GUNNAR NORDSTROM GALLERY
GUNNAR NORDSTROM GALLERY home gallery info artists exhibitions gallery news glossary GUNNAR NORDSTROM GALLERY
space
Organic in Nature
"Organic in Nature" Lori-Ann Latremouille, Lynda Meurk-Anderson and LeSan Riedmann
Lori-ann Latremouille   
March 9, 2005 - April 10, 2005
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
We are again pleased to show new works by Canadian artist Lori-Ann Latremouille and Seattle native, Lynda Meurk Anderson.

“Organic in Nature” is an exhibit where two distinctly different artists use vastly different approaches to common elements of nature.

Latremouille’s thoughtful charcoals reveal a kind of figurative language that dictates its own narrative. Charcoal and pastel provide the sensuous black and white tones which give the work a certain strength and vitality.

One can see in it both our ancient ancestors and multiracial villagers of our future all the while displaying our inseparable bond with nature and all universal forms. The initial lines surface, creating positive and negative spaces, which in turn evolve into forms with new shapes emerging and metamorphosing. Organic language melts with figurative motion creating a harmony of composition.

This body of work shows a slight edge unaccustomed to the softer more spherical shapes of the past. Faces and figures wave in form and fall systematically into the backgrounds with more detail and pattern.
Only Latrmouille’s technical command, her skaters balance and pinpoint shading keep the vision form falling apart. A viewer dangles between competing elements, wondering just what the picture is about.

Inspired by folk music, street songs, street people, “real angels” and Organic forms, Latremouille’s world is one in which the elements intermingle with the forms to create a harmonious pattern, more stylized, than eroticized; a fluency in rhythm, a lyric line; it is not incidental that she is a musician, a poet and an avid seeker of odd corners and pattern making, as does music.

Although many of the figures and forms and transmorphed creatures in her work appear emotionally detached, they fold, twine, intertwine sinuously.  Bodies dominate the foregrounds, yet appear to emerge from a deeper, hypnotic ground of implied infinite regressions. In some of the drawings, patterns crowd the frame, are fragmented, jarringly edited so that compacted, the entire surface is active with multiple figures in puzzle like configurations, or sensual repose.

It is particularly in the mute presence of her female figures that one derives a sense of Latremouille’s private mythology.  The female figures are not seductresses. They are icons. Perhaps they represent maternal ancestry, female bonding or perhaps they are entranced in a surreal dream by the jungle of their imagination.


Lynda Meurk Anderson has a love of architecture, gardening, travel and experiencing different cultures combined with a strong sense of her own personal history...the phases of life if you will are all elements that are easily seen reflected in Anderson’s printmaking and mixed media images. Thoughtful and lyrical, her work reads like a short story all the while allowing the viewer to interpret it with iconography and writing their own endings. Similar to Latremouille, she likes to tell stories to engage the viewer in hopes that it will trigger some thoughtful feeling in them.  

Some of her works are monotypes only, while others employ a variety of printmaking techniques that are collaged together.  Others utilize copper plate etching, linocuts, woodcuts, collagraphy , photo-etching, encaustic, drawing and painting.

All of Anderson’s recent work feels organic and terrestrial. The changing seasons of the Northwest with its elements, the variety of lighting conditions available and general atmosphere all work in synchronicity with birth, growth, death and then the decomposition of natural materials. It is these natural materials in a variety of life stages that are reflected in her current work. You will find not only artistic renderings of printed techniques, drawing and painting, but also organic material collaged in creating a metamorphic effect of time.

Anderson’s busy life also includes another type of visual and tactile talent and that is gardening. She has a great interest in plants of all kinds, landscape architecture and design and growing anything. Her large orchid collection is remarkable and recognized widely. She has designed, planted and cultivated a large and exquisite garden on Lopez Island located among the San Juan Islands of Washington State. This spectacular garden design and its presentation will soon to be featured in Seattle Home and Lifestyle Magazine.

LeSan Riedmann rounds out this show with wire screen scuptures delicately sculpted with her hands and the ever present shadow.
She is a Washington State sculptor who has captured the all elusive shadow. Her hand sculpted wire screen figures are lovely all in themselves, but combine the shadow with the image and you have a remarkable choreographed ballet of light, shadow and form.
While figures are the primary source of inspiration, Riedmann also sculpts birds, abstracts and Martini glasses.


space