ASL ART Walk - October

Patty Liang

Fall is here at last. Fiery leaves adorned the trees and people were bundled in layers for cooler temperatures to meet at the Occidental Park for Deaf Spotlight's last art walk. I had the pleasure of leading the group of twenty people to view various art mediums on display.

We stopped by two of my favorite galleries: DavidsonGalleries and Foster/White Gallery in Pioneer Square.

Bratsa Bonifacho created amazing oil paintings with bombarding repetition of chaos in letters and colors. If you look carefully, you will see some systematic order and layers of paint into the work. His series was modeled after virus programs and their mission to destroy information so you would see and sense how overwhelming the information overload is. Rich colors overlaid by other colors to give depth, which allow you to sense something hidden beneath these layers. I would love to have one of his pieces!

You have to look at Eugenie Tung's fabulous works- at first glance, you would see various photos of empty rooms but you would feel like something was off. Feeling unsettled, you would look again, only to discover that these rooms were not just photos but paintings because the artist painted objects, pets and people, blending them into the background. She travelled all over the world and took pictures of her former residences, using the photos as a medium.

For instance, you could see the outlines of a person sitting on a chair, or two cats on the wooden floor. The artist would paint over these silhouettes in the background, rendering them invisible or even erased into the woodwork. The artist was able to achieve a delicate balance between extinction and potentiality of the space.

 

Jenny Schmid is a printmaker of incredible, satirical works focusing on society's obsessions: caffeine, audio, literature, and food, symbolizing that society cannot function without them at all. Each piece consists of a half-naked group sharing the same vice via different senses in close proximity. Through her social commentary, she forces the viewer to acknowledge the addictions in the world and how we unfortunately cannot survive without these vices.