My most recent project, titled “Comfort and Catastrophe”, consists of three sections.  It is inspired by theories about climate change (“No-Ark”), global ocean currents (“Coriolis”), and global water distribution patterns (“Tears/ Rain”). I am utilizing the 19th c. cyanotype process, in which a range of blue tones is created. I coat various types and colors of paper with a mixture of light sensitive iron compounds (ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide), place objects or materials on the surface of the paper, expose it under ultraviolet light (i.e. sunlight), and process it. In the primary section, “No-Ark”, I am exploring the possible consequences of the sea level rising.  The work consists of photograms of a variety of plastic, wood, or stuffed animals composed and exposed to light in such a way that they appear to be floating or drowning in the water. I am interested in how this imagery hovers in the space between comfort and catastrophe. In the “No-Ark” section, I am also exploring and responding to the oceanic phenomenon known as the “Great Garbage Patch”, which exists within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The “Coriolis” section explores, in a more scientific or diagrammatic way, the major ocean currents north and south of the equator. The “Tears/ Rain” section not only refers to water patterns but also to the expression of grief and mourning.

Tina Aufiero

Between ‘nature observer’ and ‘obsessed videographer’, Tina Aufiero continues to document the arrival of migrating trumpeter swans in Skagit Valley, WA. This particular photo composites several images taken by a digital video camera flown on balloons in 2009. This is an example of Aufiero’s ongoing observation involving migrating swans. The swan becomes an iconic metaphor, the trope that focuses her ideas and experiences concerning love, life cycles and social relations.

“Vantage point” shown here refers to earlier efforts in which photography and video were the result of her process. She has traveled to different locations, local and international, to observe the swans and gather video. These projects overlap and include ‘swan project’ 2002, ‘project swancam’ 2005 and ‘swan song’ 2009.
‘Swan_project’ was an interactive video and photographic journal of time spent in Iceland during the arrival of migrating whooper swans.

‘Project_swancam’ put into use a collar fitted with a video camera on the neck of a swan fabricated by Aufiero. Aufiero worked with Dr. William Sladen at Environmental Studies at Airlie - Swan Research Program in Warrenton,VA. Dr. Sladen is a well known ornithologist in the area of swan migration. Still frames exported from the collected video were exhibited as a photographic grid, 8’ x 6’, representing the ephemeral space of the swan.

Bonnie Biggs

The minis are a series of small objects made with pieces of drawings, photos and a few other uncomplicated materials. So far the ideas are centered around brief evocative vignettes from a bit of what the eye sees and mind imagines.

Linda Davidson

The installations of small paintings that I make collect the impressions, associations and intrusive thoughts that one might have while experiencing an ordinary moment in an ordinary day.  Together they represent my attempt to depict the eternal nature of a single instant in a thinking mind.

They are made as individual paintings that are gathered as opportunities arise, to form larger images.  Sometimes they are presented as pairs in which case the relationship between the particular two paintings becomes the whole story.  On other occasions the paintings are placed in the context of hundreds of others and the mural sized images create a narrative context for the individual paintings.

I use sky imagery because the sky is everywhere in human experience.  The forms and tonal relationships that develop in the clouds are at once endlessly mutable and very particular.  Sometimes a plume of smoke obscures the sky. 

The history and malleability of paint is also important to me.  Binders and pigments have been used in many ways and for millennia to represent everything that is so far conceivable to human beings. Styles and ways of handling painting media can convey a great deal about us, our present and our view of history and the future, whether through depiction, or analogous imagery.

This particular installation springs from a simple observation that I noted at the Venice Biennale in 2007.  There were many works of contemporary art that year presenting environments that had somehow been fabricated for human comfort in a post natural world.  Moving from these exhibits to the many Baroque churches and other buildings in town, I saw the domes of stone that everywhere supplanted the dome of the sky from an altered perspective.  These domes are decorated with extraordinary paintings of human allegorical figures hoisted by clouds into a facsimile of the heavens. 

The knowledge that we live in a fragile world that is threatened by (among other impulses) our human delight in invention, aspiration, opulence – even beauty is not new.  That we can no longer be innocent of this awareness must change us.

Julie Gaskill

In The Elementary Grammar of Dramatic Art, as K. S. Stanislavski called his System, he claimed that there is an immutable tie between the psychological and the physical. In every physical action there is always something psychological. For instance, opening a door is a physical action, but we always open a door for a psychological reason. 
Opening a door to escape from a room is different from opening it to overhear what is said in another room; it is different if you open the door to let in somebody you love; if you open the door during the day or night; and so on.
As a visual artist, I am interested in the same kind of signifier, the telling gesture. A turn of the head or hand that speaks volumes, “in general,” said Stanislavski, “is the enemy of art.”

David Nechak

My interests lie within a practice of faith and mindful consciousness throughout the creative process.

I look for connections between humor and insights involving life situations.

Barbara Noah

The images in this exhibition are from the Likely Stories series, which was interrupted by a hiatus to build and move into a new art studio, but will be completed in 2010. In this series, I am intrigued by the ideas of the long shot, a cultural longing for a better life, the can-do moxie that often arises out of that desire, and the notion that achievement, redemption, and salvation might be found in the sky. These themes are explored in pigment prints constructed from multiple images into alternative realities, in which solitary airborne objects function as surrogates for the viewer. These iconic symbols are everyday objects, often toys - diminutive objects taming the infinite. Whether free-floating or propelled by a toss, they are in full throttle can-do mode, ascending to improbable, transcendent heights and wryly reflective of the humor and pathos of the desire for human achievement.

Heather Dew Oaksen

What puts one impulsive adolescent boy in prison while another stays free? Minor differences. They may be as simple as the neighborhood he lives in, a better sense of which lines not to cross or ties to one influential adult. The major differences come to light post-prison. For the boy who is jailed, incarceration for a few years tends to launch a life plagued by obstacles, inappropriate responses and more prison.
The MINOR DIFFERENCES documentary film, currently in production, chronicles the 15 year post-prison journey of 7 former juvenile offenders. Their first person commentaries shed light on why and how jail exacts a long term, often lifetime, toll on youth who grow up behind bars. This exhibit excerpts stories from 4 of the 7.

In 1994, Oaksen taught a video skills class at Green Hill, a maximum security prison for juveniles in Chehalis, WA. There she got to know the young men you will meet in MINOR DIFFERENCES. At the time, they were boys between the ages of 13 and 18 – Caucasian, Native American, Mexican American and African-American. In creating their video pieces, the boys momentarily shed their label of “offender” or “gang banger.” They came across as engaging young people who, despite their mistakes, aspired to stay out of jail and lead satisfying lives. They had hopes for the future. And when they were released, Oaksen stayed in touch. Intermixing footage from recent interviews with her original work with the Green Hill boys, the feature length documentary film will vividly illustrate the subjects’ continued efforts to reconnect with the world.
The MINOR DIFFERENCES Project combines digital media products, emerging distribution technologies, and community action partners to convince audiences that sending juveniles to prison irreparably damages both the individual and the communities to which he or she will eventually return. All media products are an integral part of the larger, activist project operating as catalysts to encourage awareness, and promote action. http://www.minordifferences.com

John Overton

My work combines mixed tenses that express different times at which action takes place relative to the artist or viewer.  Color is a principal part of the work, conveying conditions of the past, present and future.

Kathleen Rabel

My current body of work strives to make physical an action, to make the intangible tangible.  These images are concerned with how a shape takes form through a series of structures that represent space, time and change on a two dimensional surface.  This comes from interest in change as movement through individual elements. My continuing work in painting, prints, process media, and photography also reflects this interest.

Kristen Ramirez

For most of my artistic practice, I have played with images that depict our culture’s fascination with easy mobility, gaudy commerce, infrastructure, and technology, always looking for a way to reveal the messy collision of messages and images. The work on view here represents an excavation of my studio practice.  Using sketches I’ve saved over the years and moving from 2d to 3d, I overlap distinct elements from five years’ worth of drawings. Tracing these layers onto one another, I am building an accretion of imagery that shows topography, commerce, natural forms, and infrastructure all in the same breath. This is my ongoing search for a vision that is useful, bittersweet, perhaps even beautiful.

Kristin L. Tollefson

Plant forms grown from line:
I draw it long and round.
These pips could be played as music.
We’d hear stylized botany, studded
with fecund beads
dew
pearl
bud
gelatinous fungi
capturing ambient light
shedding themselves, holding their breath,
exhaling.

I am drawn to the interplay between organic forms and human systems. Inspiration comes from sources including botanical illustration, micrograph photography, traditional textile and needlework techniques and fractal theory. Repetition and pattern-making, obsessive labor, and modular elements find their way into many of my pieces. Multiple simple elements convene into powerful and complex wholes. The work is simultaneously scientific and poetic.

Ruth Marie Tomlinson

Two Dot Spot Project #2: as the world turns
6.17.09 6:03am I was awake briefly at 5 to see a bright red pre-dawn strip on the horizon and to hear the densest layers of birdcalls. I know the western meadowlark, the magpies, and the sand-hill cranes, but there are many others I don’t yet know.

6.22.09 8:09am Following patches of light through stencils across the wall and then across the tabletop, my work has begun. It is a game to see how much I can get down before cloud-cover stops me or the sun moves beyond the window frame. I mailed three postcards today.

6.27.09 5:38am The sun broke the horizon just a few minutes ago and now at 5:42 it is behind a low grey cloud. Will there be enough light for me to work today? Yesterday was gray most of the day. I only managed two postcards and I mourn the loss of 6.26.09 on my large paper…but 7 is a beautiful number. Maybe these clouds will give. The meadowlarks are singing, perhaps declaiming the day. 

7.7.09 7:30am A look at the clock each morning notes the start of the day, but the rising and the setting of the sun determine waking and sleeping. I finished a second large drawing yesterday.

8.7.09 6:07am Eyes on my wall, I am waiting for the sun to clear a last cloud. Each date working with the sun is marked. The absence of the sun marked with the absence of a date. I mailed five postcards today.

8.10.09 6:16am The days are shortening and our Two Dot summer is ending. It is amazing how fast the sun moves. In 10 minutes it has doubled its distance from the horizon and now there are two pink squares on my working wall, one at each end. In the beginning of the summer, the west square began in the middle of my wall, now it starts at the edge. The light is moving so quickly I will need to get up soon to finish the last large drawing. All summer I’ve worked with the movement of the earth as a locater and marker of time. Yet I continue to refer to the sun’s movement. It is hard to wrap my mind around the idea of the ground under my feet moving, yet it is in constant motion…Terra Firma…the solidness we depend on hurling through our universe. Nothing…nothing is as it seems.
Two Dot Spot
Two Dot, Montana

David Ulrich

I am alarmed by the paradoxical attitudes we, as a society, hold towards the immediate natural environment and, by extension, the planet itself. We often claim reverence, respect, and deep enjoyment in the face of nature, yet our actions belie our words. Our fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness has been distorted by some to imply the desire for indulgent personal satisfaction, often through consumerism, which has an untold impact on both our implicit humanity and on the environment.
The images in this exhibition derive from two ongoing projects. The first is titled Mediated Nature, which is an examination of how the land itself is shaped by its inhabitants. And the second, They Paved Paradise, refers to a Joni Mitchell song written in response to the massive and insensitive development of Waikiki on the island of Oahu.

Featuring:

March 10 – April 14, 2010
Opening Reception: March 10, 5 – 8 pm

Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
Cornish Main Gallery Hours: Monday – Wednesday, Friday 12 – 5 pm; Thursday 10 am – 6 pm

Location: Main Gallery, MCC 1st floor
Day: February 9
Time: 12-1pm

The Cornish Main Gallery presents Unring the Bell, a solo exhibition by Cornish alumnus Dan Webb (Art ’91). The second installment in the Alumni Retrospective Series, Unring the Bell emphasizes the artist’s creative development from his student experiences at Cornish through recent years. The exhibition features finished sculptures, works-in-progress, early objects and drawings not previously exhibited, and an original comic book co-created by the artist and Cornish student Kelly Martin (Art ’10).

Curated by Cornish Exhibitions Curator Jess Van Nostrand

January 21 — February 26, 2010
Opening Reception: January 20, 5 - 8pm

Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
Cornish Main Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Friday, 12 - 5 pm

Thursday, December 3rd
Noon-1PM
MCC Room 309
Please note that room 309 is on the main floor of 1000 Lenora St.

Guest curated by Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum

Through a selection of photography and video works, GRAVITY probes the ways in which contemporary artists give expression to the gradual, and often imperceptible, shifts in daily life and experience. Attune to the subtleties of transformation, the works on view highlight an impulse to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity, and the ephemeral.

Nov 3 - Dec 11
Cornish Main Gallery
Main Campus Center
1000 Lenora Street, 1st Floor

Lecture and demonstration of technique: 
Cornish College of the Arts, Room 510 (Print Studio)
1:30 PM, Friday Oct 9, 2009

Zha Sai’s Homepage

Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
Cornish Main Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Friday, 12 - 5 pm

Curated by Cornish Exhibitions Curator Jess Van Nostrand

Artists from the Pacific Northwest demonstrate their perspectives on creating visual art without media boundaries. Featuring composer-video artist-printmaker Paul Rucker and video-music-performance artist Wynne Greenwood. In conjunction with Interface, the interdisciplinary series on campus, Live in the Hyphen will feature regular events for the participation of students, staff and faculty.

The Cornish Main Gallery serves as an intersection for the college’s academic departments, a venue where different art forms can be explored within the context of contemporary visual art.

Live in the Hyphen brings together, for the first time, the work of two established Northwest artists who create between mediums. Through their unique perspectives on music, theater, sculpture, video, printmaking, and performance, this exhibition demonstrates the depth and complexity of each of their artistic efforts while offering insight into how and where the disciplines intersect. Print-performance-music, video-interactive technology-music, these are some of the ways in which their work “lives” in hyphens.

Paul Rucker is an award-winning cellist-bassist-composer who produces jazz albums under his Jackson Street Records label. Rucker frequently experiments with interactive sculptures that incorporate musical elements and using printmaking techniques to create new types of musical scores. In 2007, Rucker was invited by legendary filmmaker David Lynch to perform for the opening of Lynch’s film, Inland Empire; and in 2009, he completed a permanent site-specific audio installation for the Museum of Flight in Tacoma, Washington.

Wynne Greenwood is a lesbian feminist artist working with video, performance, music, sculpture and installation. She received her MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. In 2009, Greenwood was a visiting faculty at Seattle University, teaching “Video, Performance and Identity.” Selected performances and exhibitions include Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NYC (2005), Whitney Biennial (2004), The Kitchen, NYC (2005), Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, LA (2006, 2008), Tate Modern (2007), d.i.y. art spaces and nightclubs (2001-present). She lives and works in Seattle, WA.

An important element of Live in the Hyphen is the weekly events series that take place in and near the gallery throughout the duration of the show. These events, which feature a variety of student, alumni and professional artists projects, provide the “live” (as in “alive”) component of the exhibition theme. The events are free and open to the public.

This exhibition is part of Interface, Cornish’s interdisciplinary series on campus.

A series of one-hour interdisciplinary happenings will take place on the Cornish campus in conjunction with the exhibition. For the complete schedule, click here.

This exhibition is part of Interface. Interface is an event series designed to encourage and celebrate collaborative and cross-disciplinary artistic projects and foster departmental interactions.

Performance: “This Used to be About Love” by Michael Rioux (AR ’09)
Third Floor Alumni Gallery, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
September 9, 5-8pm

Michael Rioux (AR ‘09) will juxtapose dance and visual art by tracing his own shadow on a wall for a set period- an infinite, futile task that represents the artist's innate drive to create. Curated by Ian Toms (AR ‘09)

Live Performance by Paul Rucker and Hans Teuber
Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
September 18, 12-1pm

Live performance by Paul Rucker (cello) and Cornish faculty’s Hans Teuber (alto sax) based on Rucker’s interchangeable musical score ”puzzle pieces”- requires audience participation!

collection - completion
questions - answers
courage - command
Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
September 25, 10-11:30am

Art Foundations students take to the streets as adventurers, fieldworkers, collectors and aggregators. Their accumulated findings and experiences result in collaborative works that live between research, action, and performance. The final works are presented in the Gallery. Panel Discussion, "Under the Influence: Filmic Storytelling" immediately following.

Panel Discussion: "Under the Influence: Filmic Storytelling"
Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
September 25, 12-1pm

Presented jointly with TheFilmSchool, director John Jacobsen, actor Tom Skerritt, and screenwriter Lisa Halpern (TH ’87) will discuss the power of cinema to tell stories using the resources of multiple disciplines: visual, verbal, aural, performative. This panel discussion immediately follows collection - completion, questions - answers, courage - command.

Wynne Greenwood: Mirrors in Shaky Hands
Cornish Main Gallery, First Floor, 1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121
Friday, October 16, 12-1pm

The artist talks about identity as it appears throughout her work.

This exhibition is part of Interface. Interface is an event series designed to encourage and celebrate collaborative and cross-disciplinary artistic projects and foster departmental interactions.

Design: Cornish Main Building at 1000 Lenora St. (1st floor)
Art: Cornish MC6 at 427 9th Ave N.
Opening reception Friday, May 8, 5-9PM.

Free and open to the public.