Evergreen Art Lecture Series

Marilyn Freeman is an interdisciplinary, process- and time-based artist living in Olympia, Washington. Her work is characterized by themes of identity, tolerance, faith and alienation. Baptism is the first in a series of autobiographic essays and installations about growing up Catholic.  Freeman’s contemplative film work, collectively entitled, CinemaDivina, is screened in spirituality centers as well as film and arts venues.  Freeman’s experimental feature film, Group, distributed by Frameline, was released on DVD in 2009 following its 2002 theatrical run and extended educational market release. In addition to numerous accolades for directing and producing, Freeman has received financial support from The Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation, Centrum, and the Washington State Artist Trust in the form of a Media Arts Fellowship and a Gap Grant for her screenplay, Sophisticated: The Hollywood Story of Miss Dorothy Arzner.  Freeman’s film, Meeting Magdalene (1995), played festivals worldwide and led to her short story collection, Meeting Magdalene (Naiad Press, 1996). Presently, Freeman is in post-production with The R Word, a feature-length documentary about the self-advocacy movement of people with developmental disabilities. She holds a BFA in Theater from the Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. She is a Visiting Artist at  The Evergreen State College and  cofounder of the media arts studio, Wovie.

Eric Eley’s resin drawings, works on paper, and sculptures are informed by his fascination with the rational language used in physics and higher mathematics. His analytical use of lines and points allows him to arrange elements in space in order to provide a unique way of seeing. His materials are deceptively simple—string, wire, wood, dry pigment, graphite, resin. With these materials, the artist confronts the limitations of time, space, and physical effort while incorporating or discarding the benefits and drawbacks of those limitations. In his practice, Eley balances physical labor and intellectual work. He is truly an “analog” artist, one who physically moves in space, up and down a ladder, back and forth from wall to wall, rather than plotting elements on a computer screen. He is a thinker, delighting in the usually unseen connections that exist in any given atmosphere. His work is both landscape and architecture. Not a natural landscape but a landscape of articulated space. Not static architecture, but an exploded view of perspective and scale.

Eric’s work has been included in group shows in the Kunsthaus Hamburg and the Outdoor Sculpture Projects at Volta03 in Basel, Switzerland. He has also had solo shows at Gallery4Culture, the Hedreen Gallery at the Lee Center for the Arts, both in Seattle, and the Kolva/Sullivan Gallery in Spokane. He mounted a solo show at Art Agents Gallery in Hamburg, Germany in 2008 and his work was included in the group show “Unnatural Presence” at Platform in 2006. His solo exhibition, Prospect Fields, was shown at Platform Gallery in 2008 and his solo exhibition, Look Out, in 2010.  During January 2011, Eric will be creating an installation in Suyama Space (Seattle, WA).

www.ericeley.com

http://www.platformgallery.com/artist_pages/Eley/Eley_main.html

<Eley distant blast.jpg><Eley corner shelter.jpg>

The work of Matt Browning calls attention to the ways ritual, conquest and competition inform identity.  Activated by observation and collection, Browning confronts the complexities of tradition and material expectation, generating pieces that operate somewhere between devotional objects and performative relics.

Description of recent exhibition in Lawrimore Project:

Matt Browning is taking his time.  More precisely, his new work is taking its own sweet time and asks the viewer to do the same.  It even takes time to simply locate his work within the gallery.  For his first major one-person exhibition with Lawrimore Project, Browning defies the typical expectations placed on a young artist given such an opportunity by presenting the entire body of work humbly unlit and almost-not-even-there, tucked in the very back corner of the gallery.  “Tradition As Adaptive Strategy” is a series of small sculptures similarly executed, though each unique, installed on what was formerly the gallery’s fireplace mantle.  Painstakingly carved from solid pieces of fir in the tradition of whittled ‘whimsies’, the 34, funnel-shaped objects were then filled and coated with pine sap the artist gathered and transformed into pitch through a process of heating and filtering.   Conceptually, the work flows from many sources—from folk art and native culture traditions to scientific and philosophical tracts on time, fire, homeostatsis, homeorrhesis, and Phlogiston Theory—but, most specifically, it was inspired by the “Pitch Drop Experiment”, the longest continuously running scientific experiment in the world.  Begun in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell to prove the viscosity of seemingly solid substances, the experiment simply consists of counting the number of drops of pitch flowing from a glass funnel.  In the 80 years since its inception the experiment has yielded just 8 drops, a minor return in terms of data:investment.  This glacial, ‘drop-per-decade’ notion can analogously be tied to Browning’s patience with the reception and ramifications of this body of work, recognizing that what takes time is the preparation, research and experiences leading up to the creative act and, now, perseverance in the spaces after and between the drops where we find meanings and become their steward.