Watershed Moment

Laguna de Santa Rosa (linocut monotype and letterpress on mulberry paper) by Tiana Krahn for Watershed Moment postcard 

Join the Laguna Foundation for the opening of Watershed Moment, a new exhibit from North Bay Letterpress Arts. Featuring original works by local letterpress printers—some in collaboration with poets—the show pairs words and visuals to celebrate the unique beauty of the Laguna de Santa Rosa. It also explores the creative interplay of language, image and nature using handmade papers, materials from the Laguna and letterpress and other printing techniques.

The exhibit is on display from

SAT. SEPTEMBER 6 - DECEMBER 19th

Laguna Foundation Gallery

900 Sanford Road, Santa Rosa.

OPENING RECEPTION

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 3-5 PM.

Is_2

Is_1

Folded Wing

For this exhibit I have explored crumpling as process and form using the words of two poets, judi goldberg ( Is1 & Is2 ) and Elizabeth Herron ( Folded Wing ). Three of the four artworks exhibited are featured above.

More about crumples and crumpling: Crumple: A strong complex shape that resembles a rock and its textures of nooks, crevasses, cracks, edges and breaks. Crumple crumpling is also a gesture. I have been exploring both in these abstract artworks. What you see are prints from crumpled papers and crumpled words of poets, judi goldberg & Elizabeth Herron.

A crumple, a carrier of hands’ work, works my hands, crushing, kneading paper, rocking to from back and forth, squeezing compressing again again pressing against a resistant surface feeling like I am destroying the material with thoughtless gestures.

I am no more an artist in control. I am participating in an experience that is happening with a result beyond me—a thing of its own, something else, as is. It’s mysterious. Physicists are still trying to understand its nature. It’s haphazard. I don’t know what to to expect. With each crumple repeated a unique form emerges.

The material collapses upon itself from a two-dimensional shape to a three-dimensional textural object. This gesture activates a shift, altering a perception of the material and what it was. A displacement of sorts. Perhaps a destructive and transformative process that uncovers other possibillities for seeing.

It’s similar to how the earth’s crust crumples as it occurs in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, glaciation, changing climate—forming mountain ranges, scree, even watersheds—a different landscape continually reassembling, reordering itself to another unfinished state. Crumpling is a way of aligning with the forces of the earth and the unpredictability of life itself.

Artist Residency in Eastern Iceland

Off to Iceland last September for a month long artist residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art, located on a fjord in the small fishing village of Seydisfjordur. My fifth visit to the island as there is something about the elemental shapes and energies that continue to draw me back to its natural wonders of volcanoes, rift zones and young landscapes visibly being reshaped.

I return to feel its energies and rhythms, to experience its vastness and to open me to possibilities and conversations with and of the landscape.

Conversations with, of and off:

Evidence of the landscape organizing itself—reshaping itself in human time. The eruption site of the Meradalir Volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula in August of 2022.

Two years ago in December of 2020, Seydisfjordur experienced an average year’s rainfall over a period of 10 days. Major landslides destroyed 13 buildings.

Now, two years later, evidence of the landslides remain.

displacement, dislocation, movement, shaping, change?

A water process that shapes the landscape

During my stay, I experienced a red alert storm with winds up to 60 m per second. Evidence of the power of the winds (below); a historic pier house built around 1900 by a Norwegian entrepreneur was lost, collapsing on itself.

There’s no everything; everything is always moving as the landscape (natural and human—made) interacts with the natural processes of wind, water and soil.

Dissolving boundaries between art and nature; merging art and earth natural processes. Video by Brooke Holve & Eve Chartrand created during the artist residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art.