January 15, 2015 – March 7, 2015

Patty Haller, Ingrid Lahti, Edward Lee, Trung Pham

Reception & Artist Talks: Thursday February 26th 6-9pm

This first exhibition of the new year is comprised of four artists who set out to capture what cannot be captured and then humbly offer evidence of their attempts in the form of paintings and installation.

Patty Haller’s landscape paintings seem to vibrate around the places they portray. Colors haven’t quite settled into themselves (in a good way), and the surface buzzes with layers of marks. Like the painting surface haunted by its markmaking history, the landscape she portrays has a rather haunted history as well: “The paintings are inspired by Ebey Beach on Whidbey Island. Isaac Ebey was a homesteader who was captured by Haida tribesmen and beheaded, his head sent back in a box to his homestead!”

With a background of deep study in both Theology and Art, Trung Pham’s series of Crack paintings make visible references to both art history and philosophy. They look like abstract expressionist color field paintings cut open. The cracks could be wounds, or peepholes. His statement for the series reads like a poem: “a narrow break, an opening, a sharp cut… a split second, an eruption… a stunning transformation, a rupture… a vulnerable flaw…”

Ingrid Lahti’s site-specific installation “M81, 2015” is based on images of Galaxy M81 (about 12 million light years away) gleaned from the Hubble Telescope via the freely accessible Hubblesite.org. At approximately five by eight feet, the installation’s scale is large enough to envelop the human body, while the materials used are themselves insignificant, everyday materials such as orange stickers or simple white pins.

A 95 year old Seattle artist trained in traditional Chinese painting methods, Edward Lee’s painting process is a conversation between East and West. Lee experiments with new materials and processes with more abandon than many art students, while still maintaining his practice of revisiting familiar places using more traditional painting. He writes of his painting Moonlight: “A midnight stroll leads me to this lotus pond where I sit quietly listening to the song of the moonlight. It sings an ancient tune from my childhood from a long, long time ago.”

– Susanna Bluhm, Gallery Director