Now showing through March 27 

Relics of Light features four notable artists: Keith Troester, Amirra Malak, Lyosha Grechishkin and Susan Bari Price.  New York video artist, Keith Troester presents “In a Landscape”, a 6 minute projection of two contrasting urban scenes, inspired by avant-garde composer, John Cage. Amirra Malak, Lyosha Grechishkin and Susan Bari Price paint in varied styles but with a common theme of light and shadow, also known as chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro was commonly used by Italian Renaissance painters to achieve depth in paintings.  All four artists in the current show work to capture reality with the same emotional connectedness as these early Renaissance painters did.

Susan Bari Price is a realist painter that works to convey the human spirit as the foundation of her work.  Each technically refined object is re-presented with a simplicity that makes it universally recognized.  Whether light softly streams across a felt hat, bristles from a shaving brush or a copper watering tin, a soothing quiet prevails in her insightful oils on canvas and linen.  Her nationally recognized and awarded artwork has been written about in American Artist Magazine and she currently teaches at Gage Academy of Art.

Amirra Malak is an awarded Oregon artist mainly working in vibrant, colorful acrylics on paper and board.  As the daughter of an Egyptian business man and a Caucasian American artist, a union of opposites is expressed in her paintings that juxtapose Middle-Eastern appliqué patterns and Arabic calligraphy with ethereal northwest nature themes.  When asked to describe her work Malak replied; “Light coming through leaves and trees is a metaphor for the human experience, the intangible illuminating the physical.”  In many pieces, Arabic words are layered repeatedly, much like a mantra, until the text dissolves into the effect of vibrating light or molecules. 

Lyosha Grechishkin  is a Russian artist currently residing in the Pacific NW. Grechishkin’s still life paintings reflect a strong contrast of natural light and darkness. His artistic exploration is based on interpretations of the emotional aspects of memory. 

Keith Troester’s enigmatic video “In a Landscape” collapses the light of day and electric light at night into the same frame.  This piece was exhibited in Italy's "Festival dell'Architettura 4" in 2008.  Most recently, he has been experimenting with ways of making videos without a traditional video camera.