Around Oregon Annual Exhibition 2022
Sharing work by contemporary artists from all over Oregon
July 9 – August 13, 2022
Corvallis Art Walk/ Reception: July 21, 4 – 8 pm (reception 5:30 – 7:30 pm)
Art for Lunch: July 14, 2022, 12 pm
WHAT: 20th Around Oregon Annual Exhibition, juror Mario Mesquita, Regional Arts and Culture Council
WHERE: The Main Gallery in The Arts Center
WHEN: July 9 – August 13, 2022
WHY: To share work by contemporary artists from all over the state, as selected by an outside (of Corvallis) arts professional.
The Arts Center features its 20th Around Oregon Annual exhibit July 9 – August 13, 2022. Mario Mesquita (Regional Arts and Culture Council) chose 43 works, by as many artists, out of 453 images. The AOA shows work by contemporary artists from all over the state, in various media and subject matter. From the oil painting techniques of David Carmack Lewis’ “Relic” to Tyler Brumfield’s use of bottle caps in “Encrusted”; from intimate interior photographs by Lee Niemi’s “At Home” to majestic landscapes such as M.C. Reardon’s “Storm over Nipple Mountain”; and including more conceptual work by Epiphany Couch, “Buried by White Ways”. All of them breathe a contemporary spirit, solidly based in the “now”.
Juror Mario Mesquita works at the Regional Art & Culture Council as the Advocacy and Development Team as Manager of Advocacy and Engagement. He is a practicing artist a curator of exhibits.
“What was the motivation of the artist to create?” In this body of work, the primary inspiration for the artwork was contemplation, human emotion, nature, and personal place/space. I kept in mind and asked myself of each piece, “How successfully does this work of art draw connection or engage with the viewer; what draws us in captivity?” For some without an artist or work of art statement, I was forced to judge only the visual. I think this was quite a good method since a juror can be led to see what the artist says is in the work of art at times. I was also delighted to find most submissions were well-photographed. This is still an essential skill an artist must acquire if taking their own photos. The image is the only language for an artist to communicate with a juror.
Mario Mequita
Full Juror Statement
I want to thank the Art Center for inviting me to jury Around Oregon 2022.
The submissions presented how enriched our Oregon community and view of the creative landscape to me. There were so many strong works of art that choosing approximately 35-45 pieces was a difficult task. I usually approach the process by identifying those pieces that I think absolutely qualify to be in the show and then select additional pieces to arrive at the required number to make a robust exhibition. This was based on a rubric developed that took into consideration originality, theme, craftsmanship, connection or engagement, and a statement.
After the first phase of this process I selected over 120 plus pieces in the “must be shown” category. I had to make sure that only one work was selected per artist. There were a handful of artists who I had initially selected two works or more from what they had submitted. Works submitted to this year’s Around Oregon came from a wide variety of materials, media, and process and I aimed to create a balance between them. Do not be discouraged if your work was not included. This would qualify as one of the most competitive shows I have juried.
What was the motivation of the artist to create? In this body of work the primary inspiration for the artwork was contemplation, human emotion, nature, and personal place/space. I kept in mind and asked myself of each piece “how successfully does this work of art draw connection or engage with the viewer; what draws us in captivity?” For some without an artist or work of art statement, I was forced to judge only the visual. I think this was quite a good method
since a juror can be led to see what the artist says is in the work of art at times. But also delighted to find most submissions were well photographed. This is still an essential skill an artist must acquire if taking their own photos. The image is the only language for an artist to communicate with a juror.
I hope the audience enjoys the show as much as I enjoyed looking at the images and selecting the works for the exhibition. I was deeply moved by some of the work, was joyed at the beauty of some pieces, and challenged by others.
Mario Mesquita
Participating Artists
My work is an exploration of physical and emotional aspects of place using maps and found objects. It is influenced by Deep Ecology and Bioregionalism, and informed by the practice of looking for the sacred in everyday life. I am interested in layering, combining materials and attention to detail. The work is meant to celebrate our connections to the world around us and the world within us.
Rebecca Arthur’s ceramics invoke the power and energy of earth and fire. She creates non-functional hand-built and wheel thrown forms which become her canvasses. Incorporating leaves, ferns, moss, seaweed and other materials found on long walks in the woods and on the beaches, Rebecca “paints” these forms with fire and smoke to produce unpredictable, ethereal, almost surreal results.
I like to look at the world and find things that are different and a bit quirky. I think of it as a celebration of the mundane and elevating it through art.
Tyler’s studio work explores visual and conceptual intersections between art history and everyday life and employs a wide range of media and approaches, from digital illustration to wood carving. He studies the art of the past and the objects/images we come in contact with everyday to make images and objects that reference both.
Being a figurative artist, I use images to tell a story, express ideas, emotions and to reveal something of our current situations. The human form is usually the storyteller in my work. I am particularly interested in struggles, tensions and triumphs of those around me. As a result, my work often exhibits animated brushwork or emotive color. The subject/concept determines my approach.
I have spent the majority of my artistic career traveling and painting throughout the US and Europe in the plein air tradition. In the open air I study the ever-changing landscape, recording both its vastness and its details. I am enthralled by what a person sees in just one moment in time. In the blink of an eye, we can gather enough information to tell an epic tale.
I am a multidisciplinary artist exploring the magic of generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By recontextualizing traditional mediums such as bookmaking, photography, and sculpture, I look to present new ways through which we can examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. My work is unapologetically personal — intimate and heirloom-like.
My love of both curved forms and light came together in this torchiere lamp. The sinuous structure of the steam-bent mahogany legs embrace the lighted shade which in turn provides a soft glowing light. The white oak veneer shade was hand bent and shaped to the torch form. Copper rivets connect the legs and hoops of the frame and offer a visual contrast to the dark wood.
(Holy Water Font)
Drawing upon my Mexican upbringing I include Mexican religious iconography, specifically Milagros (small metal charms representing miracles). Body imagery intertwined with religious objects connect me with my cultural identity and my corporeal reality as a woman and human being. I treat the body in parts or pieces like the Milagros. I embed Milagros into each of my works as a secret prayer.
My prints are about quiet moments; they draw upon memories while interpreting the shapes, textures found in the landscape. Initially the horse was chosen as a totem around which the nuances of relationship, vulnerability and stewardship are explored. I expanded those themes to include the garden and figures in natural environments. I found my vocabulary in the unpredictable exactitude of intaglio.
David A. Goodrum, photographer and writer, lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His photography has been juried into several art festivals and published in various art and literature journals. He hopes to create a visual field that momentarily transports you away from hectic daily events and into a place that delights in an intimate view of the world. Additional work can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com.
My fascination with pre-civilized people whose lives and values are deeply connected to the earth can be found in my current work. The unconscious bond with landscape lives in each of us and my paintings are meant to bring that bond into contemporary awareness.
Making art is an outlet for my irreverent inner self. Beginning intuitively and spontaneously, then slowly building up many layers, I bring out the individual personality of each character. My recent mixed media paintings are inspired by childhood memories.
I am a painter and a potter with a background in the life sciences. Abstracted images of plants, animals and their ecosystems are consistently present in my work. My forms are often broken down into detailed parts that illustrate the “building blocks” of a given subject within nature. Images of thrown and hand built ceramic forms appear along side mysterious faces and other elements.
The prints in this show were started during the COVID-19 stay at home order. I learned the botanical dye printing method for paper in early March on Zoom. It was a prefect medium to use during this time, as I could take my morning walk and bring plenty of fresh leaves home and start the process. From there it was adding inks and print blocks to keep changing the pieces.
My work focuses on change–what it means to face the circumstances of loss, transition, and growth. The choices made at pivotal junctures determine what follows. These junctures can be opportunities to find new paths, or to take comfort in the familiar; to go it alone or to forge connections, reveling in the present; to persevere or to switch direction, taking a risk and embracing the unknown.
In a world too often ugly I feel impelled to become a source of beauty, producing art that is not a sedative but a stimulant, even a hallucinogen.
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Human perception is malleable. Pareidolia strikes deep. The more you look the more you see, kind of like reading. Soon you’re telling your story to the art, rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, the art is looking back.
I love using my camera to create images I see as interesting in patterns or designs in both the natural and the constructed world. Abstractions that let the viewer imagine something is the ultimate for me. I also enjoy photographs that tell a story, especially about people. Again, when the viewer can use their imagination about what they see as the story in an image, that excites me the most.
Sometimes pain is a thin sliver of color on a gray landscape, like a kind of quicksand. Knowing I could suffocate in it’s expanse yet I am still drawn by my desire for it’s depths, and by the need to be encompassed by something outside of myself.
I paint in order to transform what I see into a thing that I have never seen.
My current work continues my decades-long interest in the printmaking process. These block prints reflect my attraction to the simple and charming, while also providing a springboard to interpret the world in a more personal and whimsical way. I enjoy every phase of the process: carving the block, printing with my press or by hand, and finishing the edition with hand applied watercolors.
I have been an avid but shy painter for the last 48 years and have only shown a few pieces over that time. This year my life and inner space changed, my drive to paint exploded, and I am eager to get my work out in the world. I completed these pieces while quarantining this year after potential exposure to Covid. They reflect my effort to capture feelings about a particular sense of place.
Photography is my way to document my experiences and interactions with the world around me. Portraiture is an instrument to research into and report on the times I am living. It allows me to form relationships with those I photograph and coupled with personal interviews, it offers a more meaningful look into their lives. I work primarily in black and white as it lends itself best to storytelling.
I make hand-coiled cooking vessels and cups from micaceous clay. Each year I return to harvest this clay in New Mexico. My work is one of many iterations of the ever-evolving, centuries-old tradition of pottery making in that region. I strive to make work whose beauty does justice to her wild mountain origins and brings sustenance and vitality to peoples’ homes.
My restless eye loves an untraditional mash-up. I collage antique with spontaneous, words with images, fragments with full images. Images, maps, text, drawings and scribbles. A formal career in graphic arts with my love of making things led to Sweetglass, where I create one-of-a-kind leaded glass panels.
My work explores the potential for mystery and wonder inherent in the world around us. I embrace a suggestion of narrative by using dramatic lighting and visual metaphors, a series of recurring motifs and ideas, to tell both true stories and tall tales about what is real, what is imagined and how they overlap.
On my daily walks during the COVID-19 quarantine, I photographed flowers and in observing their bloom, wilt, and decay I saw a reflection of my and our losses, along with hope for renewal and growth. Using these photographs as reference images, each trace monotype is created in a single studio session, thereby acting as a record of that day’s strength and struggle, visible in mark and color
There is so much we don’t see. I attempt to break through the veil of perception into the realm of the collective unconscious. I seek to encounter the other, the shadow, the universal knowledge. Inspired initially by petroglyphs, I explore archetypal characters and situations. I try to illuminate the experiences we all share – not just in the here and now, but in the forever.
I paint intuitively, using process-based, automatic techniques to create layered abstract paintings. My work serves to provide me with an outlet into which I can release strange energetic burstings, and also acts as a container for those events, preserving them onto the surface of the canvases which I confront.
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I had a traumatic brain injury in 2014 which led me to prioritize my creative output.
Making my own fabric is central to my art quilting process. Katazome, Japanese stencil dyeing, is my first love and has been for 25 years. It allows me to separate the production of the image from the application of color, a process more akin to printmaking than to painting. Combining art and science in my work, I care deeply that what I depict is biologically accurate as well as beautiful.
This is my work: To look, to love, to learn what it is to see with eyes unburdened by preconceptions. To find the relationships that are interlaced between within around us each. Sometimes the exploration reveals dark places, sometimes I simply bask in the ten thousand pretty things. I paint to express the inner world within exterior avatars, our human condition, the beauty and life around me.
I have issues with memory, and a lot of my work serves a functional purpose by recording my world at a specific point in time. At Home is a series of composite photographs depicting my living space from above. My intention is to continue this project indefinitely and capture these images for every place I live.
I’m curious about the world – how the brain works, evolution, native cultures, climate change, and why humans are so weird. I’m also interested in how culture and language shape our perceptions. These sculptures are visual experiments in trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes they take the form of social commentary or they may take a more humorous twist.
I create large-format woodblock prints of dreamlike coastal nightscapes. In “What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing?”, I incorporated animals from the starlore of First Peoples (Tlingit, Crow, Yakima, Wardaman (Australia), Navajo, Cherokee Nations). In “Red, Right, Nocturn”, I contrasted the shoreline that I grew up with in New Jersey with the coast in my adopted home of Oregon.
This work is attempting to visually express ideas of Radical Hope. Using patterns that are inspired from nature I hope to evoke the destruction or the construction of nature and the hope that lies with in the rebirth of a new nature. I enjoy working in patterns with shapes in mass, using lots of pieces that come together as a whole. The individuals becoming one.
My art focuses on spatial relationships and perspective shifts. I use a variety of mediums to explore these ideas, including photography. By using unusual focal points, shadows, and reflections, my photographs show alternative perspectives of the everyday experience. By challenging what is familiar, my work encourages people to reclaim their sense of wonder of things that have become commonplace.
I am deeply concerned for our planet’s ecological health and future. My avian imagery is the product of careful observation, deep appreciation, and empathy. Never mere decoration, birds are both muse and indicator species for me. My paintings combine complex visual references to art history, religion, architecture, decorative arts, and ecology.
I am thinking about the elements Earth, Fire, Water, Air and how to represent them in this time of environmental transition and climate change. On a personal micro scale to recognize these changes impacting me, my neighborhood and region. On a macro scale the planet and ominous events yet to come. How do I juxtapose and represent these events and experiences in my art, balanced with intention?
My approach to photography involves something called Mise-en-scène, which literally translates to “placing on stage.” It represents the arrangement of elements within the frame of view, including lighting, themes and composition. Through photography, I strive to show the Mise-en-scène that exists within each and every image, even if only for a brief moment in time.
I render subjects with colored pencil; the paper heavily marked with layers of color and tone. The intention is to capture the energy of the scene: of light, movement, narrative, and the passage of time.
The central concept that drives my work is my belief that all life is inter-connected and inter-dependent. I feel that humanity must see itself as part of the natural world, rather than having dominion over it. The works shared here result from my struggle to comprehend and accept the many losses to both community and our environment after the devastating wildfires of September 2020.
I call my style “American Verismo” which is inspired by Italian painting theory from the Risorgimento period (1860s), which emphasizes working “dl Vero”, or after life or truth. This boils down to a kind of contemporary impressionism based on “all prima” or direct attack in plein air painting. I like to introduce semi-abstraction into my oil paintings which are mostly representational. I
My family has lived in Oregon since the 1800’s, creating a deeply personal connection to the land for me. My creative work is an ongoing narrative of intuitive awareness that Nature does not live in the boundaries that humans do, in tiny squares on a satellite map, but within the vast landscape we have built our homes upon; going about its daily business, and yet…still influenced by our presence.
