April Gallery Exhibition Opening Reception
April 6 | 3:00-5:00pm
Hoffman Center for the Arts | 594 Laneda Avenue | Manzanita
Free and open to the public
Their beginnings are silent as their threads move through the soil beneath the surface. The cycle calls for a union with time, nearby roots, and the decay of the forest floor. As their fruits emerge, they will exhale their spores into the air to perform the process once more.
Using a flatbed scanner as a camera, Melinda Hurst Frye’s work welcomes the effect of time and what is hidden below the surface to become visible. The spores visually map their path as they settle on the scanner glass, echoing the entangled relationship of the understory’s ecology. In the face of our warming climate, the fruiting bodies provide evidence of the slow churning regeneration within the soil that takes the forest apart, so it may become again.
About the Artist
Melinda Hurst Frye photographically celebrates the ecology of the forest floor with the goals of providing visual evidence of the cycles, bearing witness to the understory, and bridging the poetry of art with biological sciences. To intentionally slow down her own seeing, Hurst Frye often works with a flatbed scanner as a camera which also allows for space and time to connect with the ecology of her surroundings.
Hurst Frye’s work has been featured in publications for both art and science, gallery and museum exhibitions, and a variety of collections. Hurst Frye holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, Georgia, USA, and lives with her family adjacent to an urban forest in Washington State, USA.
I am endlessly inspired by the contradictions of the natural world, how vistas and environments that may appear peaceful and serene can also contain malevolence or can somehow be simple and operatic all at once. Though based in Portland, I come to the Oregon Coast frequently with my family, and whether crossing a forest trail or listening to the water on the rocks these trips never fail to bring me closer to something pure, alive, and elemental that is unique to this area. Many of the images in NATURAL PARADOX in fact were taken not far from here.
I am a narrative filmmaker by training, and somewhat new to photography, but I am drawn gravitationally to the immediacy of still images, to the worlds and possibilities that can exist in their boundaries. My films and screenplays typically feature individuals facing forces beyond their agency or struggling to find the right place in the world, often observing or fighting malevolence in variable forms. This vantage has also informed how I pursue mood and tone in my images, some of which can reassure and provoke the viewer all at once.
For more information about the artist click here
Megan Hatch (she/her) lives in Portland, Oregon. Megan is a creator and curator with a Studio Art degree from Carleton College. Her experiences of growing up rural, working class, and queer inform her work. Her photography has been exhibited internationally and is in collections both private and public. She was a 2022 Critical Mass Finalist, and a 2023 recipient of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award. More information about her and her work can be found here.
The images in this exhibit are from her body of work entitled “yes-and.” The images are each bound together by a thin golden line as if by kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. They become a series of vessels to hold our hurt, and our hope. There is healing to be found in holding multiple truths in our awareness at the same time, in acknowledging the fullness of the moment, and of each other. By doing so, we get to practice wholeness. There is no way to get to where we want to go without practice.
Always a walker, from his early days as a mail carrier in SE Portland, to travels far from home. Stan Peterson continues to be on the lookout for “moments of significance” which tell a story. He now divides his time between New Mexico and Oregon for both photo shoots and carving.
He does memory paintings in gouache of sights both real and slightly surreal. From these, he constructs and carves wood sculptures as wall tableau or as narrative figures standing without backgrounds.
Stan has a fascination for birds and flight. He enjoys carving small flying owls and pelicans, a Crater bird with a single egg, and even a Mourning dove with 9 cats on its back. Sometimes the carved birds have
long legs and shoes for walking with their human counterparts.
Travel is often about the people we meet and the long distance friendships which develop. When visiting Oaxaca, Mexico recently, he sat down and carved with 2 famed “Alebrije” artists. Those sculptures went through a series of changes back in his studio and are now unique collaborations.
Stan has been exhibiting his carved and painted figures since 1981 when William Jamison (Jamison/Thomas Gallery), gave him his first solo show in what was to be the Pearl District in Portland. Since then his
work has been exhibited and collected nationally. He carves basswood with hand tools and uses a variety of colorants for finishing. The only power tool used is a bandsaw with the remaining cutoffs often becoming handheld “rescue dogs”.
April 6-Gallery Exhibition Opening Reception
Address:
Description:
Situated on the main street in Manzanita just a few blocks west of Highway 101, the Hoffman Center Art Gallery is located across the street from the North Tillamook Library.
