Julie Himel's Second Nature series is about the natural environment and our current relationship to it. Using both real and imagined places for her inspiration, Himel creates pathways and landscapes that invite the viewer to step into her dreamlike environments. The paintings represent present and future, and presence and absence at once. It is a longing for connection and a call for symbiosis with the natural world around us.
Will Robinson conveys an effortless elegance within his large-scale stone sculptures. Robinson's Figments looks to the natural world for its inspiration, capturing a myriad of subtleties such as the undulations of sails in the wind, the flukes of a whale, or the outline of a bird's wing in motion. Stones balance impossibly atop one another, emphasizing contrast between polished and raw stone. Each piece highlights the natural properties of the stones themselves.
The second 2023 exhibition of Tony Angell, Bird Day, showcases the daily habits of 24 species of birds as they conduct their lives in habitats around the world. Angell's clayboard ink etchings are selected from his collaborative book, Bird Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Avian Lives. The book is co-authored with ornithologist Mark E. Hauber and published by the University of Chicago Press.
For two decades, Mark Rediske created his sought-after color field paintings while laying the panel on a flat surface. In Language of Gravity, he experiments instead with painting upright on an easel. The resulting downward pull of the paint enhances Rediske's distillation of skyscape and atmosphere. Alternating between areas of transparency and opacity, the paintings convey the essence of vast expanses of space and light.
Inspired by the geology of the Cascade Mountain range, Sarah Winkler further explores landscape in terms of the distinct layers that she is known for. She depicts the overlapping, collage-like terrain as a textured rise in elevation, with lower and middle elevations covered in coniferous forests, waterfalls, and wildflowers, while higher altitudes evoke meadows, alpine lakes, and glaciers. Winkler mimics the process of erosion by applying paint onto wood panels, then sanding back through layer after layer. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, she pays close attention to borders, boundaries, and edges. Viewers get a sense of the landscape adapting and transitioning, beckoning toward adventure and exploration.
As he approaches 30 years of exhibiting his vernacular, street-influenced paintings in galleries and museums, Casey McGlynn returns to one of his earliest metaphors in his new collection I Am the Horse. Grazing and at rest, the horses appear in herds and as silhouettes, their interiors filled with a cacophony of symbols and color that bristle with a fervent, raw energy.
When Tony Angell walked into Richard White's office to share his artwork in 1972, it was the beginning of a 50-year journey in art and nature that Foster/White proudly continues to celebrate with Angell's new exhibition of sculptures, Aloft and At Rest. For half a century, Angell's representations of birds have dazzled viewers with scientific accuracy and a virtuoso sense for the inner temperament of his subjects that conveys their intangible spirit and resilience.
Foster/White Gallery announces the debut of Ritual Vessels, a new collection of ceramic sculptures by George Rodriguez. Varying from human faces peering out of animal costumes, to a pack of small dogs, to conjoined and single figures, to planter pots large and small, Ritual Vessels celebrates Rodriguez's vibrant imagination as he nears 20 years as an artist.
Sheri Bakes has been painting the natural world with an ethereal intensity for more than 20 years. Her new collection of landscape paintings draws inspiration from a close friend's challenging circumnavigation of Mt. Rainier on the Wonderland Trail. Highly attuned to atmospheric conditions that border on the non-visual, such as fine mist in the air or thin veils of fog lifting in morning sun, Bakes seeks to represent subtle qualities of being alive and present in time and space.
Foster/White Gallery returns to its series of group exhibitions focused on the classical elements with Elements: Water, featuring a range of media from photography and collage to painting, textile, and sculpture. Following its predecessors Elements: Earth (2020) and Elements: Fire (2021), the latest thematic collection draws from both new and prior work by many of the gallery's artists spread across the North American continent and Australia, including locals Tony Angell, John de Wit, Eva Isaksen, and Cameron Anne Mason. Representations of water alternate from figurative to abstract, and while the color blue is a popular choice, especially for painters, there are wonderful departures from expectation.
Sarah McRae Morton stands with one foot firmly in the tradition of Western figural art and the other in a hauntingly beautiful dreamscape of her own unique imagination. Often referencing literature, natural history, and memory, her paintings convey myth-like narratives that blend reality with dreaming, while highlighting her mastery of paint. McRae Morton's animal menagerie in Fair, Hail includes some of her favorites like whales, boars, and horses as well as some that are less familiar such as alewives, and snow crabs. People in 19th century attire are integrated with the animals often with a sense of blurred movement that the artist is recognized for. Many of the new paintings are presented on panel, and some are as small as 10 x 10 inches, contrasting with the large new canvas of a whale, Fulton's Last Bow.
Guy Laramée's longstanding fascination with Brasil inspires his new Foster/White exhibitions, where he probes questions of belonging and estrangement in a series of atmospheric landscape paintings as well as a group of new sculptures sourced from second-hand bookstores in Florianopolis. Often with mountains or coastlines shrouded in mist, the paintings form a loose, narrative sequence closely associated with the ambiguity between dreaming and waking.