Walking into the Maude Kerns Art Center right now feels like stepping into a lung. The season opener, “Escape to the Forest,” is a masterclass in atmosphere. Before you even look at a single canvas, you are struck by the superb curatorial work of Liberty Rossel. She has orchestrated a visual symphony where the rough bark of a Greg Navratil painting speaks to the delicate vein of a Joanna Carrabbio leaf. Rossel has found a harmony of colors and textures that makes the gallery feel like a living, breathing ecosystem.
At the heart of this ecosystem is a deep dive into the work of Yoncalla artist Susan Applegate. Applegate’s canvases anchor the room with a profound monumentality. She has stripped away the frantic noise of the woods to reveal its bones. Her trees aren't just timber; they are pillars. By simplifying the shapes of the path leading to her family’s ancestral spring—a source of water for generations—she transforms her private woods into a cathedral of memory.
There is a sacred weight to her forms, a distillation of nature into its most eternal, iconic state. As she says, “it is the forest of my interior landscape that I am painting.”
This stillness provides the perfect tension for the "magical" spontaneity of the other artists: Greg Navratil’s rhythmic acrylics mimic water dancing over stone, while Joanna Carrabbio scrapes away pigment to find dream-like textures. Nearby, Marco Elliott places a "guilt-free Eve" back into the primeval rain forest.
Under Rossel’s curation, these four visions merge into one powerful invitation to pause and breathe. “Escape to the Forest” is on view through February 6.
