PORT ANGELES — By gazing through a wall of clear water, you can immerse yourself in both the present and the future.
You can also sit down at one seductive feast, and once sated, gaze into an electric waterfall — or turn and eye the apocalypse.
This is “Envision Cascadia,” a gathering of art inspired by the extreme edge of Pacific Northwestern America, renamed Cascadia to shrug off political borders.
It’s the summer-into-fall show at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, and like its wild and fertile setting, it has lured many a creative mind.
Jake Seniuk is the center’s director, a Harvard graduate attracted decades ago to Cascadia by the beat poetry of Gary Snyder and his own imagining of the region as an American Shangri-La.
Earlier this year, he invited dozens of fellow artists to enter a show that would envision this place’s future; the result is 40 installations, sculptures, paintings and assemblages that shock, enchant and provoke.
‘Simply Smashing’
In the center’s gallery facing toward the city and the Strait of Juan de Fuca is “Simply Smashing,” a window of 200 wine glasses filled with water — and showing us a piece of Cascadia in mosaic.
This was created by Rebecca Cummins, the Seattle artist who has another work out in the center’s Webster’s Woods: a mirrored camera obscura that provides more angles on the trees and sky.
Visitors call the glasses the wine bar, and “everyone loves it,” Seniuk said. Positioned as it is, the work is luminous, even when it’s not sunny out.
Below the “bar” is “Table of Plenty,” a celebration of Cascadia’s bounty: sculpted salmon, strawberries, blueberries, Dungeness crab, mushrooms and more, glistening on two plates alongside driftwood and moss silverware with a snowy mountain range stretching between.
Port Angeles artist Anna Wiancko Chasman brought this together using mostly recycled and found materials.
Clinging to the table and peeking from its drawer are a sea star, an earthworm and a salamander, creatures that bespeak the health of an ecosystem; there are also two goblets, one filled with red wine and the other with water.
This work reveres the forest, the peaks, the sea and our reliance on them, Wiancko Chasman said.
“We need our temperate rainforest so much for clean water,” she said, adding that the earthworm reminds her of our need for healthy soil to nourish vegetables and fruit.
“Table of Plenty” is about how humans can thrive while caring for the other living things around them, the artist said. It’s about “the abundance of all life — if we can live together. That is my dream.”
Facing west from the table, you see “Bay of Dreams,” a waterfall evoked by the late Charles Stokes of Tacoma.
Seniuk, delighting in this painting, urges viewers to look deeply, to see Stokes’ flashes of electrical current as well as glints that hint at ancestral spirits.
This is Cascadia in its magnificent fluidity, with a sense of water and time flowing forward. And like the other images in the show, “Dreams” is about anything else you see in it.
Viewer completes work
Seniuk agrees with Marcel Duchamp, who said the viewer completes a work of art by interacting with it.
Seniuk hopes “Envision Cascadia” will provide the nourishment for a communitywide interaction.
Among the potential talking points: What do we want this place to become? How do we evolve from a resource-extraction economy to a new, diversified, restorative economy?
“I’m encouraging people to think about identity — especially Port Angeleans,” Seniuk said.
People all over the country look at the Pacific Northwest as a romantic, even mysterious place; many want it to stay rural while they make new lives here, but of course their arrival changes it.
“Envision Cascadia,” meantime, provides views of wilderness so pristine they make the eyes water.
There’s “Alpenglow,” a photograph by John Anderson. And nearby is a painting some will find funny while others recoil: “Hurricane Ridge: View Property for Sale” by Jack Gunter.
“The Seventh Day” is a vision of harmony among a man, a woman and a peaceable community of other animals painted by Bryn Barnard of Friday Harbor; around the bend from “Day” is “The Promise,” a disturbing oil on canvas by Michael Paul Miller with orange flames, black sky and a wounded boy staring out at the viewer.
Dark, brooding
The big, dark painting — at 4 feet by 6 feet, it dominates the room — was created by a recent transplant to this area: Miller, a Midwesterner by birth, is now an art professor at Peninsula College.
“In all of his paintings,” Seniuk said, “you have the sense that there’s something brewing, [and] it might be the apocalypse.”
Close by is a brighter contribution from a Canadian artist. Nicole Dextras of Vancouver, British Columbia, provided “Ecoman” and “Queen of Cascadia,” photographs of a dapper man and a voluptuous woman clothed entirely in fresh leaves, reeds and camellia flowers.
And on the opposite wall, another pair of images jar the viewer.
‘Red Tide’
“Red Tide” and “Olympic Organic” sprang from walks on the beach at Discovery Bay, where Karen Hackenberg lives and makes her art.
“I spend a lot of time watching what washes up, man-made and natural,” she said.
On the sand near her house, she’s seen plenty of plastic, including a red Tide detergent jug — which appeared around the time of an actual red tide — and an organic-yogurt container.
The irony, to Hackenberg, is in these “clean, natural” products packaged in plastic that’s likely to become litter or landfill.
When she went to a local frame shop with the “Olympic Organic” painting, a woman there asked what her message was. “She said, ‘I buy yogurt in those plastic containers,’ and I said, ‘So do I,'” Hackenberg recalled.
Both women then asked, “Is there any other way to buy it?”
Of course, one can make yogurt at home and pour it into a reusable container. It’s this kind of exchange that Hackenberg wants her art to propel.
“We’re all part of the problem [of pollution],” she said.
“Envision Cascadia,” Seniuk added, is both a look back on the past and a jumping-off point to the future.
“I believe in this region. We have so much richness here,” so let the conversation begin, he said. In the center, surrounded by art, is a lush place to start.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@ peninsuladailynews.com.
