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Wine:
Celebration
of the Arts
A festive, highly appreciative crowd milled through the Salon des Refusés in downtown Eugene opening night Sept. 19 to view works not selected for the Mayor's Art Show. The mood was high and celebratory. In this diverse context, the individuality of each particular piece comes to the fore, and the show as a whole is quirky, spirited and fun. Without doubt, the Salon is the indispensable complement to the Mayor's Show. Each would lose much without the other. The public knows this: We flock to both and have a blast appraising for ourselves the jury's decisions. "It's a struggle each year to secure a space," Steve LaRiccia said. "This is the Salon's 13th year and its sixth location." Uncertainty about finding a venue may last up to a month before the show, which makes it hard to line up volunteers in advance to help set up and run the show. "This year's the best space we've ever had," LaRiccia said. It was secured by DEMI (Downtown Eugene Management Inc.) and leased by DIVA (Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts), an organization whose goal is to establish a visual arts center and museum downtown. DIVA will lease the space for itself when the show is over. The Salon waved its usual hanging fee this year because of the Mayor's Show's new $10 processing fee. Also, following an idea of artist and UO professor emeritus Jerry Williams, visitors have the option to buy ribbons for $5 and bestow them to their favorite artists, who redeem them later. More than 250 ribbons had been sold by the sixth day of the show. A majority of the 323 exhibited works are two-dimensional pieces. Alix Mosieur's mixed media, Starry, Starry Night, uses the recent blackout in the Northeast to comment on our urban society, disconnected from the grandeur of the natural universe. Under a huge sky straight from Van Gogh's "Starry Night," stretches a darkened cityscape dimly reflecting the starlight. A crowd looks up, faces aglow. Written across the crowd: "In my dream fifty million people deprived of electricity were forced to look at the stars." The artist has cleverly used Van Gogh's color scheme of blue-black and yellow-green for the sky; yellow and orange and black ink for the crowd. Noelle Dass' Head of a Girl is a notable among the oil portraits for its unusual expressiveness, bold use of chiaroscuro and dynamic brushstroke. The face of Lindsay Monroe's Matteo is lit in warm tones against a cool dark background, while the wine-colored turban echoed in the frame provides a softening transition. In Marjory Tracy's Midnight on the McKenzie, chiaroscuro emphasizes the old-fashioned character of the scene of reading by oil-lamp. Georges Lastrapes entered a finely executed self-portrait. Carly J. Bodnar's Fine China, a gray-toned painting of a child hiding behind a doorway, looking devastated after breaking some china, affects the viewer. The exhibition contains some fine nudes. Most compositionally interesting is Lindsay Kennedy's Glimpsing, in which the woman's figure is broken up by close-up frames focusing on different parts of the body. The painter directs our attention to details as well as to the overall nude. In Erin Williams's Remembrance, the female nude in light tones of yellow, pink, and purple stands out against a bright green background. The partially averted, saddened face of an older woman is evocative of Egon Schiele's expressionist faces. Cyndy Duerfeldt's Untitled, a large-format acrylic landscape, is a study of light at dusk — the golden afterglow in an immense sky after the sun has set, and land and water are already indistinct. The abstract quality of the painting is reminiscent of Turner's landscapes. Simone d'Aubigne's They Speak… Listen! is a playfully stylized landscape with ghost-like rocks and hidden animal forms. In Hurley Forever, a humorous and detail-rich intaglio, Germaine Bennett reveals Heaven as a cabaret scene. Take a close look at some of the figures' expressions.
Still lifes abound. Jamie Dianne Burress's With Olives and Extra Cheese leaves traditional frame and form behind. She uses layered wood that follows the shape of the subject matter, an abstracted rendering of a meal scene. The result is a compelling, whimsical composition. Other still lifes to appreciate include Katsu Shibato's dreamy pastel, Martin Sage's collage Wineglasses and Bottles, Annie Fulkerson's vibrant Sunflowers, David Campbell's egg tempera Swedish Midday, and Alisa McLaughlin's watercolor Lock and Key. Two works in colored pencil merit attention: Darby Crouch's superbly executed pattern of red and blue knots, and Raye Burnett's wistful rendering of a piano in Old Tunes. Turning to photography, in Franci de Roos' Red on Blue — a blue façade with a red-trimmed window — composition and color scheme are deceptively simple. I found myself hooked by the vibrancy of the blue and red, the texture of the wall and the subtle reflection of the desert landscape in the window with drawn shades. La Riccia's own Polaroid manipulation, Gears and Buttercups, is a painterly gem that turns a close-up of a bicycle freewheel amidst buttercups into an almost abstract composition. In his black-and-white photograph, Steve Elder Railroad Man, Richard C. Russell uses lighting and grain to great effect for a chiaroscuro portrait with staying expressive power. I found digital photography at the Salon of higher quality and interest than at the Mayor's Show. Richard Tetz photographed the margin of ice on a riverbank to create the complex abstractions of Abstract Naturalism: Ice Series. By showing four different chromatic patterns of the same image, his print is also a study of the impact of color on shape. Stephan Livingstone created a psychedelic landscape in Night Heat Boogie, while Bob Roelke's giclee print, Caldera, is a traditional panoramic landscape with a brooding, moody atmosphere.
Because abstract patterns are the real subject matter of Art Kennedy's Winter Shadow, pixelation actually contributes to the effect of his digital print of the shadow of tree branches on a brick wall, rather than detracting from it. Among examples of fiber art, Sandra McMorris Johnson's Dyed and Gone to Heaven caught my eye with its abstract harmony of fan shapes and its quiet exuberance of colors. I was glad to see that Jenny Chapoose's beautifully executed Bear Clan got the space it deserved. According to the artist, this tapestry of Bear Clan symbols was "assembled on a large beading loom and finished with a border of deerskin. It took 960 hours to make and contains 131,456 size 11 glass seed beads." Another example of exquisite workmanship is Kenneth Standhardt's Blossom Vessel. The outer surface of the simple, earthy yet elegant, clay form is delicately incised with patterns reflecting Pre-Columbian art. According to Standhardt, "In a single vessel, the number of indentations can vary from five hundred to five thousand, each placed by hand and eye." A reward awaits those who peer inside the flawless vessel: The interior is subtly glazed in a basket pattern. Among the few sculptures, I particularly enjoyed Lisa Worthen's Equine. An abstracted horse's head made of welded metal strips, it has the graceful, evocative qualities of a gesture sketch. The Salon re-ceived 77 percent of the works remaining from the Mayor's Show. I was sorry certain pieces were missing, such as Hoa-Lan Tran's Composed, a highly stylized portrait beautifully composed and executed. Also, Tim Oatman's Ascension, an elegant, abstracted female figure in bronze, and Maria Palange's very camp, knitted rendition of the Mona Lisa in 100 percent wool ... The Salon is hosted by the New Zone Art Collective and receives a grant from the Lane Arts Council, contributions from local businesses, and a generous donation from Jerry Williams. Another artists' reception will be held Oct. 3 during the First Friday Art Walk. Expect music, donated food and beverages such as Wild Duck's own brew. The show runs through Oct. 11.
River
of Mist As I wheeled my wheezing clunker through the gritty streets of downtown Eugene, signs of early autumn arose and passed — gold-tinged leaves, a dark V of south-winging geese, schoolkids staggering under lumpy backpacks — but I've still got the Skeena River in my eyes. About 500 miles north of Vancouver, B.C., the Skeena flows out of the jagged, broken layers of shale and ore-rich metamorphic rock of the Skeena and Hazelton Mountains, cuts through glacier-carved valleys and the Kitimak Range near the coast, finally reaching the Hecate Strait and the Pacific just below Prince Rupert. The First Nations peoples of the upper river have lived, hunted and fished along its shores for hundreds of generations. The people are the Gitksan, and they call the Skeena the River of Mist. In high summer, when the Skeena entered my eyes, there were no obscuring mists. The river lay open, shores draped in bright green stands of aspen, alder, cottonwood, dotted with dense stands of fir, cedar, spruce. The river air tasted tangy and sweet, with a hint of cedary spice. The water drew lazy curves through thick shoals of salmon gravels. Most striking, though, was the river's color, a pale green like old Chinese jade or milky absinthe, creamy yet icy-clear. The Skeena and its tributaries, the Bulkley and Kispiox, teemed with fall-run steelhead and salmon, especially the big, gray-sided fish called pinks or "humpies" for their distinctive humped backs. Below the raft piloted by our Gitksan guide, Sheldon Johnson of the Frog clan, the humpies rushed and darted, furtive and shadowy as torpedoes; their dorsal fins sliced through the shallows in spawning frenzies. There, the Skeena's color was frappé of creme de menthe, impossible color, or at least unutterably improbable. Improbable, too, that the river is still so clean, so vital yet serene. It pained my heart to remember when the McKenzie's gravels swarmed with silvers and chinooks, not so many years ago, before it became a murky-gray ditch to carry pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers and human wastes to dump into the Columbia. Is this what it means to "civilize" a great river? Is this the fate foretold for the Skeena? No grapes grow in the valleys of the Skeena, and there no wines are made, but there we were able to buy a side of wild sockeye salmon and grill its deep-red flesh and dress it in a sauce of Kat's invention involving fresh cilantro, shredded nasturtium flowers, and serrano chilis, and drink with it a bottle of Elk Cove Vineyards 2002 Pinot Gris ($13.50). Wine guru Robert Parker called this "one of the best pinot gris I've tasted," high praise from him for any Oregon wine, but in this case on the mark: perfect balance, bright flavors of ripe pears and white flowers, generous and rich, this is an achievement, a benchmark for this producer, and a perfect match for salmon. British Columbia's liquor-control laws are weirder and more Puritanical than Oregon's, so we couldn't possibly have found there this lovely bottle of Michel Collon Brut Champagne ($20), but I hope you can find it here (if not, order it at your favorite wine shop). Some folks like their Champagnes light and airy; this ain't. This is full-flavored, 80 percent pinot noir, lush and juicy, suitable for a wide range of foods. Delicious and satisfying Champagne at this price? Gottahaveit. Our Canadian cousins are determined to make fine wines — as Bob Sogge has pointed out, they are now the world's largest producer of ice wines, wonderfully sweet dessert wines made from various grapes — especially from the Okanogan Valley and especially pinot noir. Gotta wish them the best of luck with that tricky grape, but we gotta hope they look for their standards not so much at Old World Burgundy or New World Californians, but down here in Cool Country, in the Valley of the Willamette. Hope they can achieve something like Andrew Rich Les Vigneaux 2001 Pinot Noir Cuvée B ($18); this is Rich's "B" wine, not the "A" level, but affordable quality, yet it deserves better than a B, mebbe B+ or A-, for its smoky black cherry flavors, its food-friendly balance of acids and tannins and alcohol (13.5 percent). If B.C. winemakers can reach this grade, they can compete with anyone. Then, if they can produce a wine like Broadley 2002 Pinot Noir Reserve ($14.50!), they can rejoice: deep, rich, round and mouth-filling, with a velvet texture and priced to tickle the purse of any pinot-phile, this wine will only improve over the next three to five years. How good will it be then? Find the wine, hide it from yourself, later find the answer. Not our Canadian brethren nor our Willamette Valley neighbors (but watch the vintners in the Valleys of the Columbia and the Rogue) are likely soon to produce a wine like California's Liberty School 2000 Syrah ($13), inky-dark, full-bodied, rich and concentrated in black fruit flavors (blackberries, currants), this is a Rhone-style blockbuster at sale prices, worth every dime. Get in your last evenings of outdoor grilling of full-flavored grub, pop the top on this black beauty, savor unfolding autumn. Maybe take a moment to reflect on times past, wonder at the passing of clean, jade-green rivers and the huddled, ghostly shadows of wild salmon. May the Skeena River, the River of Mist, be then in your eyes, and in your heart.
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