South Puget Sound Community College’s 2025 Juror’s Invitational is surprisingly cohesive. There’s no theme for the show; the seven artists, all award-winners in the college’s 2024 Southwest Juried Exhibition, were free to submit whatever they chose.
Yet gallery manager Sean Barnes, who when pressed to sum up group shows often uses such words as “eclectic” and “diverse,” sees two complementary and overlapping themes in the work by the artists who received awards at the college’s 2024 Southwest Juried Exhibition.
For the invitational, the word he chose was “reverence.” “This show has this nice balance of kind of spirituality and observation of the natural world,” Barnes said. “We have these temples and this little chapel for (Charles Pitz’s) work and then a goddess dress, and they are surrounded by representational images of nature. It really came together in an interesting way.”
The ”chapel” is defined by three black draperies hanging from the ceiling. Within are two reliquaries (a container for holy relics)and a monstrance (an ornate vessel inspired by those created for churches during the Renaissance).
“The altars, shrines and reliquaries I create are the product of my continuing journey to explore a changing sense of what is sacred in a world facing rapid climate change,” Pitz said in an artist’s statement. “I use techniques refined for centuries by devotional artists … to convey the sense of an encounter with something sublime.”
The fabric enclosure for Pitz’s pieces is a focal point for the show. It echoes Lucy Gentry-Meltzer’s Ethereal Goddess, an 11-foot-long translucent dress that would fit no being of this world.
Rene Westbrook, like Pitz, has adopted sacred forms — including triptychs she calls “temples” — for the works in her new series Abstracting the Paradox. “I decided to focus on the idea of the sacred and the profane as a creative construct, which also worked as a conundrum at the core of the paradox,” she said in an artist’s statement. “The old world is like the new one, only in decay.”
Her work encompasses both mystery and pointed commentary about the state of the world, including issues of climate. Big Book of Secrets, Lies and Other Absurdities, which viewers are welcome to look through, asks on one two-page spread: “God, are you there? It’s Earth. Asking for 8 billion friends.” Honeycomb Tablets, a construction that looks as though it could have come from the same church as the reliquaries, incorporates both religious symbols and, of course, bees.
Also addressing the natural world: John Holmgren, whose collections of prints address the fates of salmon in specific watersheds; Joan Hitchcock, who said in an artist’s statement that her paintings are inspired by “the grace of nature”; and photographers Hall Jameson and Michele Burton.
Jameson’s evocative black-and-white works suggest her own reverence for nature, and so in a different way do Burton’s. A lifelong nature lover, Burton captures the personality of her avian subjects. Often there’s something humorous in her images: Beach Encounter shows a crow apparently telling off an eagle.
reliquaries echo Lucy Gentry-Meltzer’s 11-foot-long Ethereal Goddess dress.
Susan Christian, the juror for the 2024 Southwest Washington Juried Exhibition, was particularly captivated by Burton’s eye for her winged subjects. She gave prizes to the photographer as well as Gentry-Meltzer, Pitz and Westbrook. Hitchcock, Holmgren and Jameson received purchase awards, chosen by Timothy Stokes, SPSCC’s president.
WHAT
SPSCC Juror’s Invitational
WHEN
Through May 2, with opening reception from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 11. The gallery is open from noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
WHERE
The Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at The Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts, South Puget Sound Community College, 2011 Mottman Road SW, Olympia
LEARN MORE
https://spscc.edu/art-gallery