Saranac Art Gallery: Beautiful and Thought Provoking

This month at the Saranac Art Gallery works by the artists Lisa Nappa and Jen Erickson are on display. Each artists goes about their work with different goals, and methods, and each produces something that is beautiful and thought provoking.
Jen Erickson's work consists of varying sizes of canvases covered with a thin layer of clay and different shades of oil-based white paint.On this paint she draws small markings with a very fine mechanical pencil that has had its tip sharpened even more, so that she can make even smaller marks.She stated that after she got the materials for each of her projects ready, more often then not she would just draw, giving no mind to the final project but really just going with the flow. The diversity in her work is really what other see and take from it rather than each having a set meaning or purpose, people liken some of her work to markings resembling cells, sand , even etch-a-sketch lines. She herself states that for her, and her larger pieces of work, she really wonders what thoughts and memories would physically look like when decaying and likens her work to what she envisions would be "the decay of the human mind."
Her work really takes an abstract mind to really appreciate, at first you would see it would appear as nothing but dots, but given time, shapes and emotions begin to develop within the work. Not only personality, but the works themselves scream of the hard work put into making just one of the many pieces that contain thousands of dots and lines, and on her bigger piece probably closer to a hundred thousand dots.







Lisa Nappa however takes a completely different approach to art and how she creates it. With all of her pieces a single picture has been reformatted, cut, moved, rotated, and just about anything else you can think of in order to create very unique pieces of art. The picture is of a beautiful look at Lake Chelan, right here in Washington, which she has expanded and printed onto very thin plastic. These plastic pictures then have shapes cut out of them, many of them circles, where the circles are inverted or rotated and then put back in to the picture. Her motivation for using this particular photo for her work, she explained was because she wanted to invoke the feeling of "green", of healthy, of environment. The picture itself invokes this as the picture of Lake Chelan takes on a green color at the time of the photo. Her art also consisted of more than just the 2D but also ventures into the 3D, creating works like her Water Tower, which is a 4ft tall tower made of the picture of Lake Chelan folded into cylinders and then intertwined in a circle with layers upon layers.(See picture for better description) Another one of her works that takes an unusual twist consists of circular objects with small cut outs of the picture of Lake Chelan attached to them. Whats really odd about this work is that its almost like a complete reversal from the rest of her works that consist of square pictures with circles cut out of them, and now circles with square pictures placed on them. Even more interesting then the pieces themselves is the way these circles are arrange on the wall, invoking thoughts of almost a constellation of sorts made from all the pieces as one.
The pieces displayed by both of these artist are truly amazing, and nothing like you've ever seen before. Each piece is more though provoking than the last, making sure to keep you thinking throughout your visit. I highly recommend that if you have some free time any weekend in November you swing by the Saranac and check out this amazing gallery.