Gallery One’s exhibits open on the first Friday of most months in conjunction with the Ellensburg Art Walk.
Click here for a full walking tour and map.
Main Gallery & Mezzanine:
Almost Home
Nina Vichayapai & Natalie Dotzauer
This October Gallery One welcomes two artists whose works explore the themes of domesticity and home. Nina Vichayapai uses fabric as a language to reveal how surroundings embody personal and social histories. From the intimate privacy of homes to the ambiguity of wild landscapes, she explores physical spaces as expressions of the people who have shaped them. Using textiles associated with domestic interiors, her work addresses the important role of homemaking in establishing belonging within the American landscape for the many underrepresented who have been part of it.
Natalie Dotzauer creates sculptural objects, or fragments of them, which trigger the senses and thoughts of nostalgia. A recipe, a smell, a sound, or a roof line can act as relics, or talismans of memories, triggering the senses and conjuring the delight of play. Some of the strongest moments in her life are not just pure joy or sadness; they are a wild combination of bliss and fear, sweetness, and sorrow. Her works aim to hold onto the places of these moments, visit them like monuments and hold them like relics.
Eveleth Green Gallery:
“…a little whimsy hopefully contributes something to the human condition.”
Darwin Davis
Darwin Davis started in the arts in the early 1960s making welded metal sculptures. One of his pieces, donated in 1972, stands next to the Language and Literature Building on Central Washington University’s campus. Davis’ work also focuses on political issues, and many of his works incorporate wooden board game pieces that add the playfulness of the work, but can also bring out ideas of conflict and struggle. He aims to make his audience reflect on current political issues by bringing them to light in a satirical manner. His work is methodically planned, and every piece is placed in such a way that it engages his audience. Each detail can alter the understanding of the piece making the work multi-layered in more ways than one.
Hallway Gallery:
Waxing & Waning
Patty Bury
For Patty Bury, creating art has been a lifelong obsession. Her entire adult life has been one of making, doing and experimenting. At 72 years old, the prospect of creating art is what gets her up and out to the studio almost every morning. The latest obsession for her is the versatile medium of encaustic. After accumulating a life’s worth of artwork and treasures like drawings, paintings, papers, metal, these objects become fresh material for waxing. Watercolors and drawings take on new life under a coat of wax, photographs take on otherworldly dimensions, paper, cloth and strings become a part of something completely new. Collages of old jewelry and wire and wood make statements about life and emotions. Colors blend and molten wax swirls, art accidents happen, and precise techniques are planned. Today she may feel traditional, tomorrow experimental; the wax accommodates all of her impulses.
Bury does not consider herself a traditional “artist”. She comes and goes into techniques and mediums. As quickly as she finds a new passion, something comes along that moves it out of the way and she is on to the next shiny object. Bury enjoys experimenting and combining, and work becomes all about the process or the time spent in making an art piece come into being. No matter what she is creating, Bury seizes every moment she has left to continue exploring her creative passion.