Exhibits – Linda C. Everson

Night Dreams in CLUSTER Exhibit

Linda — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 04:30:29 +0000

Night Dreams
© 1998. Linda C Everson
28″h x 20″w framed

A CLUSTER is a group of similar things or people positioned or occurring closely together. My solarplate print Night Dreams, is currently in an invitational show, CLUSTER, at IceCube Gallery in Denver.

My dreams tend to have clusters of images, ideas, fears, or emotions that keep repeating themselves over and over. And I may have these dreams multiple times… sometimes months or years later. These are called “repetition dreams”. I quite often dream of flying, floating, or falling and I can’t ever stop that process.

In my print, Night Dreams, I included many small figures; some floating, some standing. The figures cluster, swirl, and lurk on top of and around the goddess faces. The multiple faces create a multi-tiered level of mystery. Sigmund Freud said that “dreams are the window to the sub-conscious”.

Bertil Vallien, who’s famous for his sandcasted glass sculptures, often included small floating figures in his vast boat and torso sculptures. His beautiful artwork influenced my own use of floating figures and also the use of vibrant color, transparency, and multiple layers of imagery.

A SOLARPLATE is a steel backed POLYMER PLATE that is light sensitive. Transparencies can be exposed unto the plates by sunlight or UV light boxes. In the Goddess series, I used Kodalith transparencies of photos of goddess faces which I spliced together after printing them in the darkroom. I drew the floating figures onto these transparencies with a opaque pen. After exposure, the solarplate was etched in water which dissolved the unexposed areas, creating textures in the plate.

To create the multiple “flat” background colors (greens, ochres, rust, tan) I made acetate cutouts (like a puzzle) which were rolled with the etching ink and then printed on paper on an etching press. Dark brown and ochre inks were then wiped onto the textured solarplate, and that was printed on top of the flat colors. This required tedious registration and many runs through the etching press to create all the layers of color.

Several years ago, I did a whole series of solarplate prints called the Goddess Series and another called the Torso Series, all based on Greek and Roman sculptures and reliefs which I photographed. In many of those prints, I included small floating figures that swirled through the larger figurative images and/or backgrounds. Some other Goddess and Torso prints that are not in the Exhibit and also are not on my website are depicted below. Please see my CONTACT PAGE is you’re interested in more information.

Mirror Image
© 2002. Linda C Everson
18″h x 11″w image size

Paper Doll Torsos
©2001. Linda C Everson
10″h x 25″w image size

Enchantment of the Trees and Forest
© 1997. Linda C Everson
11″h x 24″w image size

Mandala Art

Linda — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:03:55 +0000

MANDALA comes from Sanskrit meaning “CIRCLE“. It is often a spiritual or ritual symbol commonly associated with Hinduism and Buddhism, but in western culture the CIRCLE motif or MANDALA was popularized by Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology the MANDALA can represent the unconscious self and one’s effort to reunify the “Self” and direct one’s focus in meditation.

The MANDALA shape also often represents the universe or cosmos, with the outer circle sometimes representing wisdom. According to The Berzin Archives, there are FOUR levels of offering: an outer offering, inner offering, secret offering, and offering of the nature of reality. Berzin also says that some mandalas are NOT round, but can be bowls, palaces, etc…

The mandala is significant in many cultures and religions and often a theme in artwork. Currently, three of my mandalas are being shown in the “Spirituality of the Mandala: Reality in the Round” show at Nails in The Wall Gallery St. Lukes in Metuchen, NJ.

My mandala series, “Little Men and the Inner Circle”, is a symbiosis of primitive figures drawn by my children and my photographs of petroglyphs we visited while hiking in the American west. FOUR is a common element in mandalas and my FOUR primitive figures are filled with various petroglyph symbols of man in his environment. There is a sense of self reflection, wonder, timelessness, centering, spiritual energy and the swirling universe in the artwork. The OUTER CIRCLE in my mandalas supports the INNER CIRCLE of humanity.

My art process involved using my children’s FOUR primative images into which I collaged photographic film positives of rocks, petroglyphs, and other textures. These FOUR transparent primative images were exposed onto zinc plates, etched, and then cut into shapes. The figures were used in ALL of my seven mandala monoprints; each printed with different themes, colors and background imagery.

To create the different backgrounds, I used other printmaking techniques such as relief roll, collagraph, painting on plexi, and embossment. All were inked and printed on paper on an etching press.

You can see more primitive monoprints on my website in the Family Album Hieroglyphics series with includes the Little Men and the Inner Circle mandalas.

Code

Linda — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 23:18:35 +0000

I’m currently an invited artist in Binary Inventions: Art and Culture in the Digital Age, in conjunction with a UND Art Department conference on the same subject. The show is at Third Street Gallery in Grand Forks – Oct 5 – 26, 2012.

The title Binary Inventions intrigued me. My digital print with solarplate – Arborglyph: (1 symbol 30) Code, contains hints of various codes; plus/minus as in my Arborglyph symbol, binary code (0110100), genetic code, Morse code, and Braille code. They are all forms of messaging or communication. Code is “a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation”.

A binary system involves only two choices: 0 or 1, yes or no, true or false, on or off switch in electronics, and plus or minus. Despite how simple this all sounds, very complicated things happen because of codes. For instance, it was recently discovered that the human genome has 4 million on/off switches that tell our genes what to do. Also, the use of the computer and the internet has changed our lives immensely in the last years. We can send messages globally in seconds. And we can record photographs and videos digitally instead of on film. In terms of size, the aspen clone, Pando, is believed to be the world’s most massive organism. The aspen’s form of reproduction is cloning (by genetic code). And aspen tree bark markings are the impetus for my Arborglyph images.

Code often lies below the surface where we can’t see it; as in computer language, electronic switches, or genetics. Code is found in nature and in man-made entities. It can be common knowledge or secret. Code is everywhere!

BINARY CODE: Binary is a two-digit numerical system in which computers store data and compute functions. Computers use the binary system because digital switches inside the computer can only be set to ON or OFF, which are represented by 1 or 0. In computer science, a code is considered as an algorithm which uniquely represents symbols from a source alphabet by encoded strings. ASCII uses a 7 bit binary code to represent text within a computer… 0100101 0111010

GENETIC CODE: The genetic code is based on sets of nucleoside base pairs called “codons”. Codons transcribe and translate genetic traits from DNA to RNA and RNA to proteins. New findings reveal that the human genome has 4 million + on/off switches that tell our genes what to do.

MORSE CODE: Morse Code transmits text by a series of on/off tones, lights, or clicks to commute a message.

BRAILLE CODE: Braille is a binary encoding scheme that represents the characters of writing for the blind that is done in a series of 6 dots.

Inspiration – “objects you see”

Linda — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 03:29:16 +0000

I just saw a great art show Triggered Momentum by Sabin Aell, a contemporary photographer, at Walker Gallery in Denver. The subject matter was quite unusual… BATH TOWELS! What also impressed me was her artist statement. Sabin had stepped outside and saw a “bizarrely shaped form: a towel”. The towel was frozen and had ice crystals on it; so she had a “you know it” moment … which is “triggered by objects you see”. Sabin immediately knew what was the subject matter for her next art series…. frozen towels.

The frozen towels took on a new form in her artwork. They danced and swayed in space, vaguely resembling many other things in the eyes of the viewer. This transformation of one odd object into something else was quite beautiful. It’s something I also try to do with my Arborglyphs monoprints. I see tree bark markings and they become something else. It’s what creativity is about… seeing and transforming. The objects you initially see become something else. Like magic!

Stephen Batura artwork

Linda — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:15:28 +0000

I was just at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art admiring the Stephen Batura’s show Edits with his wonderful acrylic paintings that were based on his collages of fashion. However, its difficult to see the ‘fashion’ in his art because of the closeup views and chopped up angles. That’s what makes this artwork so interesting to me. Stephen Batura has

a focus on texture that extends beyond the given context.

The above quotation about his artwork resonates with my own intentions in my Arborglyphs artwork. Texture is the focus, NOT the representation of the original image. While Batura’s paintings seem quite abstract in a glance, upon much inspection you see elements of reality – the flow of drapery, the collar of a shirt, or a portion of a body part.

I also like the way Batura uses triangles and other sharp angles that seem to overlap and collide with each other. There is a sense of layering here. However Batura’s use of a typical rectangular canvas with the angled imagery centered on top of a bland background color was boring. I think the paintings would have been more effective if he had created ‘shaped’ canvases. I created many shaped paintings in the past, and found that makes for an interesting departure from the typical horizontal shape.

Graffiti art – StrassenKunst show

Linda — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:24:09 +0000

From August 27 – Sept 19, 2010, one of my Arborglyph monoprints is in an international exhibit called StrassenKunst at Artspace Gallery in Richmond, VA. The theme of the exhibit is artwork INSPIRED by graffiti with 59 artworks chosen. There are photos of graffiti, paintings with graffiti images, jewelry and sculpture scratched with graffiti-like symbols, and so on.

Graffiti art isn’t just street art, nor is it always gang related. While graffiti today is often thought of as destructive and a form of vandalism, it has helped arhaeologists decipher interesting cultural practices and has brought history to a forefront.

The first graffiti art was created over 30,000 years ago at Lauscaux caves, and a few summers ago I visited that wonderful site. I have a penchant for cave art, rock art, petroglyphs, and pictograms, and those sites are inspiration for my Arborglyph monoprints. My graffiti inspiration is the from the markings on aspen tree bark in Colorado by humans, animals, or nature’s own scarring. In the American west, many trees were first engraved by the Basque and Hispanic shephards and the term Arborglyph (tree with a glyph) was born.

Apparently, the term “graffiti” came from the Italian term “graffiato” which means “scratched”. Graffiti generally means any writing on a public place, and it has been done over the centuries by the Greeks, Romans, Mayans, Vikings, and Celtics, to name a few. I was in Pompeii this summer, and the archaeologists had unearthed some interesting graffiti on walls there. In China, Mao Zedong was known for publicizing everything, including a 4000 character graffiti slogan on a wall. Throughout history man has yearned to “make a mark”.

Although their are many controversaries over some artists such as Bansky from England, graffiti has become more accepted in some fine art circles. Artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michael Basquiat did graffiti in subway stations and in the streets. Later they both became famous by showing in fine art galleries in the early 1980’s, and numerous videos were made of their lives and art. Interestingly, Basquiat in his early graffiti years left his “tag” SAMO in many places. The symbol I use in my art title in the StrassenKunst exhibit is SAM. I wouldn’t claim that I use “tags” in my artwork, but I do use symbols in the titles that are my own “alphabet”.

A “tag” is the most basic writing of an artist’s name, it is simply a handstyle. A graffiti writer’s tag is his or her personalized signature. Tagging is often the example given when opponents of graffiti refer to any acts of handstyle graffiti writing (it is by far the most common form of graffiti). Tags can contain subtle and sometimes cryptic messages, and might incorporate the artist’s crew initials or other letters.

Subsequently there are many graffiti INSPIRED artists and art exhibits today. I personally do not condone defacing public property with art. However, photographing graffiti art (on trees) has proven to be an interesting subject matter for me.

The Pillars of the Earth

Linda — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:03:40 +0000

Tonight on Starz is the beginning of a 8 part mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, The Pillars of the Earth. This epic story deals with conflicting elements: building and destruction, love and war, good and evil, religion and royalty, family and foe, feast and famine, joy and misery, and so on. Although the fight for the crown in feudal England is a central theme, the evolution of building a massive Romanesque church to building a soaring Gothic cathedral in medieval 12th century England intrigued me more.

How does this story about architecture relate to me and my experiences in life? Like Tom the Builder and Jack, my father, grandfather and many uncles were builders. They built everything! Commercial buildings, houses, furniture, cabinets, outdoor sculptures, and extravagent bird houses. Building is part of my roots!

In college, I had to take art history classes where I studied Romanesque churches, Gothic cathedrals, flying buttresses, cornices, naves, and so on. At the time I found it a bit mundane. Since then I’ve been fortunate to travel to Europe, and now find that those classes were very valuable when visiting various architectural sites. As I read the novel, I found myself intrigued by all the building practices of the time.

Although I’m not a builder, I now have a penchant for photographing ancient walls. While in Andalusia, Spain, I toured lots of Moorish architecture and photographed the walls and crumbling arabesque ornamentation. Those images were used as background textures in my Arborglyph and Arabesque monoprint series. I worked on this series for an exhibit in Kuwait in 2007.

Calligraphy is an important art form there. My Arborglyphs (calligraphy-like glyphs that have NO particular meaning) provide a visual link between cultures.

Arborglyphs and Arabesque: (2 symbols 1, 3) Ancient Rust Walls

Moore Inspired Exhibit

Linda — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:31:11 +0000

Tonight is the opening reception for the exhibit Moore Inspired at the Botanic Gardens in Denver. My ceramic sculpture Reclining Mother was accepted into this juried exhibit through August 1, which displays Colorado artists whose works were inspired by Henry Moore.

Henry Moore’s wonderful sculptures are on display in the Botanic Gardens until January 31, 2010.

Henry Moore’s use of organic forms in his Reclining Figures influenced my creation of Reclining Mother while doing ceramics in college. I was attracted to the primitive and archaic attributes in his forms and surface. Although my sculpture is ceramic, my earthy and reticulating glazes were influenced by Moore’s use of surface on wood and rock.

The ‘hollow’ or negative spaces in Henry Moore’s figures were significant in my own sculpture as well. These enclosures lead the eye back into the embryonic figure. Although reclining, my ceramic figure has movement. My sculpture is small in comparison to Moore’s monumental figures, but it still is a non-representational ‘mother earth’. Moore’s sculptures were tied to the earth as well.

See more information on Henry Moore lectures and tours at the Botanic Gardens.

EMBRACE – Installations at DAM 2

Linda — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:02:42 +0000

The Embrace show at the Denver Art Museum was one of the more extensive and interesting installation shows I’ve seen. Seventeen artists created their own ‘dialogues’ with the unusual architecture in various areas of the museum. Although ‘painting’ was a term often used to describe the art; the installations encompassed everything from plastic, cloth, wood, mirrors, found art, sculpture, video, and so on.

In addition to the interplay of the art and architecture, the use of language, interesting materials, and the interaction of the audience in the artwork were also important components of the Embrace exhibit.

El Anatsui’s Rain Has No Father? was a huge ‘cloth’ made of found bottle tops that were sewn together with copper wire. It was displayed in the African Art area where you observed other ancient African art in it’s proximity, seeing a common link between the traditional and the contemporary. His analogies to the Rocky Mountains and raindrops in shimmering clouds was remarkable. DAM is well known for it’s Native American collection and the art reminded me of Native American blankets and clothing as well. The flowing nature of Anatsui’s ‘cloth’ negated the actual stiffness of the metal components, and I admired the sheer amount of work involved in creating his ‘cloth’. Although his art did not have the same use of the diagonal wall spaces that was so obvious in other installations, the shadows created on the wall behind the ‘cloth’ were beautiful.

In Chamber, Charles Sandison used the diagonal walls and ceiling of a cavernous space for his video projections of swirling colors, letters, words, and symbols. Language was an important component. What I enjoyed about Sandison’s installation was that the viewers were also part of the artwork. Their bodies created shadows on the walls, so they were also ‘creators’. The images swirling on their bodies and clothing made them into mini artpieces walking throughout the space. The art repeated itself, yet it was constantly changing. It was a wonderful experience!

Another artist who’s art involved the audience through the use of mirror’s was Zhong Biao. In Mirage his combination of abstraction and different sized figures at different perspectives and angles added complexity to his huge painting.

In Twilight’s Compendium, Shinique Smith’s installation was probably the smallest in size. Yet her “binding and bundling” of found materials (usually fabrics) that were “unwanted, abandoned, coveted, and mass-produced” was an intriguing environmental comment on multiple levels. Many years ago I did a lot of sewing and also worked in the fashion industry, so her materials were reminscent of past experiences for me. Shinique Smith’s artwork is autobiographical, and tells stories not only about herself, but others as well. Again, language is a important component of her artwork.

Christian Hahn’s art did not relate to the architectural space of the building so much, but his use of space within his paintings was quite intriguing. His uniformed figures within unusual environments were prettily colored, yet somewhat scary and hazardous. The scenarios created conflicting emotions of “playfulness and aggression”. There were countless stories and possible lessons to be learned from Hahn’s art.

The walk up and down the stairways of DAM gave me multiple perspectives and created questions on several of the installations. Did I like the spray painted art of Katharina Grosse better from above or below? Where did that cord on the Jessica Stockholder’s plastic art on the staircase wall lead to? Was it interesting to view one installation through another installation? Would John McEnroe’s drippy art fall? Would I get cut by Matthew Brannon’s humungous knives? Why did the children love the bungie cord installation by Tobias Rehberger, but I got claustrophic? How did his interpretation of ‘rain’ compare to Anatusi’s ‘rain’? Did Rick Dula’s painting of the skeleton of the Hamilton building emphasis the complexity of the buildings structure?

Embrace was a wonderful exhibit at DAM and if you missed it, you can learn a lot from the 2 volume catalogue. There are many photos of the artists in the process of creating those extremely intriguing installations. The engineering feats alone were substantial. I find that as an artist, I learn so much from other artist’s comments, processes, and artworks.

EMBRACE – Architecture and Installations at DAM

Linda — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:12:04 +0000

When the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened its new expansion, the Frederic C. Hamilton Building which was designed by Daniel Libeskind; art critics and some viewers complained about the unusual contemporary design. A common complaint of Libeskind’s architecture was that the slanted walls made it difficult to show lots of artwork.

However, the current show Embrace proved them wrong! Seventeen contemporary installation artists were invited to work with this unusual architectural space and it was a huge success in my opinion. The wonderful staircase and atrium in DAM gives the opportunity for the viewers to see several of the installations multiple times in different perspectives, and to see connections between the installations.

The Embrace show is about the dialogue between painting (in a broad scope) and the architecture. In the Embrace catalogue, Christoph Heinrich’s talks about the labyrinthine space, cavern qualities, mazes, and diagonal walls in the Hamilton Building at DAM.

Even in the very beginnings of art, cave painting responded to the shape of stone…with the bison… deriving their volume from the natural projections of the walls on which they were painted.

I found this to be an interesting analogy, having toured many of the ancient cave sites in Europe. Henrich’s discussion about the traditional “white cube” type of museum and the new role of the general public in art appreciation is very interesting. I highly recommend this Embrace catalogue to further understand museums, viewer’s roles, installation art and the artist’s concepts and process. The catalogue has so many great photos of the artists at work, plus their final installations, that you don’t have to see the actual show to learn from it. Unfortunately the show closes April 4, 2010, but the catalogue will still be available.