NIC's Corner Gallery to feature faculty art

The works of five North Idaho College art professors will be on display Feb. 8 through March 25 at the Corner Gallery in the Boswell Schuler Performing Arts Center on the college’s main campus in Coeur d’Alene.

The NIC Art Faculty Exhibition, a biennial event, will open Feb. 8 with a reception at 5 p.m. in the Corner Gallery. Before the reception, the artists will present a slide lecture and panel discussion at 4 p.m. in Todd Hall in the Molstead Library, across Garden Avenue from Boswell Hall.

“This exhibition lets us demonstrate for students and the community what each faculty member brings to the classroom and to their profession,” said NIC art professor Michael Horswill, who is also the Corner Gallery director and an exhibiting faculty artist.

The show will feature the works of Otis Bardwell, Jen Erickson, Brian Fahlstrom, Horswill and Jessica Raetzke.

Jen Erickson, an NIC associate professor of art who specializes in drawing, watercolor and oil painting, will show three large oil paintings and some watercolor pieces in which she explores the idea of elements coming together and dispersing.  

One piece was previously shown as a finished piece before Erickson covered the canvas in graphite and started again from a blank slate. Erickson said repurposing and transforming the piece has been a decades-long project and that revealing a renewed version of former work has been a highlight of her exhibition experience.

“The piece appears one way from a distance and then as you go up to it, you discover things that you don’t see from a distance,” Erickson said. “It becomes another thing as you come up close to it. Visually, I’m interested in that as an artist. Covering up old work helps that process because you already have the layers and history there.” 

Brian Fahlstrom, an NIC art instructor who specializes in painting, will show a three-piece series featuring the story of St. Martin of Tours and the beggar, where a Roman soldier on his horse cuts off part of his cloak to give to a beggar in an act of charity.

The scene has been depicted hundreds of times by artists throughout history, so Fahlstrom said he challenged himself to make a new interpretation of the story by using not only an unfamiliar medium – a milk-based paint called casein that behaves differently than oil or watercolor – but also a style that is different from his typical abstract work. 

"My previous paintings tended to have expressive brush work, very bright colors, and lots of abstract, swirling movement,” Fahlstrom said. “Everything in this new series is relatively restrained, and there’s nothing fantastical or abstract in any way. I’ve kind of pushed for the opposite of what I normally do."

Michael Horswill, an NIC art professor and mixed media sculptor, will show a series of wall sculptures that explore the concept of a horizon line as a visual metaphor using steel, glass, encaustic or wax paint, woodworking and other materials.

While making the pieces, Horswill contemplated a range of relationships and contrasts in life – from nature’s horizon line between earth and sky to everyday divisions in differences of understanding, language, opinions and interpretations. He said the horizontal and rectangular shapes express “tension or energy between two formidable realities” in complement to his other work, which often focuses on fluid, dynamic and organic shapes.

“My work references the idea of a landscape painting by virtue of their horizontal shape, but they’re talking more metaphorically about the divisions of space and sociological, emotional and intellectual divisions where two thoughts or people or forms or things come into contact,” Horswill said. “It’s the idea of proximity.”

Jessica Raetzke, NIC professor of art and photography, will show a series of more than a dozen photographs of outdoor images that she has collected over the course of the past year and a half.

Many of the images were captured near her family’s home in Alabama and from her travels, Raetzke said. Each photo emphasizes the elements of art – color, form, line, shape, space, texture and value – in a series curated while thinking of her family.

“These photographs are small moments to contemplate,” Raetzke said. “I tend to focus on the formal elements of what I’m seeing out in the world – framing things in interesting ways and trying to notice things that you normally wouldn’t. Everything is so very busy. It’s nice to slow down and just take a moment."

 

Otis Bardwell, who is an art instructor at NIC, will show a number of pieces, including a ceramic piece titled “Oculi Omnium.” Bardwell said he is inspired by the art movements Arte Povera and Mono-ha, both of which explore and make use of non-traditional materials.

 

 

 

  

For more information about the Art Faculty Exhibit, contact Corner Gallery Director Michael Horswill at (208) 769-3202 or Michael.horswill@nic.edu. 

Posted: Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022

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