Mendocino Art Center's June Gallery Exhbitions

Sixteen artists from the Miasa-Omachi area in Nagano Prefecture are exhibiting their artwork as part of the fifth bi-ennial Miasa Sister City Art Exchange Exhibit.

 

Mendocino Art Center founder Bill Zacha and artist Toshi Yoshida formalized the sister city relationship in 1980. In 1992 Miasa and Mendocino started annual youth exchanges that have continued throughout the years. The Annual Art Exchange Exhibit was inaugurated in 2008 at the Mendocino Art Center, followed by showings in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Mendocino Coast artists have exhibited their work in Omachi, Japan, in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015.

 

“Two Worlds” is Betty Helen Longhi’s Gallery Ten exhibition. “My first world is that of jewelry and how to make it work that integrates with the body and gives the wearer a felling of comfort and celebration,” Betty explains. Many of the pieces use a process called Keum Boo in which 24K gold is fused to the surface of the silver to give a rich contrast. “My second world is a product of my studies of Buddhism and meditation and my desire to do work that relates to these ideas,” Betty says. “In our world today, which is filled with so much stress and anxiety, my hope is to offer something that even for a few moments would project a sense of peace and tranquility.” The works can be used as objects for meditation or simply be reminders that places of beauty and serenity can still be found if we just take the time to go there in our minds.

 

David Weitzman’s “Layers” exhibition will be in the Nichols Gallery. David creates the effect of three-dimensional landscape scenes by layering two-dimensional images drawn on transparent acrylic sheets. The depth of the scene is created when the individual drawings are stacked one on the other, separated by spacers. The gnarled, rough trunks, twisty limbs, and intricate traces of branches of trees set against the bright sky appeal to David’s sense of line and reawakened his fascination with Chinese landscape painting, all perfectly suited to his favorite medium as an illustrator, pen and ink.

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