This is Sandy Brown Jensen, and you’re listening to Viz City, KLCC’s arts review program. Eugeneans know Tim Boyden as the owner of the popular Out on a Limb art gallery. It’s been closed a while now, and Tim has had some health issues, which lit a fire for “community, collaboration, and positivity.” It was Tim who asked the question, “If not not now, when?” which became the title of the season opener exhibit at the Maude Kerns Art Center.
Tim reached out to fellow local artists whose work he deeply respects, Ila Rose, Jud Turner and Michael Whitenack. From the beginning, artistic collaboration has been at the core of this dramatic, don’t miss show. And collaborate they did, on very large and intricate pieces such as a composite sculptural creature that Tim and Michael co-created called “Delores the Dog-a-Saurus” and another called “Wolf at Play.” You can tell already this show is family friendly. Tim and Ila created a wonderful woodland throne built of twisty wood, the back and seat hand painted with a deep green landscape of mushrooms, ferns, and little fairy lights.
When you walk into the gallery, please do what I did and just stop in your tracks and try to take it all in. Why yes, that IS a life size welded steel Mylodon Shark by Jed Turner swimming alongside a majorly large Velociraptor. On the wall in the side gallery, a super-sized “Iridescent Dragonfly” sculpture by Tim Boyden climbs the wall next to a butterfly Tim made by literally butterflying open a patterned burl to reveal the wood grain like two wings.
The four artists hung the show themselves with an eye to making it very three-dimensional with the floor thronging with animals, other critters curling up the window sills and corners, and Ila Rose’s arresting series of large 20 x 30 acrylic or oil paintings adding color and surrealism. Ila’s bigger than life people seem to be a personal pantheon of gods or goddesses or powerful Fair Folk. You’ll see a lot of snakes and skeletons, amanita muscaria mushrooms, moths and theriomorphs in her visions of Dreamtime change.
This show isn’t just all one thing unless you count this one word: gottaseeit.
This is Sandy Brown Jensen for KLCC.
