Fall 2024 Art in Storefronts, “Solidarity”
Olympia Artspace Alliance (OAA) announces “Solidarity” – a new exhibition of artworks by local artists that will be on view now through November 2024, in the windows of the Goldberg Building at Capitol Way at Fourth Avenue, downtown Olympia.
The exhibition features work from Eevee Davis, Elizabeth Mauro, Cooper Carras and Allen Burgess.
The Olympia Artspace Alliance invited Olympia-area artists to contribute an art installation that speaks to the importance of standing together as a community, nation and global society and explores and inspires unity, support and solidarity.
Each window in the Goldberg Building features an artist:
Eevee Davis, “Seeds from the Sea”
Elizabeth Mauro, “reckoning”
Cooper Carras, “Lifting up Olympia”
Allen Burgess, “Their Work Was as It Were, a Wheel Within a Wheel”
Name: Eevee Davis, they/them
Title: Seeds from the Sea
Artist statement:
My intention with my art is always to bring beautiful colors together. While I typically create abstract works that leave the interpretation up to the viewer, this particular piece on the theme of "Solidarity" is intended to bring together my heritage, the intersections of my own identity, and socially relevant world events.
I am a Blacktiné (Haitian and Gullah Geechee), Disabled, Queer, Trans/Non-Binary creatrix based right here in Olympia, WA.
You can find more about my work, and myself, on Instagram @Exo.Skell
About the work:
The connection of, specifically red, string is a nod to the Japanese "red string of fate" legend, a physical implication that we are all connected, in more ways than we know.
The flowers are a physical representation of a favorite quote of mine "They tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds.” which is attributed to Dinos Christianopoulos, a Gay Greek poet.
This quote made a wide public resurgence during the 2018 DACA protests.
The sun and water, represented by flowing dyed fabrics, are the life forces of our planet. The artist also enjoys spending time in the water on sunny days.
Name: Elizabeth Mauro, they/them
Title: reckoning
Artist Statement:
reck·on·ing
the action or process of calculating or estimating something.
a person's view, opinion, or judgment.
we are witnessing a genocide of the PALESTINIAN people in GAZA. the inhumanity, terror, and grief of which are immeasurable.
can we measure it? i fear if we don’t, we will be able to compartmentalize ourselves into inaction. here, we can try to quantify the loss by accounting for each individual killed. the scale is 1:1; one vessel for one PALESTINIAN martyr. this piece accounts for less than 2% of the over 39,000 killed.
looking at each vessel, i’m confronted with grief for the families and communities in anguish. looking at the scale, i’m filled with rage and shame for our individual and collective complicity in this inhumanity.
the work of this piece will continue until PALESTINE is liberated from this violence, all the dead are counted, and each vessel finished.
@upperleftclay
Name: Cooper Carras, he/him
Title: Lifting up Olympia
Artist statement:
Lifting up Olympia highlights individuals who share a common bond of actively supporting Olympia. Their support takes many forms, but each person, in their own way, helps drive the culture and commerce of the city. This project also explores the concept of an art exhibition that continues to evolve while on display. New portraits will be taken and added throughout the duration of the show. Check back periodically and reach out if you or someone you know would like to get involved. Visit: www.coopercarras.com/olympia/
Cooper Carras is a fourth-generation Olympia resident and has been a professional photographer for 20 years. Throughout his career, he has worked in portraiture, fashion, weddings, architecture, and still life. His work has been featured in numerous magazines, and he has had the unique opportunity to photograph three U.S. Presidents.
Special thanks to Ross Carras for writing the code that powers the digital frames.
@coopercarras
Name: Allen Burgess, he/him
Title: Their Work Was as It Were, a Wheel Within a Wheel
Artist statement:
This installation and its accompanying manuscript were a labor of ancestral veneration. Following the beginning of the attack and subsequent war on the Armenians of Artsakh in 2020, I felt a resurgence of an old panic I felt as a child, an old panic that could be traced back through my family to the day they escaped Paghesh during the Hamidian massacres in 1896. That quiet grief and fear disguised in jokes within my family about the necessity of arranged marriages, eyerolls at Turkish travel magazines advertising our decimated villages and churches as a playground for tourists, the embarrassment and anger I felt when my middle school teacher told me my report on the genocide of 1915 couldn't possibly be true- it forced me to realize that the cultural impression of being a part of the Armenian diaspora had left on me was primarily grief. I thought about my relationship to my father's side of the family, a migrated family from a border town in North Wales. I thought about my grandmother insisting superstitiously that we touch wood when saying something that would tempt the Good Folk, my grandfather and my father shouting merrily at each other about British parliament over Christmas breakfast, pawing through my great-grandmother's button collection in its Victorian tea tin. That experience against the other was so starkly different, all contingent on the reasons they were forced to leave home. It came together for me when a professor of mine asked me, being a grandchild of an enslaved woman herself, "What about the joy?"
This is what I made when I thought about the joy. This is what I made when I thought about the fact that there was no feasible way only challenging, troubling, and painful ancestral memories can be passed down- that the experience of victimhood and subsequent survival is always interlaced with an indelible joy, and that I can reach back through myself, to the moments my great-great grandmother would have been smiling.
@_attor