Exhibition Dates:
September 7 – September 29, 2007
Opening Reception:
September 7, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Opening Introductions: 5:30 pm

Main Gallery:
KATHLEEN BODLEY
Using her art as communication, Kathleen Bodley paints because “it is what I can do and what makes sense to me.” Her paintings often start from words, nonsense phrases or deadly serious comments. She then translates these thoughts to the human form, using it as an expression of vulnerability, especially in the open landscape. Choosing to deal with one tiny moment in time and space, Bodley’s works remark on choice and human will. She often uses friends and family as the subjects in her work, willingly or not, because through them she feels she can find a vision of herself.

In addition to her creative work, Bodley has a background in scientific illustration and has published her illustrations in various anthropology and archaeology publications over the years. She lives and creates art in Pullman, WA.

Mezzanine:
KERRY VANDER MEER
Kerry Vander Meer received an Artist in Residency award in 1997 to a remote area of County Kerry in Southwest Ireland. While there, she read and talked to many people about the "great hunger" and the migration of the Irish people. It affected her deeply, and at one point she found herself carving potatoes in the shape of boats and calling them casket ships, a metaphor for the thousands that died making that voyage. After returning home to the United States, she continued working with potatoes – making forms by first slicing and extracting water, then reassembling and shaping them.

Vander Meer completed her MFA in sculpture from Mills College. Her talents, however, also extend into the realms of painting, printmaking, mixed media, installation, and performance art. Her works appear in collections in U.S., Germany, Spain, Ireland and Japan. She is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including artist-in-residency awards at the Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland, Millay Colony in Upstate New York, Villa Montalvo in Santa Clara, California, and Foundation Valpariso in Spain. Vander Meer's work has been praised by influential critic Lucy Lippard, and is included in many books and publications such as Artweek, San Francisco Focus, New York Times, and The Oakland Tribune.
She currently teaches art and Yoga at Creative Growth, an art center that serves adults with disabilities in Oakland, CA.


GAIL GRINNELL
A major focus in Grinnell’s adulthood has been caring for those, young and old, who cannot care for themselves. This experience has become the base from which she explores the cultural, spiritual and intellectual aspects of living. Grinnell’s primary motivation is to give visual form to her experience of living and the materials and working methods she chooses to use are a direct reflection of her everyday activities over the years.

Through her work Grinnell explores the layered nature of personal experience, aspiring to make visible the small ways that people mark time while living together. Her work utilizes materials and symbols that are familiar to her like thread and cloth, bones and veins and imagery taken from the mechanics of clothing construction and physical caretaking of the body.

Grinnell strives to make evident the process she uses in making her art, so that when looking at the work one can imagine the movements involved in its making – the repetitive motions for making the work corresponding to the repetitive requirements of being a caretaker. Her work has been shown extensively in the northwest and across the US. Grinell was a 1998 GAP grant recipient and in 2006/2007, a fellow of the foundation at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland.