Alex Rydlinski | Home

JULY 2020
SOUTH GALLERY
Home | Alex Rydlinski

Alex Rydlinski is an oil painter from Fairbanks currently living in Kenai. He spent over a decade living in the lower 48, traveling around the country, and trying to get back home to Alaska. In 2017 he studied in Norway with the master painter Odd Nerdrum. He’s been living on the Kenai peninsula for nearly a year, creating a body of work steeped in the old master tradition with special interest in the human being in the Northland wild.

Artist Statement
The things we find most beautiful in nature are often the scars of tremendous violence. The beautiful fjords — the result of glaciers scraping and carving through the rocky cliffs. The beautiful rivers— rushing meltwater relentlessly eroding the earth. The beautiful mountains— the smashing of tectonic plates, sending crumpled crust miles into the sky. Our most beautiful sights could be the plains of Ares.

I try to paint in this same way; coarsely, with a lot of energy, scraped down and taken again, over many sessions over many months. I’ve scored the paint film with beach-washed volcanic pumice stones and scratched at it with kitchen knives. Whole figures have been moved a few inches to the left or right, hand gestures and facial expressions changed, colors endlessly modified - look for these traces and you’ll find them still.

The ideas evolve in this way, too. I start with broad themes and discover ways to reinforce the narratives over time. The old woman picking berries, for example, a picture about human resilience, originally had companions out in the field. But the focus is really about her personal struggle, and it becomes more emotionally intense now that she is all alone. When you think of Sisyphus, do you picture him with friends and family sharing in his burden?

I hope you enjoy my rough, Dionysian pictures, the fruits of my first year back home in Alaska. I’ve tried to strip them of all superficiality and delicacy, and get straight to the raw energy and emotion. In their coarseness, with their conspicuous scars of continuous change, I hope you find their beauty.

www.rydlinski.com

Listen to an interview with Alex and Anchorage artist Graham Dane on Out North Radio.

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Sandra Talbot | Third Nature: Divining the Scientific Archive

JULY 2020
NORTH GALLERY
Third Nature: Divining the Scientific Archive | Sandra Talbot

Archives of scientific activities and expeditions can be viewed simultaneously by both artists and scientists as repositories of knowledge, ways to satisfy the desire for order and control, and as mirrors of ourselves, of the collector, and of culture and society. In Third Nature: Divining the Scientific Archive, I leverage archived science-made materials and imagery gathered during my own scientific expeditions to remote treeless islands of southwestern Alaska and the Aleutian Island Archipelago. The work explores the impact of scientific expeditions—including the mid-18th century Bering Expedition—and subsequent colonial expansion on the ecology of these harsh but beautiful geographies.

Artist Statement
The dichotomy between the science and art worldviews provides a gateway through which both artists and scientists can explore a personal and collective relationship with the world via the platform of the archive.  Scientists (like me) and artists (like me) can leverage scientific collections—fossil compendia, field notebooks, nautical logs, herbaria sheets, genetic data and imagery, or the myriad other objects collected or created during scientific activities and expeditions—to generate knowledge, and archives of these collections can be viewed simultaneously as repositories of knowledge, ways to satisfy the desire for order and control, and as mirrors of ourselves, of the collector, and of culture and society.

For the past thirty years, I participated in scientific expeditions to treeless, windswept islands of Alaska’s Aleutian Island Archipelago and allied island groups. Landfall was made on a number of those same islands during the ill-fated 1741 Second Kamchatkan Expedition (also known as the Bering Expedition). This experience provided an unparalleled opportunity to place imagery emerging from archives generated via my own lived experience straddling the 20th and 21st centuries within the context of archived records and the lived experience of 18th century scientific explorers.  My artistic research tracks document and imagery archives from the voyage of the packet boat, St. Peter—which carried Captain Commander Bering’s crew from Kamchatka to southeast Alaska and, after many trials, including sickness and death of the Commander, back to Kamchatka—during 1741-1742. My own field research activities and archives—mostly materials from botanical expeditions conducted between 1988 and 2019—span much of that 18th century track, and I use in my art-making those archived science-made materials to explore the impact of scientific expeditions and subsequent colonial expansion on the species and indigenous people that occupied and continue to occupy these remote treeless islands. In an example of ArtScience, I leverage insight emerging from art-making, science-making and my own lived experience to erect and test a new hypothesis to solve a mystery that has puzzled nine generations of biologists exploring these same harsh but beautiful geographies.

www.sandratalbot.com

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Trine Bumiller | In Memoriam

JULY 2020
CENTER GALLERY
In Memoriam | Trine Bumiller

In Memoriam is an installation comprised of fifteen large watercolor paintings of spruces, one golden. Through the story of the Golden Spruce, it honors the memory of living things, both trees and humans, in a time when life seems more precious than ever.

Artist Statement
There was once a very special tree, on an island off the northwest coast of Canada, called the Golden Spruce. It was a Sitka spruce tree with golden needles, missing the chlorophyll to make it green. The Haida Native Americans, who lived in the area, considered it sacred. It was over 200 feet high and believed to be over 300 years old. In 1997, a former forest engineer cut the tree down in protest of logging companies that were destroying the local forests. The man disappeared before being brought to trial and has never been found.

The Sitka spruce only grows in the area of the northwest coast of the US and Canada. The trees are the third largest species in the world, growing to over 300 feet high. The Haida revere the trees for their many beneficial properties, as shelter, fuel, and dugout canoe wood; it is part of the lore of the tribe, and each child is assigned a tree at birth, to be their guardian. The Golden Spruce was considered sacred, and its demise a tragic loss for the tribe and the community.

My installation, In Memoriam, recalls and honors the story of the Golden Spruce, and all trees, and forests that have been and are being destroyed due to human intervention. It also speaks to our current times and memorializes many lives lost in this time of pandemic and senseless killings. Fifteen large watercolor paintings of majestic spruces on mulberry paper acknowledge and honor this history. They emphasize the verticality and height of these majestic beings, and evoke their human qualities of both power and fragility. In Memoriam speaks of lives lived and lost, of both the natural and human worlds.

One tree is golden, to reference the one special Golden Spruce, and to highlight the preciousness of what we have lost, to venerate and make sacred the spirit of the tree, as well as the spirits of lost human souls. Contrasting with the otherwise dark trees, it is a beacon of hope at the end of the installation. Walking through the installation should feel like being present in a vast forest, still and meditative, yet awed by the presence and precariousness of life.

www.trinebumiller.com

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