Gallery Artist Group Exhibition

The work of Harold Hollingsworth is characterized by colorful eruptions, rich surfaces and rhythmic playfulness. The tossed off elements and poetic debris of our common modern environment influence on his work – weathered advertisements, paper flyers peeling off walls, fonts and moments of graphic abstraction in everyday life. In the past, he has used familiar images such as old road sign graphics, vintage and modern letter forms, along with numbers, crossed with natural and accidental forms found in nature. Recent works are more subtle translations of modernist forms that mirror graphics that are cut free of their original meaning.

A graduate of Western Washington University, Harold has also been shaped greatly by the teaching style and bravado of professor and artist, R. Allen Jensen. Harold showed with Galleria Potatohead and Linda Farris Gallery after graduating from Western Washington University in 1989. He has shown with Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Circa Gallery in Minneapolis and has been shown recently  in residence at Takt – Berlin Germany.

A native of Seattle, Harold has presented 17 solo shows and participated in 38 group shows. His work resonates not only with individual collectors, but corporate investors as well. Approximately 25 Nordstrom stores around the country display Harold’s work. The Target Corporation, Twitter, and Hilton Hotels along with Swedish Hospital have work by Harold.

Ann Wåhlström is a Stockholm based artist who combines artistic work in glass with freelance design. Since 2005 she has been creating her unique glass objects in collaboration with glassblowers in Sweden, Czech Republic and USA. Wåhlström has studied glassblowing and design in Sweden at the Glass School in Orrefors and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, and in the United States at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle and the Rhode Island School of Design. She says this has given her the best of two worlds: Swedish traditional craftsmanship and American artistic freedom. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1985 at Gallery Nilsson/New Glass in New York, where she was “discovered” by Kosta Boda. This was the start of a twenty-year collaboration with the glassworks group. She has won the Excellent Swedish Design Award on several occasions and is represented in Swedish and International Museums.

Scott Fife follows in the footsteps of Pop artists from the 1960s and 1970s by focusing on the fads and fascinations of American culture and using non-traditional materials to create his sculptures. Beginning with commercial products, he turned to objects from everyday life and also created a series of portraits of celebrities all fashioned using archival cardboard, glue, and screws. To give these simple things greater cachet, Fife often recreates them at an exaggerated scale making them literally larger-than-life.

American, b. 1973, Seattle, USA, based in Seattle and San Francisco, USA.

John Kiley, a renowned artist at the forefront of contemporary glass sculpture, is known for his groundbreaking exploration at the intersection of sculpture, blown glass, and architectural forms. With a unique blend of technical expertise and artistic vision, Kiley’s work transcends boundaries with a dynamic interplay of light, structure, and spatial relationships.

Kiley’s affinity for glass was evident from an early age. As a teenager, he experimented with painting on glass. Later, he refined his skills through formal training and apprenticeships with master artists, including 16 years with Lino Tagliapietra, developing a deep understanding of traditional glassblowing and fabrication techniques.

Kiley’s sculptures frequently incorporate individual elements into larger frameworks, showcasing his meticulous attention to detail and risk-taking approach. Whether creating towering structures, intricate blown glass orbs, or delicately assembled shattered blocks, each series exemplifies his ability to seemingly defy gravity. Through this creative process, he explores the inherent tension between chaos and order, strength and fragility, resulting in works that evoke metamorphosis and the intrinsic beauty of imperfection.

In addition to his solo work, Kiley is known for his collaborative projects with architects, engineers, and other master artists, pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the realm of glass in sculpture. His willingness to experiment with scale, materials, and techniques have earned him widespread acclaim and recognition, with his work featured in galleries, museums, and public spaces worldwide.

Curtis Steiner is an autodidactic polymath based in Seattle, WA. He is a master gardener, calligrapher, and artist. His luminous watercolors cast color and form as abstract protagonists in the midst of transformation. Soft forms swell, breach and accommodate the cavities around them, like lungs filling with air, or aquifers releasing water, in a waltz of scarcity and abundance. Informed by his calligraphy practice, Steiner’s renderings contrast precision and gesture to make the ephemeral concrete, a cloud between blinks, or a cellular exchange hidden from view. Their saturated totemic forms recall Tantric Paintings from Rajasthan, rich elemental voids to contemplate the infinite, suspended bridges to the sublime. Steiner establishes compositional parameters that generate ensuing forms, echoing parametric architecture’s pursuit of complex systems-driven geometry. Despite their meticulous abstract nature, these deliberate and organic forms suggest a human allegory. How do two individuals relate to and transform one another? What energy emerges when a couple collides?

Born and raised in Munich, Germany, Heike Brachlow received her BA in glass 2004 from the University of Wolverhampton, her MA in 2006 and PhD in 2012 from the Royal College of Art in London. She works as a self-employed artist from her studio in Cumbria, and as an educator and lecturer, teaching at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work is represented in many museum collections including the V&A (UK), the European Museum of Modern Glass (Germany), the National Museums Scotland, and the Tacoma Museum of Glass (USA). She has won the Jerwood Maker’s Open Award in 2011 and the Glass Seller’s Arts and Crafts Award at the British Glass Biennale in 2017, and her work has been exhibited in many countries including the USA, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, Italy, and Germany.

Jane Rosen has the unique ability to evoke both enigma and precision with her work. Her chosen subjects–animals wild and tame–are used as vehicles to explore their instincts and natural intelligence. For Rosen, understanding animal nature is a key to understanding human nature. She is fascinated with cultures such as the Eskimos, Native Americans, and Egyptians. Rosen excels across several different mediums including sculpture, painting, and drawing, and traces of all three can be found in each artwork; upon close observation a sculpture has been painted or a drawing has had several layers of wax sculpted onto its surface.

Rosen was born in New York City where she grew up and began her career as an artist. Despite finding early success in galleries and a prestigious teaching position in the city, Rosen found herself captivated by the accessibility of nature on a visit to the West Coast. She eventually relocated permanently to San Gregorio, California, where she keeps her studio and resides on a horse ranch frequently visited by the birds you see in her work.

Rosen was recently selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their prestigious 2014 Annual Invitational in New York. 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. She exhibits in galleries around the United States.

Preston Singletary has become synonymous with the relationship between European glass blowing traditions and Northwest Native art. His artwork features themes of transformation, animal spirits, and shamanism through elegant, blown glass forms and mystical sand carved Tlingit designs.

Singletary learned the art of glass blowing by working with artists in the Seattle area including Benjamin Moore and Dante Marioni. As a student and assistant, he initially focused on mastering the techniques of the European tradition. His work took him to Kosta Boda (Sweden) where he studied Scandinavian design and met his future wife. Throughout his 30+ years of glass blowing experience, Preston Singletary has also had opportunities to learn the secrets of the Venetian glass masters by working with Italian legends Lino Tagliapietra, Cecco Ongaro, and Pino Signoretto. In 2010, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the University of Puget Sound. Now recognized internationally, Singletary’s artworks are included in museum collections such as The British Museum (London, UK), The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), The Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY), the Mint Museum of Art and Design (Charlotte, NC), the Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC).

Singletary maintains an active schedule by teaching, lecturing, and exhibiting internationally. In 2009, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, launched a major mid-career survey of his work, entitled “Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire, and Shadows”. In 2018, he launched a new traveling exhibition with the Museum of Glass, titled “Raven and the Box of Daylight“, which pushes the boundaries of glass as a medium for storytelling. Preston Singletary continues to assert himself as a keeper and teller of stories and as a contemporary master of his craft.

One of the long recognized artists in the Northwest, Gregory Grenon is well known for his work as a colorist exploring the dynamic and expressive qualities of the people he paints.

Gregory Grenon grew up in Detroit where he studied at the Center for Creative Studies. After a stint in Chicago, where he furthered his printmaking skills at Landfall Press, he moved to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s. He has had one-person exhibitions throughout the region as well as in New York, Chicago, Boston and New Orleans. Gregory Grenon has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, OR; the Portland Art Museum; the Seattle Art Museum; the Tacoma Art Museum; the Boise Art Museum; and New York Public Library.

Andrea Dezsö is a visual artist who works across a broad range of media including drawing, painting, artist’s books, embroidery, cut paper, animation, sculpture, site-specific installation, and public art. Dezsö’s permanent public art has been installed in three New York City subway stations, at the United States Embassy in Bucharest, Romania and at CUNY BMCC Fiterman Hall in Lower Manhattan. Community Garden, Dezsö’s mosaic in the New York City subway was recognized as Best American Public Art in 2007 by Americans for the Arts. Dezsö is Professor of Art at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) in Providence, RI, and lives in a small house at the edge of the woods.

Morisawa combines disparate and incongruous materials to form beautiful and disorienting designs that reflect a series of visual paradoxes in her mosaic-like work. Although she has done representational images in the past, Naoko’s current work is focused almost exclusively on abstraction. For her, these abstract compositions are a visual representation of feelings that cannot be adequately expressed through language or traditional figuration.

Morisawa’s methodology for creating boldly colored mosaic paintings is both highly technical and entirely intuitive, layering thousands of meticulously cut and oil-stained wood and paper pieces to create dynamic textures, shadows, color fields, and patterns. With a background in traditional Japanese marquetry (or intarsia) – a technique in which images are created using carefully cut and glued slivers of wood – Morisawa sees the natural textures and patterns of the wood grain and paper fibers as fundamental elements in her pieces. Naoko makes art that is natural, playful and lifts people’s spirits. She also wants her artwork to be about herself, like a diary. Each piece is created with the care one would use writing a letter to a loved one or friend. Bright, fun, and unusual subjects attract and inspire Morisawa to work in new directions.

Naoko Morisawa was born in Tokyo, Japan, and studied art at Japan’s Tama Art University. She has worked as a commercial product designer for Godiva Chocolate and Twining Tea and taught art classes in Tokyo, Yokohama, and the Canadian Embassy before moving to the USA in 2004. She has exhibited her work in more than 30 states across the US, in Japanese museums, the Dublin Biennale, National Weather Center Biennale, Bellingham National at Whatcom Museum, and Tokyo Art Olympia Biennale at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Japan. Her artwork is included in the Permanent Collections of City of Seattle, City of Portland, City of Bellevue, Kent and Shoreline, Seattle Public Utilities, and Seattle International Airport. Her studio public art exhibitions / installations have been selected by The Metro, City of Seattle, Seattle Center, Washington Convention Center, Macy’s Seattle, Seattle Children Hospital, Seattle Salmon Bay Park, Lake Sammamish State Park, Amazon, Nordstrom Inc. General Electric HQ Exhibition, and Facebook- Meta (TBC).

Jeremy Bert is a Seattle based artist working primarily with electric light, neon and manipulated reclaimed signage. Originally from Montana, an early interest in ceramics lead him to The NY State School of Art and Design at Alfred University, earning a BFA in 1994. In 1995 Jeremy moved to Seattle, WA where he has worked for over 20 years as a licensed sign electrician, certified welder, crane operator and light projects designer. Bert has taught neon workshops at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood WA, Urban Glass in NYC and Penland School of Craft in NC. Jeremy’s work is held in public and private collections. He has exhibited his work at MONA The Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles CA, Jenkins Johnson Gallery San Francisco, CA & New York NY, Traver Gallery Seattle, WA, and The Museum of Glass Tacoma, WA. His work, “Transient light Graffiti” is in the permanent collection of the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh PA.

Jeremy’s mixed media sculpture represents a strong commitment to re-usage. By re-appropriating the refuse of the sign industry Bert reclaims commercial waste and transforms it into something enriching for the community.

Jeremy and his wife, Jen Elek, maintain a studio at their home in south Seattle where they work with neon, clay and steel.

Jen Elek is a studio artist and educator based in Seattle.

Elek investigates interpersonal themes and the notion of community by creating objects and installations of colorful glass and neon light employed as a non-verbal form of communication.

Jen has been a member of the Northwest artist community since moving from Bethlehem PA to Seattle in 1995. Elek has traveled to Canada, Japan, Australia, and throughout the U.S teaching glassblowing workshops. Jen has worked for many notable artists including, Dale Chihuly, Ginny Ruffner, Nancy Callan and was a key member of Lino Tagliapietra’s glassblowing team for 15 years. Jen’s involvement in Northwest Art organizations include; Pilchuck glass school, The Museum of Glass -Tacoma, Hilltop Artists and guest lecturer at The University of Washington in Seattle. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Glass Tacoma, Tacoma Art Museum, Pittsburgh Glass Center and Traver gallery Seattle. Jen maintains a studio in south Seattle with husband Jeremy Bert.

Tori Karpenko received his BFA from Drake University, where he majored in Painting and graduated cum laude. During his sophomore year, he attended the Lorenzo de Medici Institute of Italian Studies in Florence, Italy.

Since moving to Washington in 2000, Tori has exhibited his work regionally in the Pacific Northwest. In 2001, Tori joined the Confluence Gallery and Art Center’s Board of Directors, and he was elected Chairman in 2002. Since 2003, he has been active on the Methow Arts teaching roster, where he has led several dynamic learning experiences in the public school system. Since 2008, he has served as a regional ambassador for Artist Trust.

In 2011, Tori began working for TwispWorks, a community inspired project that is repurposing a 6.5 acre, multi-building complex formerly used by the US Forest Service. This complex will be transformed into a hub for creative enterprise. As Director of Campus Operations, Tori manages the building renovations, oversees the Artist in Residence Program, develops a destination education program, and directs numerous cultural events throughout the year.

Tori received funding from Artist Trust through the Grants for Artists Projects to transport and show The Lookout at Traver Gallery. The Lookout is a cathartic work from a time of personal crisis when Tori found solace in mountain solitude. The result of his studio practice during this time of healing is twenty paintings that explore the transformative power of solitude and quiet contemplation in raw wilderness.

April Surgent started working with glass in 1997, at open-access hot shop studios in her hometown of Seattle, WA. She went on to study at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia where she graduated with honors in 2004. In 2003, she changed her focus from blown to wheel-engraved glass after studying under Czech master engraver Jiri Harcuba at the Pilchuck Glass School. She has been engraving for 20 years, interested in contemporary approaches to the traditional craft of wheel engraving. Notable recognitions for her work include a 2009 Behnke Foundation Neddy Fellowship, a 2016 USA Ford Fellowship, and acquisitions by Iowa State University and the Smithsonian’s, American Art Museum.

Observation and in-depth research inform her work discussing our changing planet. Her interest in natural history, applied science, and climate change have led her from Antarctica to Alaska studying vulnerable species and ecosystems. In 2013, she worked at Palmer station as a recipient of the National Science Foundations’, Antarctic Artist and Writers Program and in 2016 as a volunteer field biologist for the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program. Most recently Surgent has worked in Southwest Alaska with the US Geological Survey assisting with pelagic food web research. Surgent lives and works on the Quimper Peninsula in Washington state.

Wagner works in a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, time-based projects, book works and sculptural interventions. Her work aligns itself with both the principles of Minimalism, and the ethics of an alchemist. She manipulates materials to make works that are about the passing of time and material transformation.

A big departure from her oil on canvas works of the 60’s, the tape works from the 70’s showcase Wagner’s unique process of using tape (cloth, masking, Gaffer’s, Permacel) to transfer oil pastel pigments onto plexiglass. Tiffany Bell explains that “having used tape as an incidental tool in her painting, she became fascinated with it as something to mark on. Her preoccupation with tape led to a consideration of process and the role of chance in the creative procedure. She started applying bands of tape to paper (…) and marking the resulting surfaces all over with chalk. A second layer of tape was then layered on top, removed, and affixed to Plexiglas. Seen from the opposite side, traces of the original drawing were thus incorporated into a new context.”

Wagner is an artist indicative of her time and place. Robert Storr summarizes, “Wagner, materialist, formalist, empiricist, and poet of the given and the accidental as well of the systematically altered is, in this every respect, an all-American artist to the core.”

Matthew Szösz is known for his innovative use of materials and developing new sculpting processes, as well as video work that documents the excitement of making.

Born in Rhode Island, Matthew Szösz has received 3 degress including a Masters in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design. He began producing his own work a decade ago, and has received several awards, including the Jutta Cuny-Franz, a Tiffany Foundation grant, and the Borowsky Prize. He has been an artist in residence at university and arts programs across the US, as well as Denmark, Japan and Australia, and has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Washington, Toyama, Penland, Pilchuck, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Public Glass in San Francisco, where he was executive director. He has exhibited at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, GlazenHuis (Belgium) and the Museum of Art and Design in NYC, among others.

In 2010 he founded Hyperopia Projects, curatorial/ project group based in the USA that advances cross-genre material based sculpture and critical thought. He currently lives and works with his wife, Anna Mlasowsky, in Seattle, WA.

“I am the child of two ideas. The first is the unreconstructed artisanship tradition in which I was raised. The second is the church of ecstatic blue collar Rock & Roll anarchy for which I volunteered. This is the territory that excites me- lying between the sensitive and considered restraint of learned technique and the manic populist energy of the rock throwing iconoclast, described by an wobbling elliptical oscillation between the two. Sophisticated, erudite ideas with feet of clay, a heedless headlong dive into complex and esoteric waters. The friction of these two has been my experience of life, the experience of living within the body and the mind at the same time, each correcting the other in ragged arrhythmia. The opposing pulls of intellect and emotion maintain a tense center that lives and vibrates with their energy.”

Mexican-born artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre are brothers and artistic collaborators, who moved to the United States from Guadalajara, Jalisco in the early 1970’s.  Leaving behind the academic, religious and social rigors of an all-boys Catholic school in 1960’s Guadalajara, the de la Torre brothers ended up in the small Southern California surf town of Dana Point, where they discovered the unbridled joys of co-ed public schools.

While attending California State University at Long Beach in the 80’s, they studied sculpture and glass blowing, during which time the artist-brothers began a flame-worked glass figure business.  This business was quickly eclipsed when their artistic collaboration began in earnest in the late 1980’s with small mix media works.  In the late 1990’s, they began to do large-scale sculptural installations, eventually branching out into commissioned site-specific and public art projects.

Currently, the brothers live and work on both sides of the San Diego-Baja California border, enjoying a bi-national life style that very much informs their art.  Einar and Jamex de la Torre have worked, taught and exhibited both nationally, as well as internationally. Their distinctive three-dimensional work can be found in galleries, museum collections, Museum catalogs, as well as in various public art installations.

Joseph Rossano, born to clinicians and research scientists, graduated from Louisiana State University as an artist. His path joined him, via mentorship, collaboration, and exhibition, with renowned artists and institutions including Dale Chihuly, Judy Pfaff, The Pilchuck Glass School, Waterford Crystal, Museum of Glass, the South Australia Museum, Google, and more. Integrating cutting edge technology and science with his art, Rossano engages and challenges the viewer to reflect upon humankind’s impact on our planet and its varied ecosystems. Much of his youth was spent exploring the North Shore of New York’s Long Island and hiking in the Catskill Mountains. These were formative years that evolved a life focused on creating environmental awareness through art.

Cordy Ryman was born in 1971 in New York, New York. He received his BFA, with honors, from
the School of Visual Fine Arts/Art Education in 1997. His work has been exhibited at PS1
Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, NY; Visual Arts Center, New Jersey, NJ; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; Bronx River Art Center,
Bronx, NY; The Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY and Esbjerg
Museum of Modern Art, Esbjerg, Denmark. Gallery exhibitions include DCKT Contemporary, New
York, NY; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY; Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX; Kavi Gupta,
Chicago, IL; Gallery Diet, Miami, FL; Stalke Galleri, Kirke Saaby, Denmark; Thomas Rehbein
Galerie, Koln, Germany; and Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden. He was the recipient of the Helen Foster
Barnett Prize from the National Academy Museum. Ryman’s work has been reviewed in Artforum,
The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, and Time Out
NY, among others. His work is in the collection of the Microsoft Art Collection, Pizzuti Collection,
Raussmuller Collection, Rubell Family Collection, The Speyer Family Collection, and the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Miami. In 2013, he installed a large public commission at Michigan State
University and in 2014, he received a Percent for Art Public commission. In 2014, Ryman will
exhibit at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, NY; the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY;
University of Springfield Illinois Galleries, Springfield, IL; and the Contemporary Arts Museum,
Houston, TX. Ryman lives and works in New York, New York.

I was born in Seattle in 1955. We moved around a lot: Honolulu, Lake Oswego, Vancouver, Seattle again, Pasadena. In 1975, my first real studio was a one car garage in Santa Cruz. Next, in 1980, a large bedroom in Berkeley. Both had stupendous views!

On a visit to Seattle when I was 14, my Aunt Helyn brought me to the Francine Seders Gallery, where I saw the works of Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and others. She also brought me to the studio of her older sister, Aunt Ruth. This day had an enormous impact on me. I never saw them again; they both died the following year. Once, years later, as I was leaving my Aunt Mary’s home, I pointed to one of Ruth’s paintings and said I think about this painting all the time. A large watercolor of rock and water, loose, abstract and yet real. “Well, you’d better take it then!” It’s still on my office wall.

I studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s, held extended residencies in Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s, and since the mid 1990s have engaged in a passionate study of Asian art. I began using encaustic around 1983, having seen an encaustic painting by Joseph Goldberg. This was before there were any books or classes on it. I looked it up in Ralph Meyer’s Handbook of Artists’ Materials and Techniques and did the best I could with it. I made up my own methods, some of which failed. With encaustic, I can bring together all of my other methods: oils, papers and inks, fabric, tar, and gold. In any medium, my work draws on multiple lineages of art, culture and spiritual meaning. I finally got around to earning a BFA in 2005, and had a show that year at Traver Gallery, Tacoma.

My first show with the Traver Sutton Gallery was in 1990. From that show, the Quarter saw Gallery in Portland took an interest and I showed there until they closed in 2000. I became familiar with many in the Portland art community and moved there in 1998. In September 2006, I curated “Impulse,” a national show of encaustic painting and sculpture at the Portland Art Center. I’ve participated in group exhibits at the Art Gym (Marylhurst University) and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and had a solo show at Oregon State University in 1995. I have taught painting and drawing in Seattle and Portland since the middle 1990s. In 2007, I led a group of artists on a tour of museums, galleries and artist studios in Barcelona. I was nominated for the 2013 Northwest Artist Awards. You can see my paintings at the Traver Gallery in Seattle, at i.e. gallery in Edison, WA., at Cedar Street Galleries in Honolulu, and at Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon. And soon, at Gallery MAR in Carmel, California.