Felted birds, intricate Upper Lynn Canal cartography and framed paper dioramas are just a few of the works on display at First Friday openings, from 5 to 7 p.m. around town this week.
Juneau artist Lori Stenberg will be holding a show of her work at the Presbyterian Church during the monthly celebration, held on each first Friday of every month since February.
Stenberg is bringing two series. “The Wordless Gospel” consists of five oil paintings on two-by-three-foot panels, each focusing on a different color. “They are meant to sort of unfold the story of the Gospel in a visual way,” Stenberg said.
The series, currently housed at the Love INC office in Juneau, has traveled across Juneau from various church groups to the Lemon Creek Correctional Center.
A second series, which Stenberg completed with friend Candy Behrends, consists of painted silk banners depicting scenes from Southeast – a humpback whale, skunk cabbage, a glacier, and an underwater scene complete with seaweed and anemone.
“I am a person of faith, but I don’t necessarily paint religious stuff,” Stenberg said. “Every painting is an act of worship, whether it appears religious or not. I don’t make a distinction between secular and non-secular work.”
Stenberg has lived in Juneau 24 years, and started actively painting and showing her work 15 years ago. Though the relationship between art and faith is ancient, the connection is just starting to reassert itself in the minds of many modern people.
“There really is a growing movement across the U.S. to reintroduce art into the church in a fresh new way,” she said.
Stenberg also will conduct a workshop at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Presbyterian Church. It will include an exercise called “visio divina,” with Stenberg reading a passage from the Bible and attendees creating a visual response to it.
Also on tap for First Friday is a display of Amelia Nash’s artwork at Skipping Stone Studios. Nash said the show has primarily an oceanic theme and features paintings inspired by German expressionist woodcuts, as well as examples of her favorite medium, tatebanko.
Tatebanko is the Japanese art of making dioramas out of paper and placing them in a box or frame. Nash’s tatebanko art has been on display in one of the Art on Main Street windows for several months.
“I enjoy marrying the natural world and the fantastical within the neat boundaries of a fancy frame,” Nash said.
Across the way from Skipping Stone, pop into the Alaska Arts Confluence to take a look at Jeffrey Moskowitz’s maps of the Upper Lynn Canal. The installation is part of a larger mapping project to highlight areas of Southeast with up-to-date satellite imagery, topography and bathymetric features.
Moskowitz derived layers from NASA, USGS and NOAA data to produce original maps through his company, Hemlock Lines, using ArcGIS, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.
“What I have to keep reminding myself as a geographer is that humans on this planet are a lot smaller than we perceive ourselves to be,” Moskowitz said. “I wonder what it would be like to see the landscape from a birds-eye view so that small feeling is re-produced. These maps help us identify ourselves in these surroundings – what we can’t see in our everyday life.”
Kelly Mitchell’s felted birds will be on display at the Port Chilkoot Distillery as part of First Friday and Nancy Nash will play piano and lead sing-a-longs of Christmas tunes at the Sheldon Museum, which will be decorated for the holidays.