One person’s trash is another’s art – or music – and Olympia’s Matter Gallery are collaborating with the Washington Center for Performing Arts and Vancouver, B.C.-based ScrapArtsMusic to show us exactly that, with an art opening tonight and music show tomorrow night, all based on trash.

Tonight’s art show in the WCPA lobby is a kind of celebration of everything Matter Gallery has done in Oly since it opened a few years ago: highlight local and regional artists using recycled and reclaimed materials to make art that ranges from serene to funky. Among the artists in tonight’s show is Olympia’s Bil Fleming, working with Christine Malek to produce a large-scale installation from leftover plastic.

Then tomorrow night ScrapArtsMusic brings five virtuosic drummers together to produce energetic and extraordinary sounds from accordion parts, artillery shells and other industrial scrap. Read more »

Collective Visions Gallery in Bremerton has just opened the exhibition from its annual statewide juried competition, the CVG Show. Juror Kathleen Moles, curator of the Northwest Museum of Art, chose 137 artworks from around 800 entries from around the state for the show, which opened last Saturday.

Prize-winning artists include William Turner, Todd Houghton, Counsel Langley, Jon Schmidt, Claudia Pettis, Naomi Smith, John Kane, David Colon, Harry Longstreet and Dawn Sagar. Best of Show Award ($1,500) went to Justin Gibbons for “Golden Hydra.”

CVG is an artist cooperative supporting 20 area artists which was founded in 1994, the …

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Amid the snow and ice, a couple of Tacoma galleries stood staunchly open last week – and Brick House was one of them. The upper downtown gallery had just opened a self-portrait show by 20 established local and regional artists, and while there are a few unremarkable works, most take on the topic of self from unusual viewpoints.

Two of those come from Alan Hopkins: The Bay area artist uses himself as a metaphor for larger human issues with inventive grace. In “Painting Through It,” Hopkins positions an iconographic, waist-up nude of himself behind a thick wire screen. Despite interesting composition (a Buddhist-inspired pose, with arms bent at 90 degrees holding a paintbrush and mirror with tapered, delicate fingers) the portrait is static and uninspiring, until you realize that Hopkins has in fact painted it through the screen itself. The crisscrossed wire casts prison-like shadows on Hopkins’ body, the flatness of the portrait takes on a new metaphorical dimension, and paint dabs on the wire blur the boundary line. Read more »

Olympia artist Kim Merriman has turned a rejection from Olympia’s new City Hall into a gift for herself and the new VA Puget Sound health clinic on American Lake in Tacoma: a triptych painting a light-infused scene of Mt. Rainier and Puget Sound in fused glass and brushed aluminum.

Merriman, who worked for 20 years as a portrait photographer and has recently begun working in glass and metal, created the triptych as a submission to the juried selection of art for Olympia’s new City Hall building. The glass piece shows a soaring blue-and-white Mt. Rainier, with sunset …

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Following on from its “Hot Fusion” show in summer, Tacoma’s B2 gallery on St. Helens Avenue downtown highlights four abstract artists for “Cold Fusion,” a show that includes some extremely strong work in painting and photography.

Best of the bunch is Judy Hintz Cox, whose painterly abstracts play with a textured white background imprinted with elements of black and just one other color. Almost sumi-like in the way she pays attention to paint drips and single, wide brush strokes, Cox uses the single colors judiciously to speak eloquently and emotionally. In “Fear Not 2” the splash of rust red falls on the thickly spread white like the shock of blood on snow. Just visible underneath the background are hints of newsprint, like a memory. Other red works are equally strong; those on a corridor wall with apple-green and more Miro-like geometrics, like “Inspired by Cello,” are less effective, with simpler texture in the background.

Photographer Jeff Mitchell exhibits two series all of the same object, one black-and-white, one color. It’s so close-up as to be unrecognizable, though it’s reminiscent of the curvy lines of the Bilbao Guggenheim museum, frequent inspiration of photographers around the world for its space-age asymmetry and shiny metal surface. Closely cropped, Mitchell’s black-and-white photographs bring out the light playing on the curves, tricking the eye’s perspective like an Escher drawing, the shadows flattening into the foreground and the shiny light flipping into the background. The color series isn’t as arresting but the composition is still compelling, placing curves and lines in unexpected parts of the frame.

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Inspired by the Christmas story, Gig Harbor artist Sanne Beavin has painted a series of light-filled works depicting the different people and moments in the narrative as part of the Advent and Christmas worship of Harbor Covenant Church, Gig Harbor.

Beavin, a parishioner and local painter who also created a series of works for the church during Lent, focuses each of the six paintings in “The Master Painter” series on different people in the Biblical story, with a human understanding of their role combined with an ethereal brushwork in the gold-red light that suffuses every work, symbolizing the divine. The paintings are hung around the sanctuary of the large Protestant church, with each one arranged each week as a kind of still life amid brushes and a stool on the floor of the stage; a kind of meditation tool. Read more »

Jon Roberton, a Northwest painter whose work has been shown in Federal Way, Sumner and Laguna Beach, CA, is showing his nature-based paintings at The English Home and Garden store in Auburn this month, with a reception Saturday.

The English Home and Garden is a garden center selling plants, flower, trees and home improvement items. Roberton’s work ranges from flowers, birds and landscapes to fantasy paintings.

Reception 6-8 p.m. Dec. 3. Free. The English Home and Garden, 102 29^th St. SE, Auburn. 253-709-4265, www.jonroberton.com

It’s not fantastic art, but it moves you just as much. “T-Town Transgender Neighbors: A Portrait Exhibition,” which just went up at the University of Puget Sound Collins Library, is a portrait show in the deepest sense of the work: 13 works of photography and text that delve into the most fundamental aspect of people’s lives, their gender.

The show impresses, not with visual tricks, but with stories. Each of the 13 folks shown in 11×13 photograph and text has coped in some way with transgender issues, with outcomes ranging from crossdressing acceptance to surgery and a complete estrangement from their old life. The photography by Irielle Dean is polished but conventional, subjects posed in front of Tacoma landmarks like the Narrows Bridge or Wright Park. There are a couple that have more depth of eye, like “Lukas G.”, slouched defiantly in front of a slash of graffiti downtown, the light bisecting him on a diagonal. But in a way, the conventionality does more than place these people squarely in our own neighborhood; it frames them as would a prom or wedding photo: mainstream, accepted.

And that’s mostly the point. Read more »