Only at Western

The first art exhibition for the fall 2010 semester will be on display in the Western Wyoming Community College Art Gallery August 25 - September 23. The display, by artist Jenevieve Hubbard is titled “Narrow Passage,” the show  is free and open to the public.

When Jenevieve was three and her brother was two, her Father talked her Mother into moving from Cedar City, Utah to a native traditional village in Alaska called Pilot Station. There she was generously and lovingly taught the sites, smells, sounds and stories of the Y’Upik people who had lived in the village for generations. She can still remember the quiet beauty of a Y’Upik woman skinning a seal with an Ulu on the beach.

Life in the village as an outsider became a woven experience of the integration of native culture and western ideals. The Y’Upik people were rooted in subsistence living and ancient animist beliefs where everything in their surrounding was imbued with a spirit source – rocks, trees, ice, dirt, animals. This was juxtaposed with their recent exposure to a western consumer based society – blue jeans, coca cola and cable television. Hubbard managed her own personal dichotomy between life inside her typical Christian American home and an outside existence fiddling with fish traps on the beach and watching villagers hang smoked salmon.

After college at the University of Utah, Hubbard began a series of totemic industrial paintings using soil, tea, ink and acrylic paint. This work became a return to the elemental themes of her childhood, drawing from indigenous mythologies and reflecting her attempts to navigate the spiritual fall-out of a disconnected and isolated modern existence.

Hubbard’s most recent body of work, “Narrow Passage” is made up of fingerprint and labyrinth imagery. The labyrinth itself is one of the oldest non-representational symbols dating back to the Bronze Age. It has been associated with the journey inward – a single path beginning and ending in the same place.

Hubbard describes, “From eerie images of a vacated Chernobyl quickly reclaimed by trees and deer to experiences in my own history of unstable bush plane flights over the stone polygons of the Arctic tundra, my labyrinth paintings reflect recurring childhood dreams skipping from one island to another stretching on into infinity, lost in a place uninhabitable to human life.”

WWCC Gallery Director, Professor Florence McEwin , describes Hubbard’s work as “the suggestive imagery between waking and dreaming  the results of  a   subdued palette of tonality and hue that muffles and sharpens the senses in a contradictory yet entwined experience.”

The artist will do a presentation about her work , past and present, on Thursday, September 23 in the art area. For more information contact Dr. McEwin at 307 382 1723.