Archive for December, 2009
“For me, animals endure our presence and attentions with a bemused tolerance so often lacking in our own species.”- Susan Brearey
“Forest Silhouettes,” a new collection of works by noted artist Susan Brearey, now on display at the J.H. Muse Gallery, will be celebrated with an opening reception December 17, 5-8 pm. Brearey, along with artist Mike Piggott, will be featured at the gallery’s annual holiday party, Champagne & Chocolates.  Brearey’s works remain on display until January 15, 2010.
Represented by galleries around the country, Brearey makes her home in Vermont, where she is on the faculty of the Putney School.  Inspired by Vermont’s landscapes, as well as other wilderness, her paintings “employ an economy of detail which evokes both the archaic forms found 
in the primitive cave paintings of Lascaux and the elegant simplicity of Asian art.”
“When you look at one of my paintings, it is like the moment you see an animal, just before it flees,” she says.
Highly evocative, Brearey’s wildlife portraits hold spiritual magic. I think of them as visions, as messengers from one space to ours. They are here with us only momentarily, physically compressed, traveling from portal to portal.
Anthropomorphism is completely absent. Brearey’s animals are practically faceless, symbolically universal. Her palette is muted; she favors serious blues, dulled whites to silver; I see references to topographic maps in a few of these new works. Maps…. or a tree’s inner rings, a forest’s way of revealing the years of its existence.
Brearey leaves it up to us to form answers to all the questions her paintings ask. Likely, a certain warning about our planet’s future is here; Brearey acknowledges that her paintings reflect her concern for environment and species. Perhaps these paintings are prayers, or premonitions.
For more information on this and other exhibitions taking place at the J.H. Muse Gallery this month, log on to their website.
Item #2
Ring in the Season with Amy Ringholz’s Solo Winter Show & Reception, at Altamira Fine Art. The exhibition opens with an artist’s reception at the gallery (172 Center Street) on Friday, December 18, 5-7:00 pm. The show remains up until January 8, 2010.
I remember what I believe was Ringholz’s first show — or one of her firsts; she had a Takin’ it to the Streets booth, and she sold a lot of paintings that year. Her signature “jigsaw” painting style was totally new. Since then, Ringholz has become one of Jackson’s favorite local artists; her work could be called playful, but it is rooted in the artist’s deep reverence for the power of animals, and by our collective unconsious reverence for wildlife. Her work is certainly energetic and vibrant.
Says Altamira’s Director Mark Tarrant: “Amy’s Holiday Show has become an annual happening where locals gather to celebrate the Season and her work. Amy’s bold works depicting our local wildlife on bright, colorful canvases are a fitting way to celebrate both the end of the current year and the beginning of the new one.”
For more information, log onto Altamira’s website here.
Item #3
Trio Fine Art – featuring art by Lee Carlman Riddell, Kathryn Mapes Turner, September Vhay and Russell Chatham – will be open the following hours during this Holiday Season:
December 22 noon-5pm
December 23 noon -5
December 24 10-3
December 29 noon – 5
December 30 3pm-8pm
December 31st 10-3
The gallery looks forward to seeing everyone during the Wednesday, December 3o Art Walk. Additionally, Trio Fine Art will be open during the winter on Thursdays only, 12:00 noon – 5:00 pm.  More information on Trio’s winter shows will soon be available.  www.triofineart.com.
The first part of this series (planned as two parts, it is now a three-part) touched upon landscape designer Walter Hood’s cursory views on Jackson’s approach to its own landscape. This second installment addresses Hood’s vision for a new NMWA sculpture garden and connective earth design.
“It is not the stuff you have. It is the stuff you no longer have. A lot of planning is too much about “what we need” v.s. “what we have.” In a reciprocal way, planning should be about the things that connect us-how to connect us. That makes us special.” – Walter Hood
Walter Hood has travelled to Jackson Hole to consult with the National Museum of Wildlife Art (NMWA). In a recent edition of NMWA’s member publication Call of the Wild, Hood described the beginnings of his collaboration with NMWA that will, ideally, result in a new museum sculpture garden.
It’s not as if Hood’s work to date has included an ongoing interest in wildlife museums, but the environment and how people use it drive his work on the project. Process and progress, inspiration ignited by how people choose to make “place.” On a certain level, he says, it’s all the same, whether one is talking about a sculpture garden or an entire community.
“The museum is interesting in that there are these cultural artifices, pieces of art, 
that are trying to represent nature,” says Hood. It’s a bit ironic that bronze elk are stationed at the base of the Museum’s driveway right across from the Elk Refuge; the installation seems an attempt to convince the public that there is a connection between NMWA and the Refuge.
“If the landscape itself was powerful enough it could move people in fantastic ways. That is what I am interested in. Standing out on NMWA’s hill, is there a way to allow a visitor to be in the Refuge? It is possible. NMWA’s architecture builds on the idea that it is “with the landscape,” and ironically that is one of the issues they are dealing with.”
Hood believes he could scale and shift existing landscape, so that art as well as the landscape is legible. “Attempt to eliminate design dichotomy, the experience of being either here, or there – either at the museum or in the landscape; either in Jackson or in the landscape.”
Check out parking lot ratios to the buildings they serve, suggests Hood. Looking at the Museum’s site, the parking lot stretches incredibly far, perhaps taking more space than the building itself. Part of the lot might be converted to trail, and a pervious surface is healthier for surrounding growth than asphalt, an oil-based material.
Rarely filled, and within a couple of miles of town, a reduced parking lot would be no problem if more mass transit options existed. “You don’t even want to know what asphalt is doing the environment; pervious surfaces would change our world drastically.”
Will NMWA pursue traditional design for its sculpture garden? Hood thinks both representational and contemporary design will be utilized.
“As a designer I have my own preferences, but when I do work I accept that scope,” he affirms. “What they are interested is figurative art with a long tradition, pre-Renaissance. But they had a show last year with Picasso and other contemporary artists rendering wildlife. Fantastic! Jane (Jane Lavino, NMWA’s Sugden Family Curator of Education) talked about the possibility of having contemporary installation in the landscape that would talk about wildlife in very different ways. I think then the project becomes broader in scope.
It is not about placing things; it is about creating more of a visitor experience where you can have permanent and temporary pieces co-interacting in the setting. Helping people make discoveries without bringing in the artificial. We have some strong ideas on how that might be achieved. It is my job to provoke. NMWA has the ability to create amazing indoor and outdoor experiences, and those are what museums are about today. It could be fabulous!”
It’s all already there. It’s only a question of how to make it visible.
Yo! Been off-line for two weeks, give or take a sunset.  The J.H. Art Blog is being administrated three quarters of the country away from Jackson Hole. That’s the case all winter, but we’ll keep posting and inquiring and spreading the word.  Here are a few last minute postings, and….I know you know. They’re up anyway.
Rossetti, McCandless and the Art Association join hands for this one; an opening reception takes place Friday, December 11, 5:30 – 7:30 pm at the Center for the Arts.
Miga Rossetti’s first show in a while, Where to Put it All, mixes the chaos of Rosetti’s life with the efficiency she strives to inject. In NYC, many artists and art lovers are converting their homes into galleries, holding mini-shows for artists whose work is not marketable in the current….market. They find ways to stash their “personals,” and maybe Rossetti looks to pick up on that trend.
“Fitting it all in, stashing it, layering it, isolating certain things, giving over to many – all of this is considered,” says Rossetti. Our efficient winged friends are 
considered–creatures who can keep a neat house in a tiny circle, frenetic as each day might be. Materials include mixed media on board, including acrylic paint, natural materials and paper collage.
Martin Garhart & Valerie Seaberg: Falling Awake combines a contemporary painter and printmaker’s artistry with local artist Valerie Seaberg’s 
undulating vessels. Garhart has served as Professor of Drawing, Painting and Printmaking at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, for over 30 years. Valerie Seaberg describes herself as “an ocean child” destined for mountain life. Her mixed media vessels are like great, tumbled beachcombing finds, undulating clay forms encircled by pine needles or horsehair. They are high country marriages between an ancient ocean and raw land. Seaberg’s works are muscular, sensual and convey a deep sense of time, earth, and element.
Wow—Whoever wrote that is really good! www.artassociation.org.
Item #2
Hot off the Facebook presses:
Lyndsay invited you to “Affordable Art Weekend with Oswald Gallery and LMC” on Friday, December 11 at 12:00pm.
Event: Affordable Art Weekend with Oswald Gallery and LMC.
What: Exhibit
Start Time: Friday, December 11 at 12:00pm
End Time: Saturday, December 12 at 8:00pm
Where: Oswald Gallery, 165 North Center Street
Join Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary and Oswald Gallery as we kick-off our Contemporary Art Collaboration in the Oswald Gallery space with an Affordable Art Weekend. Works by artists in both galleries will be on view and all artworks on view will be $3,000, or less, with many works under $1,000.
Please consider donating 10% of any purchase price to one of several arts non-profits.  A nice gesture from McCandless, recently forced to call it quits — it will really happen this time, I think — because of late-to-the-game town rulings on the state of her space.
Why now? Lyndsay has been in that space six years, TOJ. Come on. Give a hand, don’t slam her door. If you had problems, or if anyone did, why didn’t you voice them? Why didn’t you do something pro-active to keep LMC cooking?  I hope there is a bit of investigating on the part of the two newspapers. If everything is on the up-and-up, so be it. If this is a sudden, last-ditch effort on the part of LMC’s next door developers to beat back the common peeps, that stinks. Fix it up, instead. You have the money. And, it would do your complex (that nobody is living in) good stead.
The gallery will be open from noon until 8, with a cocktail reception each night from 6 to 8 pm.
Item #3:Â It’s Bazaar.
This Christmas, please come for some good cheer and bargains — and to support the JHHS Rotary Interact teenagers who are selling great gifts to raise money to open a village library in Nepal.
Many new rug designs and selected imports have just arrived. Bring your neighbors!
Sat. & Sun. December 12 & 13 10 am to 4 pm. Steer your sleigh to 1520 Fish Creek Road, in Wilson. Look for the prayer flags. For more information, contact hostess and Nepal benefactor Didi Thunder, at 307.733.4124.
Throughout December, Mountain Trails Gallery hosts its Holiday Miniatures Show, a collection of small works on canvas and bronze sculptures. Currently on display, the show remains up through December 24th.  An artists’ reception takes place Thursday, December 17, 4-7 p.m.
Gallery Director Pam Flores notes that the show explores a wide selection of 
subjects and styles. Prices are mixed, providing good opportunity to purchase affordable art; it’s a nice chance to 
begin a personal collection.  Themes are primarily Western, and include wildlife, Native American culture, cowboys and landscapes.  More than 50 works are included.
Many artists will be on hand to greet the public during the reception, which takes place during December’s Gallery Association Art Walk. This is the first holiday reception for Mountain Trails in their new corner space on the Town Square.
For more information contact Pamela Flores, at 307.734.8150, or email director@mtntrails.net.
I like the way this new show of hot art screens and still photography by filmmaker Peter Pilafian has come together: it’s been very “techno.” I have lots of “techno” feeling notes—why am I thinking of Astro Boy? Why, when I’m featuring Peter’s image of melting glacier ice that resembles molars?
Peter Pilafian’s new show is up at Elevated Grounds, on the Teton Village Road. An opening reception takes place December 5, and you should be prepared to see something completely different. Comprised of thematic groupings, Pilafian plans to explore such stimuli as Texture, Indigenous Portraits, Architecture, Shadows and Landscapes.
Watching Pilafian define and curate, I began thinking of these thematic groupings
as a series of reflective pools. Fluid videos surrounded by a string of photographic pearls. The show offers a glimpse, in National Geographic style, of some of Pilafian’s memorable earth journeys.
The exhibition will feature as many as five hot art screens and a selection of still photographs taken around the world.  A Delphi tablet, aged city walls of Havana, coffee farmers, Irish fiddlers, evocative shadows, orange trees and images of Athens are all part of the multi-layered story Pilafian wishes to tell. High definition BluRay DVD footage provides vivid, crisp focal pointsPilafian plans on framing his videos as a painter frames canvases. Why not frame moving landscapes? Pilafian’s images are part of Grand Teton National Park’s Lawrence Rockefeller Preserve Visitor’s Center installation; consider that sensory exhibit and you will get a feel for this show.
Contact Peter Pilafian via email at: ppilafian@earthlink.net.
Item #2:
Ring-a-ding-ding!
Dancers’ Workshop’s 2nd Annual Affordable Art for Christmas Sale takes places Saturday, December 5, in the Center for the Arts Theater Lobby. The sale runs 11:00 am - 5:00 pm and is open to all. It’s free!
DW’s Alissa Davies tells us fifteen local arts vendors will be on hand, offering holiday arts and craft items. Jewelry, paintings, bags, and knit items (fingerless 
gloves!) neck warmers and hats are specialties of this sale;Â proceeds help support DW dance programs.
Price points are in line with a Scrooge-like economy – everything on sale is priced between $1 and $99. A DW holiday rehearsal will be taking place on stage in the theater, a joyous treat.   For more information, call DW’s offices, at 307.733.6398.
