Since 2003, McClure has dissected and reassembled mass-produced toys to expose their internal mechanisms, recasting them in precious metals. McClure describes her process as a kind of “Geppetto-like taxidermy,” unearthing value in the disregarded. Her curiosity-led approach, informed by a background in metalsmithing, is directly shaped by the profound loss of her childhood home to a tornado.

Her process, part excavation, part reconstruction, highlights cycles of consumption while revealing unexpected beauty in what was once disposable. With Wunderkammer, McClure invites viewers to enter a space where overlooked materials are transformed into specimens of significance, where narratives emerge from fragments, where the hidden histories of objects are unearthed and their imagined futures explored, where the transient becomes enduring.

Centering on a series of new bronze sculptures, constructed from meticulously cast mass-produced, battery-operated plush toys, she creates expressive, uncanny portraits that tell a story of reinvention, resilience, humor, and beauty. Her stoic bronze figures, with the weight of artifacts, stand in dialogue with a new installation of her “mutants” series – whimsical, kinetic, plastic sculptures reconfigured from the same salvaged source material–while works on paper document each figure’s metamorphosis with paint, charcoal, pastel, and water, capturing the tension between animate and inanimate. McClure’s titles in this body of work draw on mythology, literature, and art history, situating these figures within the broader cultural context and encouraging the viewer to reflect more deeply on the work.

Cathy McClure first gained recognition with Carnival of Life, a Zoetrope that combined theatrical elements, shadow play, and animation, earning her the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Memorial Award the same year she completed her MFA. Since then, she has exhibited widely, including a solo presentation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and participated in residencies at Pilchuck Glass School, Les Frigos Paris, iolair, and the McColl Center for the Arts. McClure has completed major public commissions, most recently A Place in the Woods for the Seattle Convention Center Summit in 2023, where she also served as Artist Consultant from 2016 to 2024. Her work is held in significant collections, including the White House, the Pace Collection, and the CCS Bard Collection, with recent acquisitions by Public Art at SEA Airport. Additional solo exhibitions include the Milton Hershey Museum, Neuhoff/Edelman, Moss, and Art Basel Miami.

Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, September 6th, from 3:00–5:00 pm.

If you’re interested in viewing or acquiring artwork before the opening, please contact us at info@travergallery.com or 206-587-6501.

Click here to see available works

The post Cathy McClure | Wunderkammer | Sept 2025 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

“Covid and time ended my 33-year working for Dale Chihuly, wherein all my creative focus was on his work and the arc of his success. I had allowed myself to become fallow as an artist without my own challenges.

Now, with time, I have built a studio and started working for myself again.

Over the past two years, I was drawn to several assortments of distinctive wood that had been discards given to me. These were remnants left from harvesting trees, from the rough cutting of lumber, from building construction, and from the making of fine furniture. These discards were saved by others because of their shape and their textures. They expressed the character of the wood determined by weather, cut, fire and decay and were a kind of diary of time.

Within these gifted savings of others, I began finding myself, as measured by this work.”

–Parks Anderson

Please join us for the opening reception and celebration of Parks Anderson’s return on Thursday, November 7th from 5:00–8:00 pm.

If you’re interested in viewing or acquiring artwork before the opening, please contact us at info@travergallery.com or 206-587-6501.

Click here to see available works

The post Parks Anderson | Black & Blue | Nov/Dec 2024 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

Traver Gallery and Chihuly Garden and Glass are thrilled to present a groundbreaking exhibition featuring the latest works by Blown Away episode winners Gemma Hollister and Karen Willenbrink-Johnson, alongside series winner Morgan Peterson.  This unique gallery exhibition emerged from a Chihuly-inspired episode of the celebrated glassblowing competition, Blown Away, judged by Michelle Bufano, Executive Director of Chihuly Garden and Glass. In this special team challenge, contestants crafted monumental, nature-themed glass sculptures, vying for a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to exhibit their works during Refract: The Seattle Glass Experience. which begins on Friday, October 17th, 2024. Click here to learn more about Refract.

Each of the three exhibiting artists bring a distinct vision and narrative to the medium of glass. Gemma Hollister’s pieces offer a critique of modern capitalism, using glass as a material for thought-provoking works such as Hitchbot in Paradise, a stained-glass tribute to the ill-fated robot that successfully hitchhiked across Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands with hopes of hitchhiking across the United States. Morgan Peterson will present a series of cameo portraits of Seattle-based drag queens highlighting ideals of feminine beauty, alongside works from her renowned Designer Drug series and new pieces inspired by her experience on Blown Away. Karen Willenbrink-Johnson’s brings her deep connection to nature to life through glass, with vibrant, dynamic sculptures that reflect the beauty and vitality of the natural world.

Traver Gallery and Chihuly Garden and Glass are honored to provide a platform for these artists, each of whom has made a significant impact on the contemporary glass art landscape. This exhibition not only celebrates their achievements on Blown Away but also their continued contributions to the field of glassmaking.

For sales or other inquiries, contact us at 206.587.6501 or info@travergallery.com.

CLICK HERE to view the exhibition

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The post Tobias Møhl | Intentionally Accidental | Oct 2024 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

A practicing Buddhist, Gunn’s art-making process centers on the closely observed. Whether the starting point is a broad sweeping landscape or a spilled coffee on his studio floor, materials, mark-making, and meditation are essential to his methodology. In his landscape paintings, bold shapes and colors often reference landforms—hills, rivers, lakes, or skies—each carrying a symbolic significance. In his abstract encaustic works, marks borrowed from accidental moments and found elements refer obliquely to lakes, rivers, and stones. The artist’s profound connection to nature and his deliberate journey of making bring poetic and unexpected relationships to life within his paintings.

Jef Gunn was born in Seattle in 1955 and grew up along the West Coast, from Puget Sound and Portland to Southern California and Hawaii. He studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s, held residencies in Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s, and, since the mid-1990s, has engaged in a passionate study of Asian art. Gunn has taught since 1996 at Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle, Oregon College of Art and Craft, Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Click here to see works in the exhibition.

The post Jef Gunn | Moving : Stilling | Jun 24 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

Earlier this month, Ruffner was honored with the prestigious 2023 Washington State Governor’s Arts & Heritage Award, the highest honor given by the Governor to individuals and organizations who have made remarkable contributions to Washington’s arts and cultural development. Her use of AR, and now AI, has given birth to dynamic virtual, animated sculptures, creating rich, optimistic narratives while raising awareness about technology’s potential to be an inclusive tool for artists. It also emphasizes the critical role of artists actively engaging with the sciences to expand the discourse surrounding the impact of scientific progress.

Throughout her remarkable four-decade career, Ginny Ruffner has consistently demonstrated a visionary spirit through her exceptional artistry, inspirational life story, and innovative contributions. We are truly honored to share this exhibition with you.

Seattle-based artist Ginny Ruffner trained at the University of Georgia, graduating with honors and an MFA in drawing and painting. Ruffner has had more than eighty-five solo exhibitions and several hundred group shows, and her flameworked and mixed-media sculptures and installations can be found in numerous national and international collections. Seattle public art installations include a 30-foot-tall kinetic water feature downtown and a permanent installation in the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Recent augmented reality projects, in collaboration with Grant Kirkpatrick, include “Weston Riff” at Photo Center NW, “Branches” at the Seattle International Film Festival, and “Poetic Hybrids” at the Seattle Art Museum. She has written two books and been the subject of an award-winning full-length documentary, “A Not So Still Life: The Ginny Ruffner Story” (2010). Ruffner has lectured and taught extensively and has served as artist-in-residence at schools and universities around the world.

The post Ginny Ruffner | Language = Symbols, Symbols = Language | Oct 2023 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

Knitting together glass, stone, and pigments, Rosen sculpts her material directly – carving, cutting, tinting, and burnishing the surfaces with the facility of a painter working canvas. Rosen’s methodology and her intense relationship with the mediums she works with are evident in her ability to capture the essential nature of her subject, revealing at once the inner essence of figure and material. Her sculptures capture an essential character, subtlety, and beauty, revealing a personal poetic relationship between animal and human realms. Through her work, she gives us access to that feeling of potency and asks us to quietly observe and protect that essential connection to our natural world.

Rosen was recently selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their 2010 Annual Invitational in New York, a prestigious exhibition juried by some of the greatest artists of our time.  A masterful and sought after teacher, Rosen has taught at numerous elite institutions including the School of Visual Arts and Bard College in New York, LaCoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.  Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News.  Her work has been exhibited across the United States and is in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of  Contemporary Art San Diego.

The post Jane Rosen | A Dogs Life | Oct 2023 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

For this exhibition, McClure uses discarded battery-operated stuffed toys and transforms them into unique gem-like small-scale sculptures that she calls “Bots” and “Mutants.” Although bursting with bubbly personalities, these anthropomorphic creatures tell a story about our societal penchant for instant gratification, over-production, and chronic excessive consumption. Stripped of their stuffing, McClure exposes their innards, preserving the components that once gave these toys their unique movements and sounds. She then re-casts the limbs and armatures in precious metals and reassembles the new parts in a Frankensteinian manner. The resulting reincarnations exude charm and invite contemplation, drawing upon a collective nostalgia for a past we’ve enthusiastically discarded.

These precious sculptures, part historical and part figurative, like archaeological artifacts, become vessels holding a multitude of memories, each one carrying a hidden history and a reimagined future

Click here to see all available works.

The post Cathy McClure | Unearth | Sept 2023 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

Recently, Kiley has been working on multiple ideas simultaneously, embracing a more unrestricted approach to his creative methodology. Through this process, he continues demonstrating meticulous attention to detail, a masterful level of craftsmanship, and an expanding curiosity in his material exploration. Kiley creates a dynamic interplay between the viewer, the space, and light, through thoughtful contrasting colors, intricate carved optic passageways, fractured optic glass, and precariously balanced and perfectly transparent optic glass blocks.

John’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world.  He has been a visiting instructor at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland, The Bezalel Academy of Art And Design in Jerusalem, Israel, The Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, WA.  He has worked and demonstrated in Finland, Ireland, Mexico, Italy, Japan, Bulgaria, China, Australia, Brazil, and Turke

Click here to see all available works.

The post John Kiley | Studio Sessions | Sept 2023 appeared first on Traver Gallery.

Warashina says of this exhibition, “In this series of work called, The World Upside Down, I view the earth as an uncontrolled symbolic, spinning ceramic wheel, in space to give a glimpse of looking at our planet from above. To me, the figures represent human consciousness observing and experiencing the realization of possible escape from annihilation portrayed through dreamlike, cosmic scenarios using current and future space technology. These figures have become the actors in my introspective narratives, as a way of escaping the doubts and disharmony of human nature and its routines, by role-playing scenarios to my liking, much like a child playing with dolls.”

Patti Warashina was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1940. She earned both her BFA and MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1964. She holds the title Professor Emerita, having retired from the University of Washington after 30 years of teaching.

Her awards include the American Craft Council Gold Medalist 2022; Smithsonian’s 2020 Visionary Artist Award; 2018 United States Artists Fellowship Award; 1994 American Craft Council Fellow; three NEA Grants; a “Lifetime Achievement Award/Woman of the Year -2001” Artist Trust, Seattle; and “Distinguished Alumnus Award” in 2003 from the University of Washington, Seattle. She was invited by and given travel grants by the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean governments to participate in their cultural exchange programs. She has been awarded public commissions by King County Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Commission, Tri-Met Public Art (Portland, OR), and Vulcan Real Estate. She was awarded a “Special Commendation from the Governor of Washington State” in 1989.

Ms. Warashina was honored with two 50-year retrospective exhibitions in 2012 and 2013 at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), and the Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, respectively. Two books have been written about Warashina’s career as a ceramic artist, Patti Warashina: Wit and Wisdom, published by AMOCA for the 2012 retrospective, and Patti Warashina, published by Natsoulas Press in 2021.

Her public collections include works in the Smithsonian, Washington, DC; American Craft Museum, New York City; Mint Museum, North Carolina; American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA; L.A County Art Museum; University of Washington Meany Hall and University Medical Center, Seattle; the Detroit, Seattle, and Tacoma Art Museums; as well as international museums such as the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Australia’s Perth Cultural Center; and Korea’s Inchon World Ceramic Center.

Click here to view available works

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