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!

"Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes" by Lauren Faulkner

"Born in 1890 in Austria, Egon Schiele was a figurative painter mentored by Gustave Klimt and associated with Art Nouveau and early Expressionist movements. Schiele is well known for his brutal confrontation of death, sex, loss and discovery as subject matter. His ability to convey weighty emotion through the simplicity of pose is masterful. During his life, Schiele’s work was lauded as depraved, pornographic and controversial. His visceral and uncomfortable representations of the human form, as well as the human condition, are unflinchingly honest, poignantly beautiful and expertly crafted. Although Schiele died in 1918 at the age of 28, his work reflects the talent of a fully-matured artist.

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."
---Lauren Faulkner, March 2011.

Lauren Faulkner recently graduated from the University of Puget Sound with a concentration in painting. She is originally from Portland, but Tacoma is her home for now. http://www.laurenfaulkner.weebly.com/


Lauren Faulkner, Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes installation at the Telphone Room Gallery, Oil on canvas paintings, March 2011. Painting on left: 22"x26"; Painting on right: 24"x30".



Lauren Faulkner, Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes installation at the Telphone Room Gallery, Oil on canvas paintings, March 2011. Painting on left: 22"x26".



Lauren Faulkner, Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes installation at the Telphone Room Gallery, Oil on canvas paintings, March 2011. Painting on left: 22"x26"; Painting on right: 24"x30".



Lauren Faulkner, Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes installation at the Telphone Room Gallery, Oil on canvas paintings, March 2011. Painting on left: 24"x30"; Painting on right: 16"x30".



Lauren Faulkner, Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes installation at the Telphone Room Gallery, Oil on canvas paintings, March 2011. Painting on right: 16"x30".

Emulate: A Visual Interpretation of Schiele’s Nudes by Lauren Faulkner is on view at the Telephone Room Gallery from March 4 - 28, 2011. Viewable by appointment almost anytime -- email us at thetelephoneroom@gmail.com for an appointment.

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).

"Montana (erased)" by Buddy Bunting

An erroneously left answering machine message detailing a stranger's travels through Montana form the basis for Buddy Bunting's Montana (erased) at the Telephone Room Gallery -- continuing the Seattle artist's exploration of the western landscape, its mythology of transcendence, openness, and expansion. The show features the actual answering machine message, as well as new paintings and found objects.

"I am fascinated by the western landscape, its mythology of transcendence, openness, and expansion. In researching certain sites of interest, there are diversions, many drawings, and wrong turns. I am compelled to make paintings of these places, paintings which resonate in the mind and require some time to reveal their effect."
---Buddy Bunting

Buddy Bunting, Cemetery at the Montana State Prison near Deer Lodge, Montana, photograph, 2008.
Photo courtesy of the artist.  

Buddy Bunting, creation or bust (honk 4 jesus), ink and pencil on paper, 5 x 7 in., 2010.
Photo courtesy of the artist.  

Buddy Bunting, Untitled, ink and pencil on paper, 5 x 7 in., 2008.
Photo courtesy of the artist.  

See more of Buddy Bunting's art at http://www.buddybunting.com/.

You can also listen to a 2009 interview with Buddy at http://podcasts.thestranger.com/2009/06/bunting.

 

Buddy Bunting is a Seattle based artist who works primarily in ink and watercolor on paper. His work has recently been seen locally at Winston Wachter Fine Art, the Tacoma Art Museum Northwest Biennial, Crawl Space Gallery, and the SOIL Gallery, as well as Powells Books in Portland, Oregon, and the Painting Center in New York City. He was a recipient of Artists Trust GAP Award for Individual Artists Projects in 2009 and 2004, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2008, and a 4Culture Special Projects Grant in 2005.

Montana (erased) by Buddy Bunting will be on view at the Telephone Room Gallery from November 5 - 30, 2010, with an everyone-is-welcome open house on November 5 from 6-10 pm. Viewable by appointment almost anytime -- email us at thetelephoneroom@gmail.com.

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.