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/

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.

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!