New From The Northwest - Exhibit By Appointment Only

Winston Wächter Fine Art is excited to announce the group exhibition, New From the Northwest, featuring Northwest-based artists Philip Govedare, Etsuko Ichikawa, Michael Schultheis and introducing new gallery artists Mya Kerner, Jan Hoy, and Kandis Susol.

Painter Philip Govedare creates intricate, layered landscapes that are suggestive of a complex narrative of natural forms and human intervention. His paintings elicit questions about our role in nature and how our activity has reshaped the earth’s surface.

“My work is a response to landscape that is vast in scale and inspires the imagination to contemplate our place in the world, what came before us and what lies ahead.   While my paintings may elicit questions about our role in nature and the transformation of the earth’s surface, they are above all, a celebration of the beauty and mystery of the earth and the natural world we inhabit.” – Philip Govedare

Etsuko Ichikawa investigates what lies between the ephemeral and the eternal through the use of glass, paper, fiber, video, and sound. Her pyrographs are drawings made by fire and water, capturing and eternalizing the immediacy of a moment. She has completed several artist in residence programs at the Pilchuck Glass School and has been recognized by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received numerous grants and awards, including Dave Bown Projects, Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including The Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo, the Henry Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Seattle Art Museum.

Multidisciplinary artist Mya Kerner’s soft and poetic landscape paintings explore the language of mountain ranges and rocky terrain with expressive marks built through spatulas and palette knives that she finishes with gestural strokes of graphite.  Through her paintings Kerner touches on themes of ancestry, storytelling and ecological concern.

Artist Kandis Susol’s work is comprised of sculpted sheets of hand-made paper that she sees as reflections of the movement and flow of natural elements. In her work Susol has developed an unconventional way of making paper infused with beeswax, damar resin and oil pigments that is sculpted into paper and set onto panels.  Each element and layer is unique and imperfect.   This very process-oriented work allows Kandis a way to look at imperfections as a way to find similarities and uniqueness in our flawed and beautiful lives.

Michael Schultheis’s sculptural works are three-dimensional renderings of the brushstrokes found in his gestural and geometrically-rich paintings.

Cast in bronze, Schultheis’s sculptural forms are imbued with the artist’s personal stories of how one connects with individuals in their life and how these different paths chosen in one’s journey overlaps and interacts with another’s.

Whidbey Island-based artist Jan Hoy creates abstract sculptures that explore formal, geometric, and spatial relationships. She works in clay, steel, and bronze. “By combining organic forms with a touch of linear I find the perfect counterpoint. My intension is to create forms that are satisfying in shape, simplicity, and balance.”