homeward waltz, 2023
Homeward Waltz served as a love letter to Seattle, inviting non-established and emerging artists to bid farewell to the summer season. The works in 'Homeward Waltz' explored themes encompassing memory, connection, embodiment, illness, spirituality, and personal narrative.
Mairin Amdal
Contrast Dye, Viewing Window, Taking Inventory, 2023
Oil on panel, Ceramic, Wood-fired, Oil on cardboard, 10 x 22", 7 x 6 x 2", 9 x 12"
“Mairin Amdal is a self-taught oil painter and ceramic artist based out of Tacoma, Washington. Through both mediums, anatomical structures, creatures, and tools are repurposed into tangles and landscapes. Themes of illness and isolation are imbued with playful mysticism and fantasy. Her practice comes from a need to integrate her inner world with the outer, to reconcile the heaviness and lightness of growing up.”
Nawryn Emerson
Laughing and Crying; enveloped in forgiveness, holding it all while the roots grow out, 2023
Graphite, Gauche, Chalk Pastel, Ink, 12 x 18”
“Nawryn Emerson is a multimedia artist living, breathing, and loving her life in the beautiful PNW. She studied at The Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and graduated with a degree in Intermedia Studies. The themes of her work often focus on memory, time capsule, personal narrative, and her love of fantasy world-building.
She thinks Sleepless in Seattle is one of the best movies of all time.
Her dog’s name is Bunny.
She believes in the power of prayer, playfulness, and nostalgia.
The melding of Nawryn’s physical world and internal world attempts to dance together in her piece “Laughing and Crying; enveloped in forgiveness, holding it all while the roots grow out.”
Alta Amdal
Cleansing 1, 2023
Mixed media, 11 x 14’’
“Alta is a self-taught visual artist from Tacoma, Washington. Her visual works are created through a slow and impulsive process of layered texture and form. A playful conciliation between lurid memory and the discernment of self. This piece began in the early spring of 2023 and was finished in late summer.”
Camryn Kim-Murphy
Swimming Lessons, 2023
Embroidery on muslin, Polymer clay, Shell, Found objects, 41.5 x 14”
“Camryn Kim-Murphy is a writer and maker living in Seattle. Their work is typically diaristic and private and focuses on the symbiosis of words, sounds, and nature. They are interested in unveiling art as an elitist practice, and rather framing it as an essential exercise in trust. Their mixed media piece “Swimming Lessons”, uses recycled natural objects and beads found on beaches during their summer ritual of swimming every day, thread from their mother’s sewing kit, and a cloth found in the free pile of their best friend’s apartment. It is their first visual piece.”
Linnea Ross
Vid Vattnet, 2023
Ballpoint pen on raw canvas, 21 x 15”
“Linnea Ross is a visual artist with an academic background in mathematics and engineering. Their style is dark and contrastive, featuring stylized chiaroscuro and value technical precision. Their medium of choice is ballpoint pen on raw canvas. This pair of pieces immortalizes two moments in time on one summer evening: one marked by the formidable motion and force of a passing freight train, and the other by deafening stillness and vulnerability of rabbit in tall grass.”
Lillie Walsh
Salt of, 2023
Wire, Chain, Found objects, 36 x 36”
“Lillie Walsh is a multimedia research artist whose work utilizes found and collected materials to re-spatialize the archive. Living within the realms of sculpture, collage, assemblage, and bookmaking, they are interested in the ways these different mediums expose the throughlines of history keeping. With an eye toward attending to what they term sacred mundanity, their work becomes an interdisciplinary and dialogic exercise in both making and being. They use their work as a means to experiment with what it may look like to renegotiate embodied encounters of the archive. They do this in hopes of generating experiences and dialogues that interrogate dominant modes of historic preservation and dreams into futures of more participatory modalities. Using making as a mode of knowledge production within their process, this practice of embodiment extends into experiences of interacting with their work. Curious about the consequences of vital materiality on mundane experience, they create with the intention of being an active listener toward their material environment. This is practiced in hopes of moving toward a collapse of hierarchical patterns of human consumption and production.”
Deborah Brandti
oceanic feeling pt.I, 2023
Mixed Media, 4 x 4”- 20 x 4.5”
“Déborah Brandti is a Venezuelan-born multimedia artist. They studied painting and creative writing at Montserrat College of Art. They explore a variety of subjects within their work, pertaining to their lived experiences as an immigrant of indigenous descent swayed by dreams, nature, and the elements.”
Rosa Sittig-Bell
To Do When Get Home, 2023
Oil on canvas, 23 x 18”
“Rosa Sittig-Bell is a painter and Art History Masters student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In her oil paintings, Sittig-Bell seeks to explore the relationship that liminal locations and personal objects have with the constant transformation and transfiguration that occurs through digital image sharing. She is interested in how traditional materials can be utilized in conjunction with intangible contemporary imagery and sources.”
Tara Sell
My Last Thread, 2023
Fabric, Embroidery thread, Chain, Grommets, Cat Hair, 10 x 12”
“Tara Sell has been creating her whole life, holding her beginnings in drawing and painting with her grandmother. Surrounded by muses, both the human form and the felt-but-unseen have always been the largest sources of inspiration to her. The task of transmuting the complexities in bodies, movement, and emotion drives her work, as well as her personal spirituality and love for the fantastical. Her more recent work has manifested as tangible objects; craving something she can touch, she has been utilizing fabric and hardware as her tools of choice. The difficult and time-consuming nature of these materials creates a healthy respect for the slowness and reward of the process itself. Inspired by unpredictability following hardships, ultimately leading one back to the self, she has drawn from the imagery of The Star tarot card (Rider-Waite)- a totem of reflection for this ebb and flow.”
Kaya Nieves
Having a Best Friend is Like a Deep Exhale, 2023
Photographic prints, Sticks, 8 x 10”, 11 x 14”, 8 x 10”
“Kaya Nieves is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of connection, embodiment, sensuousness, and spirituality. Working within and inspired by the realm of fantasy & surrealism, they’re interested in the biophilic melding of people and their environments. In their photographs, they seek to convey this relationship as a bridge between waking life and dream; a reminder that our tangible reality reverberates within the metaphysical.”
