Saranac Art Projects

SARANAC ART PROJECTS ANNOUNCES PRINT SALE TO BENEFIT CROWS SHADOW INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS.

Various artists will lend talents to raise funds for New Zealand Exhibition.

(Spokane, WA)  Saranac Art Projects will be sponsor a one-night sale of monotypes from Crows Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA), located on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon.   The mono-prints were printed by renowned artists from a weekend “Monothon” to raise funds for the organization’s 2008 exhibit in New Zealand. The funds raised will go toward travel costs for CSIA’s participation at the New Zealand Biennial International Art Festival, in which some of the organization’s print collection will be exhibited and its Master Printer will be conducting a printmaking workshop.

“Monotype prints are created by pressing paper to an inked surface that an artist has created,” explains Frank Janzen, CSIA Master Printer. “The result is a unique piece of art that cannot be replicated.” Several renowned artists, including James Lavadour, Phillip Charette, Joe Fedderson and others, participated in a two-and-a-half day “Monothon” to create the one-of-a-kind monotype prints. 75 artists created mono-types over the monothon weekend.

The completed prints, donated by the artists, will be displayed in the Saranac Building Lobby adjunct to Saranac Art Projects.  The prints will go on display on Friday with the sale starting at 5:00 P.M. on First Friday, December 7th. The sale will conclude at the end of the gallery walk at approximately 8:00 p.m.  Prints will be priced at $100 for an 11” x 15” size print and $200 for a 15” x 22” print.  All proceeds go directly to Crows Shadow Institute of the Arts.

Crows Shadow Institute of the Arts was Founded by artist James Lavadour (Walla Walla) and a group of supporters in 1992, Crow's Shadow Institute is a non-profit art facility designed to bring technology, instruction and cultural exchange to artists on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Eastern Oregon. The Institute houses a large printmaking studio, computer graphics lab and photography darkroom as well as an extensive library, private studio space and administrative offices.
Saranac Art Projects is a not-for-profit exhibition space in Spokane, Washington with a mission of supporting contemporary visual art, featuring artists working in the American West.  Saranac Art Projects is located at street-level in the recently renovated Saranac Building at 25 West Main Street, Spokane, Washington. 

Hours:
Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
For further information, call 509-999-8529 / [email protected]

Saranac Art Projects set to make splash

Free gallery will display contemporary works

Megan Murphy stands with her daughter, Murphy Kendall, 5, in the Saranac Building. The Spokesman-Review (Dan Pelle The Spokesman-Review) If you go Saranac Art Projects 25 W. Main Ave. On exhibit: Steve Peters' "Here-ings: A Sonic Geohistory" and Raymond Meeks' "Unique Artist Books" and photographs. Runs through Oct. 20; opening reception today, 5 to 8 p.m. Gallery hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Information: (509) 999-8529

Julianne Crane
Staff writer for Spokesman Review
September 7, 2007

There's a fresh, new gallery in town – the Saranac Art Projects.

The nonprofit exhibition space occupies two connecting storefronts on the ground level of the historic Saranac Building at 25 W. Main Ave.

The free gallery is poised to explore cutting-edge, contemporary art in the American West.

"We want to focus on people who are dealing with interesting ideas but who are a little under the radar," says Megan Murphy, gallery director.

Murphy and a small group of advisers have been putting the gallery's concept together and working through its nonprofit status for a little more than six months.

"It started out as a small idea," she says, "and just took on a life of its own."

The Saranac Art Projects' board of directors includes some heavy hitters in the region's visual arts community.

In addition to Murphy, a painter and founder of Artocracy.com, there are Ben Mitchell, art curator at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture; Chris Bruce, director of Washington State University's Museum of Art; Nancy Brown, Spokane architect; and Wes Mills, an internationally exhibited artist based in Missoula.

"What is perhaps unique is that Saranac Art Projects is fundamentally an educational space," says Mitchell in an e-mail, "and is an integral part of the greater fabric of development and dialogue that the Community and Saranac buildings represent."

The buildings also house Thin Air Community Radio (KYRS, 92.3 FM) and the Magic Lantern, an art-house cinema.

Building owner Jim Sheehan "has been really helpful and supportive in getting the space started," says Murphy.

First exhibit

The premier show, opening today, features two very different Montana artists: sound artist Steve Peters of Missoula and photographer Raymond Meeks of the Bitterroot Valley.

"Neither one of the artists is working in the commercial gallery system," says Murphy. "It is a really interesting dynamic."

Peters' sound installation, "Here-ings: A Sonic Geohistory," is the result of a project for "The Land," a venue for site-specific environmental art in central New Mexico.

"Wishing to develop an intimate relationship with the site rather than impose his own noise upon it," says Murphy, "he devoted himself to the act of listening to the sounds that were present during each hour of the day and night over the course of a full year."

In sharing his findings, "Peters encourages us to offer our own attention to the subtle poetry that surrounds us," Murphy says.

"His work reminds us that, beneath the surface of the commonplace, the extraordinary lies waiting to be revealed."

Peters' installation consists of a dozen speakers hung throughout the gallery, with each having a different sound emitting from it.

"It is very austere but very beautifully done," says Murphy. "It is really thoughtful."

As a complement to the sound installation, there's also a series of haunting photographs by Meeks.

NEW EXHIBITION AT SARANAC ART PROJECTS

Saranac Art Projects in Spokane opens a new exhibition—works by Jennifer Reifsneider and Susan Skilling—on Friday, October 2 from 5-8 p.m.

Susan Skilling’s paintings are subtle and elegant meditations on such widely varied subjects as plant forms, slices of rocks and geodes, crystals, the night sky and Tibetan mandalas.  Created with densely layered mineral-based gouache paint on handmade Thai mulberry paper, the work can seem both geometric and organic.  Long a well-known and highly respected Seattle artist, Skilling’s paintings have been shown extensively in the Pacific Northwest.  Greg Kucera, the prominent Seattle gallerist, says of her work:  “From the first time I encountered these delicate, subtle paintings I have been intrigued by them.  Each body of her work has been a slow, quiet revelation of this artist’s path toward a personal enlightenment.  [She] is the kind of artist who is led by her inner voice and not by the dictates of fashion or the marketplace.”

Jennifer Reifsneider, from Missoula, Montana, explores the nature of containment through two-and three-dimensional mixed media sculpture. The laboriously handmade works make use of materials such as fiber and wax in combination with natural forces like gravity and erosion.  For many years she has also been working with dictionaries and single sheets from printed books, reconfiguring these familiar objects into highly complex, conceptually-based sculptural works that question our perceived notions of reading, learning, research and curiosity.  Reifsneider’s works are evidence of her interest in process and time, as well as the spaces between ideas, such as experience and memory, and language and communication.  The artist says:  My method of working is a search for some experience of the beauty and definition amid . . . confusion.  The work is about its own becoming, and embraces the quest’s inherent contradictions.”  Like Susan Skilling, Reifschneider is an extraordinarily disciplined studio artist, ignoring the fads and seductions of the contemporary art marketplace.

This Saranac Arts Project exhibition is the first time either artist has exhibited in Spokane or the Inland Northwest.

Saranac Art Projects is a not-for-profit exhibition space in Spokane, Washington with a mission of supporting contemporary visual art and culture and featuring artists working in the American West.  Saranac Art Projects is located at street-level in the recently renovated Saranac Building at 25 West Main Street, Spokane, Washington. 

Hours:
Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
For further information, call 509-999-8529

NEW EXHIBITION: