(L) Polar Nights, torn paper and acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”, 2016 by Heather Moyer. (R) Spring at Three Creeks, soft pastel on paper, 16”x12”, 2018 by Janet Rawlings
Alyson Belcher (alysonbelcher.com)
Bio: Alyson Belcher is a fine art photographer based in Bend, Oregon. She received a bachelor of arts in humanities (English, art history and film emphasis) from the University of California, Berkeley and an masters in fine arts from San Francisco State University. Alyson’s work has been exhibited and published throughout the U.S. and internationally. From 2000-08, she focused her creative energy on a series of self-portraits made with a pinhole camera that combined photography with improvisational movement. She exhibited this work in numerous galleries from New York to Taipei. Since then she has focused on photographing landscapes and the natural environment. Her recent series Ice Portals was exhibited at the Bend Art Center in 2018 and has received awards from Lensculture and Life Framer. Alyson has been teaching in the School of Photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco since 2000. She specializes in the history of photography, contemporary fine art photography and alternative photographic processes. She currently teaches online photography classes in the MFA Photography Program at AAU.
Artist Statement: Since its inception in 1839, photography has been used to capture things that are not necessarily visible to the naked eye. Camera technology has given us the ability to see our world from extreme perspectives, from the smallest of microscopic details to vast aerial landscapes. All of my work is united by my obsession with the two most basic elements of photography: light and time. I have worked with many photographic processes, ranging from the earliest type of camera (pinhole) to the latest in digital technology. New projects are born out of a need to communicate something internally and my curiosity about different ways to work with the medium. I look for the relationships between darkness and light that convey mystery and ephemerality.
Ice Portals is a series of photographs taken during the unusually cold winter of 2017 in Bend, Oregon. These photographs are records of the unique ice formations that I discovered during my early morning walks. Each day I would visit the same location to find a completely new configuration of ice. The dramatic changes were the result of snow and ice slowly thawing and refreezing. Each of the topographic studies in Ice Portals is an abstract landscape that challenges our sense of scale. The lines, shapes and textures highlighted by the mysterious qualities of light and shadow create a confusing space that is fragile and fleeting.
Julie Winter: (Instagram: @julieprintmaker)
Bio: Julie Winter is a printmaker and educator with a master of fine arts degree in visual studies from Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Art (2018) and a bachelor of arts degree in social science from the University of Washington (1998). From 2011-2015 Julie studied under master printmaker and founder of the Bend Art Center (formally Atelier 6000) Patricia Clark to build her foundation in printmaking and visual studies. As a current artist member of Bend Art Center (BAC), Julie teaches printmaking classes in woodcut, linocut, electro-etching, drypoint, monotype and collagraph techniques and has served in leadership roles there, including interim executive director and gallery director. Her recent work includes curating the BAC’s invitational group exhibition WINTERxWINTER this past January. For this exhibition, Julie brought together the diverse creations of 20 artists working within a set of loosely defined parameters to create a new, shared landscape via a unique and stunning installation and the community interaction it generated. Julie’s passion for arts education and community-building inform her practice as a visual artist. She currently lives and works in Bend.
Artist Statement: My practice as a visual artist is tuned to the investigation of landscapes, shared relationships and connections with ourselves and others through place. I amplify found surface marks into a visual language through printmaking and mixed media utilizing the repetition of marks and the translation of them through a process-oriented, experimental approach. Pulling together various materials found in or derived from the landscape, whether collected objects, textures, photographs, drawings or emotional responses, I create many printing surfaces that I then layer on top of each other and edit down to locate the essential underlying image. I set up systems of observation and collection as ways to inventory the found surfaces and to subsequently transform them into orchestrated landscapes. The process of printmaking serves as a translation device for this information and guides the direction of the finished work. Through translation, a transitional space is created in the artwork, a platform for my mapping imagery of surface relationships and the intuitive nature and meaning of my work.