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It has been six years since Director/Curator Scott Patnode first developed the idea of having regional
artists use the walls of the Jundt Art Museum as a drawing surface. Initially it was a clever and loaded
curatorial idea, but, with the passage of time, it has become something more - an important triennial
celebration of what some of the area's best visual artists do. In addition, by limiting each artist to a
drawing, the exhibition extends and highlights the Jundt Art Museum's well-known collection of drawings
and prints. Yet these Drawn to the Wall exhibitions are unique in that each work is created in situ,
specifically for the exhibition, and destroyed afterwards, raising questions about the idea of archiving itself.
Just as the artist, Ed Keinholz, renowned for his room sized tableaus, termed the rather complicated
sculptures that acted as inspiration for his larger work, "drawings," Patnode makes the unspoken
assumption that all artists "draw." As in past years, Patnode asked five accomplished artists
from a variety of disciplines to work in the gallery on one eleven and a half foot by eight foot panel
each. The pieces will be completed over a two-week period. Few stipulations are given, except
that after the exhibition is finished, the drawing is finished and each panel repainted gallery white.
Gina Freuen is known for her ceramic sculpture which has been shown in exhibitions
throughout Washington State, California, Oregon, Kentucky, North Carolina (where she received a
NICHE award) and elsewhere. Like Ken Price or Ron Nagel who built their careers on ceramic sculpture
set in deliberate dialogue with the traditional vessel, Freuen uses the teapot as a starting point or a
parameter. She then loads each piece with beautiful glazes and various coli aged elements, and lets
the body of the pot morph into alarming proportions, effectively changing each from a symbol of
domesticity into something wilder, funnier, and more psychologically subterranean. In addition to her
sculpture, Freuen has always made drawings. Large and loose, their lines compliment the curves
of her ceramic work but are usually rendered in black, white, and gray or beige. In recent years,
Freuen has incorporated photography and digital technologies into these two-dimensional works,
experimenting with collage, both actual and on the computer. These pieces are complex. A pastiche
of imagery, they carry a psychic weight that differs from the quick, quirky humor of her sculpture, yet
they never lose the graceful sense of form and composition that is key to both bodies of her work.
Michelle Forsyth received her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and came to the USA,
obtaining her MFA from Rutgers University. Recipient of several Canadian Council awards, she was
recently awarded an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Southern Maine for Spring 2009 and an
Artist Trust GAP grant. While her primary medium is painting, Forsyth is decidedly a conceptual artist.
The youngest of the five artists, she has already developed several strong series on public violence
using media images or photographs as a starting point. What sets her use of the photograph apart from
others is how she manipulates it to change its initial effect. First, Forsyth isolates a small part of the
original photograph and then deconstructs that image in actual terms by breaking it down to its smallest
component, sometimes, tiny squares, sometimes little pixels or star bursts. These thousands of shapes
are either painted in brilliant color or cut out of paper or felt and attached to the surface of the wall with
pins. The artist states that these painstaking processes are a reaction against contemporary apathy
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toward media images of suffering. She wants to "make surfaces that are tactile and intimate so that the
viewer gets caught up in [the pictures] ...." The end result is pleasurable and confrontational in equal
measure. As soon as the beauty of these isolated bits of color is asserted, we realize that the original
intent of the image has been stunted.
Kevin Haas, who received a BFA from the Chicago Art Institute, an MFA from Indiana University, and
studied at the Tamarind Institute, comes from a printmaking background. Like Forsyth, Haas is a young
artist who works easily with digital images and video yet also has an affinity for traditional media, and his
approach is as conceptual and exacting as hers. He may photograph images through glass, or photograph
video images, or re-photograph photographs themselves. In his series Chicago Scribed, Haas used the
scratched and often dirty plexiglass found in public transit shelters as a filter for his photographs of the
city. The results are loose but careful, as the scratches themselves turn into calligraphic marks over
the decaying urban image. Haas claims that his "work deals with memory, movement, presence, and
perception in the urban landscape." And there is a tinge of deliberate nostalgia, not only in his subject
matter but also in how he marries twenty-first century technologies to older processes. After Chicago
Scribed was photographed, Haas chose to print it in photogravure, a mid-nineteenth century process
where transparent images are etched into metal plates. The results are beautiful, old and new, with both
photographic detail and lush etched line.
Richard Schindler's work reflects his experiences as both an intellectual and a craftsman in the truest
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sense of both words. Upon receiving his MA in painting and drawing from Stanford University, he
was awarded a residency at Roswell Art Center. After a decade in the Bay Area, he moved to the
Northern Idaho, where he cleared land, milled his own lumber, and built a home by hand. He points
out that because Nancy and Ed Keinholz lived in the area during the summers, he wasn't completely
isolated from art, "There was a touchstone to the outside world - people came from all over Europe
and the US." However, nine years later, Schindler moved to Spokane and began making rough hewn,
but decidedly elegiac sculptures composed of wood, metal, animal skins, and other found objects.
These often enormous pieces have the kind of contemporary romanticism found in work by Anselm
Keifer or Julian Schnabel - a bravura use of coarse materials that ends up suggesting nostalgia or
heroics gone slightly to seed. Like many sculptors from Robert Hudson, to Terry Allen, to Robert
Arneson, Schindler never abandoned the two-dimensional world and has consistently produced
paintings and drawings, not only to augment his sculptural pieces but as works in their own right.
Ken Yuhasz' work, while differing from Schindler's in material and style, shares certain sensibilities
and influences from West Coast 1970s assemblage, to Bay Area funk, to pop art. In Yuhasz' case, this
turns into a kind of easy populism which is obviously genuine and reflected in his background. The artist
grew up outside of Los Angeles and began his career as a draftsman for architects and manufacturing,
eventually ending up as an art director for the Appaloosa Journal in Idaho during the early 1980s. He
became frustrated with the changes in design technologies, how, in his words, "the work wasn't in my
hands; it was in someone else's hands or a computer." In order to reconnect with manual processes, and
under the influence of neon artist George Ray,Yuhasz began making neon signs. He went to Portland to
study at the Neon Art School there, and in 1991 he moved to Spokane and opened Acme Glass Works
while working at his sculpture. If Yuhasz has a signature process, it is how he attaches neon to objects
from daily life. If he has a signature style, it is his ability to find fantasy in the everyday world: where a
toaster is given propellers and a kerosene lantern, wings.
The pleasure of writing for this exhibition is that after considering each artist's work, there is still no way to
imagine how the five walls will look. If a valence of disparate talent creates a strong show, this one will do
that. If there is something else - some magic that happens when five individuals work in one space, in a
short amount of time - we'll see that too. For those of us lucky to be there when it is up, the immediacy
and temporal nature of a Drawn to the Wall exhibition is that it demonstrates what artists actually do,
highlighting process and privileging completion over collecting.
Frances DeVuono
Frances De Vuono is an artist, Professor of Art, EWU, and contributing editor for Artweek
This publication is funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign, 2007-2008© Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-0001