Saratoga News

Photograph by George Sakkestad

A visitor walks past a wall of mixed-media drawings by Judith Juntura Miller, part of a three-artist show at the Gallery at Montalvo.

Artists explore codes from inner and outer worlds

By Shari Kaplan

Combining personal and universal symbolism with a spectrum of colors and textures, the Codes From Inner and Outer Worlds exhibit at The Gallery at Montalvo blends the evocative artwork of three Bay Area artists.

Through Feb. 22, visitors to Villa Montalvo can view drawings, paintings and image-objects of Kaaren Tekla Fladager, Judith Juntura Miller and Mary Hull Webster. The codes in the exhibit's title, explains curator Theres Rohan, refer to a system of images shared by a culture at large. These open many possibilities for the transmission and interpretation of messages and ideas.

Fladager writes in her artist's statement that painting is the physical embodiment of metaphysical investigation.

"Through painting, I move into a mind state which pre-exists language and culture yet does not exclude them. This state, which is spacious and empty, cannot be developed, only discovered," she explains.

Further discovering this state are her seven pieces, consisting of oil on linen, oil on cotton canvas and ink on rice paper. In "Meeting," a dark-skinned man clad in white emerges from a dark red wall in which half of his shadowy outline remains.

The whole painting, in fact, is suffused with warm shades of red. Carrying a lantern, the man calmly contemplates a bird of prey perched beneath an open window. The bird, in turn, contemplates the man.

Most of Fladager's paintings have people as their main subjects, such as the ominous figure toting a shotgun in "Man in Black" or the purple-caped subject of "Magician," who turns his magical back on the viewer in order to appreciate the beauty of the horizon.

Miller's love and propensity for art blossomed during her childhood, much of which was spent on a cattle ranch in Eastern Oregon. "I drew on everything: edges of newspapers, scraps of paper, mud in the creek, walls of the ranch cabin," she writes of this time in her life.

Among her current artistic interests is portraying "the messages we give and receive at every level: personal, spiritual, societal."

The exhibit shows some 30 of Miller's mixed-media works, each 11 by 15 inches with its own thought-provoking title. All have some connection with sound and/or sight, such as "Meaningless Notes," "Shifting Silences," "Reflected Signs" and "Sounds of Fall."

Certain symbols and images pervade a great many. These include climbing and reaching flowers; containers ranging from vases and bottles to birdhouses and wooden cabins; animals, mainly insects, birds and a few mammals; birds' nests; cocoons and small diagrams of the inner ear. Scraps of paper printed with meaningless--or perhaps only cryptic--letters, numbers and symbols appear on some of the canvases.

Webster succinctly explains what the creative process is like for her.

"I'm not doing anything. Something's just flowing through me. There are more thoughts. They will come. I want to make visible the mind that inhabits me," she reveals in her statement.

"At best, there may be a recognition that this is also your mind. We can connect through these images and bring new bits of consciousness into our world."

Among her 12 contributions to the exhibit is "Bliss Mandala," created on the gallery floor. A totem of sorts, the mandala's center consists of a teakettle, wall clock and drum stacked atop a hot plate, all united by the hot plate's long cord swung over them. Around them is a spiraled, symmetrical pattern formed with rice grains dyed red, yellow, teal, sky blue, grey, white and tan.

Webster's other works take their form in media such as drypoint etchings, collages, linoleum prints, oil paints and pastels. From afar, some resemble scribblings or random collages, but in actuality there is much more to them for the viewer who thinks, and looks, carefully.

Codes From Inner and Outer Worlds runs through Feb. 22. The Gallery, located at 15400 Montalvo Road, is open Thu. and Fri., 1-4 p.m. and Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m., before Montalvo concerts and during intermissions. A reception with readings and discussions by the artists takes place Feb. 1 at 2 p.m. For information, call 961-5813.

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