Natural Voices:
The Contemporary Northwest Landscape

Exhibition Statement

This exhibition featured the work of four Portland-based artists: Dennis Cunningham, Lucinda Parker, Keaney Rathbun, and Christy Wyckoff. The artists work in linocut, acrylic on paper, painted wood sculpture, and monotype respectively. Each artist uses contemporary approaches and techniques to address the subject of the natural environment and its relationship to human inhabitants. Abstraction, mystical “mindscapes,” visual metaphors, and decorative whimsy are just of few of the approaches these artists employ. The work in this exhibition was selected by Mary Priester, formerly curator of prints and drawings at the Portland Art Museum.

Dennis Cunningham, Lucinda Parker, Keaney Rathbun, and Christy Wyckoff each create works addressing the human relationships to the natural environment from different conceptual bases: they are linked by an underlying view of nature as an infinite source of psychic nourishment. The Pacific Northwest, where mountains, rivers, forests, and ocean are never far from sight or consciousness, is particularly conducive to artistic investigations of our relationship to the natural environment.

Dennis Cunningham produces complex pictorial stories in black and white linoleum block prints. ostensibly about fishing, the composite imagery uses multiple perspectives, pictures within pictures. Fishing is a metaphor through which Cunningham expresses his concerns about the human condition, wildlife, and the land.

Lucinda Parker looks closely at simple organisms — a leaf, a pod, a spiral shell, a snake, in dynamic abstractions done in acrylic on canvas or paper. Though seemingly spontaneous, her works are composed in a disciplined structure of design and mood.

Keaney Rathbun’s whimsical wood sculptures and colorful screen-prints also act as visual metaphors. With the simplest of materials — twigs, wood scraps, and paint — he creates a chimerical world of plant, animal, and human interdependency. Intimate in scale, figurative, and brightly colored, his works are immediately appealing and accessible.

Christy Wyckoff creates luminous prints of dramatic landforms, boulders, fire and water; depicting the earth as a vital living force. He brings nuances of color and surface texture to give form to his mystical “mindscapes” in which dark ominous landscapes are pierced by shafts of light.

Back to Past Exhibitions