Images (clockwise from top left): Best of Show, “The Channel Swimmers,” by George M. Schoonover; First Place, “Arithmetical Anecdote,” by Kim Olden; Second Place, “Brushes with Halo Objects #1,” by Ken Oehlen; Third Place, “Solitary,” by Ken Van Brott; Honorable Mention, “Mean Little Rattle,” by Amy K. Wendland.

David Edgar has differentiated himself through plastic.

Until 2004, he created amorphous figures merged with iconography made of steel rods. Today, he sculpts marine life from recycled plastic bottles that have been displayed in 30 exhibits across 18 states. He credits his wife with coining the word “plastiquarium” to describe his decorative art.

“The general public is intimidated and uncomfortable with fine art like I used to make,” Edgar told a crowd of 20 during a preview lecture for the Gateway to Imagination national juried art competition at the Farmington Museum. “I think it’s important to have the work be joyful
and still provide artistic content.”

Edgar acted as juror for the 10th annual Gateway competition. An associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Edgar has a background that includes stints with the Walt Disney Co., chairman of the art department at Ashland University in Ohio and running the nonprofit Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Fla.

He said that work having a narrative quality was important to him when selecting art for the exhibition. Iconography, symbolism, quality of craft, compositional skill, insightful content and contextual success also counted. But in the end, he said, he chose work that moved him on a gut level.

Honorable mention awards went to Durango artists Amy K. Wendland for “Mean Little Rattle,” a sculptural form made from found wood that looks like a snake’s head, fitted with teeth and a long horse-hair tail, and John Grow for “New Worlds,” an oil painting of girls playing with beach balls that happen to be planets. Last year’s Best of Show honoree, Gil Bruvel, was also awarded an honorable mention for his sculpture “Dream of Earth.”

Wendland received a Special Recognition Award for “Kelp, 10 p.m.,” a graphite drawing. Sandra Butler of Durango, Shirlen Heath of Mancos and Sandy Applegate of Pagosa Springs also received Special Recognition Awards.

“Hive” by Butler is a sculptural piece with a honeycomb-shaped end covered in wax. “Navajo Peak” by Applegate is a mixed-media painting that looks like a Japanese woodcut print. Heath’s large, turned aspen wood vessel inlaid with malachite is prominently positioned at the museum entrance.

George M. Schoonover of Yachts, Ore., won Best of Show for his watercolor, “The Channel Swimmers,” three women in bathing suits sitting around a covered porch. His painting meets all the qualifications for technical prowess: composition, context, execution and narrative quality, the iconography of life. It’s clear why Edgar chose this work as Best of Show.

First place went to Kim Olden of Farmington for “Arithmetical Anecdotes.” Second place to Ron Koehler of Cleveland, Miss., for “Brushes With Halo Objects #1.” Ken Van Brott of Gallup, N.M., was awarded third place for his black and white monoprint of a single feather, “Solitary.”

Grow’s second painting in the show, “Left Behind,” featuring Noah’s ark against a tumultuous sky and longneck dinosaurs wading up to their necks in water, was selected for the Farmington Museum Purchase Award. The museum purchased the $2,400 painting for its permanent collection.

Other regional artists featured in the show include: Amy Vaclav-Felker, with “Rufus the Western Box Turtle,” a papier-m`E2ch`E9 sculpture with a colored box for the turtle’s shell; Howard Rachlin, with “White Sands at Sunset,” a panorama photograph; Karen Godblod, with “Moon over Bondad,” a digital image; Judy Brey, with “Blue Boat,” a ceramic sculpture; and Lora Davis, with “Why Cupid has Wings” and “Barnyard American Idol,” two gorgeous needle-felted fiber sculptures.

Gateway to Imagination features 107 works by 86 artists from 26 states.

As Edgar writes in his jurist statement: “This exhibition has something for everyone.”

artsjournalist@centurytel.netLeanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.

If you go

• Gateway to Imagination, 107 works of art
by 86 artists from 26 states, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Monday-Saturday, through July 14,
Farmington Museum, 3041 East Main
Street, Farmington, (505) 599-1174.

• Views from the Plastiquariam, David
Edgar, 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Monday-Thursday,
10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, through June 29,
Henderson Fine Arts Center, San Juan
College, 4601 College Blvd. Farmington
(505) 566-3464.

Phil Borges photos showing at Open Shutter Gallery

photos clockwise from top left: Humeria, 11, from Kabul, Afghanistan, sells eggs on the street to help her family survive.

Asgeli is a midwife to the Afar people who has
performed hundreds of female circumcisions. Now
she leads a campaign to end the practice among the 1.3 million Afar people.

Akhi from Bangladesh was sold as a sex worker at
the age of 13. Within three months she had bought
her freedom and started an organization to strengthen the rights of sex workers.

“My photographic projects are devoted to the welfare of indigenous and tribal people. My intention is to help bring attention to the value these cultures represent and the challenges they face,” writes Phil Borges on his Web site.

The photographer is trying to change the world.

His current exhibition at Open Shutter Gallery coincides with the release of his book Women Empowered. The book is a result of his partnership with the organization CARE to bring attention to the necessity of empowering women to eliminate poverty.

For more than 30 years, this former dentist has lived with people of indigenous cultures. He often enters a village and begins handing out Polaroid images to the children. He stays among the people for many weeks, earning their trust and respect, and then he begins to capture their portraits with a medium-format Hasselblad camera. The chosen negative is then scanned into a
computer, and early images in the series were printed with a high-end inkjet printer.

However, Borges found that the black ink metamerized. So he brushed platinum onto the paper before printing, to stabilize the ink, then he created a negative in the printer and made a contact print. Later, he sepia-toned some of the images and printed the color.

The effect is magical. Each image is framed with gentle brush strokes. The women in his portraits are focal. The background is faded, yet subtle tones draw the eye away from the portrait and back again to the woman or the child.

The images are printed on gorgeous paper, and the story of each woman or girl is written along the bottom of the page. The person’s name and age, along with her village and country are identified.

Empowered Women is the fourth book Borges has compiled from his photographs. A portion of the proceeds from the book goes back to CARE.

“While the women’s movement in the West has made much progress, I continue to be shocked by how women’s rights are compromised in the developing world,” Borges writes in his introduction.

He goes on to tell the story of Abay, a 28-year-old woman from Awash Fontale, Ethiopia. As a 12-year-old girl, Abay refused to be circumcised. Her mother insisted, telling her she would be ostracized and unable to marry.

The girl ran away and then returned to her village as a CARE station agent. Five years later, she convinced one of the women to let her film a circumcision ceremony.

The male leaders of her village had never seen a circumcision and were horrified. Two weeks later, the men voted to end female circumcision in their village.

The photograph of Abay shows a confident, beautiful woman in a diptych with a camel. The details of the grasses and the sand at her feet and the gorgeous color of her skin draw the viewer into the eyes of a woman who dared defy her mother and her culture to change a tradition of mutilation.

In a world where 80 percent of refugees and displaced people are women and girls, and where one in three women has been beaten, abused or raped, Borges turns his Hasselblad into a vehicle for compassion.

artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.

Editing is a beautiful and fascinating process. Space in a newspaper is limited. Every now and then I like to post the original draft of an article along with the published version. Subtle stylistic changes and eliminated sentences often don’t change the meaning of a piece, but do change the voice. I leave it to the reader to decide which version they prefer. Below is the text for a recent article in the Durango Herald.

“My photographic projects are devoted to the welfare of indigenous and tribal people. My intention is to help bring attention to the value these cultures represent and the challenges they face,” writes Phil Borges on his website. The award-winning photographer is trying to change the world—One photograph at a time.

His current exhibition at Open Shutter Gallery in Durango coincides with the release of his most recent book: “Women Empowered.” The project is a the result of Borges partnering the organization CARE to bring attention to the necessity of empowering women in the global campaign to eliminate poverty.

For over thirty years, this former dentist has traveled the world, living with people of indigenous cultures, spending time in the depths of the Ecuadorian Amazon or the heights of the Tibetan Himalayas. He often enters a village and begins handing out Polaroid images to the children. He stays among the people for many weeks, earning their trust and respect and then he begins to capture their portraits with a medium format Hasselblad camera. The chosen negative is then scanned into a computer and early images in the series were printed with a high-end inkjet printer.

However, Borges found that the black ink metamerized. So he brushed platinum onto the paper before printing, to stabilize the black ink, then he created a negative in the printer and made a contact print. He then sepia toned some of the original black & white image and printed the color.

The effect is magical. Each image is framed with gentle brush strokes that look Sumi-esque. The women in his portraits are focal. The background is faded, out of focus, yet subtle tones and shading draw the eye away from the portrait and then back again to the woman, the girl, the child, who seems to be gazing into the viewer’s eyes. Borges maintained the look even after halfway through the project he upgraded to a new 12-ink printer with archival ink that doesn’t metamerize and the platinum brushing was no longer necessary.

The images are on gorgeous paper and the story of each woman, each girl is written along the bottom of the page. Below each picture the persons name and age, along with her village and country are identified. These also look handwritten, though they are printed.

“Empowered Women” is the fourth book Borges has compiled from his photographs. A portion of the proceeds from the book goes back to CARE and the book brings awareness to the mission of CARE to help empower women around the world.

“While the women’s movement in the West has made much progress, I continue to be shocked by how women’s rights are compromised in the developing world,” Borges writes in his introduction.

He goes on to tell the story of Abay, a 28-year-old woman from Awash Fontale, Ethiopia. As a 12-year-old girl, Abay refused to be circumcised. Her mother insisted, telling her she would be ostracized and unable to marry. The girl ran away and then returned to her village as a CARE station agent. Five years later she convinced one of the women to let her film a circumcision ceremony. The male leaders of her village had never seen a circumcision and were horrified. Two weeks later, the men voted to end female circumcision in their village.

The photograph of Abay shows a confident, beautiful woman in a diptych with a camel. The details of the grasses and the sand at her feet and the gorgeous color of her skin draw the viewer into her eyes. The eyes of a woman who dared defy her mother and her culture to change a tradition of mutilation.

In a world where 80 percent of refugees and displaced people are women and girls, and where one in three women has been beaten, abused or raped, Phil Borges turns his hasselblad into a vehicle for compassion. If only more artists were as humanitarian as Borges, perhaps our world would be a different place.

artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.

If you go:

Through May 23
“Empowered Women”
Open Shutter
755 East Second Avenue
970-382-8355

Computer a tool to take work beyond the familiar

Photo Left: Gerald Wells, a Southwest Colorado resident for 37 years, says using a computer to create art has returned a sense of discovery to his work.

Photo Right: “Mothership” created using 3-D scanning and computer plotting.

In 1963, Gerald Wells went to Vail to start an art school. He taught for five summers, envisioning an art utopia. He evangelized about an art school that would encourage students to do what they wanted to do without interference – a school that would promote inventiveness.

The Vail art school never became a reality, but Wells was determined to relocate to the Southwest. His studio partner at that time at Western Carolina University was Al “Doc” Sarvis, a member of the Monkey Wrench Gang. Sarvis’ friend was a guy named Edward
Abbey.

“Abbey said: ‘If you really want to drop out, there’s this little school in a place called Durango,’” Wells said from his studio at Fort Lewis College, where he spent the last 37 years teaching and making art.

According to Wells, both Sarvis and Abbey applied for jobs at FLC, but were turned down.

“That’s Fort Lewis history. They turn down every opportunity. Can you believe it? They wouldn’t hire Edward Abbey to teach in the English Department?” Wells said.

Wells planned to leave Durango after his first year at Fort Lewis. He decided to stay because he thought that as the community grew, the new residents would be more forward thinking and make a difference.

But nothing has really changed, he says.

“The Southwest is focused on its history,” he said. “The people who come here are tied to the past. The tourists who visit are looking for the Old West. It is something we keep perpetuating through the handmade crafts that we call fine art.”

“Good art isn’t regional,” Wells said. “We don’t have a Southwest doctor or a Southwest physicist, but we have a Southwest artist? People use the label for personal legitimacy, but it’s not something you simply elect to be.”

For Wells, art is innovative and unfamiliar. He thinks Southwestern artists are re-doing the same old things, focusing too much on history.

“It chokes new ideas and prevents them from getting started,” he said.

He acknowledges that his own representational images are about his anger at the decaying human condition. They are not art he claims.

His art is the work he creates on the computer.

“The computer changed me and changed my life. There are no rules. I can get away from representation and get back to discovery.”

His computer-based art is created using 3-D software such as Lightwave and Cinema 4D and vector programs such as Moto. The work “Mothership” features a crescent-shaped image floating against negative space and is printed with archival inks, looking almost like
pastel. It took two days for the computer to render the graphic, which shows a photograph compressed into hatch marks and shapes that are far beyond the familiar.

“The most deadly thing for creativity is control, since – improperly imposed – it merely drags what might have been a new discovery back into the scissors of history, and that is the end
of the creative outcome,” Wells wrote in an e-mail detailing his philosophy. “So I work with the process in order to preview as many options as possible before introducing elements of structure that will guide and preserve an image.

The process is never over, from a conceptual standpoint, and there is little to say about the image that gets hung on a wall, except that it might provide a clue about something far more important: the next image that I hope I will be able to make.”

Wells, who earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Mississippi, said his art education was about what he thought.

People such as David Smith taught him to look at the way art changed everything around it. To look through it at what it defines.

“Anyone can paint and draw, but I want to know what you think,” Wells said.

Then he went on to lament about local amateur artists painting flowers.

“I know these people and what goes on in their personal life. They aren’t telling the truth. Artists have to tell the truth. Art is about interaction of people. It has very little to do with pretty pictures.”

artsjournalist@centurytel.netLeanne Goebel is a freelance writer focusing on the visual arts.

Jeremy Moore won best of show in the 46th annual
Juried Student Exhibition at the Fort Lewis College Art
Gallery with “Similar Disparity.”

Fort Lewis College art students score hit after hit

I didn’t have high expectations for the juried student exhibition at Fort Lewis College gallery. Student work is often filled with imitation and mimicry, aspirations to be like a favorite artist.

A young artist’s craft is still developing; the aesthetic is only coming into tune. It can be miss after miss with the occasional hit.

Not the 46th annual Juried Student Exhibition. It scored hit after hit with only the occasional misstep.

The painting in this exhibition was strong and clearly inspired by Assistant Professor Kevin Bell. His work is often sparse, exploring tension in the mundane in-between places of the contemporary western American landscape. Bell explores what we have created, not what is necessarily beautiful.

Paintings by Keith Dale, Eirick White, Ami Dore, Krista Mickelson and Jeremy Moore seem influenced by Bell’s work. Dale’s oil paintings “19th Street” and “Arroyo” show images of hauntingly vacant-looking buildings, black asphalt painted with yellow stripes and mobile homes illuminated by a single streetlight.

White’s “The Decision” is a painting of the men’s room, a toilet on one side, a urinal on the other. Dore’s “Waiting Out Your Philistinism” features an oddly illuminated turquoise bucket chair suspended in strong, angular shadows. And Mickelson’s nicely crafted watercolor “Gurt se Dank,” which literally translates as “belt is thanks,” is a painting of a German billboard at a highway intersection with fluffy clouds in the background.

“Best of Show” went to Jeremy Moore for his acrylic-and-oil painting “Similar Disparity,” a painting of a red-headed girl sitting on the transformer box of a power pole at the same level as a raven who is perched on the line. The sky is tangerine and the girl is slouching, staring at the raven whose head is turned in her direction. They watch each other. Moore is a senior, and his work has narrative his drawing skills are strong.

Rebecca Barfoot’s painting style and technique stood out as unique. “Annie Swynnerton & Ellen von Unwerth: The Impasse Between Pleasure and Decadence” is a large oil-and-acrylic mixed-media work of an illuminated Victorian Swynnerton-esque figure surrounded by erotic von Unwerth images.

Strong ceramic and sculptural work appeared in the show. Jessica Davis’ animated and amorphous teapots were awarded the juror’s choice award. Lydon Wilkinson’s “Memories at Peace” is an interesting bowl filled with what appears to be a ceramic sea anemone. Too bad the bowl is cracked; it might have won more than an honorable mention. Wilkinson also won an honorable mention for his cement-and-chain creation, “Unchained Spirit.”

Colin Spear earned honorable mention for his slab-constructed ceramic vessel “Tipping Point,” a leaning house with its roof flapping open. And Joel Morgan won an honorable mention for his untitled sculpture of three wooden cubes made from twisted tree limbs.

Terry Gasdia should have won more than an honorable mention for his bas-relief sculpture in white Colorado Yule marble “Rain Dancers.” This sculpture of what appear to be Hopi rain dancers is a very fine work with lovingly carved details in the feathers, corn and beaded jewelry the dancers wear.

Juror Laurel Vogl has selected and awarded strong and inspiring work by students in a wide range of media. In fact, I believe this is the strongest student show at Fort Lewis this year.

artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.

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