Seemingly ordinary, farming can often be overlooked in our fast-paced, digital world. So for a new group show, four local artists aim to illuminate the beauty present within the rural landscapes of the Inland Northwest.
This month, Terrain Gallery is displaying "Listening for an Echo," a collection of art from Karen Mobley, Megan Perkins, Abbie Evans and Pam Deutschman.
Various mediums are featured, with Mobley and Perkins primarily showcasing watercolor paintings, and Evans and Deutschman contributing photography.
"I think it's kind of neat to have a combination of photographers and painters because usually those two mediums are fairly siloed," Perkins says. "We'll have painters in general and then photographers over here, but to have them together I think is really interesting."
The show came about after Deutschman began photographing scenes at her partner's family farm. Upon realizing that she had a body of work she wanted to display, she reached out to Mobley to organize a group show centered around farming and rural scenes.
Mobley, a longtime leader in the local art community (she served as director of Spokane Arts from 1997 to 2012) then put out a call to fellow local artists. She thought both Perkins' and Evans' art would capture the theme of the collection she and Deutschman wanted to create.
Evans took an interest in Mobley and Deutschman's idea, and reached out. This is Evans' first show, and it features a different type of photography than what she normally shoots.
"Creative portraiture is my first love," she says. "I love to tell stories of people who are maybe traditionally underrepresented, and I also like to tell stories that are ancient and rooted in myth and the occult."
But Evans says she's long been fascinated by farms and viewed this show both as a way to experiment with a different style of photography and to learn about farmers' stories firsthand.
"I just really wanted to learn," she says. "I wanted to look at new organic practices. I wanted to look at farms that were embracing old ways and maybe learning from some older wisdom that maybe a lot of us have forgotten about. I was just interested to see what's out there."
Deutschman, who's earned both Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees in photography, also has a background in fashion design and often uses other mediums alongside her photography.
For this show, she's sewing together photos captured on her iPhone, creating what's reminiscent of a patchwork quilt using photographs rather than fabric.
None of the artists are hanging their own work in the gallery — that's a task Terrain's Carl Richardson will undertake — but Deutschman is building ledges and glass encasements to add an additional visual element to her photography.
While some may be displayed on the walls or stacked like quilts in the gallery, Deutschman says she hopes the pieces weave together various elements and scenes to tell a story and honor the history of past generations of farmers who cared for the land, as well as to highlight the challenges and intensive labor that often come with farmwork.
"We have an idea of what ranch life and farm life is like," she says. "And it's part of it, it's a facet, but we don't see all those other layers."
Perkins often paints scenes of places, as seen in her 2018 "Artist's Eye on Spokane" series, for which she painted every week for a year, capturing various scenes throughout the city.
"She's been documenting everything — I mean, city scenes, farm scenes, barns, all those kinds of things," Mobley says of Perkins. "She personally has an affinity, I think, for the agricultural land."
Perkins grew up on the west side of Washington state, enveloped in a suburban landscape. When she moved to Spokane for college, she was exposed to her in-laws' rural environment.
"[My husband's] parents live up a little further north of Mead, and they had sort of like a little hobby barn," she says. "If you've ever been to a house in the country, whether it's a working farm or hobby farm, there's collapsed cars, there's weird barn equipment... It's just interesting to me because I don't really know what most of it is, so I see creatures out of farm equipment."
While Mobley will primarily have watercolors on display for the show, she's also showing some oil paintings and wood burnings featuring landscapes of the Palouse.
"I think we're looking at this from a kind of romanticized point of view, we're not really talking about the industry," she says. "We're all kind of touching on some of the same kinds of imagery and some of the same kinds of ideas, but it's a little bit of a reverberation rather than a straight on, 'These are pictures of farms.'" ♦
Listening for an Echo • Jan. 5-27, open Thu-Sat from 4-7 pm; First Friday reception Fri, Jan. 5 from 5-8 pm • Terrain Gallery • 628 N. Monroe St. • terrainspokane.com
