Exit133 Tacoma Arts in Review: "Emulate" at the TRG

Erin Bailey visited us for our Party Line with Lauren Faulkner on March 18, and gave us a nice write-up on Exit133 this week:
http://www.exit133.com/6199/

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Tacoma Arts in Review: "Emulate" at the Telephone Room Gallery
(March 27, 2011 by Exit133 Tacoma Arts in Review)
by Erin Bailey
 
The Telephone Room Gallery is an alternative art space located in the North Tacoma home of Heide Fernandez-Llamazares. This pint-sized gallery operates under the mission “to house artist-driven exhibits and programming. Big ideas in an intimate space.” Named for the working rotary telephone mounted inside, the Telephone Room offers uniquely personal opportunities to experience art up close and to interact with artists over a welcoming kitchen table.

Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes features three nude portraits by emerging artist Lauren Walker inspired by iconic artist Egon Schiele. Faulkner’s work takes the viewer along on an artistic journey as Faulkner captures Schiele’s style while displaying her own progression and inspiration, and challenging her abilities. Egon Schiele was an Austrian artist during the turn of the 20th century who studied under Gustav Klimt, drawing inspiration from artists such as Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. Early in his career Schiele gained fame for his pornographic style, depicting women in erotic positions. Schiele defended the legality of distributing his work in public against many who argued it was pornography which resulted in the destruction of his work and three days in prison.

This is Faulkner’s first showing in a gallery since she graduated from University of Puget Sound with a concentration in painting, and her commitment to learning from process and exploration is clear. Says Faulkner: “In this series, I examine Schiele in terms of style. I combine some of Schiele’s most revered nudes with my own palette imbuing in the paintings a synthesis of Schiele’s and my own vision of the body. By emulating his style, I hope to gain further insight into his creative process, and to create work that reflects his artistic mastery.” While her work is as stylistically her own, traces of Schiele are evident in the exposure of the human body and poses that emulate loss, discovery and sexuality. In confronting eroticism, sexuality and Schiele, Faulkner sidesteps Schiele’s trademark eroticism, and instead imbues her subjects with serenity and modesty. In explicitly addressing and exploring female sexuality, the artist acknowledges her connection with the women she depicts.

The first nude you encounter is a woman praying with her back to the world. In hiding her face and layering blues and purples Faulkner imbues the work with a sorrowful ambiance; yet despite the sadness portrayed, the subject does not appear defeated. Faulkner uses her affinity for Schiele’s style to utilize color as an emotional language, layering shades to create an aesthetic rendering of what many see as Schiele’s grotesque style in a modern and feminine interpretation. Faulkner stated that she excluded the face to leave interpretation open, to allow for an individual emotional reaction from each viewer. The exclusion of the subjects’ face and their cultural ambiguity allow for the viewer to relate easily.

The Telephone Room activates the local art community, offering both established and emerging artists a venue to share their work and interact through “Party Line” artist talks and activities. Opening homes for the arts sustains the community in times when art support suffers from budget cuts and dwindling interest. Imagine if we all were art activists, offering our homes to local artist…what would the art community in Tacoma look like? Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes is on view through March 28, stop in before it closes!

Perfectly Small, Perfect Fit: "Montana (erased)" by Buddy Bunting

The Weekly Volcano recommends Montana (erased) by Buddy Bunting:
http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/events/werecommend/2010/11/buddy-bunting-montana-erased-the-telephone-room-gallery-tacoma/

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by the Volcano Staff on November 3rd, 2010
http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/

When the Telephone Room in North Tacoma says it's the world's second smallest art gallery, it's not lying. The space is small ... perfectly small, clocking in at an economical 12 and a half square feet. The cozy confines of the Telephone Room Gallery should be the perfect fit for Buddy Bunting's Montana (erased), which will open there Friday with an all-are-welcome open house. Inspired by a random answering machine message, Montana (erased) features paintings and found objects that explore the western landscape.

Nostalgic Road-Trip: "Montana (erased)" by Buddy Bunting

Rosemary Ponnekanti reviews Montana (erased) by Buddy Bunting in the Tacoma News Tribune:
http://blog.thenewstribune.com/arts/2010/11/02/buddy-bunting%e2%80%99s-nostalgic-road-trip-art-at-the-telephone-room/

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Buddy Bunting’s nostalgic road-trip art at the Telephone Room
By Rosemary Ponnekanti on November 2, 2010
Tacoma News Tribune

Most of us, on receiving a wrong-number telephone message, would erase it and forget it. Seattle artist Buddy Bunting turned it into art, and the obvious place for it was Tacoma’s tiny Telephone Room Gallery. Opening this Friday at the Telephone Room, a closet-sized gallery in a private North End house, is Bunting’s “Montana (erased),” an installation of paintings, photographs and objects that combines nostalgia and sociology with the erroneous voicemail at its center.

Pick up Bunting’s own handset inside the room, and you can hear the message, left on his phone while he was on a Montana road trip. (Bunting tried to reroute the message through the Telephone Room’s own rotary-dial phone, unsuccessfully. That would have been cool.) The message, ironically, details another Montana camping trip, this one by an unknown woman who’s remembering a long-ago time where she and her travel partner felt insecure as the only hippies in town, not to mention the only African-Americans. It’s a dreamy message, more vision than communication and filled with both memory and a sharp sense of not belonging.

Bunting explores both these components in his surrounding installation, which fits the tiny room like a glove. Exquisitely jewel-like oils and watercolors – the wistful, washed-out style that got him entry into TAM’s last Biennial – describe mountains, grass, four-square country buildings in the middle of nowhere. A gas station, lit up against an endless black night, is otherworldly; a pale brown RV floats like a thought. Stacked on shelves are rock collections, piles of old National Geographics, dried poppy stems. Only the baby pictures don’t really work – this is about Montana as a state of mind, not a personal scrapbook. It transforms the Room into a memory, with vaguely regretful feel, of both a place and a sense that whoever lives here is on the very edge of community.

Buddy Bunting’s “Montana (erased)” opens 6-9 p.m. Friday at the Telephone Room Gallery, 3710 N. 7th St., Tacoma, and is on view by appointment through Nov. 30.
http://www.buddybunting.com/

Inspired Art: "Montana (erased)" by Buddy Bunting

Dawn Quinn reviews Montana (erased) by Buddy Bunting in the current Tacoma Weekly: http://www.tacomaweekly.com/citylife/art/inspired_art/

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Inspired Art by Dawn Quinn
Published on Wed, October 27, 2010
http://www.tacomaweekly.com/

Buddy Bunting depicts ‘Montana (erased)’ at the Telephone Room.

Seattle artist Buddy Bunting takes a lot of road trips. In traveling the country, he returns home inspired to work on pieces that encapsulate what he has seen. The Telephone Room Gallery’s newest show, “Montana (erased),” highlights pieces and items he has made and found on a trip to the “Treasure State.”

One element of the exhibit that ties in with the Telephone Room Gallery is a voicemail that Bunting had received while he was away that prompted and inspired the works. According to the gallery’s press release on the show, “an erroneously left answering machine message detailing a stranger’s travels through Montana form the basis for Buddy Bunting’s ‘Montana (erased)’ – continuing the artist’s exploration of the western landscape, its mythology of transcendence, openness and expansion.”

The message was a coincidence, and Bunting kept it on his phone for quite some time. Fellow Washington artist Nicholas Nyland told Bunting about the Telephone Room Gallery and he deemed it the perfect place for his newest show. In the message, the woman relays a past trip during the 1960s in which she and her boyfriend visited and were not met with the warmest reception, which led to them driving through the state and not staying.

On the left wall of the space, eight oil-based pieces don the walls on paper, cardboard and other materials. A bird, train, rocks piled high in the middle of an idyllic valley, sunrise over the horizon, a vintage van, a lone, tall, aging building in the middle of nowhere, trees and a double payphone at night, as seen at a gas station all combine to form images that Bunting likely came across often in his travels, and that together form a personal story.

Straight ahead into the gallery, shelves house more pieces, found and formed by Bunting. A detailed rocky canyon and an ink and pencil depiction of a motor home with “Creation or Bust” and “Honk 4 Jesus” donning the sides frame a hexagonal vase filled with brown flowers. Below, more prints, this time colorful, rocks likely picked up on the road, a landscape photo filled with trees, Book of Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets, a National Geographic issue from July 1971 and a phone armed with the infamous voice message fill up the rest of the shelves.

To the right, 10 pieces fill up the expanse of the sea foam green wall. An oil colored piece of canyons tops the left side, with simple color for the sky and brown landscape. Below, five pieces of paper that look as if torn from a Moleskine notebook are all placed in succession after the other with each utilizing only one color and each highlight a store sign or a car seen along the road.

The middle and right side of the wall feature three acrylic paintings, each varying greatly in content. The first has two children’s heads and below, another scenery shot of Montana’s mountain ranges fill the piece with jagged rocks jutting up, green moss covering them and a pale blue sky peeking through with clouds interspersed. To the right, a vivid interpretation of an empty gas station at night shows the brightness of the pumps and the lights of the shop, multi-colored tints that reflect from the ground and the ceiling and all together create an entrancing shot. A print of St. Francis in the dessert that Bunting possibly pulled out of a catalog rounds up the pieces on the wall.

Visitors to Bunting’s show should try to listen to the voicemail message before checking out the other elements, as it is what created the framework for every piece included. Upon playing, listeners will hear a story of a woman being in a remote area and a completely different world than she is used to. Much of Bunting’s works are about Western spaces and feelings of isolation, so the message appearing on his machine when it did was a fateful reminder of his intents and visit. The show fully utilizes the Telephone Room Gallery’s minimalist space and is an opportunity to take in new works from a renowned Northwest artist.

“Montana (erased)” will be on view at the Telephone Room Gallery starting on the night of the show’s opening, Nov. 5, which takes place from 6-10 p.m. and will show through Nov. 30. The pieces are viewable by appointment almost anytime, just e-mail at thetelephoneroom@gmail.com to schedule a time/day. For more information, visit http://thetelephoneroom.blogspot.com/ or “like” the Telephone Room Gallery on Facebook (www.facebook.com/Telephone.Room.Gallery).

Teeny is Big

Oh, it just never ends, but we never mind it either... the Seattle Weekly named us the "Best Teeny Tacoma Art Space - 2010".

"Small is good, when you can get to it. At 12.5 square feet, The Telephone Room occupies a closet-sized space in a Dutch Colonial home that since 1930 had been occupied by nothing more than a black rotary-dial telephone. But in May 2009, this tiny room began housing artist-led installations by the likes of Blake Haygood, Ben Hirschkoff, Nicholas Nyland, and Kristen Ramirez. One exhibit featured floor-to-ceiling drawings, another was inspired by episodes of drunk dialing, and a third riffed on brass chandeliers. Directed by artists Heide Fernandez-Llamazares and Ellen Ito, the space is available to visitors by appointment and at monthly art openings." —Adriana Grant

I'd like to point out that Blake, Ben, Nicholas and Kristen aren't the only artists we've hosted. We also loved showing Tacoma a teeny bit of (in order of my memory) Shannon Eakins, Marc Dombrosky, Lisa Kinoshita, Matt Johnson, Jennifer Peters, Chris Sharp, Zack Bent and Gala Bent, Peter Lynch, Allison Hyde, Jeremy Mangan, Laura Komada and Paul Komada, Elise Richman, James Porter, Saya Moriyasu, Pei Pei Sung, Randy Wood, Jessica Bender, Noal Nyland, Julie Rivera, Jessica Balsom, and Ellen Ito.

Here's what the Telephone Room Gallery looks like when none of the above artists are showing in it:

Thanks Adriana!

"I don't hate anyone" by Chris Sharp will be on view at the Telephone Room Gallery from August 6 - 29, 2010, with an open house on the evening of August 6. Viewable by appointment almost anytime -- email us at thetelephoneroom@gmail.com.

We're the best!

...at least that's what Seattle Magazine says. They noted the Telephone Room Gallery as the most artistic use of outdated architecture in their annual "Best of" issue (December 2009). Follow the link, or find it in print at a newsstand near you!

And as always, stay tuned for information on our upcoming exhibitions. We're featuring Elise Richman in January 2010. Say goodbye to the aughts and hello to the... tweens?

Blake gets us into the Tiny Top Ten

Thanks Regina! Or is it thank you Blake!

www.artsjournal.com/anotherbb/2009/11/blake-haygood-in-the-telephone.html

"It 12.5 square feet, The Telephone Room in Tacoma is not the smallest gallery in the world but must be in the tiny top ten.

From its Web site:
It is located in a Dutch Colonial home in Tacoma and since 1930, its sole purpose has been to house a black rotary dial telephone. Until now...The Telephone Room is small, but its mission is big: to house artist-driven exhibits and programming. Big ideas in an intimate space.

Opening tomorrow night are Blake Haygood's new drawings under the collective title of Is You Is, in gouache and graphite on ragboard.

Haygood began as a printmaker and still paints in a modified printmaking style, incising form into wood panels and painting in layers through a process of erasure, laying on and partially wiping out. When he began painting earlier in the decade, acrylics in a mineral varnish woke up his weightless world.

Born in Athens, Ga., in 1966, he grew up in a smaller, more rural town nearby, spending a lot of time at his grandfather's farm bordered by woods. Untended, the farm had slid into disrepair. Beyond a barn with a caved-in roof and machinery rotting in the field was the woods, also strewn with broken machines.

A walk in the countryside meant a scramble over dumped refrigerators, cars and parts of cars, washing machines, buzz saws, bikes and bed posts. Wild grasses, mosses and tree saplings used the machinery as nurse logs, shooting up inside it and growing large enough to shoulder it aside or bury it.

Haygood's new work has moved beyond the semi-pastoral decay of the old South to explore more remote cosmologies. Inside them, densities of cut stone or wood linger on their blunt bases before pushing off into the air. His forms may be eroded, but his soft hues are always brand new. He is a master of the potent blank. He takes his cues from traditional Chinese landscape artists who created air, water and mountains largely by leaving them empty. Haygood's forms are lovely, but it's the colored air around them makes them matter.

Is You Is is half a line. Musically, it ends in a love song. Although Haygood uses the reference to mark a career turning point, no longer part-time painter and part-time art dealer but painter full-time, his paintings make the song their own. What is lost, ruined or left behind is desirable again in the redeeming space he makes for it. "
---Another Bouncing Ball: Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go, November 2, 2009, www.artsjournal.com/anotherbb.

The Telephone Room Gallery opening for "Is You Is?" New Drawings by Blake Haygood is Wednesday, November 4, 2009 from 6-9 pm and Blake will be in attendance.

"Is You Is?" New Drawings by Blake Haygood is on view from November 4 - 30, 2009 in the Telephone Room Gallery. Viewable by appointment almost anytime—email us at thetelephoneroom@gmail.com.

The Volcano Gods notice us

Alec Clayton writes nice things about Jessica Bender's art in The Weekly Volcano today.

"The Bluebird: Jessica Bender’s tribute to Charles Bukowski"
by Alec Clayton
August 13, 2009
www.weeklyvolcano.com/2009-08-13/visual-edge/4088

Dead Man in my House

Rosemary Ponnekanti wrote a very nice article about the Telephone Room Gallery and our Art + Ice + Beer event with Jeremy Mangan in The Tacoma News Tribune today:

"From small art gallery, big ideas"
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Rosemary Ponnekanti
www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/840897.html

Also published in the Seattle Times, "Tiny Tacoma art gallery makes big splash":
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2009708623_tinygallery23.html





Photos courtesy of the Tacoma News Tribune.

Wild Kingdom

The Telephone Room Gallery chose the artist for the August 2009 City Arts Tacoma Curator's Eye. We chose Shannon Eakins who lived in Seattle and then Tacoma for the past 8 years or so, and recently moved to Las Vegas to pursue her MFA in sculpture. We miss her already.

Unfortunately, magazines have to edit their articles but we want to share with you the original article that we wrote...

Wild Kingdom
Shannon Eakins, Artist Selected by Martin Gengenbach, Ellen Ito and Heide Fernandez-Llamazares of the Telephone Room Gallery

Almost any city dweller has had an encounter with wildlife. The moment when you see a crow on the sidewalk, and you both stop short, eyes locked...is this a greeting? An acknowledgement? A silent challenge? What informs our interactions with wild animals? Do we want to tame them? Engage with them? Live among them undetected? Shannon Eakins' artwork reflects upon such moments of secret communication and explores our shared experiences with the Animal Kingdom.

While living in Tacoma for the past five years, Shannon has engaged with falcons, deer, and other animals of the Northwest. Her work doesn't simply depict animals-this is art that aims to be meaningful to animals and to beguile them: an exquisite, intricately embroidered falconry glove, an alluring installation of kinetic sculpture that mimics the sounds, sights and scents of deer mating rituals.

Shannon contemplates our shared urban environment and the animals that surround us but are not our pets. It is something we can all relate to: we've all had experiences with animals, either thrilling in the connection made ("and then it looked right at me") or not made ("and it didn't even see me").

"Dolphins may voluntarily swim with us (and have for decades, in the Bahamas), but what if I actually entice a whitetail deer into a gallery to participate in my installation, or what if that falcon actually comes when I call it? I want to see if animals can care about what I make. People seek something from wild animals even when they are not using them to fulfill a basic need. Could the same be said in reverse? I really want there to be a reason for this reciprocity and I want my work to explore that desire." --Shannon Eakins






I Made This for Us. 2008. Embroidered leather falconry glove, hood, and bronze whistle. Performance/documentation views. Dimensions variable. Photos courtesy of Shannon Eakins.

Shannon's blog: www.shannoneakins.blogspot.com

Eakins & Dombrosky: www.tacomafunmachine.blogspot.com and www.battlebornlv.blogspot.com

Shannon was a part of the Telephone Room Gallery's inaugural Hello! show (February 18 - April 30, 2009). The Telephone Room Gallery is always viewable by appointment at thetelephoneroom@gmail.com.

Small is Dynamite!

...Or should we say TNT? The News Tribune arts writer and critic Rosemary Ponnekanti wrote about the Telephone Room on the GO Arts blog:

"Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Small art, fun space - the Telephone Room

Posted by Rosemary Ponnekanti @ 09:54:20 am

Laura Komada, "Untitled (bigfoot and tree)." Photo courtesy The Telephone Room.

It may be tiny, but there's a lot of art going on at the Telephone Room over the next week.

The one-room gallery inside the North-end house of artist Heide Fernandez-Llamazares is having two open houses: one today, to close the current show, and one next Wednesday, to open the next. The gallery, which Fernandez-Llamazares and co-organizers Ellen Ito and Marty Gengenbach call the world's second-smallest gallery (what's the smallest? The Tollbooth, of course), measures just 12 1/2 square feet. It's an original room in the Dutch Colonial house, built with curvy shelves to accomodate those wishing to have a private conversation on the black rotary dial phone (which still works, by the way.)

Since the room is pretty unusable for anything else, the artists decided to convert it into a gallery. It can fit about three medium-size flat works, lots of small ones, or maybe one medium installation (can't wait to see that, maybe the tiny room crammed with giant balloons a la Western Bridge?!) And since it's in Heide's house, you have to email to set up an appointment - unless there's an open house.

Which there is, tonight. The current show "Home Sweet Home," featuring Laura and Paul Komada of Seattle and Noal Nyland of Lakewood, is almost over - last chance to see it is from 5-8 p.m. Paul Komada's hand-knit Mondriaan-ish geometry mixes cozy texture and strict form in a pleasing way. Nyland (brother of Nicholas) creates a mapped landscape of greens and gray-blues with quilted fabric, the pieces chopped out like deer-bites in a rose bush, calm but disconnected. Laura Komada's watercolors are simple but strong: My favorite is the untitled Big Foot next to a fir tree, their shadows looming far beyond the reality.

Next open house is for Jeremy Mangan, who just won the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation Arts Award, and who'll be creating a life-size 3D painting of a shot-dead old-west gunfighter in a pine box. (That'll make it extremely crowded in the Telephone Room, which fits about two viewers at a time.) Rumor has it that he'll also be leading a beer mug ice-carving session in the backyard, complete with local microbrews. That's 5-9 p.m. June 17. I'll be there.

So where is the Telephone Room? Email thetelephoneroom@gmail.com to RSVP and find out the address. You can also visit http://www.thetelephoneroom.blogspot.com/ for info."

We have officially become citizens of the Greater Blogosphere. Thanks, Rosemary!

as seen in City Arts, April 2009

Congratulations to us: the April 2009 issue of Tacoma City Arts magazine features a quarter page blurb on the Telephone Room Gallery in "City Seen"! (see page 7)



"Operator? Art, Please
The world's second-smallest art gallery, the Telephone Room, has a big mission: artist-driven exhibits and programming that spark more personal conversations between artists and the public. Located in a private 1930s home, this twelve-square-foot gallery boasts a rotary phone with a cool vintage ring. Founders Heide Fernandez-Llamazares, Marty Gengenbach and Ellen Ito hope the nontraditional space will inspire artists to try something new or explore site-specific ideas. Sixteen artists participated in Hello, the inaugural exhibit, which runs through April 15. For upcoming Shrinky Dink-making with Jessica Bender, contact thetelephoneroom@gmail.com."
-- Virginia Bunker, City Arts Magazine, April 2009.