New Exhibitions at SJIMA

Director and Curator Ian Boyden – Peggy Sue McRae photo

Three new exhibitions have just opened at San Juan Islands Museum of Art that are truly world class featuring artists of global and historic significance. Sleep of Reason: Selected Prints by Francisco Goya seems darkly relevant to our times. Goya served as a painter in the Spanish court of the late eighteenth century and some of his work shown here was so politically provocative it was not published until decades after his death.

I arrived at the museum just in time to hear the museum’s director, and curator of the exhibitions, Ian Boyden introduce “Rebar and Case” one of three parts of  Ai Weiwei: Fault Line by Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. The work investigates the corruption leading to a tragic loss of school children’s lives during the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. The marble pieces are carved into the shape of twisted rebar recovered from faulty school construction that collapsed in the earthquake. The marble used came from the same quarry as the marble used for Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Names of the students cover the walls.

In buoyant juxtaposition to the dark weight of Ai Weiwei’s mortuary stone and Francisco Goya’s images of madness, Portland artist Dana Lynn Louis’s installation As above, So Below in the museum’s atrium floats with an effervescence created by suspended glass, stung discs of mica, and painted patterns on the tall glass windows that mimic prayer beads. Meditation cushions are provided and a floating table of glass bells with felt clappers seem to send up a silent prayer. Says Louis, “My intention is to inspire hope and thus encourage action towards the betterment of our ability to live humanely together.”

SJIMA is open Friday – Monday, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Silent Bells – Peggy Sue McRae photo

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