Upcoming Events

Art Outside Opening

June 21, 2008 1 - 4 pm

Art Ranger Tour with curator Jake Seniuk at 2 PM

Art Outside, the Port Angeles FineArts Center’s acclaimed outdoor art program, will open its 9th season on the Summer Solstice, Saturday, June 21, in Webster’s Woods, the Center’s five-acre art park. The unveiling of new works by nineteen Northwest and Canadian artists will be celebrated with a 1-4 pm reception in the Center’s courtyard and with a guided tour of the park, beginning at 2 pm, by Center director and Art Outside resident curator, Jake Seniuk, who has shepherded the program from its inception in 2000.

The greatest charm of Webster’s Woods, no doubt, is the whimsical interplay between artists’ ideas and the self-perpetuating landscape. Unlike high-ticket projects such as the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park —totally designed and built from the ground-up with vast resources on a barren piece of land —Webster’s Woods is a highly evolved natural forest ecosystem that serves as inspiration to the artists.

“I like to call the works here interventions,” said Seniuk. “Artists have the opportunity to respond to nature in a very free way, and they respect and are invigorated by that. By and large, the works are seamlessly integrated into the living forest in clever and often whimsical ways. That also provides the visitor a path to discovery. Finding works tucked here, or hanging there is a bit of a scavenger hunt, and most people seem to find that exhilarating.”

“This season features new works by a number of favorite past contributors,” said Seniuk. “Artists including Shirley Wiebe (Vancouver, BC), David Nechak, Alan Lande, Carolyn Law (all Seattle), James Lapp (Mount Vernon) and Dani LaBlond (Port Angeles) have returned year after year to work their magic in the Woods. Others are responding to this unique opportunity to site their art in a full symphonic landscape for the first time.”

One new contributor is Buster Simpson (Seattle), an artist who has worked extensively on the national public art stage and is known for works that raise environmental awareness. Here he’s wound a 24-foot long band-saw blade around the multiple trunks of a giant maple tree. The saw has a twist in it, which turns it into a mobius strip. It’s titled Path — the mobius strip is an endless path, a one-sided object which one could trace with a continuous line without ever lifting the pencil off the surface.

Inscribed on the blade is an endless phrase — “This Mobius path brings us back where the beginning is never ending.” The tree Simpson chose is one that has the remains of an old tree house and his intention is to continue the physical history of human engagement by having the tree grow around the blade and capture the saw and its message for those walking the woods fifty years from now.

For Gregory Glynn (Bainbridge Island) the band saw is a tool, not a sculpture in itself. The artist has used it to mill a madrona trunk into three-quarter inch boards that retain the tree’s natural outline. He’s erected twenty of these into a fan of splayed curving slices that rise fourteen feet above the forest floor like big bacon slices.

Ingrid Lahti (Mercer Island) offers an equally tall aluminum obelisk, sleek and shiny, topped by a chandelier of dangling aluminum tags that flicker in the sunlight like a candle.

“Art Outside, like the woods themselves, is a work in progress,” observed Seniuk. “New works are coming in daily towards the Solstice opening, while some from past seasons have gone back to the artists, and others still linger on in various states of decomposition.

Some of the artists will be working almost to the last minute to get their works installed. “I’m rooting for Viva Jones (Sequim) to be able to fire her ceramic dragon in time, “ said Seniuk, “but the complexity of the design and construction might delay him from assuming his post as a forest guardian until later in the month.”

“We’ve been fortunate to have received the generous sponsorship of First Federal Savings and Loan of Port Angeles, for the fifth year running,” said Seniuk. “That allows us to grant each artist a base honorarium to assist in production and travel costs. By and large it’s a labor of love for everyone involved. I think that’s a major factor in the joy that walking in these woods inspires in so many visitors.”

There’s a wealth of other new work — in materials ranging from glass to concrete to batik to nylon mesh to sound — joining the more than one hundred pieces still on site. In addition to the aforementioned artists Art Outside 2008 also includes new work by Mary Coss (Seattle), Chuck Iffland (Chimacum), Sarah Tucker (Port Angeles), Lin McJunkin (Conway), Margot Myers (Bellingham), Deanna Pindell (Port Hadlock), Gloria Lamson (Port Townsend) and Julie Lindell (Seattle).