PORT ANGELES — The teenagers chosen for “ArtPaths: Portfolio 2012” appear fearless.
They might not feel entirely unafraid about revealing their hearts through their art. But they have gone ahead anyway, depicting love, loss, joy, disconnection and connection in the public art display to open Sunday.
This is the annual student show at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, and it spotlights 25 youths chosen from Forks, Port Angeles and Sequim high schools.
Through June 24
Their exhibition will remain up through June 24, which will be after some of them graduate and begin their next chapters.
One of the most striking sculptures in the show is by Victoria LaCroix, a 17-year-old junior at Sequim High.
It’s a loop of chain connected by two hands with fingers intertwined.
These are the hands of Victoria and her late brother, David James Randle, who was fatally shot at his home in Dungeness in February.
Before the funeral director took away his body, Victoria was allowed to go in and say goodbye.
She held his hand for a moment. Later, she sculpted clay into two joined hands.
“It symbolizes how we are forever entwined,” Victoria told a reporter earlier this week, right after she had brought her artwork into the center’s gallery.
One of three pieces
Victoria’s sculpture is one of three she created for “ArtPaths.” Another, also made of chains, is titled “Stay Strong.” The third is a wrist shackle and chain connected to a ball of painted dollars, symbolizing the way money can confine a person’s thinking.
Like the rest of the students, Victoria worked with Barbara Slavik, education director at the fine arts center.
Slavik, in her 22nd year here, is a passionate advocate for these young artists. She’s getting ready to retire but wanted to stay through one more student show and one more opening reception in which she honors the teens — for the risks they took and the art they made.
Reception Sunday
That public reception, with refreshments and a 3 p.m. awards ceremony, will go from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. Sunday inside and outside the center’s gallery.
Grace Trautman is another Sequim High School student whose medium is clay. With cliff swallows’ nests as her inspiration, she shaped a group of figures and arranged them together, only with one outcast away from the others — like what happens in life.
The teenagers’ passions are on display, too: in the strange guitar sculptures by Eddy Bartley of Forks High School and in the paintings by Patrick Carpenter of Sequim.
They depict a bizarre forest, inspired by the lions-and-tigers-and-bears scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” but also by Patrick’s own walks in the woods.
“I really enjoy Surrealism,” he said, as in that genre made famous by the Spanish painter Salvador Dali.
After he graduates in June, Patrick plans to major in Spanish and minor in art at Central Washington University. He hopes to travel and teach English as a second language one day.
Nora Krebs, a Port Angeles High School exchange student from Waltersdorf, Germany, celebrates travel — and other teens who came a long distance to get here — in her three “ArtPaths” paintings.
International portraits
They’re portraits of three classmates: one from Ethiopia, one from Indonesia and another from Germany.
“I’ve gotten to know all of these people from all over the world,” said Nora, who arrived in Port Angeles last August and will return to school in Germany next month.
Other young artists selected for “ArtPaths” include Dayne House, Alyssa Miles and Julius Tuvenvall from Forks High; Chauncelamay Bailey, Aubrianna Howell, Megan Perrizo, Britney Robinson, Bryttani Vaughan and Darian Wattenburg from Port Angeles High School; and Jesh Anthony, Austin Becker, Blake Bryant, Jaiden Dokken, Gabriella Halady, Julianne Miller, Andrea Morris, Sarah Necco, Jackie Sanschagrin, Sarah Spray and Lorah Steichen from Sequim High.
As in past years, local businesses support the “ArtPaths” students: Karon’s Frame Center donated matting and glazing, while Olympic Stationers funded art supplies.
After Sunday’s reception, the show will stay open to the public from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays; admission is free to the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center at 1203 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
For more on other activities at the center, visit www.PAFAC.org or phone 360-457-3532.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
