Two new and separate exhibits occupying the Doris Crowston Gallery at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt won’t be there long, but there’s still more than a week remaining to catch these eclectic arrays of artworks.
The title of the show, Two and More, refers to “artists working with printmaking and clay who explore two and more surface design techniques,” curator Sadira Rodrigues writes in her description of the main gallery exhibit. “Playing and contrasting techniques and their combined effects, the artists in the exhibition reveal a breadth of material exploration, combined with extraordinary skill and control.” That they do.
Dominating the exhibit are several framed and deftly layered photograph-based prints by Bowen Island’s Vanessa Hall-Patch. The subject is rural, clapboard cabins on the island that are now abandoned, many with boarded-up windows and mottled with mould. The buildings have created “a curious abandoned presence in the hub of our small island community,” Hall-Patch told Coast Reporter. The images bring to mind the lives once lived in those homes, but also speak with inevitable melancholy of aging and days gone by.
“All of the large pieces of the singular cabins are created with a combination of photo-etching (the cabin), screen printing (the gold details) and chine collé (the technique used to adhere the delicate washi to the stronger support paper),” Hall-Patch explained. Other of her works in the show involve different processes.
Hall-Patch’s collection shares the main gallery with a number of pottery works by seven Sunshine Coast artisans, including Mike Allegretti and Elaine Futterman, of Creek Clayworks, Bev Niebergall and husband Ray Niebergall, Jack Olive, Jack Ploesser, and Pia Sillem.
Allegretti and Futterman use an 18th-century German technique of adding salt in their gas kiln which combines with silica in the clay to produce “luminous, almost alchemical surfaces,” said Rodrigues. Jack Olive uses a range of glazing techniques including raku, while Ploesser, added Rodrigues, “exhibits his deep knowledge of copper red and ash glazes and the curious ways they interact with each other.” All seven potters’ pieces displayed in the exhibit are worth close examination and are a tribute to the level of ceramic work on the Coast.
In the smaller room at the centre’s Doris Crowston Gallery is a display of more than 100 art cards in various media created by 15 Sunshine Coast artists. The works are part of a fundraising effort by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council.
All the cards are for sale at $20 each. “Of that, $10 goes to the artist and $10 goes to the arts council,” said administrator Andrea Dancer. The cards are suitable for sending as notes in the mail, but also are well worth framing as tiny works.
The card display and the Two and More exhibit are on until Sunday, Nov. 10, when there will be a closing reception with the artists starting at 2 p.m.
