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“Border – the line that separates ……….”  (Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary).  Art often provides a starting point for conversation – between the art and the viewer, between the artist and the viewer, and between viewers. The curator hopes that out of an honest, engaged and thoughtful encounter viewers will change and grow.  The ideal of the transformative potential of all art and the acknowledgement of that potential being limited by preconceived aesthetic ideas and expectations prompted curator Michael Caldwell to organize this exhibition. He asks us to consider how we think about art by bringing together the work of artists whose art purposely challenges artistic expectations or ‘borders’, and in doing so expands the potential of art to affect us.

The exhibition is entitled Borders, and it opens at the Confluence Gallery on Saturday February 25, 2012 with an artists’ reception from 4 to 8 pm. The show continues through April 14. It includes artists from the Methow Valley, the Okanogan Valley, Spokane, Pullman, the Tri-Cities and Seattle.  Although, they work in a variety of media and explore a range of subject matter and styles they are linked by a willingness to push beyond comfortable artistic expectations.  The work ranges from the extremely honest and penetrating self-portraits of Ben Moreau and the intensely autobiographical mixed media work of Anne Osin to the mysterious narrative paintings of Kay O’Rourke and the mathematically based abstractions of Christopher Watts. Some of the work may be hard to look at and may make us uncomfortable but they all hold the potential to “make things new.”

Interested disciplines

Visual Arts