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Visual Art: Books: Outdoors:
Mayor's
Art Show 2005 The Mayor's Art Show jurors were ceramicist Jocelyn McAuley, law professor and arts advocate Dom Vetri and renowned installation artist Mike E. Walsh. Their sole directive: Their selections (60 out of 444 entries) should represent the diversity and quality of the arts in Lane County. Paintings outnumbered other submissions, which the show reflects. The quality of technique demonstrated by painters is high, and their genres and themes varied, although predominantly representational.
Lynda Lanker's classic Western-style portrait of Elladean Bittner is exquisite in its handling of the challenges of egg tempera paint and its delicacy and depth of expression. It stands in stark contrast to the mood and manner of execution of Barry Geller's acrylic close-up Portrait of Haley, which is more stylized, flatter in texture and emotion, and a bolder, sober composition. Do Mi Stauber gives Her Generous Regard, a soft, luminous, multi-layered colored-pencil close-up of an elephant's face, a precise rendering of the animal's anatomy and wrinkled skin, reaching toward abstraction in its marvelous study of texture. Sisy Anderson's Chinese-influenced Com-passionate Warrior captures a horse's character with ink and watercolor. Betsy Wolfston's Being, an incized, glazed-painted ceramic tile representing a bird, is a lovely reminder of how we sometimes neglect to simply be. Vigil, Mary Jungels' expressive acrylic portrait of a dog, won a Juror's Award. Landscapes are well-represented in Brent D. Burkett's impeccable craftsmanship with Idaho Memoir. The contrast of complementary greens and reds that dominate is softened by the golden light suffusing this classical scene of rolling mountains in the fall. The warm sunset glow provides a halo of timelessness. We are suspended in a memory, forever perfect.
Cyndy Duerfeldt's masterful large-format acrylic, On the River, earned a Juror's Award. As water, land and sky bathe in warm evening light, shadows lengthen and edges dissolve. Matter loses its density, and the intangible acquires substance. All three elements merge to share in the expression of light and shadow. Earth and liquid heaven reflect in the fiery water. We are reminded of Turner's atmospheric, abstracted landscapes. Aliga Craycroft's Carriage House is a striking large-format charcoal composition. It combines an unusual perspective and a strong visual rhythm provided by the texture of directional lines contrasting with light and dark quiet areas. Peggy Spiess' triptych of branches laden with hot red persimmons set against the cool blue of friendly cumulus clouds creates a lovely interplay between slightly diagonal branches, undulating clouds, and the full, curved mass of the fruit. In Kathleen Caprario's oil diptych, Transition Zones: Leaving to Arrive, the left panel presents a nebulous universe with sunlit worlds emerging from darkness and chaos. We experience again Caprario's fascination with dichotomies such as light/dark, positive/negative, organic/geometric. This is a stark, intense, minimalist work. The Structure of My Family, Sally Schwader's pleasant mixed-media abstraction, also provides a study of value contrast, but the mood is lighter, with predominant blues and yellows and overlapping geometric planes.
Printmakers are few, but two tiny prints drew my attention: Susan Schaeffer's solar-plate etching, Some Chanterelles, and Carrie O'Coyle's Migration, a watercolored drypoint, both drawn with a free, spontaneous yet delicate and precise hand. Among photographs, Jeff Cooley's Lindsay, a portrait of painter Lindsay Kennedy immersed in water, has the merit of a simple, strong composition. In Winter Sunset, Harry Bonham makes use of a vintage alternative photographic process, gum dichromate, which produces an interesting ink-wash effect. The image itself, however, is conventional. Colette Govan's Golden Life is a charming travel shot. The inkjet printing, however, mars the presentation. Folded Pentagon, Jon Meyer's still-life of human models, is a pleasing if contrived geometric composition. If most works are representational, many also contain a narrative element. Tommy Waggener received a Juror's Award for his mixed-media The Duel, a giant $10 bill constructed out of large photographs stapled onto a wooden panel, shot through with a shotgun and splattered with blood-red stains. It's a witty reference to the duel that killed Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, whose portrait adorns $10 bills. Thomas Rubick's gouache, The Ninth Crusade, is a biting reference to Abu Ghraib. The infamous image of a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box, wires attached to his hands, is transformed into a Christmas card, the prisoner's green garment and hood evoking a Christmas tree decorated with a garland of electric lights. The words "Idah Saidan Wa Sanah Jadidah" ("Merry Christmas" in Arabic) are written in arabicized Latin alphabet. PJ Sargeant's mixed-media diptych playfully tackles The Case For or Against Cloning, while Virginia Mae Sands multiplies in colored pencil the image of toy-dog Scud, raising issues of consumerism and standardization, with a clear reference to Warhol. Digital compositing appears to lend itself well to visual narratives, as exemplified by Kristen Murphy's Here I Am and Michael Karas' untitled inkjet print. The latter evoked for juror Walsh the building in 2004 of a Wal-Mart (with its happy face logo) at the foot of Mexico's Teotihuacan pyramids, consumerism turning us into robots and the earth into a wasteland.
Digital technology can also serve three-dimensional art, as with Jeffery Garman's untitled metal sculpture. Mayor Kitty Piercy's selected Chuck Owens' Dilation for the Mayor's Award with the city of Eugene in mind. Denis Grace's ambitious homage to The Tragic Life of Camille Claudel portrays the sculptress at three stages of her life in high-relief bronzes that capture Claudel's expression with great sensitivity. The wrinkled skin of the aged subject, however, proved to be a technical challenge not quite met. Enchantress, Carolyn Osborne-Sommer's simple clay piece, is quietly successful in its very simplicity. Pottery is exquisitely represented by Kenneth Standhardt's geometrically indented vessel, influenced by Native American basketry patterns, Grace Sheese's Dome Jar, which derives inspiration from Asian architecture, and Faye Nakumara's Red Sky Vessel. With all three, high craftsmanship and aesthetics go hand in hand. Sally Metcalf's untitled basketry piece evokes the flowing grace of a sea anemone. It received the new Exhibit Designer's Award. Claudia Bark's wonderful and whimsical Paper Thin dress sways on its hanger as viewers move around it. James Nason's Crescent Chair in Oregon black walnut follows a spare, curvilinear design. The most unusual three-dimensional medium this year is performance artist Rosalie Juhl herself. The concept of exhibiting oneself, while not new, is a first for this venue. The piece forces us to consider again the eternal question of what is art and the more general issue of how we view and objectify each other. Susan Detroy, the gallery's exhibit designer, views each show as itself "a piece of artwork composed of several artworks." Attentive viewers will note groupings along thematic as well as purely aesthetic criteria. The Mayor's Art Show essential complement, The Salon des Refusés at DIVA, will be reviewed next week.
Europe's
Rise THE EUROPEAN DREAM — How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, by Jeremy Rifkin. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004, hardcover and paperback. Immigrants continue to come to the U.S. in large numbers, mostly seeking economic betterment. But the country they come to is seeing the atrophying of "the American Dream" with its visions of equality and justice, economic opportunity and mobility, and the spirit which served as inspiration for the world. Meanwhile in Europe another dream is being fashioned.
In an important book published in 2004, Jeremy Rikfin has demonstrated this with vast amounts of economic information and attitude surveys, in The European Dream — How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Rikfin shows that the U.S. is now the most unequal of the industrial nations in the world, with growing economic disparities, high levels of poverty, the largest percentage of incarceration and rampant violence and crime. Furthermore, U.S. unilateralism and what late Sen. Fulbright called "the arrogance of power" is offensive to most of the world and seen as a serious threat to world stability and peace and a sustainable environment. The 25 nations within the Europe Union have agreed to a collective approach to their future. Rifkin shows with much interesting evidence how significantly different that vision is in contrast to the U.S. EU agreements lay out mandates with regard to environmental and work protection standards (contra NAFTA, CAFTA) and human rights — including protection for rights of women, immigrants, children, aged, and others. The result is not utopia, but an articulated conception of mutual interest, multilateral efforts to improve the quality of life for all, and a sense of responsibility for the common good. That may sound like nostalgia for the vision many formerly had in this country. But as Rifkin starkly reveals, that portrait has eroded here and has advanced in Europe. While we stress individual success, ownership, wealth and privacy, the Europeans are cultivating visions of a civic society with universal rights and a community emphasis. As most of the world's scientists and policy makers acknowledge the critical challenge of greenhouse gases and global warming, George Bush thumbs his nose at the world and rejects the Kyoto treaty. Europeans are clear in their quest for policies to achieve environmentally sustainable global conditions. While the world seeks multilateral approaches to conflict resolution and global poverty, our government has snubbed the U.N. and has initiated unilateral preemptive war on Iraq, rejected former U.S. policies disavowing deployment of first-strike nuclear weapons and made only minor increases in U.S. financial commitment to ending global poverty — far less than the industrial nations of Europe. These policy decisions are major indicators of the current vision in the United States, and are in sharp contrast with those in Europe. Europeans cannot fathom what is happening here. They read of "culture wars" and the "blue/red states" but truly are mystified by what they correctly assess as a huge shift in "the American Dream," This does not deter the nurturing of "the European Dream," and Rifkin presents a provocative and creative analysis to juxtapose these different visions for the future. His analysis of the shifts within U.S. culture and policies transcends parties; it is not a Republican or Democratic Party problem. What has evolved over years has been increasing reliance on "the market," lesser expectations for the role of government, and arguments about "freedom" while cutting taxes for the privileged and social services for the needy. Europeans meanwhile observe the U.S. plagued with poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and crime — making the society more polarized and unstable. Some 46 million Americans have no health insurance. The U.S. and South Africa are alone among developed countries without national health care systems. EU policies, on the other hand, are designed to advance the social wage whereby economic and social amenities are being made available to larger numbers of people and thereby increasing the quality of life for the society as a whole. Nothing captures this more than the difference with regard to children. In Europe, prenatal and child health care, paid parental leave, good child-care availability and increasing investment in education are dramatically different from the realities within the U.S. The point of the book is not to merely critique American policies and admire those in Europe; rather, it lays out a challenge for the world. Which vision for the future serves humanity and all of us best? We are at a crossroads in many ways and decisions made now, from the global to the local, are going to shape human destiny.
North
Umpqua Trail The waters of our state are as diverse as they are spectacular. Asking me to pick my favorite river in Oregon is like asking a parent to pick their favorite child.
But if I had to pick one, it might very well be the North Umpqua River, which tumbles off the jagged volcanic peaks of the southern Cascades and pours through a narrow gorge before joining the South Umpqua west of Roseburg. The North Umpqua has got it all: Dramatic waterfalls, glass-smooth emerald pools and stately old-growth forests. It is an intense whitewater rafting adventure, and a world-renowned fly-fishing destination. And it is close enough to Eugene — less than two hours — to be a reasonable day hiking destination for folks in Lane County. The extraordinarily cold and clear waters are the product of one of the world's largest known explosions: The eruption of Mount Mazama about 8,000 years ago, which created Crater Lake and expelled billions of tons of pumice near the source of the North Umpqua. Water percolates easily through this material, and is chilled to a temperature barely above freezing as it travels underground for miles before emerging as springs that form the headwaters of the river. The North Umpqua is unique among the world's rivers in that the main stem, fed by refrigerated waters, is actually colder than its tributaries. Highway 138 parallels the river, and many spectacular sites — salmon spawning beds, columnar basalt speckled with lime-green algae — can be enjoyed from the road. The rest of the scenery is taken in via the 79-mile long North Umpqua Trail, which is divided into 10 different segments between 4 and 18 miles in length, easily accessed by 12 different trailheads found on or near the highway. The different segments cover a lot of ground, taking in classic old-growth Douglas fir/western hemlock forests on the lower segments, as well as mixed conifer, ponderosa, and lodgepole pine stands as the trail gains elevation. Some of the most notable sights to be had from the trail are double-tiered Toketee Falls, the 2002 Apple Burn (unfortunately closed to hikers), Boulder Creek, the Medicine Creek Indian pictographs, and moss-covered Crystal Springs. One of the shortest but most interesting hikes is the 3.5-mile Hot Springs segment. To get there, take I-5 south for 68.6 miles to Roseburg. Get off I-5 at Exit 124, and follow signs for the North Umpqua River and Hwy. 138. Take Hwy. 138 east for 59 miles, then turn north (left) for 2 miles and find the North Umpqua Trailhead at the east end of Lemolo Lake. The first thing you'll see from the trail is the tall metal penstock that climbs a steep cliff face. It's just one part of the North Umpqua Hydropower Project: Eight dams, three reservoirs, 30 miles of flumes and canals, 6 miles of penstocks and tunnels, and approximately 100 miles of roads, all located on public lands, all part of Scottish Power's international energy portfolio. Most of these monstrosities are hidden from view as you climb, then descend and cross the river along a highway bridge. On the other side, the trail climbs again, before once again dropping back down to the river. The last three quarters of a mile take you through a moss-draped forest along the river's edge. The best part of the trail is at the end. After 3.5 miles, just before the trail crosses the river again, turn north (left) at a trail junction for a third of a mile to a clothing-optional hot spring covered by a rustic wooden roof. After your soak, you'll want to explore the other great hiking segments along the North Umpqua. You'll probably have a tough time figuring out which one is your favorite.
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