Kenai artists — Blog — International Gallery of Contemporary Art

MAY 2023
CENTER GALLERY
2000 Journals: Filling the Void | Diane Dunn

I am a self taught multi media artist. Acrylic painting, collaging, book making, photography and sculpting are some of the creative roads I explore. I am drawn to installation and performance art as it incorporates the audience as a medium with which to complete the piece.

I have had my work shown at the Kerf International Exhibits, Seattle, Anchorage Museum, International Gallery of Contemporary Art under the mentorship of David Felker and Studio Works, in Portland, Oregon.

I call Kenai, Alaska home.

Artist Statement
My work was once described as having the flavor of Horror Vacui. A latin-derived term meaning “fear of emptiness”. I find great comfort in surrounding myself with a multitude of found or created objects. This body of work pushed me to great limits creatively, physically and emotionally. The images that fill this room are an outpouring of my thoughts and feelings.

The 2000 Journals: Filling the Void project was a year in the making. The mono printed images on each marks a moment on my life’s timeline during that 12 months. I can look at a journal cover and tell you how I was feeling and what was happening in my life in that moment.

The Performance and Your Participation

I will be taking up my own 500 page journal and begin the process of writing. I will be “in residence” during gallery hours for the duration of the show. I will record the thoughts and feelings that come to mind from the visual cues that surround me.

You are invited, one at a time, to come into my journaling space, look over my shoulder and read my journal entries. I ask that you do so in silence. You the observer become the observed.

You may write in the journals, but you must return them to any square in the grid. You the observer become my collaborator in this performance.

www.darkfruitfly.com

Virtual Exhibition Tour

JULY 2020
SOUTH GALLERY
Home | Alex Rydlinski

Alex Rydlinski is an oil painter from Fairbanks currently living in Kenai. He spent over a decade living in the lower 48, traveling around the country, and trying to get back home to Alaska. In 2017 he studied in Norway with the master painter Odd Nerdrum. He’s been living on the Kenai peninsula for nearly a year, creating a body of work steeped in the old master tradition with special interest in the human being in the Northland wild.

Artist Statement
The things we find most beautiful in nature are often the scars of tremendous violence. The beautiful fjords — the result of glaciers scraping and carving through the rocky cliffs. The beautiful rivers— rushing meltwater relentlessly eroding the earth. The beautiful mountains— the smashing of tectonic plates, sending crumpled crust miles into the sky. Our most beautiful sights could be the plains of Ares.

I try to paint in this same way; coarsely, with a lot of energy, scraped down and taken again, over many sessions over many months. I’ve scored the paint film with beach-washed volcanic pumice stones and scratched at it with kitchen knives. Whole figures have been moved a few inches to the left or right, hand gestures and facial expressions changed, colors endlessly modified - look for these traces and you’ll find them still.

The ideas evolve in this way, too. I start with broad themes and discover ways to reinforce the narratives over time. The old woman picking berries, for example, a picture about human resilience, originally had companions out in the field. But the focus is really about her personal struggle, and it becomes more emotionally intense now that she is all alone. When you think of Sisyphus, do you picture him with friends and family sharing in his burden?

I hope you enjoy my rough, Dionysian pictures, the fruits of my first year back home in Alaska. I’ve tried to strip them of all superficiality and delicacy, and get straight to the raw energy and emotion. In their coarseness, with their conspicuous scars of continuous change, I hope you find their beauty.

www.rydlinski.com

Listen to an interview with Alex and Anchorage artist Graham Dane on Out North Radio.