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The Hyporheic Zone: Beautiful, Majestic, Desperate, Monstrous, Tragic

BEAUTIFUL, MAJESTIC, DESPERATE, MONSTROUS, TRAGIC: ART from the *HYPORHEIC ZONE.
*The hyporheic zone is where ground water meets surface water (hypo = below, rheic = river).

Tom Jay and Sara Johani, with a combined intensive engagement in art of over 70 years, are preparing a two person exhibit at Northwind Gallery in Port Townsend, WA, scheduled to open November 5, 2011. It's the culmination of the last ten years of work in bronze sculpture, cast at their own Lateral Line Bronze Casting Studio in Chimacum, WA.

The name of the show is BEAUTIFUL, MAJESTIC, DESPERATE, MONSTROUS, TRAGIC: ART from the HYPORHEIC ZONE. More on this and the philosophical, stylistic and proper content of art during the early 21st century below.

Tom and Sara have over 30 public sculptures in the region, approximately 15 pieces each. They work as a team and also make their own individual sculpture with the partner acting as assistant, mentor, manager, helper in whatever skills are required. Tom is a master bronze caster, having run a working foundry for over 40 years. He established the first art foundry in the Pacific Northwest (Riverdog Art Foundry) and cast work for many Northwest notables. Since 2000, Tom and Sara have managed the foundry in a gentler manner, as a studio casting facility rather than a production art foundry, no longer casting for other artists but focusing on their own creations, from miniature to monumental.

Partners in life and art, Tom and Sara also teach a bronze casting primer four months a year during the winter months (all Saturdays). 2011 is the tenth anniversary of this popular class - Sculpture Revealed - where accomplished artists and amateurs alike sculpt a piece, prepare their molds and finish their own bronze casting, learning the entire process from start to finish. Alumni have casting privileges at The Lateral Line Foundry after completion of the initial series. Actions of the students from successive classes have helped evolve words to name what the artists actually do. It's not "business" in the bottom-line sense that Tom and Sara have been engaged in for decades. Now they call it "Generous Mutual Exchange" (GME). It's all about locality, community, in a word, PLACE. Look for student work also displayed in the November show!

Philosophy, Style and Content.

Time is a mobious strip. We describe time in various historical terms but time returns, over and over again, the same yet not the same. We think we comprehend an age only to find out our understanding is largely meaningless a couple of decades later. Is it all quite absurd? What are the essential questions for our time? These are koans Tom and Sara ponder and attempt to address in sculpturally symbolic terms, turning the past into the light so it can bloom again. Creating art to act as cultural implement, exploring human nature as metaphor, juxtaposing present culture to remote past culture to recover functional human bearings, contrasting nature based to industrially based culture - these are some of the gritty questions Tom and Sara grapple with in their persistent dance with constantly shifting current culture.

Here are some specific philosophical ideas that recur in Tom and Sara's ruminations: thinking and perceiving as elders in order to sustain long term human existence and culture; mythologizing local ecology to create sculptural "teaching" narratives, translating classical folk wisdom into new contexts, intentionally blurring the lines between community activism and art making, repairing the torn tapestry of Pacific Northwest ecology.

To this end the artist team is presenting several series of sculptures, mostly in cast bronze. Themes include: human, salmon, raven, equine, the feminine, morphic fields, individual portraits, metaphorical juxtaposition of human to creature relationships IN CONTEXT. The proper context is not only local, it's also cosmic! "Where in the world is this?" Intensifying familiar images in a transformative light, finding balance. Asking the question, then responding to the question with sculpture precipitates meaning, from mundane to mythic.

Titles include: WITNESS, SALMON OF WISDOM, RISK, MORPHIC FIELDS, STARVING RAVEN, MEADOW MATRONS, FOREST MONK, EXTREME EQUIPOISE, GALLOPING GRAPHICS, ACER, VISUAL HAIKU, MOTHER LODE, ETHICAL FITNESS, RANSOM'S EGG, RAVEN'S NEEDLE, FOG WOMAN, ALCHEMICAL CRUCIFIX, GRUB - (PERFECTION IS PERVERSION), SALMON DREAM. MEMORY of a PAST PURE WORLD, POTLATCH BELL, NEOMEGAMAMALITHIC, CORDA - GAIA'S GRANDMOTHER (COSMIC EROS), SIMPLE CHAOS, THE BOTANY OF ATTIRE.

Tom and Sara's styles are somewhat eclectic - there is a naturalistic depiction of some elements with a certain abstraction around the edges. Depending on the current quest, emphasizing juxtaposition of unlikely themes or elements is a favorite creative ploy. These are individual artists, not followers of styles of the hour. They are keen to dig deep and dwell in the vertical while ranging far and wide to glean meaning from the lateral. Seriously playful - life is not a video game - they surf the tombstone while dancing on the quaking landscape of meaning.

BEAUTIFUL, MAJESTIC, DESPERATE, MONSTROUS, TRAGIC: ART from the HYPORHEIC ZONE.

The exhibit at Northwind Gallery in Port Townsend will embody and present many of the metaphors mentioned above. The human condition in context, our future, relations to the "other", finding balance, the full range of WHAT IT IS! Myth is the story that contains, condenses and digests complex information in symbolic form which is readily grasped and retained.

Metaphorically bringing together artifice and dark truth, surface appearance and buried meaning, the obvious and the mysterious, the seen and the hidden is their game.

Art, articulate and arthritis have common roots involving joints. "ART ARTICULATES COMMUNITY" - striving to keep art a functional joint in the human / ecology community.