Esvelt Gallery Faculty Show Virtual Tour

WORLD WIDE WEB-The Esvelt Gallery has proudly presented the work of the Columbia Basin College Art Department faculty in a new 2021 exhibit. The work presented includes painting, drawing, photography, collage, digital media, ceramics, and sculpture. The visual arts faculty are artists who engage in their unique studio practices to showcase what is possible through continued creativity.

Included are works from the painter and professor Tracy Walker; multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator Rachel Smith; professor of 2D and 3D Design and curator Cozette Phillips; Adjunct professor and photographer Eric Demattos; ceramist, painter, and educator Greg Tate; painter Dustin M. Regul; and adjunct instructor Camille Rendal who regularly engages in sculpture, woodworking, metalsmithing, painting, and drawing.

Camille Rendal, Raven Spirit Box, mixed media. Rendal's work investigates quantum physics, astronomy, alchemical and esoteric theories, and the natural landscape.

Dustin M. Regul, Untitled (Alpha-telescopii III), oil and ink on handmade paper and panel.

This series of works presents the artist's mind as the art itself, providing the sketches and color samples like a mood board. Mood is aesthetic.

Cozette Phillips, Resonant Frequency, mixed media, wood, and steel pedestals.

Phillips connects relics of past technology with elements of nature, the oldest technology.

Resonance, brass, bismuth, copper, tin, steel, steel stand, and steel pedestal. This piece features hard line headphones and seashell hybrid. The idea plays upon regular plugging in and the subsequent necessity of unplugging oneself from the noise of life.

Always, repurposed plastic Walmart bags. Always appears from the ceiling as if heaven fed and spills onto the floor as an unbroken stream of perforated plastic that, rendered non-recyclable and non-reusable, will still be with us always.

Tracy Walker, Call Me Pessimistic, gouache on paper

Gouache is much like watercolor, except where watercolor's tendency is towards pale and subtle, gouache is vibrant. It is with this vibrancy that Walker depicts a conversely peaceful and frightening scene. Are the clouds over the serene landscape fluffy cumulonimbus or something more sinister?

Rachel Smith, ... (you're muted), screenprint on paper spilling from down the wall to the floor. Recognizable vintage dot-matrix repeats a printed statement of a potentially cold hard fact. What it means for one to be muted has evolved throughout the decades, and yet the hard edge remains.

Captive Audience, screenprint on paper. Speaks to loaded sentiments and how so often one is held verbally hostage. Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator whose artwork investigates the complexities of the individual and the collective as it relates to memory, processes, and materials.

Eric Demattos, Time Over Distance, photography, wood.

Demattos effectively inter-lays photo imagery onto wood panels. It's the same place, different times, and all in one blink. The effect tricks the eye like a glitch from the Matrix.

Greg Tate, Wallula Platter, colored clay, Cone 6

Harvesting the Wind Series: Looking south, colored clay, Cone 6

Untitled, colored clay, slip, oxide, pencil

Each of Tate's three pieces offers skillfully melded textures and forms that evoke not only a place (landscape) but alludes to the people who may inhabit the space with things that support life.

Rebecca Merkley-Omeje, Experimental Geometry, Part I cast of steel and bronze. Her work explores fossils, caves, and the undiscovered. Mysterious and masterful.

The Esvelt Gallery is located on the Columbia Basin College campus in Pasco, Wash. Its continuing mission to act as a focal point for all art styles endures virtually through the videography and editing of Tyler West.

Learn more at their website, http://www.cbcartscenter.com, and keep up to date on news and exhibits via Instagram @cbcartcenter.