Wall space is thrilled to announce its exhibition schedule for 2013.
This year we are excited to expand on the ideas of how we view our world artistically, how we look for commonalities, yet celebrate our differences, and we explore space, time and dimension. It is photography at it’s most diverse, finding new ways to create and discuss how photographs live in two as well as three dimensions, how objects are not as they seem, how perspective can alter our understanding of creative works. I am looking forward to challenging certain conventions, standards and digging more deeply into our medium.

January

Beautiful My Desire 

Waiting 3rd Street Bus Stop (c) Sean Dana

It was a pleasure to work with curator Ann Jastrab for our Seventh Annual New Directions exhibition. New Directions is a showcase for new and emerging artists to talk about work around a theme with an invited curator, someone with a unique sensibility and idea about contemporary photography. We have been honored to work with highly esteemed curators like Michael Foley, Clint Willour, George Slade and Carol McCusker. Contemporary curators like David Bram and Debra Klomp Ching have also exposed wall space audiences to new works from talented emerging artists. Beautiful My Desire, a portion of the Theodore Roethke poem the Rose focuses on light, the emotional and physical qualities that draw us to bask in a heavenly glow.The exhibition Beautiful My Desire is the result.  Over 100 artists submitted work, 30 were selected to produce 40 images hanging on the walls of the gallery in Santa Barbara in January, moving to Seattle in February.

The talented artists who participated in the exhibition (in alphabetical order)
Mary Ellen Bartley – Victoria Bjorklund – Charles Blackburn – Aaron Blum – Nan Brown – Carlos Chavarria          Sarah Christianson – Sam Comen – Sean Dana – Danielle Ezzo  – David Gardner – Brian Glinkiak – Robert Holmgren Rachel Jablo – Chang Kyun Kim – Bear Kirkpatrick – Heidi Kirkpatrick – Kaden Kratzer – Danica Kus – Fritz Liedtke Clay Lipsky – Jennifer McClure – MaryAnne Mitchell – Maggie Preston – Eleanora  Ronconi – Esmeralda Ruiz – William Scharf – Kurt Simonson – Jamey Stillings – Samantha VanDeman

February –   Object –

We opened February with a three dimensional look at incorporating photography into common household and discarded objects.
It is an honor to announce our representation of Heidi Kirkpatrick, a Portland, Oregon based artist taking objects we often pass over, instilling them with mystery and mischievousness. Small, intimate found objects are given new life as she infuses them with her own photographic images.
Sue Van Horsen, based in Santa Barbara, California filters through junk piles, flea markets and antique stores to find objects to re-purpose. New life is given to these finds, adding her own photography, or found anonymous photos to create new narratives and stories for these anonymous objects.

We show a bit of traditional, yet uncommon photography from Yvette Meltzer, a Chicago based artist. Her series Revolutions looks at the beauty of a machine we pass by daily. The idea of a laundromat, with its banks of whirring machines seems hardly fodder for a photograph. Yvette has created a vision of organic shape within a rigid structure. In photographing long exposures of laundry as it is tossed about within the confines of their stainless steel surroundings, the laundry itself becomes mysterious and confounding. What do you see? The gleaming stainless, the jumbled vibrant color seems to engage our curiosity as well as our own imagination.

March –

Jardin – Ryuijie & Janelle Lynch

It is our pleasure to showcase guest artist Janelle Lynch and gallery artist Ryuijie in a two person exhibition called Jardin. Each artist brings a unique perspective to the flora that surrounds us. Ryuijie’s newest series, Color Ice Forms are stunningly intimate macro visions of flowers encased in ice, rich in color and texture, complimenting the soft subtle green landscapes of the gardens of Mexico by Janelle Lynch. These quiet views of overgrown play areas, hidden gardens and the wildness Janelle captures, draws us in to let us play in these wonderlands of green.

May – 

Dislocation –  Priya Kambli & Kate Connell

Imagine traveling to a new country, unsure of what lies ahead. The artists we have on the gallery walls in May have experienced just that. Represented gallery artist Priya Kambli showcases her Color Falls Down series, a photographic essay connecting her american present to her indian past, and Santa Barbara creative artist Kate Connell takes an introspective look at time spent in Japan, blindly finding her way through a culture, looking for normalcy, in strange territory.

June – 

Revising History – Jennifer Greenburg

If we could only turn back time, change our lives, create beauty and find anonymity in becoming someone new. Gallery artist Jennifer Greenburg has managed to do just that. Her brilliant series Revising History is a complex creative tale. Jennifer has inserted herself into found anonymous photographs, alongside her husband and their fur children to recreate a vision of her life had it been lived decades ago.

July –

Caeli Tellus Unda  (Heaven, Earth, Sea) –  Deborah Bay  | Keith Johnson | Kerry Mansfield

Under the guise of a series of scientific abstracts, we look at the world from the milky way to the deep blue oceans. We are juxtaposing three talented artists with unique looks at the world around us. We introduce you to the talented Houston based creative artist Deborah Bay. Her Big Bang series takes the unlikely turn of looking at the stars through the barrel of a gun. We are excited to show this stunning body of work.

Keith Johnson’s new work, The Chosen Place, is a series of diptychs, bonding water and air. In these combinations we find a meditative state of calm and infinite possibilities. Photographs taken from Keith’s summer cabin, these combined images transcend time and space, and capture the fleeting beauty in the atmosphere that surrounds us.

Grounded, Kerry Mansfield’s vision of soaring while finding solid ground, makes up the third part of this exhibition.

September –

Anonymous – Heidi Lender

Introducing the talented Heidi Lender. A newly represented artist, Heidi’s creativity can be measured in leaps and bounds. We are so pleased to introduce you to the mind and world of Ms. Lender. We are showcasing three very unique series, all with one combining thread. Heidi places herself at the center of the narrative. In her series Once Upon, a self imposed photo a day project, Heidi raises herself to new heights by standing on a bench, evoking a new idea, feeling or inspiration everyday. She Can Leap Tall Buildings is a creative look at the power of being a woman. We are all superheroes, at times we win, other times we struggle. This look at anonymous self portraits of all the simple and complicated roles we play in the course of our lifetimes is played out in staged creative tableau’s.

October –

Asymmetry – Kim Kauffman & Victoria Heilweil

Things are not always as they seem to be in this exhibition featuring two talented women using alternative methods to craft their vision. Gallery artist Kim Kauffman‘s series Illumitones is scanned paper objects with lyrical results.  Victoria Heilweil’s series Remnants takes an uncomfortable subject, scanning her baby’s stained fabric diapers and crafting graphic beautiful abstractions with her results.

November –

Specimen – Lori Vrba

Lori Vrba has been hard at work crafting new stories, using objects and her beautiful images. Drunken Poet’s Dream, her newest body of work explores at its core the ever-present internal tension and the external visual sensitivity of Vrba’s own full, complicated, difficult and rich life. We are excited to showcase this hand crafted, intimate work for the first time.

December –

Perspective – John Chervinsky

John Chervinsky is consistently pushing the edges of our preconceived notions of time and space. We are excited to fill the gallery with his new color work, Studio Physics. This work of still lives spans thousands of miles, cultures and creative understanding. The work is initially laid out and an initial photograph is taken. A portion of that image is shipped to an anonymous painter in China, after a period of weeks the painting returned and reinserted into the original still life and recaptured. This investigation into time, space and perceived reality exemplifies the tension between two artists making a unique spacial boundary.

We have a full year ahead of us, and I am so excited to show you what talented and creative people we have the opportunity to showcase. As always, these images and more are on our website, so don’t hesitate to dig around and find work that moves you, excites you and stretches your imagination.

See you in the gallery soon.