Collective Visions Gallery should open some minds this month as the space in between its walls welcomes and weaves a few different forms that might amount to artistic discovery.
On the visual side, all month long, is the unique collaboration of ceramic printmaking created by CVG artist Paula Gill, while musically, for one day only, the gallery will host the eastern-old-style combo of sitar and tabla played by Pundit Debi Prasad Chatterjee and Vishal Nagar at 7 p.m., Oct. 12.
Tickets for the concert are $19 in advance, $22 at the door, while Gill’s artwork will be on display free through Oct. 27.
Gill’s is a subtly avant-garde display of the mergence between two of this West Bremerton-based artist’s pastimes. After she completed her undergrad work at Carleton College in Minnesota, she wanted to move simultaneously in the creative directions of clay work and printmaking.
“But they said ‘Nope, you’ve got to pick one,’” she said, noting her choice – the graphic design trade of printmaking.
Luckily for local art lovers and for the finer art side of her work today, many years graduated and now her own boss, Gill can combine just about anything she pleases. Thus, this show marks a collaboration of tools from her printmaking past, ceramic tiles and color under an organic theme – “Seeds: meditations on hope.”
Equally collaborative, musing and naturally pure is the eastern-old-style sitar and tabla music of Chatterjee and Nagar, CVG president Alan Newberg noted. He booked the two Eastern-born, Western-traveling musicians last year, but due to some complications, Chatterjee performed with a sit-in percussionist.
So, Newberg said, he is excited to offer these two very talented players together in the gallery setting.
“On the one hand it can be very meditative and visual art is conducive to that meditative spirit as well,” he said. “Those spaces are very interesting … but on the other hand it also tends to have lots of harmonic shifts. And the kinds of rhythms that occur are also very distinctive from say jazz … or any other style of music, really.”
From repetitive to accentuate, it builds to crescendo with Chatterjee’s sitar and Nagar’s tabla in repartee, Newberg said, until they reach an improvisational space within the traditional cadence.
That space is also where the printmaking fine artist Gill dwells in this show as her tile making transcends its former self. This would be somewhat of a must-see show for fans of Gill’s river show in 2004 or her other tile show at the CVG in 2005. For those who haven’t yet, you can see her work at www.redstep.com — Red Step Studio online.
“I really wanted to stay with the tiles because I’ve been with them so long,” Gill said. “But I wanted to take them in a new direction.”
With the green ware (all the work done before the tile goes in the kiln) she starts by making slates of clay and covers them with a visceral liquid. Then using tools and techniques from her printmaking background, she embosses and carves her images before sending them into the heat.
Wait up to 36 hours, anxiously open the hatch to the kiln, look at the “gift,” she said, and one might be either exhilarated or destroyed.
“There’s this element of surprise, you direct part of it, but you also have to let go … let go of your ego,” she said later. “It’s exciting but it’s also devastating … But you also accept what the fire gives you as a gift.”
Once she’s gathered up the good tiles, she uses another printmaking tool, the ink brayer, to color the now spontaneous surface, creating images that reflect in some strange ways the journey of a seed making its way through a year and another and another as it cycles through life.
“Water is a symbol of the unknown, the uncharted,” Gill said, looking at one of her new pieces of this show entitled “The Guide.” “This represents a journey into the unknown where there are these cycles that are like our guides.”
Meanwhile, the next installment in the CVG’s monthly musical cycle will be Chatterjee and Nagar’s trip to Bremerton Oct. 12. In November, it will be electric cellist, vocalist Jamie Sieber.
