Gallery Route One exhibits Contemplating OTHER: and Marna G. Clarke Closing and Salon Sunday, January 28, 4 to 5 PM

Gallery Route One exhibitions:

Project Space & Center Gallery: Contemplating OTHER: I know you are, You know I am
Alice Escott, Linda Guenste, Brigitta Varadi, Curated by Patricia Watts
Annex: Marna G. Clarke, Recent Works

Show runs through Sunday, January 28

Opening Reception: Thursday, December 21, 3 – 5 PM, Artists’ Talk, 2:30 – 3 PM

Salon: Sunday, January 28 4 to 5 PM

Contemplating OTHER: I know you are, You know I am

Curated by Patricia Watts

In Contemplating OTHER, three artists reflect on human-animal relationships. Selected by Curator Patricia Watts, artists Alicia Escott, Linda Guneste, and Brigitta Varadi examine how our human relationship with animals has dramatically altered over time. As world populations continue to rise and as wild spaces are reduced due to human encroachments, our heightened interactions with animals expand our awareness of both ourselves and other. As individuals, our consciousness of the boundaries between humans and animals ultimately determines our own fate as a species. Having become dependent on animals for psychological and nutritional needs, human beings don’t often know where the self ends and the other begins.   

The three artists in Contemplating OTHER arrive at their subject from different perspectives and

use diverse media to reflect on the human-animal relationship in their art. Alicia Escott places herself in the role of animal, physically cloaking herself in sheets of found plastics, upon which she has delicately painted wild animals. She then places herself in nature for documentation. Her work takes the form of photographs, video performances, and installations. Linda Guneste makes vivid paintings that reflect her experiences of finding the remains of abandoned corrals scattered throughout the Great Plains states of America. There, cattle were historically rounded up in small groups and loaded onto trucks, then hauled off to slaughter. Brigitta Varadi works with the pelts of slaughtered sheep to present an aesthetic element of farming practices, in which animals are marked with color-coded paint to identify ownership. The wool and leather skins are a remnant commodity, or artifact, which she transforms into artworks.

Patricia Watts is the founder and West Coast curator of ecoartspace. She has worked with artists addressing environmental issues for twenty years, curating over fifty art and nature exhibitions and events.

Contemplating OTHER is an exhibition in Gallery Route One’s ongoing series With The Earth: Art and the Environment.

Marna G. Clarke: Recent Works, Keeping the Chanel Open

Inspired by a Martha Graham quote that encourages artists to “keep the chanel open,” to keep doing work that is clearly and directly one’s own vision even when unsure of its strength or validity. Photographer Marna G. Clarke has deliberately opened her eyes to the daily unfolding of life around her and the light that illuminates it. Marna has turned her camera on her environment, broad vistas as well as small details, in addition to glimpses of friends and herself and partner. Some of the images are a continuation of her interest in aging that she exhibited two years ago in her book and exhibition at Gallery Route One entitled Time As We Know It. She deepens the enjoyment and effect of these images by playing them off each other in diptychs and triptychs.

Ms. Clarke has been photographing since 1972 when she lived in New York City and later in Hartford, CT. She moved to California in 1996, and to Inverness in 2003, joining Gallery Route One in 2012.