“Ranger,” by Perri Howard will be on display.
By Laurelle Walsh
“Hardscapes” opens at Confluence Gallery this week, an exhibit that invites artists to take a deeper look at how humans invent, design and engineer structures and systems that alter the natural world around us – both the beautiful and the ugly.
The show opens on Saturday (July 18) with a reception from 4-8 p.m., and runs through Aug. 22.
Mare Nemeth’s “Social Security” looks at where support for the aging comes from.
Confluence Executive Director Salyna Gracie brought the idea for Hardscapes to the gallery’s show committee last year, with the goal of considering “the anti-landscape; what humans do to alter the natural landscape,” she said. Gracie co-curated the exhibit along with Mare Nemeth.
Hardscape is a term used by landscapers, who plan for the hard aspects of a garden design before they put in the plants, Gracie said. The exhibit’s call to artists asked, “How do we rearrange the earth to fulfill our human needs? Do we choose to work with or against the natural world? How do we fence out or defend against the threats of nature, either real or perceived?”
Nemeth said she has been pleasantly surprised by the degree of cohesion among the works in the exhibit. The curators chose to bring a sense of comfort to the show by using colors taken from a photo of the Methow Valley: the emerald green of a hayfield, the mauve of the dry shrub-steppe hills, and the azure blue of the sky. “We wanted to bring in colors from our every-day environment,” Nemeth said.
And though the colors evoke calm, “a lot of the subjects are not really soothing at all,” Gracie said, noting the artists’ use of concrete, dams, power lines, cell phone towers, and grass growing through the cracks of a sidewalk. “They’re all part of the everyday landscape, but nobody wants them in their backyard,” Gracie notes.
“A lot of times these things are fixtures that we just tune out, but they really have a beauty of their own,” Nemeth added.
Four paintings in egg tempera by Seattle artist Nathan DiPietro place the viewer in the position of looking in on an altered human landscape. In Centex Playground, the viewer looks upon brightly colored children’s play structures set in the middle of a dull suburban development. The flat aspect of the image, and the lack of humans in the picture create a somewhat-sinister mood, which is repeated in DiPietro’s other pieces.
Former Twisp resident Nick Gadbois, now of Santa Fe, submitted four pastel-colored concrete panels covered with raised geometric lines. The pieces appear to be images of the Earth from space, noted Gracie, or an aerial view of a Martian civilization. Gadbois’ fascination with maps is reflected in this series, Nemeth observed.
Nemeth created a papercrete sculpture of a giant parsnip, called Social Security, for the exhibit. Her original inspiration was the pamphlet Agrarian Justice by Thomas Paine, said to be the foundation of the U.S. Social Security Administration. “It got me thinking, ‘Will I ever draw social security?’ ‘What is to be my social security?’“ Nemeth said.
The whimsical giant parsnip inadvertently became her tribute to TwispWorks, Nemeth said, because it incorporates a green metal gear, which is on the organization’s logo, and the large root itself is emblematic of KTRT radio, known as The Root, which broadcasts from the TwispWorks campus. “I will have to rely on my community for support as I get older, and TwispWorks has created opportunities to better ourselves both socially and economically,” Nemeth said.
Hardscapes asks whether it is possible for humans to take up space which is in harmony with the earth. The artists’ replies to that question are often surprising and delightful, said Gracie.
