NIC Art Faculty
NIC Art Faculty, from left: Brian Fahlstrom, Jessica Raetzke, Jen Erickson, Michael Horswill, Otis Bardwell
Otis Bardwell
In 2013, Otis Bardwell and his
wife moved their family to Coeur d’Alene where Otis runs the NIC Ceramics
program. Otis is a graduate of Cal State University, Los Angeles. His history
as an art instructor includes courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Los Angeles,
Lycée Français de Los Angeles, and Barnsdall Arts in Hollywood.
Otis’s work emerges from a labor-intensive approach that exists in the gray area between the rational and visceral. These endeavors impart a quasi-primitive mystique in the finished state of the work. The empty vessel is a symbol for nostalgia: the desire for something that is only accessible through the shifting and sorting of individual and communal memory.
“All the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the mud-pies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies to each other's sympathetic consideration.” –J.M. Thorburn, 1925
Jen Erickson
Jen Erickson’s meticulously detailed graphite drawings feature
forms created from an accumulation of handmade marks. Each mark is either drawn
or carved into the surface in a response to the previous one. These marks come together and disperse, engaging in a constant continuum of growth and decay.
She finds inspiration from the idea of loss and the act of decomposition as
well as the visualization of data and biological systems.
Erickson received her BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Montana and her MFA from Central Washington University. She has been involved with several artist-run galleries and served on the Board of Directors for the Saranac Art Projects in Spokane for several years. She frequently shows her work at the PUNCH Gallery in Seattle, as well as the Brink Gallery in Missoula, Montana, in addition to participating in group shows around the country.
She has taught classes at Central Washington University, Gonzaga, and Eastern Washington University. At NIC she currently teaches Oil Painting, Printmaking, Watercolor, Drawing II, and Life Drawing.
Brian Fahlstrom
Brian Fahlstrom’s paintings have been exhibited internationally and are held in a number of private and museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and collections such as the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, the Taguchi Collection, Japan, and the Saatchi Collection, UK. He is a recipient of the Pollock - Krasner Foundation Grant.
He received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Misouri. He has taught all levels of painting and drawing at a number of schools throughout Southern California, including the University of California Los Angeles, Claremont Graduate University, California State University Long Beach, Pasadena City College and Long Beach City College.
The work of Brian Fahlstrom evades historical placement, being firmly rooted in the tradition of painting's past while simultaneously existing very much in the present. His paintings of landscapes, architecture, and the figure sometimes verge on abstraction and at other times remain firmly representational. See more on his web site: http://brianfahlstromstudio.com/
Michael Horswill
Michael Horswill is a life-long student of art, continually exploring and uniting processes and materials in intricate sculptures for gallery and academic exhibitions and larger public artworks in the Inland Northwest. His work as an illustrator, then painter, and now sculptor is balanced by teaching design, drawing, art history, and sculpture at North Idaho College, where he also coordinates the Boswell Corner Gallery.
His sculptures are abstract visual environments that juxtapose natural materials such as wood, rawhide, beeswax, and bamboo with mechanical materials such as steel, copper, wire and glass. His influences include a fascination with mechanical systems combined with immersion in nature, including bee-keeping and watching the occasional moose while welding. He grew up in the Northwest and attended art schools and universities in Montana, Japan, Washington, and Idaho, achieving an A.A., a B.A., and an MFA. See more of his work at See more on his web site: www.MichaelHorswill.com
Jessica Raetzke
Jessica Raetzke’s lens based artwork is interested in observing and documenting the moments of coalescence between becoming a part of, and being apart from, the everyday spaces and events we inhabit, placing one on the threshold of that which is knowable and that which is unseen. It is my intention to reveal the qualities of space and time, which are neither before nor after, but filled with potential.
One of photography’s greatest and most deceptive attributes is its ability to simultaneously expose and obscure. Frames within frames act as entry and obstacle, denying resolution in the relationship between the subject and the spaces inside and outside of the frame. These images are meant to absorb what is read into them, in the same way that light is absorbed by a negative and eventually becomes a photograph. There is no gesture reaching out to the viewer to define the context of the subject within these spaces. No mask is made meaningful. There is only a sense of ambiguous significance, an invitation for the viewer to become a vital element in the creation of meaning within each image.
She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BFA from Savannah College of Art & Design.