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Dana Lynn Louis, Faith: Suspended to be Exhibited at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University
For Release: February 08, 2007The Art Gym at Marylhurst University will open Faith: Suspended, a major new installation by Dana Lynn Louis, with a preview reception on Sunday, February 25, 2007 from 3 to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The exhibition continues through March 28. Dana Lynn Louis will give a gallery talk in The Art Gym at noon, Tuesday, March 13.
In Faith: Suspended, Dana Lynn Louis floats multiple sculptures to animate The Art Gym's sheer volume of space. She experiments with cast shadow and light and with the idea of using a sequence of spaces in the formation of a whole. For The Art Gym, in addition to sculptural work, Louis has integrated drawing into the installation. In one section, she is drawing a delicate tracery of white on The Art Gym's cream-colored walls, and overlaying the web with drawings on Mylar circles and ovals. Many of her delicate drawings on Japanese rice paper can be seen through and among the hanging glass, paper and mica sculptures. Creating images suggesting delicacy and complexity intrinsic to nature, and our place in it, has been the subject of artist's work for many years. Louis lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
The Art Gym, Marylhurst University is located at 17600 Pacific Hwy (Hwy 43), Marylhurst, Oregon, 97036. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, 12 noon to 4 p.m. The Art Gym is located on the third floor of the B.P. John Building on the Marylhurst University campus, one mile south of Lake Oswego. Admission is free. (503-699-6243)
Founded in the fall of 1980, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University has a 26-year history of presenting work by hundreds of artists based in the Northwest. The Art Gym has published more than 50 exhibition catalogues and sponsored more than 100 conversations about art in the region. In 2004-2005, The Art Gym was a recipient of the Governor's Arts Award.
More About the Exhibition
In the ambitious installation Faith: Suspended in The Art Gym, Dana Lynn Louis builds on much of the work she has engaged in since coming to Portland in 1988 for a residency at the Oregon College of Art and Craft (then Oregon School of Art and Craft). Her sculptures and drawings are often about the internal workings of nature. Many of the early artworks remind one of the organs that do the body's dirty work, like the stomach and gut. Recently the artist's drawings and sculptures reference cellular arrays and the webs of vascular structures that capture air, transmit electrical impulses or carry nutrients to an organ, limb, branch or leaf.
Louis has always been interested in animating the space above the floor of the gallery and has created installations in college and commercial spaces that explored those possibilities. Louis also works actively as a public artist, and two recent commissions for Portland's City Hall and the Mary Bridge Children's Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, provide the springboard for The Art Gym installation.
At City Hall, Louis responded to the community's desire to honor Mayor Vera Katz. With Suspended Migration, she created a hanging garden of multiple sculptures crafted from glass beads, kiln-formed glass and other materials to fill a four-story atrium. There is a large red velvet cushion beneath it for the visitor who wishes to linger. In The Color of Breath at the Tacoma hospital, Louis integrated thousands of glass circles with the three-story windowed facade, causing pools of colored light to migrate across several floors of the building as the day passed. Like Suspended Migration for City Hall, in Faith: Suspended the artist floats multiple sculptures to animate The Art Gym's sheer volume of space; and like The Color of Breath in Tacoma, Louis experiments with cast shadow and light and with the idea of using a sequence of spaces in the formation of a whole.
Catalogue
The Art Gym is producing a catalogue for Faith: Suspended with an essay by Kate Bonansinga, director of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. To allow for photographs of the gallery installation, the catalogue will be published midway through the exhibition.
Acknowledgements
The Regional Arts and Culture Council provided major support for this project through an Artist Project Grant. A number of individuals also made it possible to publish the catalogue: Katherine Grant, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, Deborah Horrell and Christopher Gillem, Marilyn Murdock, Larry Kirkland, Judy Hill, Philip Krohn, Ken Unkeles, Eloise Damrosch, Gary Hartnett and Ann Sacks. The Art Gym acknowledges the support of the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support for our programming.