Iskra Fine Art

Iskra in Prints Today at SAM Gallery

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View Corridor, archival pigment print by Iskra Johnson
View Corridor, limited edition archival pigment print, 20 x 49 inches, © Iskra Johnson

 

PRINTS TODAY | CONTEMPORARY PRINTMAKERS

Wed June 8- Thu July 7

Reception Thursday, June 9th, 6-7:30 PM

SAM Gallery at Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Avenue, Seattle WA 98101

 

It’s about time printmaking got some love in this town, and I am happy to say it’s big love! On June 8th Seattle Art Museum opens its much anticipated show “Graphic Masters: Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso, R. Crumb. In conjunction,  SAM Gallery launches “Prints Today,” featuring six contemporary Seattle printmakers including Troy Gua, Rachel Illingworth, Curt Labitzke, Stephen Rock, Kate Sweeney and myself. [Read more…]

Mood Indigo: Under the Influence

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Kimono-SAAM

Last Friday I attended the opening of Mood Indigo at Seattle Asian Art Museum. It was a beautiful spring evening, the sky luminous over the park, and inside the refined Art Deco building everything shimmered in pale shafts of daylight and the flicker of blue votives. The museum’s refined and stately ambiance makes any event an occasion, although curator talks can sometimes plunge me into deep states of cultural narcolepsy. Not this time! To hear curator Pam McClusky speak is to go to Burning Man without leaving your chair. As she told the story of Indigo she took us on a riveting journey through ancient civilizations and exotic lands, weaving history, myth, poetry and metaphor into a dazzling tapestry. In this exhibit her wit and insight is evident throughout, and every caption is worth a study. [Read more…]

Ode to Beauty: New Contemporary Botanicals

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Hydrangea contemporary botanical art on plaster by Iskra
Logic Study, with Hydrangea, mixed media on Venetian plaster, © Iskra Johnson,

Early spring has brought torrents of rain, warm Chinook winds and precipitous bloomings to the garden. Tulips, plums blossoms, the wild yellow flame of the forsythia, a riot of colors and scents that inspire bursts of energy and shifting moods.

I have two very different shows coming up this spring with radically different themes. There is a method to the madness, as I go back and forth between the grime and grit of urban construction sites, the urban streets, and the refuge of nature. Both series are about the interplay of structure and surface, and the narrative of impermanence. With both subjects I use my camera to capture moments on the edges of transition. [Read more…]

New Visual Approaches to Architecture and Space: Dwell

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I have started a new set of prints about urban displacement and place, titled “Dwell.” Here are the first images, as I look at a city in flux through different visual languages.

 

Relocation-Plan-Dearborn-Iskra-Print
Relocation Plan: Dearborn Encampment

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Gentrification and Appropriation, the Tagger and the Voyeur: Chinatown in Transition

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The walker in the city is an innocent and a dreamer. The walker in the city is a tourist, a voyeur, an appropriator and thief. Always with a camera, alert to the capture.  And now run home, to flaunt the souvenirs of beautiful decay.

Little Cuba At Jackson, © Iskra Johnson
Little Cuba at Jackson © Iskra johnson

And if the walker has no home but a shopping cart and a space under the Dearborn exit ramp, the walker in the city is a “vagrant,” a word that seems like it should come from the same root as “vacant” but does not.

This person asleep unconscionably at 1 PM under loud traffic is also a thief, stealing a sense of comfort and safety from the other walker, the one with the cellphone held up looking anxiously sideways and sniffing: homelessness doesn’t smell so good.

The support system for the first walker is an entire technopolis devoted to the instant global image stream and the fine distinctions aficionados can make within the pungent hashtags of #ruinporn, #beautifuldecay, and #grime_nation. The support for the second walker is thin, but offers here and there the generosity of climate, a spare dollar, free food or a freestanding and temporarily private toilet. [Read more…]

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