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Far Away

Dates: Jul 10, 2010 to Aug 14, 2010

Participating Artist(s):
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David Carmack Lewis, 'Crossing #2'

This work combines a number of characteristics of Carmack Lewis' work: a mysterious scene, in the night, seen from above. It is not clear what happened here, or what is to happen. On top of everything: he likes fire...
About the artist...

Rich Bergeman, 'Engineer #2'

The drama and romance of old steam trains comes clearly across in color photo's by Bergeman in the "Far Away" exhibit. Primarily a black and white photographer Bergeman effectively used color, created by light fall to make a connection with times past.
About the artist...

Dan Wise, 'Out of the Mines'

Patterns made by gleaming train rails where the light catches the polished metal makes an attractive
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Cynthia Nawalinski, 'New Zealand'

The piece exist out two layers of maps, the silhouette of New Zealand is noticeable in the upper one, although most of the information of the map has been cut away. Only the part that says "ocean" is still visible
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Talmadge Doyle

About the artist...

Robert Schlegel, 'Among Twenty Snowy Mountains'

Schlegel worked with pencil, charcoal, watercolor and acrylic on old ledger paper and a map. The work is based on a poem by Wallace Stevens:"Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird." The image is a deatil of the work.
About the artist...

Far Away

"Far Away", The Arts Center's July 2010 exhibit, is inspired by the da Vinci Days Festival's theme  of "map making", which has currently morphed into the official 2010 theme of "cosmos", together with the Community Art Project of "Space Odyssey". Well, one could imagine early train travel as the (space) travel through a more limited cosmos in the early 19th Century. The exhibit, scheduled at that time is shaped around trains, locomotives and maps. The artwork is done by painters, printmakers, photographers and multi-media artists with trains and maps as the subject matter. The center piece of the exhibit is an actual running model train with its track suspended from a center point in the gallery. The train will be an abstraction of what we normally see in a picturesque landscape at Citizens Bank during the holidays. Here the train will be travelling on a free floating track through space. Gene Thompson is the train master, while Walter Barkan is the master mind behind the track.
Rich Bergeman, Dan Wise and Herman Krieger show color and black & white photographs that fit the drama of 19th century train travel: steam engines partly obscured by their own smoke and billowing steam, and also the abstraction of rails as a pattern.
David Carmack Lewis paints large scale night scenes, full of mystery, often taking place in the proximity of train rails, stations and other amenities that come with trains. His work seems to tell a story, although it is not always -or rather hardly ever- clear what really is happening in these narratives.
Three artists in the exhibit work with maps, in different ways and with different goals. Painter Robert Schlegel makes small, delicate and intimate watercolors of birds, and uses old maps as his carrier. Birds' eye view is really what maps are about, seeing a landscape from above as if it is a pattern of straight and squiggly (roads & rivers) lines. At times they are very dense lines of towns & cities connected by a sparser rendition of the connecting roads.
Cynthia Nawalinski uses maps for further mark making. She stains, burns, cuts and prints on existing maps. She lays an on second pattern of the original map. Nawalinski's choice of technique for a particular piece reinforces the comments she is making in each work.
Printmaker Tallmadge Doyle tends to work in series: Her Celestial Maps series represent a magical sky reminiscent of the map makers of the 17th Century. These maps or images are about cosmos, and travel “Far Away".