It has been six years since Director/Curator Scott Patnode first developed the idea of having regional

artists use the walls of the Jundt Art Museum as a drawing surface. Initially it was a clever and loaded

curatorial idea, but, with the passage of time, it has become something more - an important triennial

celebration of what some of the area's best visual artists do. In addition, by limiting each artist to a

drawing, the exhibition extends and highlights the Jundt Art Museum's well-known collection of drawings

and prints. Yet these Drawn to the Wall exhibitions are unique in that each work is created in situ,

specifically for the exhibition, and destroyed afterwards, raising questions about the idea of archiving itself.

Just as the artist, Ed Keinholz, renowned for his room sized tableaus, termed the rather complicated

sculptures that acted as inspiration for his larger work, "drawings," Patnode makes the unspoken

assumption that all artists "draw." As in past years, Patnode asked five accomplished artists

from a variety of disciplines to work in the gallery on one eleven and a half foot by eight foot panel

each. The pieces will be completed over a two-week period. Few stipulations are given, except

that after the exhibition is finished, the drawing is finished and each panel repainted gallery white.

Gina Freuen is known for her ceramic sculpture which has been shown in exhibitions

throughout Washington State, California, Oregon, Kentucky, North Carolina (where she received a

NICHE award) and elsewhere. Like Ken Price or Ron Nagel who built their careers on ceramic sculpture

set in deliberate dialogue with the traditional vessel, Freuen uses the teapot as a starting point or a

parameter. She then loads each piece with beautiful glazes and various coli aged elements, and lets

the body of the pot morph into alarming proportions, effectively changing each from a symbol of

domesticity into something wilder, funnier, and more psychologically subterranean. In addition to her

sculpture, Freuen has always made drawings. Large and loose, their lines compliment the curves

of her ceramic work but are usually rendered in black, white, and gray or beige. In recent years,

Freuen has incorporated photography and digital technologies into these two-dimensional works,

experimenting with collage, both actual and on the computer. These pieces are complex. A pastiche

of imagery, they carry a psychic weight that differs from the quick, quirky humor of her sculpture, yet

they never lose the graceful sense of form and composition that is key to both bodies of her work.

Michelle Forsyth received her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and came to the USA,

obtaining her MFA from Rutgers University. Recipient of several Canadian Council awards, she was

recently awarded an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Southern Maine for Spring 2009 and an

Artist Trust GAP grant. While her primary medium is painting, Forsyth is decidedly a conceptual artist.

The youngest of the five artists, she has already developed several strong series on public violence

using media images or photographs as a starting point. What sets her use of the photograph apart from

others is how she manipulates it to change its initial effect. First, Forsyth isolates a small part of the

original photograph and then deconstructs that image in actual terms by breaking it down to its smallest

component, sometimes, tiny squares, sometimes little pixels or star bursts. These thousands of shapes

are either painted in brilliant color or cut out of paper or felt and attached to the surface of the wall with

pins. The artist states that these painstaking processes are a reaction against contemporary apathy

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toward media images of suffering. She wants to "make surfaces that are tactile and intimate so that the

viewer gets caught up in [the pictures] ...." The end result is pleasurable and confrontational in equal

measure. As soon as the beauty of these isolated bits of color is asserted, we realize that the original

intent of the image has been stunted.

Kevin Haas, who received a BFA from the Chicago Art Institute, an MFA from Indiana University, and

studied at the Tamarind Institute, comes from a printmaking background. Like Forsyth, Haas is a young

artist who works easily with digital images and video yet also has an affinity for traditional media, and his

approach is as conceptual and exacting as hers. He may photograph images through glass, or photograph

video images, or re-photograph photographs themselves. In his series Chicago Scribed, Haas used the

scratched and often dirty plexiglass found in public transit shelters as a filter for his photographs of the

city. The results are loose but careful, as the scratches themselves turn into calligraphic marks over

the decaying urban image. Haas claims that his "work deals with memory, movement, presence, and

perception in the urban landscape." And there is a tinge of deliberate nostalgia, not only in his subject

matter but also in how he marries twenty-first century technologies to older processes. After Chicago

Scribed was photographed, Haas chose to print it in photogravure, a mid-nineteenth century process

where transparent images are etched into metal plates. The results are beautiful, old and new, with both

photographic detail and lush etched line.

Richard Schindler's work reflects his experiences as both an intellectual and a craftsman in the truest

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sense of both words. Upon receiving his MA in painting and drawing from Stanford University, he

was awarded a residency at Roswell Art Center. After a decade in the Bay Area, he moved to the

Northern Idaho, where he cleared land, milled his own lumber, and built a home by hand. He points

out that because Nancy and Ed Keinholz lived in the area during the summers, he wasn't completely

isolated from art, "There was a touchstone to the outside world - people came from all over Europe

and the US." However, nine years later, Schindler moved to Spokane and began making rough hewn,

but decidedly elegiac sculptures composed of wood, metal, animal skins, and other found objects.

These often enormous pieces have the kind of contemporary romanticism found in work by Anselm

Keifer or Julian Schnabel - a bravura use of coarse materials that ends up suggesting nostalgia or

heroics gone slightly to seed. Like many sculptors from Robert Hudson, to Terry Allen, to Robert

Arneson, Schindler never abandoned the two-dimensional world and has consistently produced

paintings and drawings, not only to augment his sculptural pieces but as works in their own right.

Ken Yuhasz' work, while differing from Schindler's in material and style, shares certain sensibilities

and influences from West Coast 1970s assemblage, to Bay Area funk, to pop art. In Yuhasz' case, this

turns into a kind of easy populism which is obviously genuine and reflected in his background. The artist

grew up outside of Los Angeles and began his career as a draftsman for architects and manufacturing,

eventually ending up as an art director for the Appaloosa Journal in Idaho during the early 1980s. He

became frustrated with the changes in design technologies, how, in his words, "the work wasn't in my

hands; it was in someone else's hands or a computer." In order to reconnect with manual processes, and

under the influence of neon artist George Ray,Yuhasz began making neon signs. He went to Portland to

study at the Neon Art School there, and in 1991 he moved to Spokane and opened Acme Glass Works

while working at his sculpture. If Yuhasz has a signature process, it is how he attaches neon to objects

from daily life. If he has a signature style, it is his ability to find fantasy in the everyday world: where a

toaster is given propellers and a kerosene lantern, wings.

The pleasure of writing for this exhibition is that after considering each artist's work, there is still no way to

imagine how the five walls will look. If a valence of disparate talent creates a strong show, this one will do

that. If there is something else - some magic that happens when five individuals work in one space, in a

short amount of time - we'll see that too. For those of us lucky to be there when it is up, the immediacy

and temporal nature of a Drawn to the Wall exhibition is that it demonstrates what artists actually do,

highlighting process and privileging completion over collecting.

Frances DeVuono

Frances De Vuono is an artist, Professor of Art, EWU, and contributing editor for Artweek

This publication is funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign, 2007-2008© Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-0001