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Spring Shows & Notes on Travel

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Travel Quote Airports by Iskra
Lost in dreams at the airport…..

Lots going on this spring! This post will share updates about spring shows, new work, and some notes on my recent trip to New York. Many pictures, so you may want to view in your browser if you receive posts via email.

The annual Garden Show at Whidbey Island’s Museo is lovely, and runs through April 28th. Open 11-5 Wednesday through Monday and Tuesdays by appointment. Sundays open 12-5. Shown here, Magnolia Eva, a mixed media print in a limited edition of 5.

 

Museo Garden show Iskra
Museo Garden show in Langley on Whidbey Island

Opening Saturday May 4th is The Arty Party, in the Barrel Room Gallery at Domanico Cellars. 5-9. 825 NW 63rd St. Ballard 98105. I will be one of 18 artists showing a collection of work meant to move you and move from the wall to your home: all work will be under $500 (!). The Barrel Room is a wonderful alternative gallery space on the ungentrified edge of Ballard. In the gallery Nancy Stentz and David Harto create an ambiance of elegance and fun. Visit the art, have a glass of wine, go out in the courtyard and talk motor parts or gardens with the eclectic mix of patrons. This should be a great party, just in case you were in need of one.

 

The Arty Party at the Barrel Room Gallery

On to New York:

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New Landscapes | Memories of the Farm

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Pastorale No. 1 | The Copse, archival pigment limited edition print © Iskra Johnson

At about 5 in the afternoon you sit on the fence and rock your legs against the barn wood and pick splinters out of your knees in between watching the light that angles across the fields. The wind ripples and makes three shades of green light and you sing America the Beautiful without even knowing it is corny. You are nine years old or maybe 10, and braid your hair with horse ribbons. The word ribbon becomes part of your intimate knowing of the world: mane, braid, field, wind….

I have been away for awhile roaming the landscape of the Skagit to create a new series for an upcoming solo show at Perry and Carlson in March. The new work, which I am calling “Industrial Pastorale,” is a very personal evolution of imagery that explores the liminal edge between rural and urban landscape. [Read more…]

The Art of Infrastructure

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“For poets of the ordinary nothing has to be something else to be more than what it is.”— Anon

For People who Like Orange, industrial art print by Iskra
For People Who Like Orange, Mixed media archival pigment print on paper or canvas, size variable up to 50″

Contain. Hold. Spill. Accept. Refuse. ref-yoos. Dumpsters put a lid on what we can’t bear to keep or smell or look at any longer, and give us the illusion that our national sin of consumer indulgence is not squandered, but instead made noble through the absolution of waste management. All that discarded packaging is repackaged and sits neatly on the street in a box. Occasionally the lid lifts at a provocative angle and stays there, held by chains and wheels in suspension and possibility. Crows come. Lunch is foraged, toasters reclaimed, and on certain days of the week someone finds a discarded mattress and takes a nap. Dumpsters have their own oratory. Although more punk rock than symphony, every city gets a daily concert of metal on metal and smashing glass, the rumble of trucks, and the quieter transcripts of disenfranchisement and identity that take place at night, each one overwriting the other with a soft hiss and the percussive shake of the little ball in its can of paint. [Read more…]

New Visual Approaches to Architecture and Space: Dwell

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I have started a new set of prints about urban displacement and place, titled “Dwell.” Here are the first images, as I look at a city in flux through different visual languages.

 

Relocation-Plan-Dearborn-Iskra-Print
Relocation Plan: Dearborn Encampment

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Gentrification and Appropriation, the Tagger and the Voyeur: Chinatown in Transition

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The walker in the city is an innocent and a dreamer. The walker in the city is a tourist, a voyeur, an appropriator and thief. Always with a camera, alert to the capture.  And now run home, to flaunt the souvenirs of beautiful decay.

Little Cuba At Jackson, © Iskra Johnson
Little Cuba at Jackson © Iskra johnson

And if the walker has no home but a shopping cart and a space under the Dearborn exit ramp, the walker in the city is a “vagrant,” a word that seems like it should come from the same root as “vacant” but does not.

This person asleep unconscionably at 1 PM under loud traffic is also a thief, stealing a sense of comfort and safety from the other walker, the one with the cellphone held up looking anxiously sideways and sniffing: homelessness doesn’t smell so good.

The support system for the first walker is an entire technopolis devoted to the instant global image stream and the fine distinctions aficionados can make within the pungent hashtags of #ruinporn, #beautifuldecay, and #grime_nation. The support for the second walker is thin, but offers here and there the generosity of climate, a spare dollar, free food or a freestanding and temporarily private toilet. [Read more…]

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