Your path: 404 Not Found > Records > Writing Contest 2009 List of Winners > Additional Information for Veteran Students > Hidden Stories: Paintings
Hidden Stories: Paintings by Trude Parkinson and David Airhart
For Release: October 12, 2007Hidden Stories: Paintings by Trude Parkinson and David Airhart will open with a reception for the artists on Sunday, November 4 from 3 to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The exhibition continues through December 9.
David Airhart and Trude Parkinson will give a gallery talk in The Art Gym, at noon, Thursday, November 15, 2007.
Trude Parkinson and members of the art community – artists, writers, and student – will perform Echoes, a reading from the backs of Parkinson’s paintings, at 2 p.m., Saturday, December 1. Admission is free.
The Art Gym exhibition Hidden Stories includes more than 20 paintings by David Airhart and five installations of paintings and watercolors by Trude Parkinson.
David Airhart's paintings use symbol and metaphor to address the news of the day. Year by year, scene by scene, Airhart responds to and chronicles the events and policies that disturb him and the small things that offer hope. Airhart's paintings, for example, show a man with a forked stick poised to pierce a hornet's nest, another holding a giant boulder above his head and a third tentatively touching a sleeping dove. Some are caught red-handed, others exposed for their double-speak. At times the artist seeks relief in the day-to-day and lets his protagonist cavort with the dog. Taken together Airhart's paintings form a journal and a reckoning.
From 1995 to 2007, Trude Parkinson made four sets of paintings on panel and a series of watercolors, which are all are included in Hidden Stories. Parkinson's work is about family and the stories that shape individuals. In 2004, an Oregon Arts Commission Artist Fellowship provided funds for a residency in Germany, her father's homeland. Like Airhart, Parkinson focuses on the individual – a woman walking in snow, or at her easel, a boy with a gun, a young woman headed for a wall. These paintings occupy the fronts of panels. On the backs, the artist collages additional information: reproductions of German birth certificates, family photos, with letters on some and fragments of poetry on others. Once complete, Parkinson suspends the paintings in varying configurations to reveal and suggest the changing relationships of fronts to backs and parts to a whole. A Regional Arts & Culture Council Artist Project Grant in 2007 supported creation of several new bodies of work and a publication.
Both artists reside and work in Portland, Oregon.
The Art Gym, Marylhurst University is located at 17600 Pacific Hwy (Hwy 43), Marylhurst, Oregon, 97036. The gallery is open Tuesday - Sunday, 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)
More About the Exhibition
Notes from Art Gym Curator Terri M. Hopkins
Hidden Stories
David Airhart and Trude Parkinson make paintings that harbor stories that are complex and difficult to understand let alone unravel. Because they are paintings rather than moving and flickering images, they offer us time to look, time to absorb, time to puzzle. Airhart's paintings present evidence of one man's struggle to make sense of the news of the day. Parkinson's painting installations attempt to understand the complexity of a life shaped by other lives. The stories these two artists engage are ongoing.
Year by year, scene by scene, Airhart responds to and chronicles the events and policies that disturb him and the small things that offer hope. The Art Gym exhibition Hidden Stories includes more than 20 works from the past seven years.
In the past decade Trude Parkinson created four multi-panel painting installations and a series of watercolors. All five bodies of work are included in Hidden Stories. Some of the paintings seek to come to terms with the past. Others look to the future. Once complete she suspends the paintings in varying configurations to reveal and suggest the changing relationships of fronts to backs and parts to a whole.
David Airhart began his career in Boise, Idaho, where he was honored with an Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowship in 1986 and a solo exhibition at the Boise Art Museum in 1992. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1993 and caught the eye of museum curators John Weber and Prudence Roberts, who included his work in Crosscut, the Portland Art Museum's centennial exhibition. Airhart maintains his studio practice in Portland, and has continued to exhibit his work in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
Trude Parkinson also moved to Portland in the 1990s, following a career begun in Arizona which included regional, national and international exhibitions, a position as visiting artist in the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University, and an award-winning public art project. Parkinson quickly gained her footing in Oregon when her first multi-panel installation Accomplices: Memory and Metaphor was included the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum in 1997. Her installation Memories and Incidents was part of the citywide exhibition series Core Sample in 2003.
Trude Parkinson
Sightings and Passages
This new Art Gym publication documents Trude Parkinson's work in Hidden Stories. Trude Parkinson: Sightings and Passages is a 36-page color catalogue with an essay by Seattle artist and writer Victoria Ellison and poem by Willa Schneberg. It was made possible with support from an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, which she used to travel to Worpswede, Germany, in 2005. In 2007, the Regional Arts & Culture Council awarded Parkinson an Artist Project Grant to assist her in creating new work and a publication.
The Art Gym
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.