Past Exhibitions 2018
HAC Members Exhibition
November 3 to December 30, 2018
The Annual Humboldt Arts Council Member Show is a juried exhibition designed to highlight the fabulous art being produced by HAC Artist Members. As always, this exhibition is eclectic, surprising and enjoyable.
Junque Arte
October 6 to December 3, 2018
Designed to celebrate artistic creativity on the North Coast, and heighten the awareness of renewable resources in the art making process, each artwork in this juried exhibition is made from 100% recycled materials…reclaimed, reused, recovered, secondhand, salvaged, anything un-new! This year's juror is Dan McCauley from Dan's Custom Metals.
Exhibition Sponsored by Linda Wise & Recology Humboldt County
William Ishmael-Wholeness and Fragmentation
August 25 to October 28, 2018
“…to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper to man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions … .. the notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.” from David Bohm, physicist, in “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”
William Ishmael has been an artist for the last 30 years, beginning with watercolor landscapes and progressing to large abstract works and art installations utilizing latex paint, sand, active rusting on steel plates, organic materials, and the natural elements of the weather to achieve the weathered, multilayered effects on many of his works.
William has exhibited widely including multiple shows in Sacramento, as well as galleries in Palm Springs and Lexington, Kentucky.
William’s accomplishments include being named Sacramento Art and Business Council’s “Artist of the Year” for 2011 and, in 2014, having his 9 foot by 12 foot work “Wholeness and Fragmentation” accepted by SMAC for permanent installation in the Sacramento County Administration Building.
All of the works are an effort to convey that sense of the wholeness being broken up into fragments… fragments which are beautiful in their own right, but can readily be seen in a larger context, and have greater meaning as a result.
The steel plates, the mirrored surfaces, as well as the sets of smaller canvases constituting a larger picture all intended to raise the awareness of this thesis in the viewers mind.
Tony Machado: El Maestro en Reposo
August 19 to October 28, 2018
Tony Machado impressed art enthusiasts for over 40 years with his unique style of composition and figurative oil paintings. Growing up in Oakland, California, Tony demonstrated early talent and received a scholarship to attend the Academy of Art in San Francisco from 1970 – 1973. He painted many murals in the Mission District and around the Bay Area until 1978. Tony ran his own sign painting business, worked in a foundry that produced statues for the 1984 Summer Olympics, and started “Heaven Smiles” silkscreen studios with Michael Rios that created many works including album covers for Carlos Santana. Tony then returned to the medium of oil paint and spent eight years in Humboldt County painting and showing his original art. In 2012 Tony relocated to Grass Valley, California, and continued to amaze with his many styles and talents with the brush. Anthony “Tony” Machado passed away in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 7, at the home of his daughter and grandchildren. He was 63.
Fifty Years of Wire: Elizabeth Berrien’s Journey of Exploration-A Retrospective
August 11 to September 30, 2018
A young student’s life was changed forever by the art teacher’s words: “Take this wire and mess with it!” Struggling for years, Elizabeth Berrien applied her love of basketry, weaving and other textile arts to gain control and fluency with the wire. She developed her unique, very personal textile technique of wire sculpture. Evolving it to museum level quality by the 1980’s, when few people were aware of wire sculpture and its validity as an art medium was very much in question.
In the ensuing decades, Berrien accepted myriad public and private commissions, and received dozens of top worldwide awards including a Clio, Obie, Cannes Gold Lions, and international Best of Show awards.
The artist constantly expands her repertoire. From the dragons and unicorns of the 1960’s, she expanded to explore and embrace tigers and wolves, birds of prey, humans, botanicals, microbes and spacecraft... no end in sight.
This exhibition is partially underwritten by the Ingrid Nickelsen Trust. Exhibition Sponsored by Betty Osborne, John & Sally Biggin.
Buzz Parker: Home Tree Home
June 23 to August 12, 2018
Home Tree Home explores Buzz Parker’s interests in both local Victorian houses and the beautiful California coastlines and treescapes. As a child living in rural Maryland, Parker built getaway hangout treeforts where he could escape, which inspires him now to create incredibly complicated treeforts on paper and canvas. Each treehouse has colorful Victorian architecture, hand carved skies, dreamy neighborhoods of towering homes and is a monument dedicated to all homes and the personal pride and seclusion we experience in owning and maintaining them.
Mary Robinson-Confluence
June 16 to August 19, 2018
Mary Robinson’s exhibition, Confluence: Monoprints and Mixed Media Works on Paper,brings together different modes of working and contrary gestures. Robinson mixes and remixes printmaking matrices, and cuts and reconfigures paintings and collages, to see relationships freshly. This continual composing, decomposing, and recomposing reflects the way Robinson experiences the world, where circumstances can change quickly—technology is developing rapidly, political situations can suddenly flip, and the natural environment is breaking down at an alarming pace. Her cyclical process of breaking forms apart and layering or gluing them back together mirrors desires for both order and chaos.
Robinson created the monoprints in this exhibition from stencils and matrices, hand-cut from wood and other materials, and also printed from the leftover or negative cut shapes. These prints have gone through the press several times to build up translucent and opaque layers of color. Robinson’s method of printing with scraps coincides with parallel practices of collage and collage-like painting. There is a constant dialogue between the bodies of work: some of the collages contain cut-up prints, and often the collages and paintings become “sketches” or springboards for new prints.
Towering: Art Inspired by the Redwoods
June 9 to August 5, 2018
The Humboldt Arts Council, Redwood Parks Conservancy and Redwood National and State Parks have teamed up to present a juried art exhibition celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Redwood National Park. This unique juried exhibition will highlight an appreciation for the skills and creativity of artists and the essence of Redwood National Park. Artists are invited to submit work inspired by the redwoods that conveys their personal interpretation of the majestic beauty of the redwoods as well as environmental, ecological, cultural, and political ideas. .
Claudia Lima-Humboldt
May 5 to June 18, 2018
Claudia Lima was born in San Diego and grew up in the small town of Julian, California. She is the oldest of nine children. She graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in Animal Science. After graduation she went to work in the family lumber business in San Diego. In 1982 she moved to Ukiah, California and opened her own wholesale lumber brokerage business. In 1992 she married her husband, John, a logging contractor and moved to Humboldt County. Claudia was always drawing as a child. When she moved to Humboldt County, she started taking Art Classes at Humboldt State University. She took a break from painting after the birth of their son, Christopher, but went back in painting in earnest in 2007. She has had exhibitions at the Humboldt State University First Street Gallery, Art Center Alturas, Strawberry Rock Gallery, Red Bluff Bull & Gelding Sale, San Luis Obispo Cattlemen’s Western Art Show and Sale. She also exhibits frequently at the Redwood Arts Association Gallery. The works in the exhibition are impressionistic oil paintings of logging and ranching and historic landscape symbols of the timber industry in Humboldt County.
27th Annual Images of Water Photography Competition & Exhibition
April 28 to June 3, 2018
Celebrating years of creative visions of water, this revived annual competition highlights the inspiring beauty of water. From images of lakes and streams to ice-cube trays and snow, Images of Water is a fun, theme-based show to take part in or to just take a look at. Open to all photographers, this is an exciting opportunity for all to become involved in the arts on the North Coast.
Justin L’Amie: The Beautiful Night
April 21 to June 10, 2018
We live in a world that I am told is guided by scientific rules and principles. There are reasons why each plant grows the way it does. There are reasons that a frog doesn't give birth to a bird. There are reasons things feel different at night. I am sure there are reasons why. Traveling to new places I see that everything looks familiar, yet different. The same or similar shapes, colours and textures. Variation and combination, repetition without repeating. Rare new life. They are new flowers to me. Insects with green eyes.
Richard Stockwell: Pastel Waters
April 7 to May 27, 2018
Pastel Waters features the small-scale pastel landscapes of artist Richard Stockwell. Stockwell finds his inspiration from the coastal landscapes of Humboldt County and enjoys plein air painting with other local artists.
John Humphries: Watercolor Drawing: Abstraction, Nature and Narrative
February 24 to April 15, 2018
As an adopted child I search the world to find myths and stories to fill the gap present from not having a ready-made family narrative of my own when I was young. Through this lens, I now make drawings that are emotional and technical, with a colorist's sensibility, that link the visual language of landscape, color theory, and constructed elements. These watercolor drawings are made by observing environmental phenomena (here referred to as natural characterssuch as wind, clouds, shadow, noise, birds, horizon, etc.) and through abstraction which assists these characters in describing an essential story about the landscape and built environment and mythology. Some characters within these drawings are rendered in the form of gestures, some with drafted lines and curves, some of collaged photographic elements, others of constructed pieces of wood floating above the plane of the paper. As these characters are coaxed into interactions, a complex image emerges revealing an underlying, perhaps subconscious, story about the context. The drawings incorporate physical elements embedded into the surface of the paper. The drawings for the exhibition will be drawings describing observations from nature and mythology.
Jim Lowry: African Fantasy
February 24 to April 29, 2018
In April, 2016 my wife of 35 years suddenly died. My life was shocked out of it’s norms, and I pledged to say “yes” to everything that came my way. One day a friend called and told me a small group of photographers were going to Africa for a month, and he invited me to join them. What could I say but yes. Yes to everything.
The months marched by rapidly, and it was time to go. I met my friend in the Vaxhall area of London where we spent a couple of days walking and taking photos. From there we caught a flight to South Africa, where we met our other four companions. We rented vehicles and headed out to Kruger National Park.
Kruger Park was in the third year of a three year drought. Many of the animals were suffering, especially the grazers and Hippos. Elephants were pushing trees over to eat the roots; Bones were in abundance; rivers were very low and water holes were drying up. Many areas looked like a war zone.
Kruger is about the animals. Photographers with enormous lenses and fancy equipment were all about the close ups. Being primarily a landscape photographer, I sought to incorporate animals into the landscape, rather than do just animal portraits. The land was telling a tale of gritty survival in a difficult environment. I needed to shoot that.
I spent days and nights in bush camps, out tracking animals on foot at sunrise with half a dozen other travelers and two rangers walking single file, an arm’s length apart so as to appear to be one large animal. If someone needed to stop for any reason, everyone stopped. The feeling of being last in that line is something I expect to remember for a long time.
After a month, I came home with 6,000 photos. While it will take a long time to do justice to this many photos, this show is a collection of my first choices.
I hope this show inspires the “yes” in you.
Exhibition Sponsored by Gale Becker
Humboldt Collects!
February 24 to April 22, 2018
Why are we a nation of storage units, packed basements, and reality TV shows about hoarding? Humboldt Collects presents extraordinary collections from Humboldt County residents, exploring the fascinating practice of collecting. Celebrating the intrinsic beauty and insightful stories found within the collections and the people who make them, this show examines how the items we collect inform notions of who we are as individuals and a community.
Artists Who Animate
January 8 to February 18, 2018
Humboldt County does not have a rich tradition as an animation hotbed. But one of its best-known resources are its artists, and it is in from a background of exploring other art mediums that the AWA come. Each of the five artists has worked in other mediums, and animation becomes a logical progression in their own personal art forms. The diverse forms and styles that are included in this exhibit speak to their unique backgrounds in the creative arena.
Expect the unexpected. The AwA members are continually surprised at the direction that their exhibit has taken. Animation will be explored in many forms, from historical "pre-film" techniques of moving form --- zoetropes and mutoscopes that require hands-on manipulation by viewers to create the moving image while also offering the viewer an understanding of the basic process of animation – to techniques using digital processes to create moving art. Much of the original artwork used in creating the animations will be exhibited.
AWA is likely the only artist collective of its kind in the region. Animation artists, studios, and schools are typically located in urban centers, such as San Francisco or Los Angeles. AwA is a grass-roots collective with a specific interest in artist-driven (rather than commercially-driven) experimental animation. The exhibition ‘Artists who Animate’ may be the first of its kind in Humboldt County, as participants are not students but emerging and mid-career artists with years of professional experience in various art forms.
Each artist, coming from different backgrounds, ages, and art expression takes animation through his or her own unique exploration:
Kyle Couture has studied animation formally at the Kansas City Art Institute, and his exhibit at the Morris Graves brings together his knowledge of early animation techniques (mutoscopes, a form of hand-crank flipcards that create animations of a few seconds each through changing images on multiple cards) combined with the latest digital approaches through Adobe Flash. Used together, the animation vignettes become wry comments on popular culture.
Brent Noel Eviston is an artist, a passionate drawing instructor, and a draftsman who is rooted in the drawing process, both traditional and experimental. His exhibition titled “The Forbidden Chamber” is a multi-media installation that that brings together text, images, motion and sound to explore how we consume and process information. Using the traditional drawing and animation materials like paper, ink, water, tape, etc, he creates movement through a wide range of experimental and traditional animation techniques.
Julie McNiel is a painter and teaching artist with the Prison Arts Project. Her short animation, “Fogline” is a meditation on the rhythmic passage of time and movement of bodies through space, involving a stop-motion process that uses a whiteboard with black marker, photographing, and then erasing each drawing. Hundreds of individual drawings, shown at 12 frames per second, are accompanied by a sound track of slow yet repetitive beats that calls forth the heavy, sometimes surreal, atmosphere out on the prison yard.
Amy Uyeki chooses art forms that take a narrative path, and animation is a natural succession in her storytelling. “From Somewhere” uses pastel images drawn on wood and photographed, then animated digitally as her basis for a narrative that follows 5 individuals and their families’ arrival in America, sometimes over years. Holly Mead, a San Francisco musician and composer has created the original score for this 10-12 minute animatio
Steven Vander Meer makes films that are all hand drawn on 3x5 inch index cards, what has been called "flip book style" animation. His timing and movements are quite precise, but the limitations of the medium -- mainly rough registration and small size -- cause the images to vibrate in a way that seems almost out of control. His choice of exploration is the dichotomy between complete order and utter chaos. "Random Thoughts" will exhibit upstairs in the Tom Knight Gallery. It will be a hands-on multimedia, individual film festival of his many years of animation and most current work.