In 2007, Artist Trust awarded $112,214 in Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) to 77 outstanding Washington State artists. The GAP program provides up to $1,500 to individual artists for various projects. In 2007, Artist Trust received a record 795 applications from artists working in all disciplines across Washington State.

The information included in each grant recipient profile below is based on each recipient’s application materials submitted at the time of application.  

EMERGING & CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ARTS

Susie Lee, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to purchase multi-media materials and gain experience with lighting, optics and mechatronics for her September 2007 show of new work at the Lawrimore Project. She will use video projection and a system of LEDs to “create discreet works that examine the slippage and differentiation between perceived and metronomic time.” One focus of her exhibition will be “the metaphorical implications of ‘on’ and ‘off’ in the language of light and shadow.” Her most recent work has been similarly concerned with integrating time-based mediums with static environments to express transitions between holding on and letting go.

Kristen Ramirez, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will customize a bicycle with a table-top printing press that she will use to continue her and collaborator Laura Wright’s guerilla-art efforts to distribute free art in non-commercial spaces. Their 2006 success with Peddling Art was based on using Laura’s peddle-powered sewing machine to sew patches onto participants’ clothing and distribute currency Kristen had previously printed; now Kristen will be able to enhance their community collaborations and experiential art projects by enabling participants to see how a small printing press operates and pull a print themselves.

Renee Rhodes, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) uses dance mediated through video animation to create a visual vocabulary of “human puppetry.” She will use the grant to create an installation to question human nature via a tall vertical strip upon which will be projected an image of a tower of people climbing over one another to the top. The Tower will show a group journey of simple curiosity transform into a selfish and single-minded struggle to be at a higher location than one’s fellow climbers; portray the nature of greed and point out the pattern of our blind follow-the-leader sociopolitical structures; and cycle through a representation of self-imposed hardship and progressive success.

Matthew Shoemaker, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will attend a two-week invitation-only residency with the Mamori Sound Project in December 2007. The program is located in the Brazilian Amazon, and run by Francisco Lopez, a major figure in the experimental music/art world (and a PhD eco-biologist). It has a special focus on creative approaches to working with field recordings, exploring natural sound environments and bioacoustics, and includes theoretical discussion, presentations, field and studio work. Each participant will develop a sound piece to present to the local community at Mamori Lake.

Donna Stack, Ellensburg, Kittitas County, ($1,350) will purchase a consumer-grade 3CCD camcorder and materials to produce an installation titled Lot’s Wife. The work will deal with issues of authenticity and letting go by using the parable of Lot’s Wife, who was transformed into a pillar of salt because she could not resist looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The artist finds parallels in her own bi-cultural heritage and ponders how looking back can also consume one.

LITERARY ARTS

Nassim Assefi, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will travel to Iran to complete research for her second novel, Say I am You, loosely based on her own life and that of a friend killed for “embracing democracy too quickly.” Her work addresses many themes, including: “courage in female form; the origins of humanitarianism; brain drain and its reversal; the diversity of the global Muslim community; the corrupted and misguided use of humanitarian funds; the colorful mélange of missionaries, mercenaries and misfits that find themselves doing aid work; and what it means to rebuild society in a ‘post-conflict’ country.”

Barbara Bowen, Port Townsend, Jefferson County, ($1,400) intends to create a suite of poems about the art and cultural objects from Iraq’s History Museum and surrounding lands that were destroyed or stolen during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “The poems will be multi-layered elegies,” she writes, “layered with evocations of the culture of Mesopotamia– the first code of law, the first epic poem, a source of writing, the idea of cities.” Her grant will enable her to have the time, critical review and research access to complete this work.

Ronda Broatch, Kingston, Kitsap County, ($1,500) will work on revising and finding a publisher for her full-length poetry manuscript titled Rib of New Fruit. These poems “represent the themes of water, earth and the archetypal feminine. They address what it means…to find wisdom in the habits of fish, and to discover the female through images of apples, mud and rain on the roof….Threading through the manuscript is an underlying current of spirituality with images rooted deep in Northwest soil [and the] border region where natural and human realms commingle.”

Anne de Marcken**, Olympia, Thurston County, ($1,300) will complete the remaining three stories of her short-story manuscript, After Life, and submit it to agents, publications and granting organizations. The collection is concerned with “the life that reconstitutes in the aftermath of death,” each story finding a different way to address the place death takes in its characters’ lives. Anne says, “None of the stories are concerned with heroism or sentiment or conventional tragedy– they explore the subtle and intimate mechanisms of grief, love, anger, hope and futility.”

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Redmond, King County, ($1,300) will continue researching Japanese fairy tales and writing new poems for her collection, The Woman Who Disappears, a reference to a recurrent character in these folk stories. Jeannine is interested in the connections between American and Japanese imaginative expressions, how the latter reflect traditional values and influence popular culture in the U.S. She weaves her own sense of non-belonging into her understanding of these myths and uses this alienation to also address the ecological and psychological impacts of the nuclear bomb on both countries.

James Gurley, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will travel to Andersonville National Historic museum in Georgia to continue research into the locale and the experiences of internees of this notorious Confederate Civil War concentration camp. Gurley’s great-great grandfather was a Union sergeant and survivor of this prison, inspiring him to envision a series of poems about his ancestor’s experiences, “using traditional poetic forms or formal structures of my own devising to address the privations and emotions” inherent in this subject. His integration of form and content continues his interest in examining historical topics through a contemporary vision.

Gwendolyn James, Kennewick, Benton County, ($1,500) will complete her first full-length poetry manuscript, Acts of Contrition, market it for publication and promote her work. A portion of this collection was recently published as a chapbook-length chapter in an anthology by Lost Horse Press, and Gwendolyn plans to do readings regionally and nationally at conferences, festivals, schools and bookstores to promote it and generate more interest for her upcoming book. She writes under the name Gwendolyn Cash.

Susan Jensen, Clinton, Island County, ($1,500) will buy a new computer and printer to keep up with her prolific writing output. Her current project is a series of three children’s chapter books dealing with the difficult subjects of alcoholism, incest and divorce and features an eight-year-old girl whose “delightful observations and adventures make the series palatable for the general reader.” Her target audience is the millions of children who either live with one or more of these tough realities or know others who do. Through the books’ “feisty, courageous, funny protagonist,” they will realize they are not alone.

Sonya Lea, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will complete work on a series of essays that address “the nature of remembering and forgetting on the personal, mythic and collective levels,” and then prepare this compilation for publication. Her husband’s memory loss during cancer treatment and its impact on their family and community prompted her ruminations on and research into the experience of brain injury, as well as into various aspects of identity. She describes her style as creative non-fiction built with a collage-structure, and writes that this work is about “the things that happen when the personal narrative is interrupted by forgetfulness.”

Susan Rich, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) is a poet who worked as an Electoral Supervisor in Bosnia in 1997. She will return there for a month to give a series of readings at the Universities of Mostar and Sarajevo, observe what has happened since she left, and interview residents about their lives since the war. These sources will feed her next poems, guided by the theory that “how we look determines what we see.” By this, she means not how we appear but how we use the lens of life and experience to filter our ideas, beliefs and identities.

David Shields, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) is fascinated by the “infinitely complex politics that exist in marriage…and virtually any relationship– the constantly varying exchange of power and powerlessness, the shadow play of pleasure, pain and unappeasable hunger.” He’ll use the grant to complete the second draft of his eleventh book, a novel titled Letter to Elle, in which he bares a husband’s deepest sexual and emotional needs and secrets, fears and fantasies in a tell-all monologue he writes to his wife to try to save their marriage by piercing their “unspoken truce.” Through this device, David ranges from narrative to reflection, literary reference to psychological and philosophical theory, current events to storyline.

Martha Silano, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) is a poet whose work draws from both mundane and profound life experiences and observations, using musical, alliterative and highly compressed language. She will use the grant to take two writing retreats free of the restraints of teaching and home responsibilities, time and focus she otherwise would not have. Martha will use this opportunity to revise and complete her third book of poetry, tentatively titled Poor Banished Children of Eve.

Ghida Sinno, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) is working on a short story collection that tackles the 9/11 attacks from six different perspectives, some of which are Arab-American and most of which address the tragedy’s impact on the national psyche, then and now. She will use the grant to supplement her recent and upcoming residencies to complete these stories and submit them for publication as The Strange Case of the President of the United States. Ghida’s work shifts between existential, political and personal themes in a voice drawn with the eye of a newly fluent English speaker and shaded with irony, humor and insight.

Harold Taw, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will return to Thailand for a month to complete research for his upcoming Saturday’s Child, a novel about two children born nine years apart on days suffused with superstition. His story is based on a blend of personal and academic experiences: as the son of a “Saturday’s Child” and a Fulbright scholar, his research into Thai mythology, society and culture combines with his interests in this region’s history to weave topical and mystical themes through his tale of two (un)lucky characters.

Catherine Wing, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will use her grant to write as much as possible and in the process tease out the “murky relationship of syntax and tone, tone and gesture” in her poetry. She asks, “What part of a sentence’s syntax generates a specific tone? Can tone be shifted while maintaining syntax? If a sentence makes a gesture, if a sentence can be said to wink, what is it that is winking?” She quotes Herman Melville to thank Artist Trust for providing her with a bit more “Time, Strength, Cash and Patience!” to continue this work.

MEDIA ARTS

Amy Benson, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) will create a three- to five-minute video piece with her husband, photographer Scott Squire. Spare Change will take up the question of what to do when “sp’anged” (asked for spare change on the street) and will be shown at a series of screening/exhibitions to aid in their fundraising efforts to support a feature-length documentary film addressing homelessness. Their work prominently features still photography, especially portraiture, and the larger work will present an intimate response to the myriad causes and effects of homelessness through the experiences of six or seven people who are or have been homeless.

Salise Hughes, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for purchase of a laptop computer to help produce her experimental films. She works with found footage and manipulates each frame in Photoshop. Having her own equipment will enable her to work at home for the more labor-intensive portions of her process and focus her time using the Northwest Film Forum’s more advanced editing equipment. She will create a seventy-minute program of films to tour non-profit film venues and art museums across the country, which NWFF’s director Adam Sekuler has offered to book.

Kaleb Hunkele, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to produce 1,000 professional Hi-Definition DVDs of his 5-minute stop-motion animated film Germs, Hands and Birds to sell at film-festival screenings. His animation will use puppet characters and abstract sets to formulate and test hypotheses on how variables change the relationship from a harmful one to a mutually beneficial one and vice-versa. The plot is guided by the general elements of the scientific method. Each group of Germ, Hand and Bird puppets will have its own environment and will crossover into each other’s while morphing into one another, illustrating their symbiotic and parasitic relationships.

Eric Ostrowski, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to transfer 30 minutes of his short experimental 16mm films to video and then replicate 500 DVD copies (with handmade 4-color silkscreen covers) for worldwide availability through independent video and music distributors. Included will be Skull and Blackberries, which was created by laying blackberries on raw film stock and then exposing it to the sun for two to three days. Similarly, The Hummingbird features “direct sound,” which uses marks in the optical soundtrack area of 16mm film to create sounds and rhythms.

PERFORMING ARTS

Laura DeLuca, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to commission, perform and record a clarinet concerto from a talented 20 year old Russian composer, Alissa Firsova who is presently studying at the Royal Academy in London. DeLuca plans to premiere the piece in the fall of 2008 with the Northwest Sinfonietta at the Pantages Theatre in Tacoma, WA and produce a professional quality recording.

Amy Denio, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to cover the artist’s fee to compose, record and produce the sound track for Loud Omission, a new dance piece created by choreographer Carla Barragan. Loud Omission features four dancers, video and visual projections of the paintings of Ecuadorian artist Paula Barragan, and Denio’s original recorded music score. The piece will premiere in Seattle in the winter of 2007/08 at a tba location.

Joel Durand, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for the composition and first performance of the trio: harpist Valerie Muzzolini, flutist Jeffrey Cohan and violinist Melia Watras at the Frye Art Museum for Echoes: Chamber Music at the Frye or at another venue in Seattle with an additional performance planned in Eastern Washington.

Ben Gonio, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to create a multi-media solo-show about the life of Carlos Bulosan, a prolific Filipino-American writer, poet and activist. GAP funding will be used to convert archival images to slide show format, marketing, space rental fees, lighting design equipment, artist fees (composer, guitarist, director), set pieces, props and programs.

Beth Graczyk, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to help cover costs associated with producing Salt Horse in Seattle in June 2008. Salt Horse is an evening length music/dance piece that incorporates scored improvisation, choreography, composed sound and film work, and is a collaboration with three other artists. Graczyk is a dancer, improviser and choreographer on this project.

Tiffany Li-Chin Lin*, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to cover the artist’s rehearsal time as well as time dedicated to organizing a Fall 2008 concert, plus collection and discussion of potential composition commissions. The concert will include a performance of two works by composer John Cage, the Perilous Night and the Toy Piano Suite, a solo piano work by George Crumb, a solo piano work by Henry Cowell, and two new compositions featuring toy piano.

Maki Morinoue, Seattle, King County, ($1,100) to cover rental fees of the MainSpace Theater at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. Morinoue plans to present a full evening program of her modern dance choreography in April or May of 2008. Her work “explores the nature of human behavior, characteristics and temperament. Letting movement dictate rather than narrative, I express my creative ideas while still having the liberty to play with timing, space, and order in their purest forms. This leaves the meaning behind my work open for interpretation by the audience.”

David Natale, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to promote his play Westerbrook Serenade to theaters and educational institutions with the goal of ongoing full-scale performances and teaching workshops. The grant will help defray the cost of producing the demo, making and distributing p/r packages and developing and printing a study guide for educational shows. Westerbrook Serenade is a play that tells the true story of Jewish cabaret performers held by the Nazis in a Dutch transit camp during the Second World War.

KT Niehoff, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to pay artist stipends to perform The Lift, a personal one on one dance experience at the Seattle Pike Place Market. Separately, four dancers will approach individuals on their way up to 1st Avenue, asking if they would like a “lift” up Stewart Street, one of the steepest hill climbs in Seattle. If the “lift” is accepted, the dance begins. “Lifts” will be offered 2 hours a day on four consecutive summer weekends, as well as during one additional workweek.

Eden Pearlstein, Olympia, Thurston County, ($1,500) to acquire sound engineering equipment and consulting for the artist’s for solo rap album, WayWord WonderWill, set to be released in mid-late September. This album “is an exploration of the subtleties, complexities, and contradictions of post World War II American Jewish experience. Beyond that it is an investigation into the archetypal process and pattern of identity construction in general.”

Margaret Shafer, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to pay for the services of a director or lighting designer for Charisma, a one act, one woman comedy/drama. Shafer plans to see the piece performed over a period of three weekends at a venue such as the Hugo House Theater in January or February 2008.

Anthony Taylor, Pullman, Whitman County, ($899) to purchase Max/MSP software and accompanying electronic equipment (cords, foot controller, volume pedal, sensor microphone). Taylor will perform Shown Okpebholo’s Circleplay, in it’s new version utilizing the new software at the University of North Carolina Greenboro New Music Festival October 23-25, 2007.

Cuong Vu*, Bellevue, King County, ($1,500) to cover professional studio costs of recording the artist’s working band, the Cuong Vu Trio. The music will be comprised of seven of Vu’s most recent compositions for trumpet, bass and drums, two of which were recently commissioned by the Festival of New Trumpet Music/Greenwall Foundation. Vu plans a CD release date of December 4, 2007.

Daniel Wilkins, Edmonds, Snohomish County, ($1,500) to cover artist fees for Poor Man’s Boogie (PMB). “PMB will bring to stage the stories and passion of the individuals that navigate through the hardship of poverty in the U.S. Using data collected from Social Services and other front line organizations as well as interviews from a wide variety of people such as low income families, people in government housing and the homeless, the dancers will be able to deliver a realistic representation of the desperation that poverty inflicts.” PMB will be performed at the Edmonds Center for the Arts on October 18, 2007 and at Velocity in Seattle on February 1, 2, 8, 9 of 2008.

Jeanette Yew, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for material and video investigation and the construction of puppets and scenery for Yew’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story titled The Hunter Gracchus. Yew plans to adapt the story into a parlor toy theater shadow puppet production. “The scale of this production is micro in size and all of its production elements (from puppets to scenery to lighting, sound and video) are to be portable. My goal is to create a production that can travel easily and it performed for an intimate audience environment.”

VISUAL ARTS

Betty Bastai, Oak Harbor, Island County, ($1,500) for expenses related to the creation of Whatcom Creek Scrolls, an interactive installation that deals with the 1999 Whatcom Creek Olympic Pipeline fire and Bellingham residents’ memory of the tragic event. The installation will consist of a four-mile long drawing. The first two miles of the drawing will represent the first two miles of the creek that caught fire after the pipeline rupture. The second two miles of the drawing will represent the recovery of the creek from the dead into a life-bearing stream. The work will be shown at Mindport Gallery, Bellingham in 2009, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the fire.

Dionne Bonner*, Tacoma, Pierce County, ($1,500) to complete three paintings, restore twelve paintings and frame all works in a series entitled African American Pioneers of the Pacific Northwest. These portraits will be featured as part of an installation depicting the contributions of African Americans within the region. Written biographies, live music and interactive video presentations will be employed to highlight the lasting contributions of African American pioneers in the Pacific Northwest. The work will be shown at Barefoot Studios in January 2008.

Timothy Brown, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for completion of Re-creation, an architectural installation comprised of resin and string. “The project itself involves place settings on the suspended plane of a table, a re-creation in string of places I have lived in, and a reaction to the space that the work will be made and exhibited in.” The work will be shown in conjunction with a one-month residency at the Lower Bottom Gallery in Oakland, California.

Daniel Cautrell, Duvall, King County, ($1,200) to cover creation and documentation of outdoor public art installations in the ongoing Offerings to the Wind Series. The series of twenty-four sculptural installations is inspired by the recent severe winter storm and its devastating effect on the artist’s rural community. “In and around the Snoqualmie Valley there are still remnants of the incident. Where the trees had fallen they have been cut back and removed leaving a freshly cut ‘tableau’ of clean surface emerging from the woods. I have selected particular areas where these tree stumps have been revealed and begun to create a series of art installations that offer a subtle reminder of the historical storm and the response to it.” The work will be installed along the well-traveled roadways and byways of the Snoqualmie valley.

Stephen Chalmers, Spokane, Spokane County, ($1,500) to help offset the costs of materials required to mount and frame pieces in the series Dump Sites. Using a large format camera, Chalmers documents the specific sites where serial killers have disposed of their victims. “Many of the most notorious serial murderers were either from, or were active in, Washington State, including the nation’s most prolific (Gary Ridgeway, known as the ‘Green River Killer’) and the most famous (Ted Bundy) – along with more than forty others. The landscape of the Northwest allows a killer to move easily between urban and rural areas and has many wilderness areas where bodies can be disposed of in order to make them difficult to find. These locations are called ‘dump sites’ by law enforcement agencies.” The series will be exhibited at the PingYao International Photography Exhibition, China in September 2007, and at the Orange County Gallery of Art, Los Angeles and the Chase Gallery, Spokane in 2008.

Ben Chickadel, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for purchase of equipment, studio repairs and materials for the creation of new work. Chickadel creates fragile, labor-intensive images of familiar objects. GAP funding will be applied to the purchase of a compressor and fine paint sprayer, allowing the artist to coat the surface of the work for added strength, while retaining the characteristics of paper.

Patty Cokus, Tukwila, King County, ($1,000) for professional photographic documentation of a new body of work to be shown in the exhibition Amuse, Amaze, Amend: Jewelry Art for the Uninhibited. The exhibition will be shown at Facere Jewelry Art Gallery in Seattle in August 2007.  Cokus employs materials such as metal, glass, aspirin, butter, wine and olive oil. In her Articulated Frusta series, Cokus hand fabricates sterling silver to produce forms that expand and collapse with the slightest touch or movement of the wearer, producing subtle sounds as they shift.

Tim Cross, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for materials and time to develop a new series of drawings and paintings on paper and canvas. Using an assortment of paints, colored liquids, liquid paper and matches Cross will create work that combines drawn natural and organic forms with traced and transferred parts of machines and assorted architectural images. Cross’ work combines his interests in architecture and construction with his passion for nature and the processes of growth and decay. His abstract work echoes the natural world and its inhabitants.

Chris Engman, Gig Harbor, Pierce County, ($1,500) for purchase of a new Macintosh computer. Engman creates digital inkjet prints from large files. After his recent travels through Mexico and Central America, the artist is “embracing a stronger role for digital manipulation than has been the case for much of my previous work… Unfettered access to a quality computer… will allow this work to proceed faster, in my own studio, and in a more fluid manner—and will hopefully make the work, consequently, stronger.”

Michelle Forsyth, Pullman, Whitman County, ($1,500) to cover travel and shipping costs for a solo exhibition at the Hogar Collection Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. For the exhibition, Forsyth will continue her recent series of work entitled Florescence (Flowers for Iraq), in which she translates horrific images of Iraqi civilian casualties into intricate and beautiful patterns, comprised of thousands of hand-cut circles and flowers mounted to the end of insect pins. Several brightly colored polygonal forms, resembling small explosions will also be exhibited. Forsyth “employs the labor of the hand to counter the dehumanization of rapidly transmitted, digital images. Through this process, I attempt to rescue these horrific visuals from their de-personalized context and imbue them with a sense of beauty… they become memorials to the brutal realities of the horrors of war”.

Justin Gibbens, Thorp, Kittitas County, ($1,500) to support a project entitled Wonderland, in which the artist will hike along the 93-mile path known as the Wonderland Trail, which loops around Mt. Rainier, and traverses high alpine meadows, deep river canyons, rugged lava slopes and groves of old growth forest.  Employing his background in scientific illustration, Gibbens will create on-site sketches of the life forms encountered along the trail. The artist will paint each piece with pigments made from the natural materials on hand: mud, plant material, pollen, animal scat, or insect guts. The completed series of drawings will be shown in a traveling exhibit beginning with Gallery One, Ellensburg, in the fall of 2007.

Gregory Glynn, Bainbridge Island, Kitsap County, ($1,400) to cover equipment rental in order to produce 6-10 new works. Working with native, locally downed trees and branches, Glynn creates large-scale outdoor sculptures that stand up to 20 feet tall. Most of the work is completed by hand using chainsaws, axes and wedges.  Glynn’s work is intended to “explore the inner potency in trees and reflect the simultaneous strengths and vulnerabilities existing in nature.” The rental of a portable sawmill will allow the artist to quickly make fine cuts through the length of trees that would otherwise be impossible to achieve by hand. The finished works will be installed in outdoor sculpture parks in Washington State.

John Grade, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for documentation of  Fold (Seven Types of Catastrophe), a sculptural installation sited in Willow Canyon, South Utah at the Escalante National Monument. The work, cast in a composite of cellulose, glassine pulp and ground white sesame seeds, will be suspended across the open mouth of the canyon, and documented from above and below, as natural forces contribute to its collapse and deterioration. Photographic and video documentation of the collapsing project will be shown alongside the remaining bird-picked remnants of the project. The work is scheduled for exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum in August 2008 and at Davidson Contemporary in Seattle in November 2008.

Lauren Grossman, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to cover materials for building a temporary, enclosed shelter for the safe use of polyester resins. The resins will be used to create large lightweight forms that will balance and roll on overhead tightropes. These interactive forms can be maneuvered by the viewer, by moving counterweights placed below the tightrope. In addition, GAP funds will be used to help offset the expense of mold-making and resin supplies. The balancing resin forms will be shown in April 2008 at Oregon State University and at Howard House Gallery in Seattle.

Jan Hopkins, Everett, Snohomish County, ($1,500) for financial support to cover shipping, materials and promotion for an installation to be exhibited at SOFA Chicago in November 2007. As a fiber artist/basket maker, Hopkins has expanded her practice to include alternative materials such as orange and grapefruit peels, lotus pods, lunaria seed pods and cantaloupe peels, in addition to traditional basket making materials. “There are often restrictions on traditional basket materials in order to protect them from over harvest. I continue to work with traditional materials, but have included alternative materials… that are not restricted and that I can collect in abundance. I am obsessed with pushing the boundaries with these materials and am currently working toward making large pieces set in environments.” 

David Julian, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to help cover the costs of production and travel to create Collections, a series of montages of photographic portraits and symbolic objects. The work is designed to “explore meaningful relationships between individuals and the significant items they passionately collect throughout their lives. With this work, I intend to document not just what we covet, collect or hoard, but to tell a deeper story of how we revere objects as threads to our past, or as aspects of our personalities. Accompanying each narrative montage will be a brief story by the individual describing their collections’ significance to their personal history.” The project is a result of Julian’s documentation of the Katrina disaster where he “saw the personal contents of homes strewn about the landscape and heard the stories of the possessions returning residents missed the most.”

Andrew Kaufman, Ellensburg, Kittitas County, ($1,500) for laser cutting and materials to produce Ejaculations (End Trajectory).  Kaufman will create five 4’x4’ wall mounted forms using laser cut colored plexiglass. “The imagery will be taken from a series of splats that map the discharge of fluid from my body.  By translating the most successful of these studies into digital files, I can have exact shapes cut and assembled to my exact specifications.”

Shawn Landis, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to help offset the cost of a December 2007 show at 4Culture Gallery, Seattle. Landis will surround objects found outdoors (i.e. logs, rocks, fire hydrants, swing set, garbage can, etc.) with inflatable forms comprised of orange fabric. The inflation and deflation of the fabric surrounding the objects will be on a timed cycle. Through his installations, Landis is interested in “defining the negative space around objects in our daily landscape and revealing the shape of air.”

Deborah Lawrence, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for shipping and travel expenses to support an exhibition of the collage series Dee Dee Does Utopia. The work will be shown at the Frieda & Roy Furman Gallery, a non-profit space at Lincoln Center in New York, from June 29 to July 31, 2007. The series resulted from a mass email the artist distributed on November 9, 2004 posing the question, “What does Utopia look like to you?” Lawrence received approximately 17,500 words in response, many of them from Seattle residents. “The artworks in the series are visual and verbal renditions of respondents’ descriptions of the sublime, which I’ve integrated with historic and literary texts about utopia.”

Chuck Lopez, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to cover hot shop rental at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle during the fall of 2007 for the production of a coherent body of new work. Lopez is interested in developing work that is richer and more complex than his previous work, incorporating visual texture while creating a sense of depth.

Greg Lukens, Olympia, Thurston County, ($1,500) to publish A Reasonable Plan, a small book of postcards based on the artists’ paintings. The book will consist of 12-15 images with brief descriptions and corresponding stories that are a result of Lukens’ contemplation of the American Dream. Funding will be applied toward professional digital slides, publication of the book, and marketing.

Michael Magrath, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for transportation and casting costs to support Lot’s Tribe II, a temporary public art installation featuring life-sized sculptures of Iraqi civilian war victims cast in salt. The figures (originally installed in Pioneer Square, Seattle on September 11, 2006 and left to erode) will be recast and an additional figure will be added to the group. The work will travel across country and be mounted temporarily in various cities, en route to its final destination in New York, NY for the anniversary of 9/11.

Zachary Mazur, Pullman, Whitman County, ($1,140) to cover film, equipment, printing and mounting expenses for the ongoing photographic project A Recent History. The project “addresses regional landmarks and roadside attractions in the rural Palouse. Rather than photographing the marker itself, I literally turn my back on the landmark in order to photograph the surrounding landscape. This not only reflects my deliberate response to the sanitized perspective of the tourist gaze, but also serves as a metaphor for my own questioning of the landmark’s historical legitimacy. ‘A Recent History’ addresses how the landscape can be transformed into a commodity for the tourist and examines the authenticity of how we label the landscape in response to its cultural or historical significance.”

Mel McCuddin, Spokane, Spokane County, ($1,500) for funding to help defray the cost of materials, shipping and travel to the St. Thomas, Virgin Islands to participate in a two-person exhibition and workshop at the Mango Tango Gallery. “My medium of choice is oil paint and my style can best be described as figurative/expressionist. My goal for many years has been to do paintings with a strong presence relating to the many and varied aspects of the human experience, paintings that cannot be forgotten.” 

Margie McDonald, Port Townsend, Jefferson County, ($1,500) for professional development expenses including coaching, production of promotional materials, professional photographs, website maintenance, application fees for regional competitions and pursuit of gallery representation. “In 1998 I began working as a yacht rigger.  My formal education in textiles drew me to take home metal industrial waste that was destined for recycling. I now deconstruct cast-off hardware and wire into inventive organic forms, breathing new life into inert materials.”

Carol Milne, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to attend a two-week workshop conducted by David Reekie at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in the summer of 2007. It is a rare occurrence for Mr. Reekie, who lives in England, to be teaching in the U.S. Milne hopes to learn from Reekie, one of her favorite sculptors working in kiln-cast glass, the technical aspects of his use of color, among other things.

Briony Morrow-Cribbs, Freeland, Island County, ($1,500) for materials and binding costs associated with the production of a limited edition hand-made book. Morrow-Cribbs will create etchings for an illustrated version of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s prose poem Iskandariya. “As currently planned, the book will be octavo (16 pages with 8 leaves), with the text letter-pressed on handmade paper. Each spread of text pages will be separated by a folded sheet of Japanese Kitakata paper with an etching facing each page of text. There will also be an etched frontis and tailpiece for a total of eight etchings. All the etchings will be printed at my own studio, the Cat Skinner Press…I feel that in this time of digital information the hand-made book has enormous importance and impact.”

Sally Prangley, Bainbridge Island, Kitsap County, ($1,500) for research, materials and tools to create sculptural baskets that incorporate light. “I create sculptural wire basketry by blending traditional techniques of basketry with wire-working. As I continue to push the concept of basketry by changing materials, shapes and sizes, I want to explore yet another dimension: that of adding light. I want to integrate lighting as a part of my materials so as the basket takes shape, so does its inherent illumination. Conceptually, I want to create baskets that are swirls of light, that are suspended arrays of wire shapes, mobile-like, infused with light. I want to create larger, more sculptural wire forms that glow from within.”

Karen Rudd*, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to fund the completion, photo documentation, and promotion/marketing expenses for an installation of realistic, life-size cedar tree stumps created from reclaimed cardboard and wood glue. As a visual artist with a background in zoology, Rudd explores the relationship between man and nature through sculpture, Rudd’s initial aim to return the man-made material to its original organic form has expanded to include the creation of  “a haunting landscape-like indoor installation.”

Stephen Rue, Spokane, Spokane County, ($1,500) to support the addition of paintings to the series Saints and Sinners, which focuses on contemporary and personal interpretations of saints and biblical stories. The series of oil paintings combines “my interest in the stylistic techniques of the Renaissance with my fascination and background in religion as the son and grandson of Lutheran ministers…By presenting traditional subjects in a contemporary setting, I draw the viewer into a psychological game of associations between the image and his or her own religious experience. It is in this realm of religious retrospection and unconscious expectations that I like to let my paintings live.”

June Sekiguchi, Issaquah, King County, ($1,500) to provide studio time, equipment rental, and materials for the creation of pattern-based sculptural forms in metal. “I use pattern as a means to explore cultural connections and divergence. I am interested in the interplay of iconic patterns found globally and in specific ethnic traditions that synthesize into a personal aesthetic as the conceptual base of the work.” Sekiguchi creates free standing and wall hung sculptures involving layered screens of highly patterned surfaces.

Darin Shuler, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) for the matting and framing of illustrations to be shown later this year in Getting Framed in 2007 and other shows around the Seattle area. With the added fiscal support, Darin will be able to show more pieces than in past shows, may afford to create larger works, and will better preserve previous pieces with professional framing and matting. Using ink and watercolor, Shuler depicts brightly colored encounters between irregular beasts and personified human emotions.

Eva Skold-Westerlind, Kirkland, King County, ($1,125) will print 25 images of her Anableps series to be displayed June 28 - August 18, 2007 at G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle and the Swedish Museum in the spring of 2008. Eva also plans to create a small edition of artist books to be displayed alongside the Anableps series. Eva attempts to illustrate the mysterious beauty of light meeting water’s surface. Named after the four-eyed fish that may view both the surface and interior of a body of water simultaneously, Anableps is an open challenge to the traditional fine art landscape.

John Arnold Taylor, Renton, King County, ($1,500) to complete a current body of work to be exhibited at the Helen S. Smith Gallery in Green River Community College in October of 2008. Taylor works with traditional materials and processes, creating large ceramic vessels with images carved around the exteriors that have been self-described as loosely autobiographical. John’s latest work revolves around his “Life in Renton”, depicting the conflict of having a job, commuting through traffic, having a social life, and still finding the time to create artwork.

Lois Chichinoff Thadei, Olympia, Thurston County, ($1,500) to continue her efforts to preserve the tradition of Aleut weaving. Lois received a 2007 Cultural Capitol Fellowship from the First Peoples Fund to write an Aleut weaving book. The book will contain detailed photos of previous Aleut works paired with diagrams and instruction from professional weavers detailing the skills gained by past masters necessary to create traditional Aleut baskets and mats. Once the book is completed, Thadei hopes it will serve as a learning tool to inspire a new generation of Aleut weavers and keep the artistry of Aleut culture alive. The GAP grant will cover legal fees to secure copyright and license, as well as pay an illustrator to adapt illustrations to the Aleut weaving style.

Ken Turner, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to cover material costs of mounting and framing 36 photo works, ranging in size from 11” x 14” to 24” x 48”. 

Thuy-Van Vu, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to finance a trip to Danang, Vietnam to photograph the Shantytown near the waste dump in the Lien Chieu district and then make paintings based on those photographs to be displayed alongside paintings based upon similar American sites. Vu plans to examine the idea of home and the relationship between Shantytowns and the cities they neighbor.

Jennifer Zwick, Seattle, King County, ($1,500) to purchase large-format camera equipment for the development of two bodies of work: Constructed Narrative and Visual Weight. Constructed Narrative focuses on young girls in dream-like situations mined from her own childhood and Visual Weight is based upon her experience as a security guard at the Frye art museum and deals with the deconstruction of installations.

 

* Recipient of a Centrum residency
**Recipient of a Hafer residency

Click here to view the list of 2007 GAP panelists.

Click here to view the 2007 GAP statistics.