Show & tell
“Project Fear: Starry Night” by Genevieve Rae Busby
Over the past 50 years, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology has given creative people the time and space to focus on their work in the unique environment of Cascade Head and the Salmon River estuary.
In return for residencies that range from two weeks to three and a half months, Sitka asks for little more than the chance for the community to meet the residents and learn about the work they are creating.
The latest virtual Show & Tell will present spring residents Paul Bourdeau, Meg Ojala, Genevieve Rae Busby, Kurt Fausch and Lisa Conway, live on Zoom at 4 pm on Monday, March 15.
Bourdeau is one of two Howard L. McKee Ecology residents selected for this season. He is a marine ecologist and associate professor at Humboldt State University. He and his students study how coastal marine organisms interact with their environment and respond to changing environmental conditions, particularly those brought about by human activities. Bourdeau teaches a variety of courses including Marine Biology, Invertebrate Zoology, and Plant-Animal Interactions. While at the Sitka Center, he will be developing a new course on the visual display of scientific data.
Ojala combines large-scale landscape photographs, drawings and text to imbue her subjects, such as a river or a bog, with a sense of agency. She employs ambiguous spatial illusions, disorienting points of view and a bewildering sense of scale to shift the perception of the viewer and to elicit empathy for the natural world. Ojala is professor emerita of Art and Art History at St. Olaf College. She received her BA from the University of Minnesota and her MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Ojala has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis. She lives and works in Dundas, Minnesota.
Genevieve Rae Busby is currently based in Oregon, creating work that explores the interconnectedness of our material world, both natural and human-made. Throughout her practice, she insists on the importance of examining the everyday things that populate our world, of considering the strange agency of objects and our fraught — but also delightful — material relationships. Caught in delicate gouache strokes or suspended in resin, her objects and paintings bring the stuff of our frenetic, contemporary world into focus, offering opportunity for critical reflection and wonder.
Originally from a small farm in rural Kansas, she has shown work in Providence, Rhode Island; Lawrence, Kansas; Mexico City; and the Bay Area. She recently received her MFA from Mills College.
Fausch is the second Howard L. McKee Ecology resident selected this season and is a returning Sitka resident. He is professor emeritus in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University, where he taught for 35 years. His research collaborations in stream fish ecology and conservation have taken him throughout the American West and worldwide, including to Hokkaido in northern Japan. His experiences were chronicled in the PBS documentary “River Webs,” and in the 2015 book “For the Love of Rivers: A Scientist's Journey,” which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the American Fisheries Society and the World Council of Fisheries Societies, and the Leopold Conservation Award from Fly Fishers International.
Lisa Conway grew up outside Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives in Portland. She received an MFA in Ceramics from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Michigan. She has completed numerous artist residencies including at the Archie Bray Foundation, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Conway has previously taught ceramics at the University of Alaska and the Alberta College of Art and Design. She is currently a Professor of Art and Head of the Ceramics Area at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, where she has taught since 2003.
For more information, go to www.sitkacenter.org.
“Cranberry Panomara” by Meg Ojala