Blues Hotel

While wandering Terrain, you're surrounded by thousands of colors, textures and noises. If you made it upstairs, in the corner, set aside from the bright photography, you saw a big black box. Big enough for you to walk into and hopefully, you did. There was just enough light coming out of the entrance to entice you to step in...Welcome to Blues Hotel. 
Christi AnnEula Montgomery, a local Spokane artist, created a beautiful piece with oil paintings within this box. The colors were bright and alive but my favorite part about this piece was that it allowed you to focus. I stepped into the Blues Hotel and everything else was gone. I could just stare at the texture of the paint and in that moment, nothing else mattered, nothing could touch me. It was peaceful.

Abandoned Cracker Factory Art Show

No artist claimed this piece. Someone made it, but chose not to leave a name card attached so all would know the maker of the piece. Maybe the artist was too shy, maybe the artist forgot. Or maybe it was a statement. This interactive work of art is collaborative - all who contribute are the artists.  The original creator formed the skeleton frame of the piece; the rest of us gave it life.

Visually, the piece is mostly a neon orange traffic cone, contrasting brightly against the light brown wood frame of the piece, the light brown wood floor, and white paint walls. The frame holds up the sideways cone a few feet off the ground on a rotating pole. A stack of index cards sits on the frame with instructions to write something inspirational. People can write notes and drop them into a slit in the top of the cone. Then they can rotate the crank, stick their hands inside the bottom of the cone, and pull out words left for them by someone else.

I loved this piece. Compared to the pictures and paintings hanging neatly on the walls, this bulky artwork seemed almost out of place at first. Certainly not a piece that, at first glance, one thinks “that’s great art!” Once I engaged with the piece, I thought it embodied the idea of Terrain.  The piece is unique, not one usually seen at an art gallery. The piece is made by a local, and then added on by several locals. The piece gets people self-reflecting. What inspires me? What words of wisdom do I have for someone else? The piece leaves people with thoughts to ponder after they read thoughts from others. The collaborative nature of the piece and the fact that each person walks away with a different card of wisdom embodies a key characteristic of art:  how art is experience based. People experience the same piece in different ways. For this piece, people also left their mark in different ways. Before leaving the piece, I scribbled in my bit of advice: “keep moving forward,” Walt Disney.

Editorial Cartoons

Long before the alphabet, humans were recording stories with art. The cave men painted pictures onto rock to tell stories that archaeologist now study. Despite humanity’s fairly recent obsession for the need of words to explain things, drawing pictures are still a powerful way to tell a story.  Milt Priggee, an editorial cartoonist, who worked for The Spokesman Review in the late 80s, returned to Spokane last weekend to give a very informational presentation on his work. The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, a museum very dedicated to the history and growth of Spokane, provided the space for Priggee as a part of the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau program. Humanities Washington is a non-profit program dedicated to discussing the issues of humanity. 

Milt Priggee grew up in Chicago. He has provided his art for several local newspaper and is currently living in Oak Harbor, Washington. Priggee has a wonderful sense of humor but I guess that's necessary with a career like his. 

So what is an editorial cartoonist? As an editorial cartoonist, Priggee’s job is to share his opinion on current issues through art, and therefore his work can be very controversial.  Sometimes the editorial cartoonist is the person that comes out and says what everyone else was too scared to say in fear of offending someone. Other times, editorial cartoonists offer a totally different perspective on what is going on in the world. If you're an editorial cartoonist and you’re doing your job right, there are going to be more than a few hate letters and law suits.

You might recognize this editorial cartoon titled Join, or Die created by Benjamin Franklin. Just like Benjamin Franklin, Priggee and other editorial cartoonist create very powerful images by taking current issues into their art. In fact, Priggee took Franklin's cartoon and created a cartoon that applied to the residents of Washington. 

The art of editorial cartooning will never die. It’s an art that has been around forever and isn’t going anywhere. Here’s the catch: Nowadays, the newspapers don’t want to offend anyone. They don’t want to pick a side. One week you’ll see a very liberal cartoon in the paper and the next week you’ll see a totally conservative cartoon in the same newspaper company. Editorial cartoonist create and then hope that their work gets chosen.

As a tree hugger, as everyone should be, this cartoon of Priggee's was one of my favorites. It’s simple and yet says so much. It doesn’t need any labels or explanation. Not only does it relate to those in the Pacific Northwest but this piece is applicable all over the world.

Priggee created the cartoon below in 1994 yet is even more relevant today. Again, this is a cartoon that many people can understand. It's simple and very powerful. 

 

Some of Priggee’s work is more directly influence by his location.  For those in living Washington, these photos have more meaning because of their relevance to the community.

To check out more of Priggee’s work, head to his website by clicking any of the photos!

Personally, I wish I had grown up more familiar with art work like Priggee’s. I found Priggee’s work to be very powerful because of his ability to make you think about what's happening in the world. Many of us are not as informed as we should be about politics. Politics have always been a little interesting to me but looking at editorial cartoons makes the political issues more real and applicable for me. Maybe if editorial cartoons were more prevalent in are world we would find that people had a larger desire to become more informed about what is going on in the world. Going to this lecture, I realized that the only way I get news nowadays is not through the news but through late night comedic shows, like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and The Daily Show. What does that say about our culture? Should we be getting our information from a less satirical source? What should change about our news stations so that people are more willing to listen? The news stations have one job, to inform the people, yet comedic shows are doing a better job so that's where most informed people get their information. Should this change? Perhaps humor makes it easier to listen to and see the idiotic and horrible things that go on in this crazy world.

Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers

Chris Jordan//Running The Numbers

On September 11, 2014 the Whitworth community gathered to view environmental activist and photographer Chris Jordan’s works: Running The Numbers as part of the schools 125^th anniversary celebration. A reception for the exhibit took place that evening in the Bryan Oliver Gallery and was followed by a lecture in the Robinson Teaching Theatre in Weyerhaeuser Hall. Chris Jordan, a Seattle based environmental activist and photographer, focuses on creating large scale works that depict mass consumption and waste in America. After 10 years of work as a lawyer, Jordan left his job in order to purse his long time hobby of photography in hopes of creating photographs that bring insight to current environmental issues and bring awareness to present day societies consciousness. Jordan’s current project- Running The Numbers- focuses on contemporary American culture and our blindness to consumption. As stated by Chris Jordan: “Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: two million plastic bottles (five minutes of bottle use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. Finding meaning in this mass phenomenon can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste we can pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses… This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society; in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.”

As stated by Jordan, each image is made up of an incredible amount of smaller images that together, create a larger whole. Since the human mind cannot comprehend such a large number, Jordan uses this technique in order to help the viewer comprehend what they are viewing. Jordan wants to enhance the relationship between the individual and the collective in hopes of bringing awareness to societies collective consumption. A highlight of the current Running The Numbers exhibition in the Bryan Oliver gallery is Jordan’s portrayal of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai. In his own interpretation, Chris Jordan photographed hundreds of various plastics that currently resides in the Pacific Ocean and compiled them in way that resembles the iconic painting. It is through this image that Jordan hopes to bring awareness to the current plastic consumption that is found not only in America, but also around the world.

When asked whom inspires his art practice, Chris Jordan quickly responded with Picasso. Specifically listing the painting Guernica as the most powerful activism work of art he has ever seen. Jordan says the painting goes deeper in to our cultural consciousness than any activist lecture. Stating: “It is the duty of an artist to help people feel, for it is when people truly feel something deep down that their consciousness will change”. In his own practice, it is Jordan’s hope to help the viewer connect more deeply to what they feel, and to honor his subject matter as deeply and as passionately as he can. Creating images that capture his own love, sadness, and passion for the issue presented that is then passed on to the viewer.

In his lecture, Chris Jordan recognizes the significance of the community’s gathering and the date in which the lecture was held, September 11^th. Jordan brings awareness to the fact that though the messages he is trying to convey in his art, the environmental issues, do not require as severe a response as a terrorist attack; however, the issues still require immediate action and priority. Specifically asking the community the question: “How do we get to hope from here?” Chris Jordan believes hope to be connected to the future, and is not something we have now. He believes the opposite of hope is not hopelessness, but action, and in order to change our consciousness we need to feel hope.

            In reflection of both the exhibition and lecture I found Chris Jordan’s concept on hope to be promising. As an artist I identified with the passion Jordan wants to convey in his work, and the almost urgency he uses in his photographs to grasp the heart of the viewer. As a community member, I felt Jordan’s message touch my spirit and my awareness to plastic usage is prominently on my mind.  The exhibition brought consciousness and a new perspective on American culture that I have not experienced at any other exhibition; where as, the lecture allowed me to comprehend the large numbers Jordan’s images were portraying. I left both events with a new understanding of hope, and a question of my own for society: How do we get to love from here? If hope alone does not bring a shift in our societal consciousness, will love? Can we shift our idea of environmental action to an expression of environmental love? 

http://chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#silent-spring

http://www.whitworth.edu/Academic/Department/Art/OliverGallery/

Post by Sarah Sprouse