This month Partners Gallery presents a show of its members who have submitted works that respond to the topic of “life on the edge.” It’s fascinating to see how varied are the results of each artist. Read a few musings below:
Adriane Nicolaisen: I’ve lived on the edge of the continent all my life. The view is always spectacular looking out over the edge. The horizon as an ever changing kaleidoscope of light, clouds and water. Sometimes the horizon is sharp, sometimes it's soft. But being close to the edge requires attention so as not to fall off unexpectedly. In my work edges provide an opportunity to take a chance, to introduce a change of color or dimension.
Arlene Reiss: Having a bit of a fear of heights I tend to physically avoid the edges on the beautiful headlands of the Mendocino Coast but I do enjoy painting imaginary cliffside edges. In a broader sense the world feels quite unstable right now...as though we are on the edge of chaos. Painting helps me to find a balance point between the known and unknown.
Carolyn King: I feel all things organic and inorganic are always on the edge in some way. Be it extinction or proliferation, depression or elation, war or peace, healthy or unhealthy, harmony or disharmony, etc. Homeostasis while longed for never lasts as long as we would like it to.
Carolyn Schneider: My piece Cats Trying to Hoop is about these edgy times where so many things that seemed certain are now shifting and even disappearing. Not unlike our coastline as the tectonic plates shift and the land disappears.
Karen Fenley: Jungle Memory is about the ever ongoing struggles of loss of rain forests worldwide due to global warming and human folly. High Tide is about the splendor and wonder of living on the edge of the continent.
Kathy Carl: For the last several years I have been making marks using edges of credit cards and other flat tools. Because I live here on the coast, so much of my work literally reflects life on the edge. I spend hours each week on or near the coastal trail and the harbor, where everything falls from the edge of the earth into the sea. I used to have dreams of being stuck on a cliff or steep hillside where I was afraid of falling off. I think it was a symptom of anxiety about losing control. I have let that go.
Kristin Otwell: I am showing work based on life on the edge of the continent and edge of night.
Mina Cohen: My series explores the alphabet related to various places around the world. The Green Line separates the 1948 border/edge established for the state of Israel. D is for Demilitarization refers to the line/edge between North and South Korea.
Miriam Davis: Dancing on the Edge is a recent porcelain sculpture inspired by my reading of William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.” We live on the edge of life and death and must be alive there if we are to be alive anywhere. So we sing, we dance in whatever ways we love.
Pamela Hahn: When the Webb telescope was launched I was full of anticipation of what could be discovered about the universe. This inspired my piece, Almost There.
Virginia Sharkey: As a painter, I think of the edge in purely formal terms; the edge of the quadrangle of canvas that I am working on. There was often a great amount of talk in New York when I lived there about the problem of the edge which was when the field of the canvas was apprehended as a flat surface free of illusionistic space, yet bounded by the constructs of the stretcher bars and fabric. I think of the edge as an important structural element. And I wouldn’t mind if my work would be considered “edgy.”
Virginia Stearns: I am showing Schemes for Living on a Pissed-Off Planet exploring life on the edge of civilizational demise.