One of the biggest success stories to come out of Bucktown Center for the Arts is Emily Christenson and her nature-inspired works. Some early visitors to doeGallery were impressed with her art and took a postcard of one of her paintings back to a favorite gallery in Washington, DC. Within a year, Christenson's work was hanging on the walls at the Fine Art & Artists (FAA) Gallery in Georgetown along with some of the big names of the 20th Century. Luck certainly played a role in Christenson's story, but if the work hadn't been so good and so captivating, it wouldn't have gone any further than being a souvenir postcard.

At FAA, Christenson enjoyed two years of strong sales, a solo show of her work, and a review in the Washington Post. She was preparing a body of work for her second solo show, Rivers & Rain, Pieces of Denali, when she got a call that the gallery was closing after 15 years.

More than a year later, Christenson is premiering both a new Bucktown gallery/studio (called "e|c") and the 10 works that make up Rivers & Rain, Pieces of Denali. The show runs through the end of December, and the gallery is in the southeast corner on the second floor.

Melanie De Keyrel Bell - All of the Things I Could Not SayA small woman with clenched fists full of feathers plucked from her own legs is watched by smiling, colorful faces reminiscent of the simplistic advertising from the faux utopia of the 1950s. This is a microcosm of a room full of sculptures and paintings that present themselves with a straightforward charm that makes you smile, and then you realize there are darker themes that temper the smile with unease.

Dawn Wohlford-Metallo's Twist & Shout Pressed clumps of richly textured paper pulp shaped into crusty grates, inquisitive fish, and smooth vertebrae are given chromatic life with hints of vibrant blue-greens, rusty reds, and creamy whites. These colors and textures are given room to breathe with large expanses of grays and earth tones.

The recently closed show at the Quad City International Airport art gallery featured nearly 50 stunning works: the serigraphy of Karen Blomme, the metal works of Tom Lytle, and the oil paintings and constructed boxes of Heidi Hernandez. I have exhibited with all three artists and have always been impressed by how their works strongly define the character of an exhibition.

 

While a handful of pieces are charged with exploratory energy, many of the works are more predictable progressions or refinements of previous visual explorations.

 

Blu NOLA While the work of Blomme and Lytle (both established area artists) seeks to cultivate visual and conceptual territories that they have already "claimed" with previous imagery, Hernandez (a younger, up-and-coming artist) is more vigorously exploring the "unknown" to find her own territory.

Bruce Walters' Sold House Creepy bunny costumes rendered in charcoal on paper, elongated hands rising out of the water to scratch at the stormy sky, a long, unspooled, film-like reel of hands signing out a missive wrapped around toppled driftwood pillars, and a possible gate to the underworld are parts of two separate book-based bodies of work now at Quad City Arts. One set re-presents the familiar with superb technical eloquence, utilizing the book as an end-product receptacle. The other, more adventurous body of work requires the book to become a component of the viewer's experience of the show.

Reader issue #662 Primal fires transform mud into stone. Tanned-hide-like scrolls stitched together with tea bags evoke tribal dance and hunting rituals. Intricate and whimsical lattice-like snowflake images lighten the spirits. These elemental forces of nature are on display at the Quad City Arts gallery, in the forms of clay works by Sally Gierke and Jim Cronk, cut paperworks by Keith Bonnstetter, and tribal fabric works from Tricia Coulson.

All Kinds of People by Dawn Wohlford-Metallo and Lisa Mahar The use of found objects carries an up-front challenge to artists. Do you try to transform the identity of the "junk" by visually turning it into something else? Or do you accept the object (and all of its cultural baggage) for what it is and shape your artistic statement to incorporate the materials and their recognizability?

This was one of many issues faced by several local artists who participated in the Mississippi Palette project this year. The artists teamed up with the Artists Advisory Council, high-school and college students, environmentalist Chad Pregracke, and his Living Lands & Waters organization to create eight found-material sculptures.

Eclectic Eye When it comes to art, most artists will tell you that the excitement, or the magic, actually happens during the creative process. And that usually happens in the studio.

But deciding what represents an ideal studio space will hinge on several factors. The nature of your work places demands on what type, size, and character of studio space you need, for instance. And while an open-to-the-public studio might bring the twin benefits of exposure and sales, it can also make it difficult to work.

Reader issue #640 The Caped Crusader crashes through the window. A spray of glass shards partially melds into the two loosely rendered gray figures. Their ominous shapes and the frantic motion of the broken glass add tension to the pugilistic struggle that ensues. That is just part of the skull-thumping, chain-bursting action to be found in the Figge Art Museum's Comics, Heroes, & American Visual Culture, an exhibition light on context but rich with exciting visuals.

Marilyn Monroe - Celluloid Survival While Dennis Kendall Hall's work captures numerous famous people and aspects of pop culture, it would be inappropriate to think of his work within the confines of Warhol-ian Pop Art. Andy Warhol focused on celebrity, persona, packaging, façades, and mass production. Hall's work has a sensitivity that more frequently captures the beautiful and eccentric personalities of the "real" world instead of the glossy unreality of the "glamorous."

Pages