Visit art displays at the Bandon Library in the lobby gallery and cases. Click here for background and contact information.

CHECK OUT Bandon Library Art Gallery Facebook Page

The show is open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday during the library’s hours:

• Tuesday: 10:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
• Wednesday: 10:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
• Thursday: 10:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
• Friday: 10:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Saturday: 10:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Closed on City of Bandon holidays

Find more details on our Facebook page.

DECEMBER 2018  &  JANUARY 2019

• Nature Works Collective – Eco-printed and dyed fabric and paper.
• Works in this show is by Christine Hall, Carol P. Jones, and Barbara Lebiedzik

The Nature Works Collective is a group of women dedicated to making wearable art, as well as practical and decorative objects, all made with natural fabrics such as silk, cotton, or hemp, and dyed and printed using plant materials. This collection of scarves, boxes, wall-hangings, and hand-bound journals (and a re-purposed shoe!), exemplifies the soft colors and smudged leaf and petal shapes the direct contact printing technique so beautifully creates. Some of the wall pieces are woven by the artists, and incorporate sticks, buttons, and beads. Each piece is entirely unique, and lovingly hand-crafted.

Eco-printing is a direct contact printing technique. Plant pigments are transferred to fabric or paper using heat. Each scarf, table-runner, journal, or wall-hanging is unique. Plant colors vary depending on growing conditions, stage of leaf growth, time of year harvested, and freshness. The colors of the plant materials may also change as they interact with other natural dyes and mordants used on the fabric.

The work in this show is by Christine Hall, Carol P. Jones, and Barbara Lebiedzik. All work is for sale.

OCTOBER  &  NOVEMBER 2018

• Surrealist painter David Black
  Kelly Oney of the Wool Company
• There will be a reception for David on Saturday, October 6th, 2-4 pm in the Sprague Room. Refreshments will be served. Everyone is welcome.

Painter David Black returns after 3 years, during which time he has gone from success to success, with shows all over the greater Coos Bay area, and collectors taking notice and making acquisitions of original paintings and prints. An explorer of surrealism and fantasy, David Black constructs complex, imaginative worlds using both the fantastical and the ordinary elements of life. With their vivid colors, deep focus, and rich detail, his paintings play with the laws of nature while maintaining a profound sense of order. The logic of these images is the logic of dreams; they hint at stories that may go anywhere. They invite us to participate, and to weave our own. We are happy to welcome him back with this show of new paintings and old.

The making of cloth and garments from wool has not changed fundamentally in thousands of years. Wool is harvested from the animal, cleaned and carded, then spun into thread or yarn. Kelly Oney of The Wool Factory, after knitting and crocheting for years, recently took up spinning, too. Here she displays a classic spinning wheel, various yarns and threads, and some of what one might make with those yarns.

AUGUST  &  SEPTEMBER 2018

• “Muse and Motivation”

• Paintings by Ava Richey

• Carved Gourds by Sunny Kudo”

After an absence from the Library Art Gallery of several years, we are pleased to welcome painter Ava Richey back. Working in oil, acrylic, various collage techniques and—unusually for a visual artist—language, she brings us a collection of poetry and paintings that contemplate the world. In works both abstract and representational, she observes and describes both inner and outer landscapes. Her world is a mostly quiet place, realized with paint, pastels, and textured collage in gentle colors, though there are occasional break-outs into more intense explorations.

Ava is also a gifted poet, whose spare and simple language is firmly in its point, whether reflecting on the beauty and power of the natural world, or the process of making art (or trying to understand it). Take the time to absorb her images and read her words; hers is a journey to share.

Sunny Kudo returns with a collection of carved gourds to take one’s breath away. Half of them are a celebration of fish and sea life and, as always, her brilliantly colored creatures are vigorously alive, as though she’s snatched them from the sea, mid-swim. Sunny uses the curves of the gourd’s neck to give them extra movement, which also allows the metallic paints to catch extra light. It is these details that give the work such energy and beauty beyond what is expected.

She has added masks to her repertoire, and these invoke their tribal origins while being entirely original. Birds, butterflies, and moths are depicted, too, yet are not merely decorative. Like her fish, her winged creatures seem only to have paused in their flitting long enough for her to capture them.

Her sculptural use of the twisting, turning gourds themselves to guide her makes these pieces visually arresting, and altogether unique.

JUNE & JULY 2018

• The 4^th Annual Mosaic Show

• “Distinctive Voices in Mosaic Art” 

The 4^th Annual Mosaic Show is here through July 31^st at Bandon Library Art Gallery. “Distinctive Voices in Mosaic Art” is a celebration of the artists’ personal expression in the medium.

 

Returning artists Kory Dollar and Vera Melnyk are showing new and exciting work, and master of the pique-assiette mosaic form, Kath Jones, is showing with us for the first time this year. Alli Bruno‘s Folk Art-inspired work is delightful and fun, while Pamela Mauseth inspires with her quiet angel and glowing lily. Jacqueline Iskander‘s subtle use of color to evoke a mood is evident in her Rhythm Series, each one inspired by a month of the year, and Mary Driver‘s stunning 63” wide forest is a wonderful example of intricate work in stained glass. There are mosaics in found and upcycled materials, traditional stone-smalti-gold-in-mortar technique, stained glass, and kiln-fired tiles.

Each artist’s voice is unique and strong—they are confident about what they’re saying, and how to say it.

MAY 2018

• Bandon High School Art Students
• All month there will be a box in the gallery to collect your votes for People’s Choice Award. All participating students will get drawing pencils and erasers, and gallery director Tracy Hodson will present a Curator’s Award.

The Bandon Library Art Gallery features the work of the Bandon High School Art Students. Under the direction of teacher Jen Ells, the grades 9 – 12 students at Bandon High encounter a wide range of historical and contemporary artists. Such work often becomes a jumping-off point, giving the students great creative freedom while maintaining the discipline of the assignments. They work clay, paint on silk, and of course, draw and paint on paper and canvas both realistically and surrealistically. They make portraits and self-portraits; folk art and still life. Their work is abstract, expressionistic, personal, and always interesting and original—even inspired.

APRIL 2018

• “Into the Dream”
• Paintings by Allison McClay;
• Sculpture by Cary Weigand

Allison McClay‘s paintings are a journey into a series of dreams, or into the strange, borderless space we inhabit when we’re somewhere between sleep and waking. Figures dissolve into abstraction, or are engulfed by and merged with plant life, seemingly as sentient (or more so), as the semiconscious humans they grapple with. Or embrace. Her insistence on leaving most of these pieces untitled allows viewers to enter the paintings with their own stories, memories, or allusions. Is this Ophelia, being rescued before she drowns? A baptism? When you move in to read the small words in the tape around a man’s hand: “I won’t I won’t I won’t” is he succumbing to fear, or fighting it? There are many hands in her paintings. Do they seek to comfort, or threaten, and how does the one they reach for feel about them? The viewer completes these paintings through his or her own perceptions—something that is always true when taking in art—but Allison leaves more than the usual amount of space in which that interaction can happen, making her work both personal and interpersonal; a creative dialogue.

Cary Weigand‘s carefully wrought figures are alive with personality and character, and come straight out of stories, myths, dreams. Each piece seems to have a tale behind it, a tale of humans and animals traveling together in unexpected combinations, or in relationship to one another in mystic ways. There are no clichés here: a woman and a dog ride together on the back of a buffalo; a possum is curled into a pack on the back of a young woman in a cart; an ancient figure sits with an owl, and wears a star and a boat on her own head, shaman-like; is she dreaming of the travelers behind her? What do her rapt eyes see? There are mysteries behind these pieces. Cary mixes extremely fine work with cruder areas of slab, a fully handmade technique that makes them seem as ancient as the stories they create, or remind us of.

MARCH 2018

• On the walls, Geralyn Inokuchi’s glorious paintings continue through March 31st.
• In the cases displays, Cary Weigand’s small, carefully wrought figures

Cary Weigand’s small, carefully wrought figures are alive with personality and character, and come straight out of stories and myths. Each little piece seems to have a tale behind it, a tale of humans and animals traveling together in unexpected combinations, or in relationship to one another in mystic ways. There are no clichés here: a woman and a dog ride together on the back of a buffalo; a possum is curled into a pack on the back of a young woman in a cart; an ancient figure sits with an owl, and wears a the head of a mysterious creature on her own head, shaman-like. There are mysteries behind these pieces. Cary mixes extremely fine work with cruder areas of slab, a technique that makes them seem as ancient as the stories they create, or remind us of.

These pieces are made with cone 6 porcelain, then stained and glazed, and combined with other materials. She finds inspiration in the materials themselves—their connection to the earth—and in the secrets of human nature. Cary Weigand was born and raised in Hawaii, earning a BFA and MFA from the University of Hawaii. She now lives in Bandon. Some of these pieces are available to purchase. To make further inquiries, please contact her at caryweigand@gmail.com.

FEBRUARY 2018

• On the walls, the abstract paintings of Geralyn Inokuchi
• In the cases displays by:
  • the Bandon Library Staff Picks Project, and
  • the Peace Rocks Project.

There will be a reception for all three on Sunday, February 4th, from 2-4 pm in the Sprague Room.

It would be easy to view Geralyn Inokuchi’s abstract paintings as mere bursts and swirls of color—and, as beautiful as they are, that would, perhaps, be enough—but the magic and power of these works is in their depths. Moving in to look closely, one is pulled deeper and farther into the many small moments happening within the larger canvas. Interplays of contrasting color create small eddies in the larger storm, and mysterious darkness contains surprising saturations of pure color. And there is texture—created by adding fibrous papers and painting over them, or removing areas of color to reveal what is layered below. A spirit of exploration is evoked, and the viewer is asked to take the time required to really see what is there, and to return again and again with fresh eyes. These paintings hold rich rewards for such efforts.

Though inspired by the atmospheres, hues, and moods of the natural world, Geri’s paintings nevertheless resist reduction to simple readings of landscape or skyscape: they are expressions of her innerscape. This is painting in its purest form, answerable only to itself. And in addition to all that, the work is beautiful.