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09/14/2007: "Island Museum of Art exhibits Lopez Artists"

Island Museum of Art opens “A Wild Nature”, a five person exhibition bringing diverse work from neighboring Lopez Island September 14 through November 17, 2007. Opening reception: September 14, 5-7 pm.

Curated by artist Jean Behnke the new exhibition presents a scope of art and process, each artist forming connection to nature and to their own wild nature. She says, “ In large part, we work in relative isolation from conceptual constraint and limitation and in some way we all manifest the dream of wild nature in our art work. Despite or possibly because of this common ground, it is interesting that each artists impulse speaks to the universal as well as the completely personal.”

Behnke says of the group exhibition, “In a melancholic way, this art celebrates the incorrigible tangle of a wild nature pushing through internal and external orderliness with beautiful tenacity. As in the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez there is a sense of the wild that is saturated with nature's heartiness and its reality as original home.”



Included in the exhibition are:

Bruce Botts, painter and printmaker, responds to the wild nature of things, where an emotional imagination bends in a kind of magic realism and extraordinary, aberrant animals gather in his work to celebrate the weird life, carousing in awkward friendliness. Fluently making the translation between self and nature.

Janis Miltenberger is an exceptional glass artist lampworking in a remarkable scale, transforming rods of utilitarian glass into ethereal vessels and extraordinary tableaus of shapes. (Janis’s work can also be seen at Waterworks Gallery in Friday Harbor.)

Summer Moon, photographer and visionary, honors a relationship with nature in her exquisite black and white photography by offering a tranquil invitation to experience Nature through a precise focus.

Jeffrey Hanks, an artist in every sense of the word, exhibits his ambitious ceramic forms reflecting an evolving natural process from wet earthen clay to commitment into red-hot sagger firing.

Jean Behnke, printmaker and sculptor reveals her inquiry into imaginations of the wild human/nature hybrid as inseparable from environment. As reclamation of self she overlays a personal narrative with the myths of Flora, Fauna and the universal Tree of Life producing large hand pressed block prints.

For more information about the exhibit please call the Island Museum of Art at 370-5050.