This essay was prepared by HSU students: Ryan Cox, Stepanie Guel,
Jill Moore, Jon McCallum, Adam Poore, Charissa Schulze and Brian Tyzzer.

Lori Goodman’s installation, At Bay, is based on her observations made during numerous hikes through the Eureka Wildlife Sanctuary, whose beauty and ecological complexity she believes is locally underappreciated. Her desire with this exhibition is to draw attention to the sanctuary while making a cohesive gallery installation. Goodman’s approach is to extract and then amplify visual elements from the sanctuary, interpreting the site through a sculptural installation that employs many sizes, shapes, and colors of handmade papers.

Through the repetition and alteration of organic forms, artist Lori Goodman invites us to reflect upon and appreciate our world. Goodman looks intimately at life; absorbing the minute details through a process of dissecting and exaggerating her observations, she presents nature’s often overlooked beauty in the gallery space where it can be seen in a new light. Goodman hopes her work will elicit personal contemplation and scrutiny from her audience, stirring us towards environmental and self-awareness in a compelling yet unpretentious manner. In a world seemingly saturated by industrial destruction, Goodman is conscious of how easily we can become complacent and ignorant regarding nature. We may notice the spectacular aspects, the brightest flower or the oldest tree, yet we increasingly fail to appreciate the less fantastic: the reeds, the sands, the grasses, and the marshlands of the Earth. However, by emphasizing the relationships between humans and our effect on the environment and by contrasting organic forms with inorganic shapes and colors, Goodman awakens us to a realm that has always been there for us - the forgotten natural world.

Lori Goodman was born in Montana and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She started taking art classes in college and received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Los Angeles State University in 1966. While still in college, Goodman moved with her husband to Philadelphia, and in 1973 they moved to Humboldt County, California to raise their family. Later, in 1990, she earned a Master of Arts degree in Sculpture from Humboldt State University. Goodman’s original love of weaving opened the doors to paper-making and the fiber arts in which she has been involved for over a quarter century. In that time she has owned and operated a fiber arts store, taught a variety of textile and fiber arts classes at various universities, and displayed her work professionally in New York, Oregon, Switzerland, Belize, West Africa, and throughout California.

During the months of July and August, Humboldt State University First Street Gallery will present,  Beaux Zoos: Animal Imagery in Art, opening on July  5th.  The exhibition will feature art by six visual artists from California’s North Coast: Amy Granfield, Kelly Leal, Lush Newton, Rachel Schleuter, Naomi Mest and Peggy Loudon.

The six artists in this exhibition each use animal imagery with zoological or anatomical subjects covering a broad range artistic sensibilities and approaches. The use of animal imagery by artists reflects the long tradition in art of using such images to express various aspects of cultural, societal and political conditions.  The tenor of the art in this show runs from the sublime to the farcical, from the poetic to the political, stretching across the mediums of painting, drawing, ceramics and sculpture.

These paintings explore the different ways representations create meaning and what it is that makes a description accurate.  I try to create paintings that are very open for interpretation because I think meaning ultimately is dependant on some kind of exchange.  I often paint animals because they help bring the paintings into an area of play, and make them more inviting.  I find this important because visual expression has its own realm of diction that is so commonly manipulated, we often become desensitized and less willing to engage.  In my paintings, I try to create space where the viewer can inject that definitive quality on their own terms.  In working this way, I am always reminded how no single point of view can fully define an image.  I think that meaning is something that requires some investment, and also that the mechanisms of expression and perception within us are abundant and innate. 

Kelly Leal 
Summer 2008

It's easy to be facile about the interconnectedness of things, perhaps because it represents our supreme hope.  Yet it may also be our greatest fear: that we are not greater than, but the same as all else.

I have a BS in Soil & Water Science from the University of California, Davis, and an MS in Natural Resources from Humboldt State University.  Of course nothing we learn ever goes unused, and my interest in the natural world has continued, but in a less rigid structure.

In my work I mingle science and emotionalism.  People place themselves at the center of their world, and fail to recognize the systematic importance or the “soul” (essence, dignity, nobility) of plants and other animals.  Without plants and photosynthesis in particular, there would be no mechanism for energy input into the living world.

Viewers may experience my work as strongly aesthetic because I portray natural elements carefully rendered in settings either richly worked or ethereal.  However, I see my work as strongly emotional and political.  Just the act of placing these objects at the center, enlarged and dominating, challenges our notion of a world centered about ourselves.  My animals are caught in a moment of some stress, i.e. living.  Observed reality is prismed by my own sense of wonder, creating an unsentimental but empathetic view.  It is an aesthetic of challenged beauty, with loss, tenacity, humor, yearning and most of all of possibility as common themes.

I am inspired by the same subjects as always: stalking denizens of the fields and air in order to picture them back to us.  Their portraits invite us to remember them, to be discomforted and comforted, and to meditate on our relationship with them: our place among them, and within them looking back at us.

I paint in oils, on canvas and board.

Amy Granfield
Summer 2008

This work offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the heart.  It is a departure from the safety of the wheel and an exploration into areas a little less comfortable… connection, loss, and hope. Inspired by memories and tempered by time, they reflect a reverence for the everyday experience of the beating heart.

Naomi Mest
Peggy Loudon  
Summer 2008

Rachel Schlueter is a self-taught oil painter.  She was born in Chicago Illinois in 1960 and Resides in Humboldt County, California.

Rachel’s painting style is expressive in use of color and lavish brushwork.  She states that, “I have considered myself an artist all of my life though it is only now that I understand what being an artist means; It means work.  True inspiration comes with work and it come not before but during and after much hard work.  I paint for inspiration.” 

Rachel Schlueter
Summer 2008

Beaux Zoos,  will be on exhibition from July 5 through August 10.  A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday July 5th during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  HSU First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 noon 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 707-826-3424.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Exclusion Zone: Photographs by John Mahony, on exhibit from February 2nd through March 9th, 2008.  This exhibition will feature photographs from various international and domestic sites of environmental degradation into which Mahony inserts male and female figures engaged in a variety of dramatic, often enigmatic actions.

After graduating from UC Berkley as an Art major, Mahony moved to Salmon Creek, California where he has worked for several years as a land developer.  While participating in a watershed protection project, Mahony photographed train wreck sites along the Eel River in California. He noticed, “The train cars were really ugly but also very intriguing, getting twisted, turned, embedded and polished by the river and nature.”  The experience led him to rediscover his passion for art and his desire to capture something beautiful and meaningful within neglected, often misunderstood settings of environmental distress.

Mahony focused on photography and challenged himself to portray man’s disruption of nature and nature’s inevitable, albeit altered, reclamation of the earth.  Some of these sites include the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the Ukraine, the Hanford Nuclear Preserve in Washington State, abandoned mining sites, and military aircraft crash sites.  Mahony introduced the figure of brides into these spaces as a human emblem of fertility and hope; a symbolic salve to these wounded, forsaken landscapes.  He further populates his pictures with attendant grooms, and a variety of other characters arcanely interacting with one another to enhance the dream-like, post-apocalyptic quality he sees in these Exclusion Zones.  

Mahony has gone so far as to risk personal exposure to radiation in some of these hazardous areas in order to present to us with a poetic vision of humanity’s current relationship with nature.  Telling of his life-changing trip to the nuclear wasteland of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the Ukraine, he reflected, “it’s such a phenomena to be in a place surrounded by an invisible poison, that you can not see or smell… it’s very sobering to be there and to experience what that’s like.”

The title of this booklet and the accompanying show, Exclusion Zone, references the world’s premier toxic wasteland, Chernobyl, Ukraine. Specifically, the zone is an area around the world’s worst nuclear accident with a radius that extends between approximately 100 and 500 kilometers that is uninhabitable for another 100,000 years. This wasteland is strewn with crumbling high rises, 6 abandoned nuclear reactors, gutted factories and rotting farmhouses. It is also a lush forested area where trees have sprouted out of rooftops and roadbeds. At times I wonder if our entire planet is headed for this distinction—too polluted for human habitation, and yet wild again, and being taken back by the other species.

John Mahony, November 18, 2007

John closes his eyes when he talks. I don’t know if he is imagining what he is going to say or if he is bashful, hiding from the attention that his words attract.

When John and I flew to New York City together in November of 2002, only 14 months had passed since the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center. Our journey had begun in California the day before, a cruise south in John’s pick up truck down highway 101 through redwood glades and vineyards to Oakland. It ended with an afternoon taxi ride through the dense urban landscape of New York City. The cab driver told us stories about his old neighborhood in Queens as we skated past it and crossed the river into Manhattan. Our hotel room was twelve stories up and looked down onto 7th Avenue and Madison Square Garden. After unpacking we had dinner at a restaurant around the corner on West 31st. It was 7 o’clock New York time and we were modestly hungry. Three lost hours traveling against the sun’s arc had pushed time back to midafternoon in our heads. The waiter spoke with a heavy Italian accent. The redundancy of waiting tables year after year to dunder-headed tourists had filtered the pretense of care out of his voice. That didn’t much matter to us. We were artists and we were in New York City.

In the morning we set off for a photography convention on 11th Avenue. I attended a dry lecture on the improved color gamut in the new ink jet printers of the day. At lunch time John’s models, two New York women he had met and worked with in Humboldt County, California, found us there at the Javits Convention Center. With costumes and camera gear we crowded into a cab, and drove around Manhattan looking for a location in which to shoot. The location turned out to be the site of the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center. The two women disappeared down a stairway just off Church Street into a nearby subway restroom and emerged minutes later gliding across the street in wedding dresses. Surely to those watching, the majority being tourists, it was the small kind of big city thrill that one can’t wait to describe to their friends back home, or at least chat about over a beer later. Here you are visiting the site of the worst terrorist attack ever on US soil and there is a New York Photographer shooting for Vogue no doubt. To embellish the spectacle, there I stood with my Rolleiflex photographing the photographer. And to further cement the evidence of our visit were the numerous bystanders snapping away with their cameras, our likenesses now carefully preserved between the pages of vacation photo albums all over the world.

However this was no big New York City photographer, but what I would normally consider a reserved quiet man from Salmon Creek, California. What they were witnessing was more along the lines of a good old fashioned “happening”, some odd piece of performance art, with an improvised script, actors, and a director and photographer rolled into one, all on location at the most hallowed ground in the city, at that time maybe even the country. It was then that I realized John was a performer. I’d seen and printed thousands of his images. We had discussed f-stops, lighting, cropping and the usual odds and ends, but I had never seen him work. I didn’t really know what to expect, and nothing could have prepared me for it. He was like an actor who disappears into his role.

I hid and watched the scene in reverse through the lens of my own camera, apprehensive and in a state of slight disbelief that we were actually doing what we were doing. Can you get arrested for taking pictures of would-be brides at the memorial site of 911? John and the models seemed nervous too. They worked with a sense of urgency, fueled no doubt by the thrill of the spotlight entangled with the anxiety of being a public spectacle. They must have been worried that people would misinterpret their little play as a mockery of this sacred place and the grievous event that now defined these city blocks.

This couldn’t have been further from the truth. For as long as I have known John he has been drawn to the places in our world that are damaged, that need healing. Though I have never thought of him as a saint, his work casts light into those places, and is no less heartfelt than the flowers and letters left behind at these tragic sites.

Were people upset? Far from it. Fascinated, many gathered around to watch the three street performers. Others, no less curious, puzzled furtively from a distance. Though there was an enigmatic, what is going on, quality to our presence that drew people’s curiosity, I couldn’t help but sense there was a spiritual draw as well. Being in the presence of a bride in a public place is close to a sacred experience for people. It may seem as though I am overstating this, but having been a wedding photographer I have witnessed this phenomenon. Other than birth and death there is little else that holds such sway in our culture as the sacred right of marriage. There is a sense of reverence and awe when the public happens upon a bride being photographed in a secluded location. And here we had two, in a very public, emotionally charged place. Behind the high chain link fence that surrounded, essentially, acres of air heavily laden with absence, was a large hole in the ground so clean, it could have been mistaken for the excavation of new construction. The truly powerful and heartrending reminder of what had taken place here lay just a block away, where written tributes and flowers clinging to a church’s wrought iron fence fluttered in the afternoon breeze. On the sidewalk below stood a photographer and his two angels.

We rarely ever get to see this process of the artist making his art; it is generally a private endeavor. This day, a single soul, thoughts hidden, laid his working process bare to hundreds of complete strangers. As John often does, he shot with a wide angle lens. This put him within arm’s reach of the two women, almost physically in the picture himself. John’s close proximity forged a synergistic relationship between himself and the models before him. He moved like a fashion photographer on location. His models in their wedding dresses moved with him. It made me think of Matisse’s, The Dance. There was a circle of joy and movement, a connection between the photographer and his models. It made me realize how vital the actual act of making the photograph was to him, perhaps more important than the success of the final image on paper. The push of the shutter button was the crucial moment of creation. The dance that lead up to it, a kind of foreplay.

John might not like being compared to a fashion magazine photographer, even though you could argue there are similarities. Fashion photography is about the clothes, and their prestige. The costume in John’s pictures, the wedding dress, is a powerful symbol in our culture. Placing the model in an environment that is contrary to what one would associate with a bride, the ruins of Chernobyl, train wreckage, the site of the fallen Twin Towers, only emphasizes this symbol. This tactic has been used before by commercial fashion photographers, though it is unlikely that they have had to carry a Geiger counter with them to avoid the hot soil, or chosen to kayak down the Columbia River, or climb the spans of abandoned bridges, or scale mountains of debris in a scrap yard.

We live in a world of bad news, filled with harrowing doses of tragedy so numbing, it blends into white noise. It’s no wonder that everything else on TV seems to be an antidote to the latest war, crime, or environmental disaster - a cocktail of fluff, an opiate of meaningless entertainment. In a twisted circle, these tragedies and real life horrors ultimately become the entertainment. Video games, TV and movies are more violent than ever. Nothing shocks us anymore. In our screen worlds it becomes difficult to separate reality from fiction. Which is “based on a real story” and which is the real story? Ironically, however, it is the screen that often replaces real experience for us and acts as a barrier between us and our environment*. For John, his art is a conduit, a way to truthfully experience his environment and come to terms with what is happening in the world; to place his feet on the real ground, breathe the real air, and see the real thing with his own eyes; to think about the state of the world and his place in it.

Twin Brides Facing Ground Zero, 2002
New York City

What does the cryptic language of symbols have to do with the way we experience the world? Symbols speak to us in a way that may on one level seem bewildering, but prod at a quiet part of our within. The artist’s journey to examine these symbols and encroach upon self discovery begins to encompass something bigger as we view his pictures. What do these symbols mean, if anything, to us? What is our place in the world?

What we, the audience, are left with is the evidence of the artist’s journey, his photographs, a brew of the photographer’s literal intent and meaning, artistic training and influences, veiled personal biases, the models’ personalities and improvisations, the location and light at the moment of capture, good luck or bad, accidents, happy or not, and finally the inutiae of the digital processing world. We never see the multitude of images dismissed as failure by the artist. Perhaps he has unwittingly relegated his masterpiece to the recycle bin on his desktop. Back in the day before the digital printing revolution, when I was hand printing real silver gelatin prints for John, he would hand me his marked up contact sheets to work from, and I would always think, “why isn’t he printing this one, and why is he printing that one?” It was clear my tastes in his images ran toward the more formally beautiful and enigmatic pictures that lacked the trace of a narrative. It seemed that these images, to him, were often the accidents, or perhaps the aberrations, and though interesting, ultimately were not what he wanted to accomplish with his pictures. Many of his images I thought smacked of a melodrama, that seemed artificial, were often his favorites. Then there were the scores of images that seem to stray into the middle ground.

John and I have often talked at length about the conflicting influences that are at odds with the purity of an artist’s originality: 1) The opinions of others, the desire for worldly success, and to engage and please a larger audience, versus 2) A maverick sensibility, to follows one’s vision and be damned what anyone else thinks. This is a tightrope that many an artist must learn how to walk, and ultimately decide which shade of grey they can live with. A critic might say that John’s work lacks the singular clarity of vision. But is the path to understanding ourselves a straight line? I would say that any journey worth taking, especially as an artist, is about the side trips, listening to the voice inside and going where it takes you, not about trying to fit your work into a neat ideological box. That sought after
mature clarity of vision, if it is ever reached, is a result of all the train wrecks and mountain peaks, the friction of the journey and it’s shaping of the artist’s persona. The guide through this odyssey is a map inside the artist’s mind revealed piecemeal only to him.

On the way John cannot help but see beauty in the forms of pollution and decay he reviles, or be distracted by the eroticism and sensuality of the human body. In the heat of the moment, peering through the camera’s lens, light flashes off the river, piercing the bride’s veil, dazzling his eye. The way shadows play across the model’s skin have nothing to do with any preconceived grand design. It is a beautiful picture and the shutter is released. Of the thousands of images taken, a final image, reflecting off the gallery wall, flips upside down through the lens of the viewer’s eye and sifts through their own personal filters. This picture become a tantalizing synthesis of the artist’s journey and our own personal experience.

When John takes a photograph his eyes are wide open.

A Faculty and Staff Exhibition showcasing the talent of the artists who teach and work in Humboldt State University’s Art Department will be featured at Humboldt State University First Street Gallery in Old Town, Eureka, California.  The exhibit will run from August 26 through September 21.

“The students benefit greatly from the broad and diverse artistic backgrounds of the staff and faculty of the HSU Art Department,” commented Jack Bentley, Director of the First Street Gallery.  "This exhibition demonstrates how Humboldt State’s Art Department provides students with practical, living models of individual success in the art world while also providing them with the critical abilities to understand and interpret a variety of practices in the visual arts.”

This particular exhibition will give students and the public an opportunity to see how the instructors at HSU approach their own art, outside of the classroom.  The public will be introduced to a wide range of themes and styles, which include works in ceramics, drawing, graphic design, jewelry, metalsmithing, painting, mixed media, photography, printmaking and sculpture.

The gallery will also exhibit pieces by some former professors.  Bentley cites the inclusion of these antecedent artists in the show as a way to demonstrate the depth and the evolution of the Art Department.

A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, September 6th from 6-9 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event.  Celebrating its tenth year of service to HSU students and to the North Coast community, Humboldt State University First Street 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 707-826-3424.

by Allison Harrington and Nicole Ruiz

Looking above, the sky is shifting and birds are soaring high with a freedom that humans yearn for.   Looking below, fragments of earth are peeking through the cracks in the hard cement.   Looking ahead, dynamic trees are eclipsed by man’s towering structures; and, looking even further there is the vastness of the landscape we inhabit.   Frequently, thoughts of our Earth and our relationship with it occupy Gordon Senior’s mind.  His work is embedded with metaphors and myths of nature.  Reflecting on humanity’s anthropocentric relationship with the earth, Gordon Senior often conceptualizes the cycles, the fragility, the strength and the magic within our natural world. These days however, his naturalist sensibilities and artistic intent have been disrupted and influenced by the culture shock of his recent move to America.

Gordon Senior grew up Yorkshire, England.  His desire to become an artist came about when he was involved in a serious accident as a young boy.  During the year of recovery, his main source of release was through painting and art.   From that point on he wanted to go an art school.   Senior studied art at Leeds College of Art and Wakefield College of Art in England.  He attended Leeds College at a time when Harry Thubron, an instructor there, was creating a dynamic change in the way art was taught.  Thubron and his colleagues created the first design class at the college, emphasizing a more methodical, analytical way of creating art.  Thubron is also credited with bringing Bauhaus ideas of craft and assembly into Leeds.  Thubron became a great inspiration to Senior, instructing him to trust his own sensibilities - the way one does things - and to not be afraid to take risks when creating art.  Since then Senior has been able to pass those valuable lessons onto his students.  Besides his artistic career, he was a Professor of Art at Norwich School of Art and Design in the UK. He came to America five years ago to teach at California State University Stanislaus, where he is currently a professor and Chair of the Art Department.

Senior’s immediate environment is the source of his inspiration as well as the source of materials in his work.  More often than not, Senior uses found objects from his surroundings. He prefers to collect rather than buy traditional sculptural materials because he likes to capitalize on the materials and equipment around him.  This is why he chose to only bring two small artworks with him when he moved from England to America.  He wanted to “see how the move would change the way he thought and made things”.

Hare Fleet is a piece that was inspired by his journey to this new world.  Hundreds of fragile tiny hares, made from fired earth, lined up in a boat, gaze ahead not knowing what their future will bring.  It’s a scene reminiscent of early European settlers and African slaves when they first arrived on this continent.  Senior chose the brown hare, a wild animal native to Europe, to embark on this mission. The brown hare, known for its mystery and seclusion, shown in numbers, reflects the complexity of the human consciousness.  The hares can perhaps be interpreted as an extension of Senior himself, a native of Europe, setting off on an adventure into lands unknown; and, even though Senior chose to leave much behind, he is also taking a lot with him.

In his recent follow-up piece, Odyssey, Senior continues to incorporate the hare and the boat metaphor.  But this time, Senior uses sycamore for the boat—a tree that lines the street he lives on here in America.  And this time, the hares are strong, cast in iron, and they are carrying a boat filled with soil.  Could it be that Senior has found his place and direction here in America?

Senior’s move has allowed him to see America through an outsider’s eye while reflecting on his hometown from a distance. To his surprise, Senior found being away from England made his native culture much clearer.  His move to America brought into focus what would have otherwise been accepted and unexamined, had he stayed in England.  His sentimental view of his country and the culture shock he experienced in moving to America are reflected in his works: Journey, Hand Tools and Towers. 

It took Senior two years to function properly here in America and the work, Hand Tools,  spun out of that sense of displacement.  Hand Tools is a colorful piece and includes a variety of materials, found objects like wire, metal, plastic, string, wood and ready-mades.    He plays with dimensionality, displaying these three-dimensional tools the way a two dimensional painting would be displayed flat against the wall.  At first glance, these tools seem familiar, but upon closer inspection have no apparent function.  Hand Tools, is a work of countless, functionless tools that evokes questions of wonderment, “How do they move?” and “How do they function?”  He couldn’t help but have the same feelings and questions about himself while adjusting to this new American culture.  The viewer senses that in this new land Senior himself feels like an instrument of unknown function, or perhaps that his purpose has yet to be discovered.

The Towers are a response to his newly found insight on his homeland and its contrast to American culture.  The towers resemble versions of the high-rise, a contrast from England’s small architecture.  These towers also function as birdhouses.  Senior’s first birdhouses were made from found wood and were inspired by England’s history.  The idea came from wartime England when the government rented small lots of land for the people to grow vegetables.  The people would build small, “allotment style” shacks on the land and these shacks can still be seen today. The towers that the shacks inspired are human height, incorporating materials such as rusted eggs and used cut jeans (the American Tower).

The cycle of death and rebirth is another recurring theme in Senior’s art.  Both the crow and the hare have important meanings in many cultures’ mythologies.  The crow, seen through the lens of European history, is a symbol of the spiritual, transcendental aspects of death, the journey of the spirit into the afterlife.  The hare in Celtic mythology was associated with the dawn, the moon and Easter, themselves metaphors for death, birth and resurrection.

Birds—the migration of birds—the eloquence of nature myths and the Earth’s cycles are also portrayed in his large-scale drawing, Birds in Flight, Version 2.  The light fading into the dark, birds emerging and disappearing in and out of the clouds allude to the unrelenting and repeated cycles of life to death and day to night.

In his essay, “The White Bird”, John Berger describes wooden birds, carved by French peasants, which hang in their living rooms above the hearth, during winter.  The essay begins with this quaint notion of decoration, and evolves into a discussion of our human tendency to sentimentalize nature, to tame and admire it from a safe distance.  In actuality nature makes its own course, it is wild and brutal.  This dichotomy between our perception of nature and its harsh reality is apparent in Gordon Senior’s work. 

Even when Gordon Senior is thrown off balance by the displacement and culture shock he felt when moving to America, the core of his naturalist sensibilities continue to be seen throughout his work.   His pieces quietly prod the viewers to contemplate their place on earth and their relationship with fellow inhabitants – the animals.  By elevating these usually overlooked creatures into the realm of “art”, Senior masterfully prods the viewer to consider their equal importance on this earth.  He chooses not to spell everything out and prefers the spectator to use imagination to unravel significance and meaning within the work. Gordon Senior fills his work with a wide range of meanings and possibilities for the spectators to engage in.  As a spectator, there is no telling what thoughts and feelings his work might induce.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present,  Propaganda: Poster Art by HSU Graphic Design Students, opening on October 3rd.  Professor Wayne Knight, who teaches Graphic Design at Humboldt State, has assembled the exhibition.  The show features custom-printed posters by over 30 alumni and advanced graphic design students who are either currently designing under his tutelage and other alumni artists who have participated in Knight’s poster project in recent years.

Professor Knight uses the rubric of propaganda as a contextual notion for his students to use as a jumping–off point in designing compelling posters that project a political or philosophical message.  While some of the posters may be serious, others can be amusing and light-hearted; yet all are well designed, communicating their messages strongly.

Of his poster design project, Knight relates that, “The popular notion of propaganda is that it’s always political and it’s always a form of disinformation.  The reality is that at its base it’s simply an attempt to convince, whether right or wrong, whether it is a lie or the truth.  All artists are attempting to convince in some form, the minute the object is put before the public, that it has value, that the vision is unique, or that it just has the right to exist.  This show is composed of many views on various topics that resonate with the artist.  These HSU Graphic Design students want you to see it their way.”

Propaganda: Poster Art by HSU Graphic Design Students, will be on exhibition from October 3 through November 2.  A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday October 4th during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  HSU First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12noon 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 707-826-3424.

This essay was prepared by HSU students Ryan Cox, Chelsi Kirby and Jill Moore, edited by Jon McCallum.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present, Sanctuary: Paintings by Joan Gold.  This exhibition of recent paintings by the American artist Joan Gold is meant to convey a sense of Gold’s actual studio space, which she considers her personal sanctuary.   With this exhibition, Gold seeks to present her work in a format that captures the most satisfying steps of her creative process.  By thoroughly covering the gallery walls with her intuitively arranged patchwork of color, Gold invites visitors to step inside the personal world she has created—a visual haven of brilliant hues infused with life and joy.

Each completed series of her compositions evolves from a culmination of multiple steps and manipulations.  Experimenting with the media of paint as a means of unlocking the potential of color and expression, Gold creates abstract paintings that utilize traditional techniques and modern paint materials.  Within the image space of her paintings, she deploys a form of geometric abstraction, while incorporating an engaging lexicon of emotive, gestural mark-making. This approach can alternately elicit excitement or peaceful contemplation on the part of the viewer.  These emotional, yet ethereal states, are married with great force, as if an earthquake has deliberately assembled shifting tectonic masses into a coherent geometrical union.  In creating these pieces, Gold employs a rigorous aesthetic discipline, yet with such aplomb, that, in some works, the viewer is nearly unaware of the raw union of oppositional forces.

As a child, growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Gold began using color and design as a means of achieving the visual satisfaction that she has continued to seek throughout her life.  Gold’s mother adhered wallpaper samples to the walls of her basement playroom. “I remember being very content amongst those squares of color and pattern,” she reminisces. Gold’s fascination with color began with crayons and coloring books and was later influenced by her mother’s dried floral arrangements.

Gold 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 Holocaust during Second World War had on humanity.  As the terrifying meaning of the war grew in her consciousness, she experienced what could best be described as a profound loss of innocence.  She considers that this pivotal development in her awareness had everything to do with the subsequent choices she has made for the rest of her life.  And, quite paradoxically, it is what underlies the light and energy she puts into her painting.  She determined that this lens of experience would focus her luminous, life-affirming direction in art.

Once she reached high school, she began taking art classes, where even at a young age she found herself drawn to an abstracted, reduced style of rendering. In an example, she recalls an exam in which she was asked to draw a tree and notes that while her peers worked diligently to recreate life-like representations, her tree was intentionally stylized with only one leaf. “I knew that imitating nature was not what I wanted to do,” she admits. “I liked things to be flat and design-like.”

After high school, Gold was accepted to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, a school where all students who pass the entrance exam are admitted with a full scholarship.  Of The Cooper Union, Gold says, “I found my place in the world; there were other people like me.”  There she was strongly encouraged by such professors as Ray Dowden and John Ferren to find and develop her strengths. Ferren played a paternal role for Gold in which he “provided the ground in which I could grow.”

After graduating from The Cooper Union, Gold continued her studies by participating in studio classes at the Brooklyn Museum where she gained an interest in the process of working with enamel on copper. This was followed by a fellowship to study painting in Venezuela where she enrolled in the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Caracas. 

In Caracas, inspired by the luminous effects that she could achieve in using enamel on copper, she continued her explorations by taking classes in both enamel and stained glass.  Though too toxic for her to work with long-term, these specific materials acted as a bridge to her creative process and aesthetic today, showing her how a translucent media could heighten the effects of the pigments underneath.  Living in Caracas also clearly had an impact on Gold as the vibrant light and color of the tropical locale show up in her work.  This is certainly evidenced by her hot palette, but also by the fact that she stayed in Caracas for twenty-four years.  “The color in Venezuela is extraordinary,” says Gold.  “It’s always in bloom.”

Settling in Caracas, she married and raised her four children while working as an Associate Professor at the Universidad Metropolitana.  Gold was awarded a medal for her service to Venezuela as an educator in 1974 by Raphael Caldera, the President of Venezuela.  In 1979 Gold retired from the university, and re-settled with her four children in Humboldt County, California, where she has been living and working since.  This move marked a turning point in her artistic endeavors, as it was then that she turned her focus to experimenting with acrylic paint and made a decidedly conscious effort to make her work more minimal. Emphasizing media as a means of unlocking the potential of color, Gold began to create abstract paintings, some, which are made with traditional painting techniques, while others incorporate digital imaging with paint.  Joan Gold has exhibited her work throughout the nation, in Venezuela, and is in several important public and private collections.

The works in this exhibition firmly embody Gold's unique aesthetic approach, which, within the image space of her paintings, she deploys a form of geometric abstraction, while incorporating an engaging lexicon of emotive, gestural mark-making.

She begins by painting different combinations of color and pattern with acrylics on rectangles of paper, which she later assembles into a variety of arrangements by pinning them on to boards or to her studio walls.  These works vary in size from 8 by 10 inches up to 6 by 20 feet.  Here she uses paint instinctively, almost like layers of stained glass, stacking pane over pane of paint and other media. As the layers grow thicker some areas are left bare, others are obscured, while still others combine to form complex bodies of color moving in and out of one another.  Using the application of transparent layers as a means of achieving a radiant quality in her work, she “plays with paint,” letting her intuition dictate the formal choices she makes.  Gold works on many units at a time, all rectangular in format.  As she builds up the surface she also strategically separates and reassembles the individual units of work.  Through this process of assemblage, she constructs united, yet starkly delineated regions of geometrically organized fields and groupings of color.  Observing these works is almost like viewing vast farmlands from far above or examining cross sections of fluorescent striated earth.  She terms her process a sort of stumbling towards balance, never knowing which addition or subtraction will achieve the right harmony.  The product creates a peaceful union of storms, a healthy marriage of chaos.

 A second group of works represented in Sanctuary starts with the same intuitive mark making, which, after passing through filters of technology, she then reworks by hand.  First, Gold creates works on paper with layers of translucent, yet rich, phthalos, turquoises, chartreuses and alizarins overlapping like pieces of wax paper melting into each other at the edges. These works are digitally photographed or scanned into her computer.  There she crops, enlarges details, and augments the original chroma to heightened, more ethereal, states. She then prints the new images onto archival paper and expands upon them even further, applying subtle layers of media: oil pastels, chalk pastels, graphite, colored pencils, collage, and gouache. The final assemblage is an accretion of forms vaguely reminiscent of architectural layouts, or sometimes they appear more like anatomical or botanical structures such as a flower or cell.

A unique aspect of Gold’s overall process involves the use of the studio space itself where she covers the walls from floor to ceiling with her pieces.  Gold explains this, saying, “The best moment is when there are a great many pieces pinned to the walls just before being dismantled and reborn into their final forms.  My workspace becomes the world as I want it, a safe place full of color and light.” The sanctuary of her studio allows Gold to manipulate and reorganize her work on the walls as she progresses, and this often informs new work. Surrounded by these modular, interchangeable pinnings, grouped into bodies she calls trios and quartets, she sometimes plays for years until she finds their appropriate arrangement. The next stage in the process is stacking these groupings on top of one another and affixing them to museum board or canvas, forming panels, which then blanket her studio walls.

In this exhibition, Sanctuary, Gold represents this artistic process as it unfolds in her own workspace. By extending her studio walls into First Street Gallery, Gold seeks to present her work in a format which best epitomizes the most satisfying steps in her process of creation. In covering the gallery walls with her intuitively arranged patchwork of color, Gold invites visitors to step inside the world as she creates it for herself: a visual haven of brilliant hues infused with life and joy.

Gold understands the consequences of living in this world, and embraces its gifts.  She makes work that emanates from the light end of life’s grey scale, having experienced the dark.  She paints options.  She paints windows and doors.  Gold creates her paintings to act as a great counterweight, offsetting the problems we face, and providing a space to rejoice.  Her work is deliberate, yet not dogmatic, captivating, yet it delivers a freedom.  Absorbing her work is like being transfixed by a visual manifestation of the voluminous and spiritual luminosity that many of us intuitively yearn for, but seldom glimpse in our quotidian existence.  Gold makes her world in her studio. She invites her viewer to share it.

During the months of April and May, as part of its Art & Environment Exhibition Series, Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery will present,  The Water’s Edge: Paintings and Prints by Michael Guerriero, Jim McVicker, Kathy O’Leary and Walt Padgett, opening on April 5th.

Guerriero, McVicker and O’Leary are all long-term residents of Humboldt County, California and are counted among the finest landscape artists portraying the natural beauty of California’s North Coast.  Walt Padgett makes his home with his family in Grants Pass, Oregon where he has worked as an artist and teacher for several decades.

The four artists in this exhibition each convey a sense of place where water meets land in Northern California’s and Southern Oregon’s watersheds, rivers, bays and coasts. The intention of the exhibition is to demonstrate how these landscape artists convey the complexity of these important ecosystems, while also creating high-quality art.
   
The art made by these four artists is not that of a tourist or casual observer. Elaborately colored and imbued with the humid light specific to Northern California and Southern Oregon, whether expansive or close up, these artists focus on the integrity of the region’s ecology – not as a political issue (although by inference, they warn of its fragility and argue for its maintenance), but as an experience — as their home. To better grasp the power that the North Coast landscape wields over the spirit and imagination of its resident artists, read on to the eloquent statement that artist Kathy O’Leary has prepared for this show.

VISIONS OF HUMBOLDT BAY

My inspiration for The Water’s Edge was Humboldt Bay.  A San Francisco Bay Area transplant, I moved here in 1969.  Through the years I have lived in Manila, Arcata, and now Eureka, and have viewed our bay from all angles, in all lights.  After 39 years, I am still awed by its beauty.

Once I began working as an artist, painting here and in many other states, I became even more impressed with our bay.  There are very few waterways remaining in the U.S. with so much natural beauty surrounding them.

There are certain places around the bay, which really stand out for me: The Elk River Estuary, and Indian Island.  Throughout a year, the light, shrubs and trees, and the color of the grasses and water change considerably.  The changing atmosphere, clouds and moisture around these areas, particularly in late or early light, add to the visual feast.  Indian Island in particular feels like a sacred place to me.  Its sacred feel also comes from its importance to local Wiyot (Native American) culture, as a site for world renewal ceremonies where blessings of peace and harmony, for all beings and the Earth occur.  To evoke a sense of the sacred, I used the iconic shape (as orthodox churches use for displaying likenesses of the saints) to express my sense of the holy about this place.

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?  I have thoroughly enjoyed painting these pieces and hope these images remind you of what we have here and encourage all of us to preserve it.

Kathy O’Leary
Spring, 2008

The Water’s Edge,  will be on exhibition from April 5 through May 18.  A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday April 5th during Eureka’ monthly  Arts Alive program.  Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12noon 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 707-826-3424.

Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is pleased to present  A Holiday Invitational Exhibition, which opened on December 1st and will continue through December 23rd.  Featured in the show will be artwork by fifteen artists from California's North Coast, who work in diverse styles and mediums.  The show is a fundraiser for the gallery, with a broad selection of affordable, high quality art pieces suitable for gift making during the Holiday Season.
  
The participating artists will display photographs, works on paper, 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 reminds those of us who live here, how fortunate we are to live in a community that is also the home of so many wonderful visual artists." 

Of special note, the exhibition will introduce the ceramic work of David Zdrazil who will be exhibiting his work in Humboldt County for the first time.  Zdrazil recently moved to California’s North Coast and teaches at College of the Redwoods.

A Holiday Invitational Exhibition is produced by Humboldt State students. Students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program participate in the daily management and planning of shows at the gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.  

Exhibition Schedule 

The exhibition will run from December 1st through December 23rd.  There will be an opening reception for the Invitational artists that will coincide with Arts Alive on Saturday December 5th from 6-9pm.  First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12-5pm and is located at 422 First Street, Old Town, Eureka, CA.  For more information call (707) 826-3424.

Cecilia Paredes was afraid of snakes, at least until she became one.  During a session in her studio for the piece Snake Woman, 2000, Paredes laid down, trying to remain as still as possible while all but the edge of her body was entirely buried underneath the sand by her assistants. As the anxiety of being below the surface washed away from her and her heart relaxed, Paredes began to feel a sense of transference as she purged her fears of the animal and suffocation. By working through her own experience of discomfort under the sand, Paredes developed a new mental state so that she could endure the transformation she had envisioned: to acquire the identity of a snake, protected and camouflaged.

Paredes is an internationally renowned Peruvian artist known for her unique sculpture and photo-performance work. She combines themes of origin, nature, and femininity to create a beautifully subtle blend of visual aesthetics, self-introspection, and representation. Her artwork is created through the lens of her past and present life experiences, integrated with her cultural, poetic, and environmental influences.

As a child, Paredes would create artwork using actual pieces from nature – sticks, twigs, leaves – and would paste them onto paper. As she grew up in Peru, a geographically and culturally divided country, her ethnically diverse family played an important role in supporting her artistic development. Her mother fostered her talents, saved her work, and encouraged her creativity while other family members practiced different forms of art.
Paredes began her fine art education in Lima where she learned the self-discipline necessary for creating art. Following her studies in Peru, she attended Cambridge School of Arts and Crafts in the United Kingdom and then completed further studies in Rome.

After finishing her education, Paredes repeatedly traveled, gaining international experience and recognition for her art. She currently divides her time between Philadelphia and San Jose andCosta Rica, researching and producing her work in both cities. While in Philadelphia, she lectures intermittently at the University of Pennsylvania. She considers San José her “home-base” and frequently visits the beautiful tropical forests near her studio there for inspiration.

Traveling frequently, Paredes is inspired by the many locations and cultures she encounters. Her travels and deep immersion in a variety of cultures has given her a nomadic-like perspective that informs her work.  This condition is partly the result of her choice to divide her time between North and Central America as she fully pursues her career as an artist.  Her itinerant existence is reflected in her art as she wanders, and in a metaphorical sense, portraying her many selves.

As Paredes moves through the many forms, subjects and ideas of her work, the theme of origin is highly important and all-encompassing to her.  She views the concept of origin in a literal and poetic sense. Her art lies in the methodology of investigating possibilities of where her origins lie.  From that basis, she uses a blend of sculptural forms and photography to convey a vision of her mutable identity.

Paredes, with the aid of her assistants, commonly spends weeks preparing for a photo shoot, refining the concept, and laying out the technical details. The result is a photographic register of an intricately staged event in which she may perform as an animal-like creature, a mythical being, or en element drawn from nature.  She will often merge her identity with animals that are generally unrepresented or marginalized in popular culture. She also chooses particular animals based on how she identifies with them, or as a way to face her fears and prejudice about that particular creature. Paredes wishes to give these animals dignity by showing they are worthy creatures, perfect as they are within nature. With many of her pieces, Paredes’ transformation transcends the visual realm, as her deepest consciousness reaches towards the animal she is depicting.  The process of creating her work, in turn, relieves Paredes of her own misgivings about her subjects.

Her self-portrait images often interpret herself as coming to a middle ground with nature, morphing into an entity that is not completely human or completely animal, but something new and mythical, as in Venada, 2001, in which she is presented as a human-deer hybrid. Underneath the various subjects Paredes chooses to represent, is her body, a “blank canvas”, which has been painted, posed, costumed, or digitally altered. Her approach to the traditional understanding of an artist’s self-portrait is unconventionally figurative.  She regards her work as private act— a part of her personal journey of self-discovery and interpretation. It is in these personal and private aspects that Paredes’ work becomes a truer form of the self-portrait. Paredes is exploring exactly where she fits in with the natural world.

She is inspired by nature and her personal relationship to it, as she sees her first exposure to art as synonymous with her first exposure to nature. This idea of working with nature continues strongly through her contemporary pieces. Her photographic work is at times set in nature, such as in Birdman Contemplating, 2008, in which she lays on a tree limb in middle the woods. In her sculpture, natural elements are also clearly referenced and integrated. In some work, Paredes constructed trees from replicas of her hands and arms. She also has cast her feet with inlaid

While she uses many natural forms such as seashells or bird feathers, Paredes makes sure to always pick materials that have already been or will be discarded. Often these materials have an ephemeral quality, which she often preserves with the aid of taxidermists. Her body of work contains various articles of clothing constructed from incredibly delicate material such as dragonfly wings, or chicken wishbones. In her piece To See You Through, a dress made of leaves without chlorophyll, she transforms something common into a manifestation of the artist merging with or originating from nature. For Paredes, the dresses become a surrogate skin as they contour the human body. The dresses also reference femininity, in homage to women-dominated skills or crafts.

In her more recent photo-performance works, Paredes has shifted her focus to feelings about migration and displacement. These themes emerged from her life outside of Costa Rica, as Paredes feels more at ease in the tropics. In contrast, she has spent relatively less time in the type of natural regions surrounding Philadelphia.

This has led to the development of photos such as Blue Landscape, 2008. Mythological creatures play no role in these new photographs because mythical stories have their origins in the history and nature indigenous to the region, and Paredes has no personal history with her new type of location. This image depicts Paredes, seminude, now painted, in an interior setting. She stares forward situated in front of walls plastered with floral designs on wallpaper. The environment here is patently artificial as it incorporates sentimental, mawkish renderings of tropical themes—blatantly alluding to a stereotypical visual perception of Latin American aesthetics. Instead of acting as a backdrop for her image, these interior environments are a subject equal to her physical presence in the photograph. She is truly transformed into a disenfranchised migrant—absorbed by her surroundings. 

There are other works in her repertoire that strongly hint at gender, but Cecilia Paredes does not consider herself a feminist in the classical sense. In her series entitled, The Subtleness of the Ordinary, 2003, as in her other photo-performances, she uses natural forms to metamorphose her body into a new being. Here the focus is on the genitalia, but the depictions here are ambiguous. The images create a cohesive balance and contrast between the genders, as she is a female using her body in her work, while simultaneously acknowledging the male side of humanity. The flower forms easily bring to mind reproduction, simultaneously resembling both an opening to the womb and having phallic qualities. Paredes is not antagonistic to the other gender. She is not interested in one aspect over another or pushing ideas of equality. Instead, she focuses on her whole being, how she can be both a masculine and feminine entity simultaneously.

Her artwork also speaks of environmentalism within the bounds of Paredes’ personal relationship to nature and her interest in preserving the environment. In May of 2008 she participated as a panelist in a United Nations’ seminar titled “Art Changing Attitudes toward the Environment” in which she and other artists shared their work and concerns with the world, and how their art can bring awareness to what is happening. She is a full-time artist, yet her personal connection and interest in nature and the environment certainly push environmental awareness as a clear window through which Paredes’ work can be viewed.

Paredes’ work recognizes the inherent relationship between the origins of humanity and the natural world. While her methods and aesthetics have changed, she is largely addressing the same range of issues from origin, to migration, to femininity. Her balance between traditional artistic methods and the incorporation of natural elements creates a genuinely beautiful fusion and contrast between art and nature—where her art always seems to insinuate itself. As much as these images and objects are viewed in a public setting, they retain a sense of privacy or ritualistic secrecy. In the process of creating and interpreting, the artist is seeking a poetic connection to the world.  And the art produced through her investigations have created a window into a reality where she expertly delivers to us a simultaneous sense of enchantment and verisimilitude.

Ruth Miller and Mark Jew are interns in the Museum and Gallery Practices Program at Humboldt State University. © 2009, Humboldt State University.  All rights reserved.