December 7, 2017—December 20, 2017 | Opening Reception Holiday Party: Thursday December 7th, 6-8pm
James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our third annual Holiday Pop Up, a temporary group exhibition to celebrate the holiday season. This show features a choice selection of diverse art objects including ceramic pieces, small paintings, mixed media works, and works on paper that offer the perfect gift for any art lover. The exhibition runs for only two weeks, and includes pieces by participating artists Nancy Brooks Brody, Claire Cowie, Mary Fischer, Claudia Fitch, Ayumi Horie, Fay Jones, Cameron Martin, Jenny Mendes, Alyson Shotz, Akio Takamori, Ehren Tool, Brad Winchester, Andrew Witkin, and Bing Wright. From functional ceramic such as Mendes’ bowls and Tool’s donation based cups about war to Brody’s “Book Mark paintings” and Shotz’s “Imaginary Sculptures,” this exhibition offers informal and intimate interactions with unique art objects that come to life through viewer engagement. The work in this show is both accessible and precious, exploring the realm of the mundane in artists’ practices.
Brad Winchester
Winchester combines his training as a painter with his current interest in process, material plurality, and postconceptualization. In his recent work, Winchester began by reconsidering painter’s linen as a sculptural and structural problematic. Using methods of deconstructing, dying, and re-presenting in unexpected ways in three dimensional space, Winchester challenges our relationship to and preconception of art objects. Winchester’s effort to lay bare his process emphasizes the equal importance of conceptualization and actualization in this work.
Winchester received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. He currently lives and works in Seattle, WA.
Fay Jones
Fay Jones’ work conveys the intimacy of mind, emotion, and spirituality. As a whole, Jones’ paintings echo a tremendous sense of humanity. The pieces meld figures, animals and symbols to conjure up existential meaning of human experience. Her characters become signifiers, representing the watery depth of the unconscious.
Fay Jones received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1957. Awards she has received include the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant in 2013, the Seattle Art Museum’s 2006 Poncho Artist of the Year award, grants from the NEA in 1983 and 1990, the Washington State Arts Commission in 1984, and La Napoli Art Foundation in 1989. Her work has been extensively collected in the Northwest, and is included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Oregon, and the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, as well as the Cities of Seattle and Portland. Major exhibitions include a 2007 retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, a 1997 traveling retrospective with the Boise Art Museum, and exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum in California.
Alyson Shotz
Andrew Witkin
Witkin’s work investigates systems and structures that shape contemporary life and experiences. His artistic practice blurs the boundaries and roles of art. He is a conceptual artist that focuses on language and how we perceive the world and objects around us. Much of Witkin’s work could easily be confused with the elements populating our everyday lives, yet would live on as visible alterations in and out of context. His combination of photographic images and text asks the viewer to consider not just the ways in which language shapes things, but also how it can be codified into many meanings.
Witkin’s education occurred, academically, primarily at Wesleyan University (undergrad) and Tufts University (grad). Exhibition experiences have happened at museums such as Currier Museum of Art, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as at galleries such as Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston, Theodore:Art in New York and James Harris Gallery in Seattle. Works are in the collections of the DeCordova, ICA, Boston, MFA, Boston and MFA, Houston. He has executed site-responsive works in locations as diverse as Big Bend National Park, Texas, Damascus, Syria, Naples, Italy, and a long-term project is in the works in northern New Hampshire. This summer, works of his are on view in groups shows at the Flag Foundation in New York and at Concord Art in Massachusetts. A large solo exhibition of his works at the University of New Hampshire’s Museum of Art will open in January, 2018. In addition, he is partner and director of Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston and has served as the editor of the Sol LeWitt Catalogue Raisonné of Prints and is the editor of the is the editor of the Mel Bochner Catalogue Raisonné of Prints.
Claire Cowie
Claire Cowie uses a variety of media to reference the natural world around her home in Seattle, as well as around the world. Cowie utilizes symbols of the natural world such as birds, insects, and a variety of plant-life, as well as heavily using the negative space in a work. By using watercolor and ink in the areas around her subject Cowie references the fragmentation between the natural world and us, as well as of memory. The colors and shapes in her work create dream-like landscapes that pull in characteristics of urban architecture.
Claire Cowie lives and works in Seattle, Washington, where she is a lecturer at the University of Washington. Cowie attended both the North Carolina School of the Arts (Winston-Salem, NC) and Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO). She received her MFA from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Cowie’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Takeda Biennial (Oaxaca, Mexico), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Shenzhen Art Institute (Shenzhen, China) and the Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Lake Oswego, OR). Her work is included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), Safeco (Seattle, WA), and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), among others.
Bing Wright
Wright has always been fascinated by the correlation between the photo and a mirror, both being silver based picture planes. At the beginning of his artistic career, Wright was exposed to the potential of the medium by John Szarkowski’s legendary exhibition Mirror and Windows in 1978, which reconstructed the framework of the photographic image as a two-dimensional pictorial surface into a conceptual space. With a postmodern perspective of the photographic image, the medium expanded into diverse practices that continue to reorient our relationship to photography.
Bing Wright was born in Seattle in 1958 and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Columbia University, New York. His work been shown in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; White Columns, New York; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; and the Tang Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, among others. His work is in several public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and Citigroup. Wright recently curated an exhibition of 1970s photography from the collection of the Washington Art Consortium. He lives and works in New York City.
Akio Takamori
Takamori was a seminal figure in ceramic art, whose work over the past thirty years has left an enduring impact on the Pacific Northwest arts and the medium itself. His work is often autobiographical, drawing on his life in Japan, his family, and mythological themes. He is known for his coil-built figurative sculptures in which the narrative painting defines the form. Takamori explored themes of cultural identity by engaging the history of Eastern and Western aesthetics. Bold form and color defines his body of work, which is highly expressive of human emotion and sensuality.
Akio Takamori was born and raised in Japan. He has been exhibiting in the United States, Europe and Asia since the mid 1980s. Takamori received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976 and his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University in 1978.
Takamori’s work is included in numerous collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Los Angels County Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Ariana Museum in Geneva, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grants (1986, 1988, 1992), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2006), and the USA Ford Fellowship (2011). Takamori was a professor of art at the University of Washington. He lived and worked in Seattle.
Cameron Martin
Cameron Martin is a contemporary painter whose work over the years has varied from landscape paintings to more recent abstract works focusing on color, shape, and space. Much of Martin’s work in the past has played with notions of site and non-site, with the image serving as a marker for unattainable direct experience. In this new work, it is as if Martin has revealed the originary site. No longer insisting on the muted tones characteristic of his earlier work, which elicited a contemplative silence, there is a sense of optimism in the commanding presence of these new pictures, a timeless physicality that has the potential to endure.
Cameron Martin was born in Seattle, Washington in 1970 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was educated at Brown University and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is the recipient of a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Solo exhibitions include ”Bracket”, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NY (2011), “Currents 97”, St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO (2006), and “Focus 3”, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK (2006). Martin was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 2004. His works are included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art, among others. In June of 2017, the Museum at SUNY Albany hosted a full-scale exhibition of his abstract work, accompanied by a catalogue including an essay by art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson.