posts by Alec Clayton
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Bill Collins and Gail Ramsey Wharton are the perfect pairing for a Halloween show. The imagery in Wharton’s collages is bizarre and highly inventive, and Collins’s recent paintings of houses and cars are downright spooky. Plus, the weirdness in both is done with tongue firmly planted in …
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS The exhibition now showing in the gallery at South Puget Sound Community College is amazingly lush and gorgeous. Called “What Lies Beneath,” the show features photographs by Seattle artist Melinda Hurst Frye and sculpture by Olympia-based Cyrra Robinson. The works from each — while more realistic than …
THEATER REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS The Women by Clare Boothe Luce, now playing at Harlequin Productions, is a beautifully staged, lavish comedy or errors satirizing 1930s upper crust Manhattan socialites. The piece opened on Broadway in 1936 and is best known for the 1939 film starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind …
By ALEC CLAYTON It is a rare artist who gets invited to mount a one-person show at Childhood’s End Gallery. According to owner Richenda Richardson, there have only been 20 solo exhibits out of approximately 400 in its 43 years. Three have been by Marilyn Frasca. Frasca’s show for Arts Walk will have about 50 …
By ALEC CLAYTON Rubbings as an art form are in Devon Damonte’s blood. He says he’s “deep into the rubbings world.” His father did brass rubbings back in the 1970s, and Damonte says he “spent hours with his dad rubbing gravestones.” He says printmaking, however, was his first love as an adult artist. For Arts …
By ALEC CLAYTON The cover art for this year’s Olympia Arts Walk map is fabric art by Faith Hagenhofer. The piece is called “Held Dear” and features a baby’s onesie, perhaps the most evocative of all memorabilia, surrounded by squares with a ruffled edge and topped by a fan. The onesie is a deep purple …
ART REVIEW By Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS New to Olympia is The Artists’ Gallery in the Capital Mall Promenade north of the mall and next door to Massage Envy. The Artists’ Gallery is an artist-run cooperative gallery occupying a large exhibition space with two roomy front rooms and additional rooms in back. Visitors are …
By Alec Clayton Nathan Robles and Nancy Thorne Chambers were honored this year for their sculptures in Olympia’s Percival Plinth Project at the landing. For each of the past nine years, local artists have exhibited sculptures along the boardwalk from Fourth Avenue at Water Street to the plaza. Citizens are invited to vote on their …
By Alec Clayton Actor, director, writer and educator Christian Carvajal has written a play that will have a reading at La Vida Wine Bar in Lacey. Carvajal’s brand-new, comic script is loosely based on Volpone by Elizabethan and Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson and features the talents of actors Heather Christopher, Michael Christopher, Gabe McClelland, Scott …
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS It is rare when a work of art balances commentary and beauty. It is rarer still when an exhibition with works by nine different artists in a variety of media and styles manages to attain that level of balance between the conceptual and the aesthetic. Such is …