RED CURRENT (sweet fruit)
March 19, 2012
Two of my paintings are en route to Seattle today to be included in Red Current (sweet fruit), a group show at Roq La Rue curated by Seattle artist and art provocateur Sharon Arnold. This show features an array of work by 37 Northwest artists–I am humbled and super excited to be among this truly stellar group of artists.
Bette Burgoyne, Water Wood white pencil, black paper, 12" x 12" 2011
From the press release:
Roq La Rue Gallery Presents RED CURRENT (sweet fruit)
Curated by Sharon Arnold
Opens Friday March 23rd 6-9pm (Show runs through April 7th)
Roq la Rue Gallery scheduled a winter break in it’s programming, and found that it presented an ideal opportunity to fulfill a goal the gallery had for awhile, namely working more closely with local contemporary artists who work closely to but outside the gallery’s usual realm of Pop Surrealism and underground contemporary. Gallerist Kirsten Anderson enlisted Sharon Arnold who had been curating dynamic shows around town to come on board and create a group show for Roq la Rue.
Arnold was inspired to create this exhibition by contemplating the definition of a current, something present and electric, a dynamic force with great power. Citing the exponential blossoming of the local art scene, Arnold wanted to take the opportunity to feature a snapshot of what she feels is an important moment in the growth of the Seattle art scene. “ I believe this will be a very strong collection, and something that hasn’t really been put together to this extent in recent history ”.
Arnold chose artists on the strength of what she felt they brought to the table. “I want this exhibition to feature artists in Seattle who I’ve been watching work hard, inspire, create, build community, push themselves, and move forward.”
The show itself will feature 37 artists in a salon style setting and will feature an array of media including painting, drawing, installation, and video. Roq La Rue is thrilled to work with such an abundance of Northwest talent. Please join us for a very festive opening on March 23rd from 6-9pm!
Artist list:
Mandy Greer Kimberly Trowbridge Amanda Manitach Izzie Klingels Serrah Russell Saskia Delores Debra Baxter Jess Rees Anne Blackburn Erin Frost Lynda Sherman Laura Ward Jennifer McNeely Susanna Bluhm Counsel Langley Erin Shafkind Claire Johnson Klara Glosova Andrea Wicklund Gala Bent Rumi Koshino Naomi Faith Allyce Wood Julie Alpert Crystal Barbre Deborah Scott Kristen Ramirez Allie Manch Ellen Garvens Cristin Ford Gretchen Bennett Francesca Lohmann Emily Pothast Bette Burgoyne Jennifer Borges Foster Jennifer Zwick and Stacey Rozich
Amanda Manitach, Interior Decoration (Second Empire) | graphite and colored pencil on paper 28 x 36 " 2006/2012
GIRL MEETS UNIVERSE
May 1, 2011
Dusk, acrylic, ink, graphite, glitter, paper, 30×30″ 2011
I will be presenting more than 40 new works this month at Ghost Gallery. I am absolutely thrilled that this body of work is so close to going live! I truly hope you will find a moment that works for you to come visit Ghost Gallery and see GIRL MEETS UNIVERSE.
GHOST GALLERY
504 E DENNY WAY AT SUMMIT
SEATTLE, WA 98122
info@ghostgallery.org
http://ghostgallery.org/current-upcoming-events/
Thursday, May 12th – Sunday, May 29th, 2011
Opening Reception Thursday, May 12th 5-8:30pm
About GIRL MEETS UNIVERSE:
There’s these video games that involve beginning with a world that is almost entirely unexplored. It is all there in its entirety you just can’t see it yet; it is ‘undiscovered’. You get your start on some random swath of land that floats, as if under a spotlight, in a sea of black. As you progress through the game the spotlight expands to illuminate more and more territory. You are exploring and discovering. Perhaps, you started out in the desert, but eventually you hit an oasis, river, mountain range, tundra, rain forest etc. These places have significant differences from one another, yet despite these differences they are all part of the same world. They are subject to the same underlying laws of physics.
This is how I find myself describing my art practice. As I work over the years I am discovering and mapping wider swaths of a world inside my head. Some of the areas are quite different from others in appearance, mood, use of color, technique, or material, but they are part of the same world. So far, my work remains unified through certain ‘laws of physics.’ These laws continue to be a drive towards a balance between precisely applied tool use and allowing materials to follow natural tendencies. Jake Seniuk, Director of the Port Angeles Fine Arts puts it well: “Langley’s precisely textured mixed media paintings hinge on dynamic tension between an underlying architectonic structure and organic bleeds that ebb and flow.”
detail . . .
The works I am showing at Ghost Gallery this May are all bound by these continuing threads.
There is in them, as well, the fact that my life as a mother and an artist are completely entwined. So, that as I work the awareness of childhood and the constant emerging that defines it is always there. One aspect of this is that in seeing my girls develop and discover that which fascinates I am reminded viscerally of my own earliest loves. This comes out in several ways in this show.
One series I present, called EPs, have in them in the influence of my very early passion for my mother’s record collection. As a kid I listened and danced to her albums obsessively. Not yet entirely informed about the adult themes in much of the lyrics I unconsciously created my own stories and imagery to go along with many of the songs. For me they functioned like fairy tales.
detail . . .
The Distressed series is done exclusively on wood cut from dilapidated boat hulls. This work has its beginnings in the place where my childhood access to my father’s pristine drafting tools intersects with the fantastical landscape of his shipwright’s shop and yard with all its magic piles of cast off wood. This wood made beautiful by the particular kind of wear-and-tear that the punishing marine environment can inflict.
Some of the larger works in this show have their origin in a poem by Campbell McGrath called Nights on Planet Earth. The overwrought scenes they depict also reflect the wonder, and sometimes terror, brought on by youthful moments of awareness that so much was happening all at once–at once powerfully beautiful, disturbing, inspiring, overwhelming, enlightening and unpredictable.
detail . . .
In one set of work alone, the Strange Attractors, I do not find, although it is probably there, an obvious connection to my youth. These are largely a study in how underlying structure effects what is visible. The series is also a reaction to stunning satellite imagery of plant cultivation on a massive scale. There is a beauty and strangeness that results from something natural being placed into a grid. Grids seem to be very useful to us humans.
nights on planet earth
March 25, 2011
I am putting the final moments into part II of my response to the amazing poem Nights on Planet Earth by Campbell McGrath. If you read the poem you’ll likely understand why I felt driven to make more than one work. In fact I should make three. We’ll see.
For the time being we have two which are both 30 x 30″ acrylic paintings with glitter, graphite, ink and paper on board. Here’s a detail of part I, it’s title is 2AM:
This work will be part of an upcoming show, A Good Line: Artists on Poems, at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Jennifer Borges Foster, curator of A Good Line, invited visual artists to select a poem we love and respond to it. I narrowed the pool down to about ten that I felt were great. I got myself hardcopies of these and read them. Then read them again.
The fact that they were all stellar didn’t matter. I all the time knew that Nights on Planet Earth was the one. I resisted this just a bit; the others would have been easier to respond to. Nights on Planet Earth was the toughest to tackle, the most sweeping, epic, sheer gorgeous. It was also the one I related to the most directly and so picking it left me without a buffer; it took from me any of the safety that can come from a slight disconnect.
Nights on Planet Earth knocks me over every time I read it. Or think about it. I am very fortunate to have spent these weeks with it; it has been a real pleasure. If you haven’t read it yet I’d like to encourage you too . . . you’ll find ashes and yakuza, Christmas lights, Madrid, Manhattan, Chicago, Dublin, always a city, satellites and cosmic dust, icebergs and an octopus and an army of golden carpenter ants. Go.
(Oh and the other candidates were pretty excellent, so I want to share, they included: Herr Stimmung on Transparency by Keith Waldrop, Merry-go-round by Miroslav Holub, Sublimation Point by Jason Schneiderman.)
Artists participating in A Good Line: Artists on Poems are Gala Bent, Sharon Arnold, Troy Gua, Counsel Langley, Kim Drake, Ryan Molenkamp, Amanda Manitach, Erin Shafkind, Nola Avienne, David Lasky, Liz Tran, Shaun Kardinal, Jed Dunkerley and Ben Beres.
I can’t wait to discover what poem each and every one of these awesome artists chose and how they responded to it!
Show opens on April 1st
with a reception on April 12th from 6 to 9pm
Richard Hugo House
1634 11th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122
206-322-7030
nick cave
January 5, 2011
Joy pushed just far enough to have power and the menace of the unpredictable.
Love the flip-book style on the beat presentation of the still photography.
miniature time
December 1, 2010
This show is becoming one of my favorite holiday traditions!
Ghost Gallery’s Winter 2010 Miniature Art Extravaganza will be at 2 Venues! Our Petite Works room at Ghost, AND the awesome SOLO Bar in Lower Queen Anne.
I’ve participated in the annual event before, but am especially excited this go ’round to have work from my very new series Strange Attractors displayed for the first time. Including this one which GLOWS-IN-THE-DARK!
Strange Attractor 9 | 2010
resin, graphite, glow-in-the-dark squid, electrician’s components| 7″ high x 7″ wide x 4″ deep
2 Venues to browse Miniature Art that is 6″ and smaller. Perfect gifts for the Holidays, as well as a great way to affordably grow your Art collection.
Both shows will be up for viewing beginning December 7th! Or come by Dec. 9th during BLITZ Art Walk 5-8pm
Artists: Cait Willis, Jess Rees, C.M. Ruiz, Bobby Pathammavong, Michelle Smith-Lewis, Lisa Fong, Jim Pririe, Kelly J. Brownlee, Urban Soule, Sofie Skein, Kurt Moses, Simone Rijksen, Glyn Walton, Circe Ward, Irene Wood, Counsel Langley, Jeff Friesen, Caroline Saganich, Pey Lu, Joe Chiang, Nicolas Hall, Krystal DeviantDecor, Amber R Anderson, Liz Moody, Charlie Carroll, Tyson A. Roberts, Betty Rae Case, MORE TBA!!!
strange attractors
October 21, 2010
Strange Attractor 1 | acrylic, fly-fishing supplies, electrician’s components,
15″ high x 8″ wide x 5″ deep. THREE VIEWS
I am working on a new series that I am calling Strange Attractors. All the Strange Attractor pieces begin by establishing an underlying order that, to varying degrees will end up nearly hidden or remain exposed in any given finished work, but will in all cases influence the appearance of the surface.
Strange Attractor 6 | acrylic, graphite, fly-fishing supplies, electrician’s components,
8″ high x 48″ wide x 5″ deep. THREE VIEWS
Strange Attractor 2 | acrylic, graphite, fly-fishing feathers, electrician’s components
17″ high x 12″ wide x 6″ deep. FOUR VIEWS
I am attracted to the scientific source of this series’ title, but am openly only borrowing the mood of the term rather than its precise technical definitions (not that I even fully grasp those meanings, although I am trying). In the end, these are called Strange Attractors because the words apply directly.
Strange Attractor 3 | fly-fishing feathers, electrician’s components, antique frame
9″ high x 5″ wide x 5″ deep. TWO VIEWS
These pieces are odd, at times verging on alien, and magnetically attractive. The lustrous texture of the plumage is instantly enticing; they cause fingers to twitch with the impulse to touch.
Strange Attractor 4 | acrylic, fly-fishing feathers, electrician’s components
15″ high x 18″ wide x 7″ deep. TWO VIEWS
Strange Attractor 5 | acrylic, fly-fishing feathers, electrician’s components
12″ high x 12″ wide x 6″ deep. TWO VIEWS
the space between us (update)
October 17, 2010
This piece is on it’s way to Brooklyn to be included in a show at the Brooklyn Art Museum in November.
Achievement (Expansive), 2010 | archival inkjet print, 16 x 20″
The show will be November 12th, 2010 from 7-10pm.
through the end of November
Brooklyn Art Library
103A N 3rd St
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
on my mind and bench
September 19, 2010
mighty
July 24, 2010
“What do you like to be called?”
“Well, I like to be called The Mighty Counsel Langley.
. . . but, I don’t think that’s what you were asking.”
10 x 10 x 10 x Tieton Exhibition
When: August 1 – October 10, 2010
Where: Mighty Tieton Warehouse, 608 Wisconsin Avenue, Tieton, WA 98947
I’m excited to have work in this upcoming show and hope to make it out to at least one of the events. Have been interested in what is going on at this Mighty Tieton; hope to explore and satisfy my curiosity.
10 x 10 x 10 x Tieton is the first juried art exhibition sponsored by Mighty Tieton. “Tieton is a small town with big ambitions, and so this year’s theme is ‘Small is big.’ Each artwork is no larger than 10″ x 10″ x 10″ including frame or case. All visual media including architectural models, letterpress printing, crafts, photography, paintings, books, sculpture, prints, whatever. No geographic limit.”
Juried by Ed Marquand of Marquand Books, Gail Gibson of Gail Gibson Gallery, and Greg Kucera of Greg Kucera Gallery, the exhibit has 179 works from 146 artists around the world. Each accepted entry will be featured in a fully illustrated, color catalogue of the exhibit.
Receptions during exhibition:
Sunday, August 1, noon – 5pm Opening Reception
Saturday, August 28 during Highland Community Days, noon – 5 p.m. This will be the main reception for the exhibition, so plan to attend!
Saturday, September 18, noon – 5 p.m.
Sunday, October 10 noon – 5pm, at the end of LitFUSE: Poets’ Workshop
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P.S. Mighty Tieton:
Not to be confused with the Grand Tetons:
