Index

perceive and understand our environment, often blurring the boundaries between natural environments and their technologically ‘enhanced’ variations. No longer do most people experience the natural world through hiking, traveling or working outdoors. Instead, we surround ourselves with selective organically inspired elements such as highly manicured lawns, indoor plants, zen gardens and bubbling fountains. To these we’ve recently added digitally manipulated images of nature, ‘soothing’ natural sounds and time-released “fresh mountain breezes.”

The artists in Wired Forest are deeply interested in the current manifestations of our age-old desire to interpret nature. Thom Heileson’s 101 Sunsets/ 1001 Lovesongs pokes fun at our need to take photographs of every spectacular sunset we see and Justin Beckman plays with rural stereotypes in his target practice videos.

Wired Forest is funded in part with grants from 4Culture, The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Premier Properties, Artsfund and individuals.

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Tracey Fugami is the Associate Director of Education of Pratt Fine Arts Center ( Seattle, WA). Formerly she served as Curator of Collections & Exhibitions at The Paine Arts Center & Gardens ( Oshkosh, WI), Whitney Museum and The Drawing Center in New York and currently contributes to Art Papers, Sculpture Review and Afterimage. She holds a MA in Arts Administration from New York University.

Vaughn Bell’s video projections illuminate the subtle changes in light and environment that we normally overlook. Shown in real time – a sharp contrast to what we are used to in entertainment — Vaughn sits the audience down, and making us pause to consider our environments.

Justin Beckman explores the habits and activities encountered in his recent five years in Eastern Washington. In “Take One Down” Beckman takes nearly two minutes to carefully shoot down a stack of full cans of beer. Playing on rural stereotypes, Beckman gives a look into gun culture and its role in passing time.

Cat Clifford explores subtle daily, seasonal and anthropological changes to the rural western landscape. The cast of characters who migrate through these spaces – deer, birds, people, farm equipment – travel quickly, and their and actions are best recorded by those who artificially “slow down the show”. Clifford constructs quiet diaristic narratives through video, animation and sculpture that provide a welcome respite in turbulent times.

Shannon Eakins creates machines that explore the mechanical components of blinking, scratching, reaching and twitching. Attracted to various parts of animals, such as eyes, and the movements they make, her creations resemble primitive contraptions with repetitive motions.

Thom Heileson takes images of landscapes and projects them in large format. In “101 Susnsets/101 Love Songs”, a video captures 101 typical calendar-type color photographs of sunsets, each altered digitally so that the sun is always centered and the same size, each a duration 1/30 second, resulting in a shimmering visual surface, the mixing or distillation of several instances into a pseudo-essential composite.

Susie Lee’s video and installation work often consists of ephemeral elements that appear and disappear. She records meditative moments that highlight mortality and the transient nature of things. Her works are often accompanied by sounds that punctuate instants of change or development.

Cathy McClure combines uses traditional metal-smithing techniques to explore her fascination with mechanical toys. Her reconstructed animals reveal the innards of plush wind-up toys. However, instead of plastic coverings and skeletal remains, a smooth and beautifully finished surface is seen.

Time, and an awareness of the change it brings, is at the core of Michael Sherwin’s artwork. Incorporating both still and moving images, he taps into perpetual elements of the world from the surface of the sea to the very ground beneath his feet to explore the mystery behind their elusive nature.

A runner up for the 2006 Betty Bowen Memorial Award, Mary Simpson uses the subjects of her etchings –wandering figures, desolate landscapes and row houses– as characters in her black and white Super 8 stop-animation films. Simpson uses iconic images from past eras to dramatically display isolation and loss in an unforgiving landscape.

Susan Robb combines video and technology to create works that capitalize on the inherent properties of both the mediums and the subjects she depicts. “Seedling” features several small monitors installed on large poles depicting floral imagery. The viewer walks beneath the monitors, recreating the feeling of being surrounded by tall, swaying grasses.

Lezli Rubin-Kunda’s video documentations are performance-based and most often site-specific. In knitting a sleeve on the trunk of a tree or coating its bark with soup powder, Rubin-Kunda literally becomes nature’s caretaker, illustrating her ecological concerns and musings on the land.