by Alec Clayton
Childhood’s End Gallery goes to expansive lengths to explain why their book arts exhibition doesn’t look like book arts. “Book arts come in a great many forms,” they say on their website, “from the familiar paper-bound to the fully deconstructed, hung from the walls and ceiling. Summer Reading List gathers a diverse sampling of what the book arts can do.”
That might be stretching it an iota, but the truth is that very little in visual art has been limited to paint on canvas since Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal and entered it in an art exhibition, labeled as “Fountain.”
The limits to postmodern art are limitless. The wonderful variety of genre and media in Summer Reading List at Childhood’s End is painting, collage, sculpture and more, from ceramic sculpture by John & Robin Gumaelius to constructed castles of board and paper with multiple doors and compartments by Randi Parkhurst.
An important principle in design is variety within unity or contrast within harmony. That principle can be seen at work in each individual work of art as well in the exhibition in its entirety.
Little Swimmer / Defy the Gravity of Fear, paper, acrylic cotton thread, metal and plastic, by Shu-Ju Wang is a small hanging sculpture that looks monumental in scale. It is a massive boulder (in miniature) hanging by rope (thread), and rocky discs below that with the word Fear. There are other similar sculptures by Wang plus a group of small and delicate watercolors and silk screen prints.
Parkhurst is showing two of the impressive and deceptively simple castles as mentioned above, plus a group of delicate and densely textured eco print floral patterns.
Susan Aurand’s many playfully surrealistic collages are a joy to look at. In A Day at the Beach and Dancing Monk, the dancing monk is flying with seabirds above a beach, and slightly below him a young girl also flies with the birds, and with a butterfly that is almost as large as her. A butterfly shows up again in her collage, Dancing Monk and Fishes, along with floating rocks, a silhouette of a woman balanced on one of the rocks, a child’s hand and floating fish. These collages are, in this reviewer’s eyes, playful and magical.
Among the more striking and, to some viewers maybe the most erie and disturbing, are a group of three pieces by Malpina Chan, a wall hanging piece titled Red Envelope, infused dye and aluminum; Food for Thought, created with a discarded encyclopedia and The Evil Eye, Envy & Jealousy, cast resin and glass eye encased in a glass dome. Red Envelope is a mesmerizing child’s face printed on or overlapped by black and red print. Food for Thought is a contemporary version of Duchamp’s Urinal, and The Evil Eye is a standing block of startling turquoise with the staring dye smack dab in the middle.
Summer Reading List is a compilation of multiple works by eight artists, each every bit as worthy of mention as the ones discussed here. Childhood’s End is Olympia’s premiere art gallery, and this exhibition should not be missed. The artists are: Susan Aurand, Malpina Chan, Camella Gumaelius, Robin Gumaelius, Lucia Harrison, Randi Parkhurst, Shu-Ju Wang and Suze Woolf.
The feature image of the gallery interior is by Gabi Clayton, all other photos are courtesy of Childhood’s End.
WHAT:
Summer Reading List, an art exhibition
WHEN:
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, through July 27
WHERE:
Childhood’s End Gallery, 224 4th Ave. W, Olympia
COST:
Free entry
LEARN MORE:
(360-943-3724, https://www.childhoods-end-gallery.com/Gallery_Info.html