordan is widely known for his charged imagery on the album covers of numerous bands, such as Mars Volta, Protest The Hero, and Leprous. His surrealist style humorously celebrates the human condition within a broad context of politics, history and technology.  He blends everyday subject matter and absurd imagery, realistically rendered, to create a thought-provoking dialogue between the work and the viewer. Jordan’s craft incorporates a sophisticated, complex use of color and his allusions to Art History emphatically underscore his life-long devotion to painting.       
Jesse Wiedel’s paintings expose the unsettling, stranger-than-fiction feeling that can be evoked by the mundane. In using quotidian settings from California and the American West and populating them with vividly rendered depictions of people at the margins of society, living in the streets, meth addicts and the lumpenproletariat, his works arouse shock but also laughter in the viewer. Within his narrative scenes, a grotesque, often humorous, yet uncannily familiar rendition of street life resides.

Laughter in Darkness is produced by Humboldt State University students enrolled in the Museum and Gallery Practices Program. HSU First Street Gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with the experience that will help them enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to pursue careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Exhibition Schedule
Laughter in Darkness will run from April 1 through May 18. The opening reception for the artists coincides with Eureka’s Arts Alive program on Saturday April 5 from 6-9 p.m. An open house will be held on May 3 for the closing of the show, from 6-9 p.m. First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12-5pm and is located at 422 First Street in Old Town Eureka. For more information please call (707) 443-6363.

Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery presents, Nightwatch, a collection of mixed media works and photographs by Seattle artist Ellen Garvens on display January 31 through March 2. Currently a professor of art at the University of Washington in Seattle, Garvens’ work has earned her national and international acclaim in solo and group exhibitions.

Currently, Garvens uses photography, drawing and mixed media to depict various domestic settings in her immediate environment.  She manipulates her images using digital techniques and drawing techniques to arrange the imagery so as to reflect her internal, poetic experience, rather than producing a rote, documentary recording of the photographic moment.

Inspired by sleepless wanderings around her home at night and the altered perspective of objects illuminated by filtered streetlight, her Nightwatch series developed into an internal investigation about perceptual shifts and uncertainty. The works describe ambiguous, nocturnal spaces in which the somnambulist encounters reassuring, domestic passages of imagery that emerge slowly while feeling her way through darkened spaces, yielding small visual hints of familiar images and clarity along the way.

Viewers of this exhibition can shamble through the inner workings of the artist's poetic imagination, just as Garvens wanders through her house at night.

The exhibition also features selected works from some of Garvens’ past series. One of which, is her Ambivalence Series, whichled her to larger, complex political and ethical conclusions about landmines and the effects of war.
 
After discovering a closetful of long-abandoned human prostheses, Garvens was drawn to the anthropomorphic shapes and smooth edges of the artificial limbs and body parts. As she further immersed herself in the subject, the project developed to an international level where Garvens undertook the photo-documentation of clinics in Southeast Asia, which treated landmine victims. Her well-known photographic series, Ambivalence , chronicles her investigation of prostheses and the loss of human limbs and body parts.  The series focuses on clinics in Cambodia, Laos, and other landmine and poverty-stricken Asian countries.  Nearly forty years after official cessation of hostilities in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos the people of Southeast Asia still suffer from landmines that were left behind by the combatants.

Ellen Garvens will present a lecture and slide show about her work at Humboldt State University on Friday, January 31.  The lecture will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department Building on the Humboldt State campus.  The lecture is free to the public. A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, February 1 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. The event is free and open to the public. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363. 

Conceptually hovering between different materials and methods has been an inspiration and driving force in my projects. My earlier work has been both 2D and 3D, the most recent work (the Valence Series) is drawing and photographic collage.  The subjects are from my surroundings, i.e., cups, food scraps, surfaces or spaces that form my immediate environment. Things are often recognizable but are also ungrounded, hidden or veiled.  It is about flux and uncertainty, and looking for things that might be revealed in the gaps and perceptual shifts. All of the work favors the unknown.    

The Nightwatch Series started when sleeplessly wandering around the house one night. The streetlight seeped in through the windows illuminating surfaces and objects. My perspective shifted radically under this light and connected events and thoughts differently.

Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way.  This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people.
Alice Munroe

In this quote Alice Munroe illuminates my own process of making work: quite literally using a house as a frame of reference but also metaphorically in the virtual space of the computer. I digitally connect and arrange images to both hide and reveal new viewpoints.  The shape of the final image encourages scrolling horizontally across the picture plane, peering through imaginary windows and noticing objects as if walking through a new uncertain place.

Similar themes are found in all the work selected for the show, which includes examples from my drawings and photography over the last 10 years.

Ellen Garvens
Winter 2014

Artist statements are as varied as the artists themselves. And they change, as they should, as the artist matures. Like many young painters I was more interested in having something to say and trying to make a difference than in the work itself. I have found through time that the body of work and the life of observation have become the most important thing. The journey is the destination. The act of painting is the message. All I want to say is, “Look around and see the world we live in.”

Stock Schlueter
Autumn, 2014

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, Being Here, a solo exhibition of landscape paintings by Stock Schlueter. Being Here opens Tuesday, November 25 and runs through Tuesday, December 23. Stock Schlueter has been painting the landscape, primarily focusing on Northern California as his subject, for over 45 years. In his studio in downtown Eureka and on location, Schlueter works only under natural light. With a deep understanding of color and light, while employing a contemporary edge in his composition, Schlueter expertly portrays Northern California’s natural beauty.

The connection between artist Stock Schlueter and his subject matter has had a profound impact on his success. As a youth, raised in remote Willow Creek, California, surrounded by vast forests, mountains and rivers, Schlueter spent his free time exploring uncharted territory. His initial appreciation for the natural world paved the way to his future success as an artist. Schlueter states, “I crawled around in the mountains all my life. The landscape is a big part of my own upbringing and of my soul. I spent so much time in it. I don’t have to imagine what a madrone tree looks like. I know exactly what it looks like.”

Schlueter’s early years in Northern California led him to College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California where he was an athlete, focusing primarily in football, wrestling and track. He earned a full-ride athletic scholarship to the University of Northern Colorado. Majoring in art, he took every art class available, but describes his greatest training as “just being a painter”. Upon graduation from the University of Northern Colorado, he moved back to California’s North Coast and began working with his father in the forest as a timber faller. Soon realizing that working full-time compromised his real passion to make art, he traded it all in to paint full-time. In fact, he spent about five years living out of his truck and camper, painting outside, and coming to nearby Arcata, California, to occasionally exhibit his works. It took about five years of this before Schlueter decided to settle down and get a studio.

Schlueter’s appreciation for the simple life is reflected in the world in which he surrounds himself. Nestled away in his cozy studio in Old Town, Eureka, he places his easel directly under a skylight, refusing to paint under anything but natural light. “I really don’t like artificial light. It changes the colors… I’m really tuned into the natural light process.”

Stock Schlueter’s paintings, which depict the landscape of Northern California, offer a subtle array of qualities concerned with both subject matter and a pure love of design. Initially, these scenes strike the viewer as beautiful, realistic renditions of the countryside replete with intriguing trees, attractive skyscapes, bodies of water and country roads. The eye is then drawn toward the depth of the spaces created here and the liveliness they lend to the interplay of those compositional elements. This magnetic quality of his work owes to the fact that underlying his subjects is a masterful, modern approach to composition and design.

Stock Schlueter: Being Here, is partially funded by a grant from the Humboldt Art Council Beverly Faben Artist Fund and by generous community donors.

The exhibition will run from November 25 through December 23. A public reception for the artist will be held during Eureka Main Street’s Arts Alive on Saturday, December 6th from 6 to 9 p.m. First Street Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from noon to 5 p.m. HSU First Street Gallery will be closed on Thanksgiving Day and on November 28. The gallery is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California.  Admission is always free.  School groups are encouraged to call ahead for tours.  For more information, please call (707) 443-6363.

Watch the Documentary

Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery presents, The Spider and the Fly, a collection of prints and mixed media drawings by artist Gail Wight on display April 1 to May 18.  Currently a Professor of Art at Stanford University, Wight’s work has earned her national and international recognition in solo and group exhibitions.

Wight is inspired by the natural world and the way that it is perceived by humanity. She depicts human, animal, plant and other species in order to reveal the patterns and effects of biological convergence. Sculpture, video, interactive media and print are Wight’s primary mediums, which she liberally uses to explore themes of evolution, art, biology, cognition and animal sentience. Recently her work has focused on the concept of time, unlocking the desire for a better understanding of the unknowable past.

The combination of scientific and philosophical approaches in her mixed-media work connects ideas about so-called reality and the subconscious.  Her art explores the dynamism between nature and human innovation, using new technology and unique methods that reinvent traditional approaches in making visual art.

Wight’s work re-examines human perceptions, concepts of science and nature through the creation of a variety of experiments, physical objects, and performances. The current exhibition at HSU First Street Gallery includes, Solar Burn, aseries inspired by scientific experiments done in the 1940s in which spiders were given a variety of drugs and then released to spin their drug-influenced webs. In an uncanny fashion, the spiders, through their spider web designs, expressed the unique effects of the drugs they were a given.  Using a magnifying glass and light, Gail Wight burns the line of their intricately woven patterns (made under the influence of such drugs as caffeine, marijuana and LSD) into translucent paper. In some places along the line of the drawings, a small hole may randomly burn through the paper, which allows a refraction of light to pass through. When hung before a light source, the pieces achieve high visual interest as they spectrally divide the light passing through the drawings.  The resulting pieces describe, in a mimetic fashion, the altered state that the respective drugs may induce.  The drawings alternatively remind us of how science is often manipulated in service of ideology.

In the artist’s most recent digital prints, which are presented in this exhibition, she creates intricate, floral-like images using composite scans of fly wings and insect parts, resulting in playful, intricate depictions of complex of organic phenomena.

Gail Wight will present a lecture and slide show about her work at Humboldt State University on Friday, April 4 at 5 p.m. The lecture will be held in Room 102 in the Art Department building on the Humboldt State Campus.  This event is free to the public.  A reception for the artist will be held at HSU First Street Gallery on Saturday, April 5 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The event is free and open to the public.  The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street in Eureka, California.  Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.

Working primarily in sculpture, video, interactive media and print, I attempt to construct biological allegories that tease out the impacts of life sciences on the living: human, animal, and other. The interplay between  art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition and the animal state-of-being are themes that have, over the last two decades, become central to my art. Recently, my imagination has fixed on the topic of deep time. I find myself craving a better understanding of the unknowable past. What were the sounds and smells of the Mesozoic? What was it like to rock back and forth in a Cambrian sea? I look at the ground differently as I walk, feeling time receding miles below its surface. I try to imagine ancient shorelines in desert patches and swamps covering barren plateaus. It seems so relevant, speeding along a freeway constructed of pulverized river beds and seashells. I’m looking for prolonged chords, where the deep past resonates in the present.

The fossil record for insects dates back approximately 400 million years. Often, when I find an expired fly on my studio windowsill, I’m comforted by the knowledge that these small creatures will most likely be glancing their way around spider webs long after the human-centric environment outside my window has disappeared. There’s a lovely concept in biology called “convergence”, which attempts to explain the emergence of similar characteristics among vastly different plants and animals. In The Spider and the Fly, I toy with the visual manifestations of convergence, and hint at potential psychological similarities.

BIO 
Gail Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Her exhibition record includes over a dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain, and her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and Centro Andaluz de Art Contemporaneo, Spain. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Wight is an Associate Professor in Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, where she directs Experimental Media Arts in the Art Practice program. Her work is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery presents, "The Universe Unfolded", an exhibition of art featuring a variety of mixed media works by Ananda Oliveri. The exhibition will run from January 31st through March 2, 2014.

In his most ambitious exhibition to date, "The Universe Unfolded" presents an array of new and recent acrylic pieces as well as mixed-media interactive installations. Oliveri paints on uncommon surfaces such as Plexiglas, mirrors, and the walls themselves. The artist also uses optical effects to literally immerse the viewer into the work. This combination of installation and select works interact with the physical gallery space to encompass the viewer within his art.

The implicit narrative of "The Universe Unfolded" is largely based on the theory of technological singularity, or the Post-Artificial Intelligence world.  This narrative is created artistically through diverse materials and recurrent motifs. Repetition is used in many aspects of this exhibition to create an intersection of random determination and systematic order showing in recurring motifs such as triangles or infinite reflections of mirrors facing one another. 

Ananda Oliveri’s work blends highly conceptual approaches with an urban aesthetic. Using spray paint and large-scale origami, the artist draws from many cultural influences to accompany his narratives of transformation, fate and chaos in our current, and future, globalized world.

Currently working and living on California’s North Coast, Ananda Oliveri has shown in many of Eureka, California’s gallery spaces. He has also shown his works throughout California and nationally. A resourceful artist, gallery owner and curator, he partially funded this collection of work successfully using the fund raising platform, Kickstarter.

There will be a gallery reception for the artist, whichwill take place at HSU First Street Gallery on February 1st from 6-9pm during Eureka’s Arts Alive program. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For more information call 707-443-6363.

The artist’s goal often is to create not only a language with which to express one's self but also a realm, which is negotiated by said language. Over the course of creating the work in my current exhibition, The Universe Unfolded, I discovered that my influences and interests, no matter how disparate, had converged to do just that. The further I dove into the narrative I was creating the more I realized that there was nothing that couldn’t be utilized in rounding out my language, my realm.

Sequential art, architecture, cartography, science fiction, origami all had a role to play in the universe I was creating–a role that was cast long before the universe came to be. It is with this realization that I saw the endless possibility of expanding on what started out as a handful of unrelated paintings into a cohesive body each providing a glimmer of the whole.

This understanding echoed the major theme of the work itself–transformation, change, evolution. I have, in a way, been transformed by this realization. I am excited to continue to build upon this, to make my universe more and more complete. New characters, new locales, new narratives spring to mind continuously, begging to be cast as a new painting or sculpture or collage. For the time being the stage is set with this permutation of my realm, my universe. Enjoy.

Ananda Oliveri, 
February, 2014