2017 April Exhibition

Kim Tepe

Miriam Omura

Ani Volkan

Mandy Greer

Jampa Dorje

Gallery One’s exhibits open on the first Friday of most months in conjunction with the Ellensburg Art Walk.
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Needles and Thread
A National Fiber Show
juried by Mandy Greer

View the Exhibition Catalog

Featuring works by:
Ivonne Acero, Andrea Alonge, Mayumi Amada, Sally Anaya, Maggie Avolio, Diana Baumbach, Andrea Beck, Diane Bronstein, Daphne Cuadrado, Deb Curtis, Sara Drower, Connor Dyer, Kelly Fleek, Jacquelyn Galbraith, Anne Greenwood Rioseco, Sarah Haven, Kiana Honarmand, Lexie Johnson, Katt Kelly, Philippe Kim, Annie Klaas, Kandy Lopez, Heather Macali, Elysia Mann, Jennifer Mcnelly, Amy Meissner, Chris Motley, Miriam Omura, Ajean Ryan, Heather Scholl, Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, Julia Tatiyatrairong, Kim Tepe, Donimique Vitali, Ani Volkan, Ny Wetmore, Emily White

Juror’s Statement:   

I am a working artist, so I know all too well the vulnerability of submitting work to be judged.  I know the disappointment of not getting in, and how it wounds. But also how it can make us reconsider our perspective, and also become even stronger advocates for our own vision of our work. So I juried this show with the tender hearts of hard-working artists in mind. I literally could have kept twice as many works in, I loved so many and felt pleasure in getting to see what people are making. But the parameters of the show made me edit, and with all editing, a more concise story begins to emerge. I didn’t select work in an academic way, but as a pleasure-seeker, as someone who loves what the human hand can make and say, and express that words can’t.  There is beauty, yes, but also anger, a will to be heard, a will to be seen even at our lowest.

As a conceptual artist whose own beginnings are grounded in traditional craft pottery, particularly Japanese folk pottery and the philosophy of Wabi-sabi, I gravitate to works that are not necessarily about a perfection in craft technique, but what the essence of craft means; a deeply passionate engagement with materials that transcends what is proper and correct. The story, the will of the individual voice is what pulls me in. I gravitate to the underdog, the freaks and geeks, the weirdos, those who know the shadow and make their own light, despite all odds. I chose many works that act as a mirror for us all, or that might be speaking to just a few, offering comfort as if to say “I see you, I am like you too.”

Fiber and cloth are some of the human animal’s oldest technologies, technologies that are built to last and are still important, thousands of years after they were invented. Cloth and the things we make with it shows our will to survive, to stay warm, to comfort with a blanket, to sail into the unknown with full sails, to adorn ourselves with intricate beauty showing off the infinite in the human imagination. Cloth is about softness, and the domestic, and also about resiliency and invention. Thank you for allowing me to see the threads in everyone’s work, and pull together a picture of this moment in time.

Eveleth Green Gallery:

Mandy Greer – Metamorphic

Mandy Greer is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist who works in a symbiotic way with fiber-based installation, photography, film, performance, and social and environmental interactivity.  For Metamorphic, Greer presents a collection of works from the last several years that explore the connection between the flux of our inner life and the geologic, translating the upheavals of stone, ash and magma into soft and malleable fiber that becomes a shadow of the domestic.  This exhibition spans several bodies of work, and has been informed by an on-going series of residencies Greer does with her family in remote or isolated places, distilling into artworks imagery that questions assigned roles, the social and intimate projections on the family, and the boundaries between body, environment and imagination.

Greer centers mothering as a generative and artistic medium for her work, and challenges the dominant notion of the ‘solo genius artist’, rather focusing on the symbiosis within groups and defacto collectives.   The maternal becomes a map for approaching social and ecological healing.  Caring for and carrying children becomes a way to understand the collective body, the family as body, the body as ever-changing environment.

Transformation is central; chaos is woven  into order and back into chaos.  Using the physicality and metaphor of weaving, the subtle metamorphic passage of flesh  and time is represented in glittering stone, erupting ash, dust, animal and flesh again. Greer transforms the detritus of our contemporary textile waste stream into timeless, elegant and raw conglomerations of inscrutable nature and the underbelly of human ceremonial imagination. By reclaiming the cast-offs of ‘fast fashion’ and reinvesting the material with painstaking hand-work, we are invited to enquiry on how value and meaning are ascribed, erased and altered.

Hallway Gallery:

Jampa Dorje – An Archival Idyll

Stéphane Mallarmé conceived of the Book as a spiritual exercise. For Jampa, the Book fuses Newtonian sequence and Blakeian simultaneity, as a vehicle to write poems. Jampa writes right in the book.

Jack Spicer, a Berkeley Renaissance poet, is Jampa’s inspiration for molding serial poetry into small books. The poem arrives on the page, whether he collages it together from bits or carves it from a single block, whether he dreams it or works it out as a puzzle. Once it makes it onto a sheet of paper and can be read, the poem is already a part of the book. And, once in the book, the poem gets lonely and wants to speak to other poems.

I keep making books, this book overlapping with the next, always with a bit undone, like a Navajo weaver, letting the spirits come and go.