Courtesy Creative Arts Workshop
“Sister Cities, Port Townsend, Ichikawa,” acrylic digital print and resin on panel, by Chad Elperding
You’re in a plane approaching a city. The plane is about to land. As you look out the window, the view reminds you of a slide in your high school botany class.
That’s what it feels like when you visit the latest exhibition at Creative Arts Workshop. That kind of wild ride from the the aerial to the microscopic is on display in the contrasting works of Chad Erpelding and Megan Moore.
Courtesy Creative Arts Workshop
“Connectors,” collaged photolithograph and etching, with hand coloring, by Megan Moore
They’re the winners of the Creative Arts Workshop’s (CAW) 2012 national juried exhibition titled “Boundless: New Works in Contemporary Printmaking.”
The high-flying prints, selected from a field of 45 entrants, can be seen through April 22, when the show lands — that is, finishes up.
Moore, of Chico, California, is a bit like a botanist of plants that live on paper alone. She makes prints of parts of real plants, cuts them up, and then uses wheat paste to create collages of botanical creations that never were, until now.
Creative Arts Workshop’s Katherine Spencer said many visitors see not the plant kingdom only but animals, double helixes, vertebrate spines, and even a plant whose leaves sprout leaves with an uncanny likeness to light bulbs.
Allan Appel Photo
These are pretty to be sure. But are we to relax and admire or wonder what role we play in such mutations?
Boise, Idaho-based Elperding’s work is smaller in scale and tends to get lost on the white walls of the installation. But, like Moore, he is also intent on creating an alternate world. His is one with roots in contemporary politics, and, he hopes, a perspective-shifting take on globalization.
In CAW’s second-floor gallery, he offers a project called “Sister Cities.”
It sounds timid and milquetoasty but it is anything but kumbaya. Taking cities linked by this sweet kind of cultural-exchange relationship, the artist overlays satellite views, street maps, and other geographical shapes.
Then he creates an image that looks orderly but is also topsy-turvy.
For example, “A satellite image from Mercer Island, Washington is cut in the shape of streets of Thonon-les-Bains, France. All of the information is overlapped through a disconnect between the image on the paper and the shape of the cut,” he writes in an artist statement.
Allan Appel Photo
Number 17 (pictured) wins the prize with pieces of “sister cities”: Seattle, Be-er Sheva, Bergen, Cebu City, Chongqing, Christchurch, Galway, Gydnia, Haiphong, Kaoshiung, Kobe, Limbe Mazatlan, Nantes, Pecs, Perugia, Reykjavik, Sihanoukville, Surabaya, Taejon .. and don’t forget Tashkent.
Take that, globalization.
Then what are we to make of Number 11, whose cities are noted as Othello, and Wulensi, a small town in northern Ghana, and whose surface is pretty much blank?
Moore’s work is more decorative by far and Erpelding’s approach conceptual. Both ring alarms. They draw you in until you are nose to nose with questions whose answers are going to be found neither in a botanical text or a gazeteer.
