Arts reporter and critic Rosemary Ponnekanti keeps you in touch with the arts and culture scene with the help of other News Tribune writers, critics and editors.
Rosemary Ponnekanti is the arts reporter at The News Tribune, and has been a classical music nerd nearly all her life. Besides spending way too much time in galleries, museums and concert halls, she occasionally brings a whistle or double bass to Celtic jam sessions, and insists on singing "Happy Birthday" in four-part harmony.
Other contributors include:
> Arts & entertainment editor Craig Sailor
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At Fulcrum Gallery, Laura Ward's building paper houses. Her show "Trace" takes fragments of architecture and interior patterns and reconstructs them with layers and layers of paper, carved like wood and painted like ghostly memories.
An East Coast native who moved to Seattle for the glass, Wardgrew up, she says, in a "haunted house" in New Hampshire, full of layers and secrets, with two woodworking parents and an inherited love of tools. Since then, she's traveled west, exploring abandoned buildings and creating virtual houses of chalk, wallpaper, grass, backless facades, plastic siding, glass frit and pretty much anything she can get her hands on. Her art changes medium like Madonna changes images, but one thing's constant: an exploration of impermanence, possession, appearance, and the human desire to make a home.
In "Reflection," for instance, seven sculptures project from Fulcrum's north wall like white wrought iron. Filigree and ornate, they cast candle-lit shadows. Go closer, though, and you spot the asymmetries: one tendril ends in a fleur-de-lis, the other side in a flush line. One side arabesques into space, the other is empty. It's subtle: Ward gently mocks our desire for sameness and reminds us of the imperfection of our memories. And of course, it's not wrought iron, it's paper. Layer upon layer, glued into wood-like strength and carved and painted into a sculptural softness.
On the opposite wall, "Flake" takes the same paper-mass and combines pristine white snowflake-shapes into a semi-globe. The blanks speak of collective memory loss, or bombed-out cities.
"Portion" and "Boundary", also white but in cast cement and cast rubber, are more architectural, fragments of pattern like relics of an abandoned life, still warm with the heat of the departed inhabitant.
Ward's craftsmanship is immaculate, her vision wistful. It's as if she's searching for the very soul of a house, and finding it in these gentle reconstructions of visual memory.
"Trace" is up at Fulcrum through January 25. 6-9 p.m. Thursdays, 12-6 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, and by appointment. 1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma. 253-520-0520, fulcrum.oliverdoriss.com
Laura's also in a group show opening 6-8 p.m. Jan. 13 through Feb. 28 at Winston Wachter Fine Art, 203 Dexter Ave., North Seattle. 206- 652-5855
