News Article

“DRAWN TO THE WALL III,” an invitational exhibit featuring the drawing installations of five well-known Inland Northwest artists on 11 ½-by-8-foot movable walls will be on display in the Jundt Galleries at Gonzaga University’s Jundt Art Museum Aug. 31-Oct. 6.

Participating artists are Spokane residents Richard Schindler, Gina Freuen, Ken Yuhasz, and Pullman, Wash., artists Michelle Forsyth and Kevin Haas. The Jundt Art Museum will host a free public reception from 7-9 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 13. A free public walk-through with Karen Kaiser, assistant curator for education, is set to begin at 10 a.m., Friday, Sept. 14. The 28-minute video “Jim Dine: A Self-Portrait on the Walls,” will be shown on Saturdays throughout the exhibit (except for Sept. 22) at 1, 2 & 3 p.m. in the Jundt Lecture Hall.

Museum Director J. Scott Patnode invited these artists to spend two weeks at the museum and for each to create a drawing on one side of an 11½ -by-8-foot movable museum wall. Patnode did the same with five other artists in 2001 and for five more in 2004 for this triennial exhibit. The unusual format for this project is that the drawings will be removed and painted over at the end of the exhibition and the walls returned to their normal use as gallery partitions.

Artists selected for “Drawn to the Wall III” all have their own individual approach to drawing and methods very different from each other. Freuen’sporcelain vessels and mixed media works on paper are recognizable to Northwest audiences by their playfulness and layered surfaces. Since 1997, Freuen has been an adjunct instructor at Gonzaga, teaching design, ceramics and beginning drawing. Freuen has also been a group manager for Inland Craft Warnings, a nonprofit contemporary crafts advocacy corporation and event.

Originally from Los Angeles, Yuhasz moved to Idaho in 1983 where he opened a commercial neon business. He began experimenting with his first neon art work sculptures in 1989. Yuhasz often uses found objects incorporating neon into his designs. He owns and operates Acme Glass Works in Spokane.

Forsyth is a Canadian-born artist who teaches painting and drawing at Washington State University. She states that the “hand-made” is important in that it has power to counter that potential dehumanization of “rapidly transmitted, and publicly consumed images of spectacle.” Forsyth, who works with photographs, translates these images into thousands of tiny bright painted pieces that show the artist’s hand.

Haas is another artist who works with photo-based imagery. As a printmaker, Haas employs both hand printing and digital technologies. His work explores aspects of memory, movement and presence within the urban landscape. Haas has received both the Artist Trust Fellowship and GAP grants and is an associate professor of printmaking and digital media at WSU.

Schindler is interested in found objects that show the passage of time by marks made by the human hand, or damage from the elements or neglect.

“I am attracted to a kind of crudity in materials,” Schindler said. His large-scale sculptures are a testament to this dedication to weathered materials. His drawings and paintings reflect the same sensibility, with their worked and re-worked surfaces. Schindler has taught fine art classes at GU, Eastern Washington University, Spokane Falls Community College and the Spokane Art School.

“Jim Dine: A Self-Portrait on the Wall” is a 28-minute video that documents the artist’s eight-day marathon in 1995 when he covered the exhibition walls of a German museum with monumental drawings. The video is of Dine’s drawing installation at the Ludwigsburg Kunstverein near the Stuttgart exhibit; Dine’s drawings were also time-restricted, removed and the walls repainted for the next exhibition. Dine’s drawing installation was used by Patnode as a reference for the “Drawn to the Wall” exhibition. Patnode challenged the five Spokane artists to create drawings that are site-specific and time-dependent. There was also the added tension of two weeks of close encounters with each other’s different working styles.

Concurrently in the Arcade Gallery is “ROBERT SPERRY,” an exhibition of ceramic plates drawn from private collections by Northwest master Robert Sperry. Sperry’s work will be on display through Nov. 17.

Admission to the Jundt Art Museum is free and open to the public. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Monday through Friday, and Saturday noon-4 p.m. The museum is closed Sundays and school holidays. Holidays closures: Sept. 21-23.

For more information, please contact Karen Kaiser, assistant curator for education, via e-mail or at (509) 323-6613.