Beyond All That

Beyond All That opens in the Burnett Gallery at Gualala Arts Center on Friday, July 12th, 4-6 pm, featuring the work of Alice Wingwall, Suzan Friedland, and Lis Gladstone. They heard the expression “Beyond All That” and discussed what it might mean to them and how their work might reflect that meaning. The result is the vision of 3 different artists expressing that common theme. The show will involve new mixed media pieces by each artist reflecting their respective styles, histories, and something beyond those constraints.

About the Artists

Alice Wingwall works with the juxtaposition of images. In her photographs, photomurals, sculpture, site-specific installations and film, she brings together compositional elements, memories and associations. The spatial arrangements, evocative prints and words that she creates have a very distinctive presence.

Alice was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, studied art at Indiana University, architectural history and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was awarded an MFA and served as a graduate student instructor. She also studied in Paris at the Ecole du Louvre, the Ecole Metiers d’Art (stained glass studio), and the Atelier del Debbio for stone carving. With a grant from the Danish government, she studied architectural history at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen.

Subsequently she taught in the University of Oregon Honors College and started the sculpture program at Wellesley College as an Assistant Professor. Her work is included on the campus and in the collections of the University of Oregon, the Oakland Art Museum, the University of California College of Environmental Design, and in private collections in Massachusetts, Indiana, Texas, Oregon and California.

Her photographic work is featured in the exhibition Sight Unseen, mounted by the California Museum of Photography in Riverside and now touring various cities internationally, including Washington D.C. and Mexico City and was also a part of the show Blind at the Museum, organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She also exhibited at Photo L.A. through 2017 with the Blind Photographers Guild.

The film “Miss Blindsight: the Wingwall Auditions,” which she and Wendy Snyder MacNeil co-edited, also showed in many places, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where it was premiered as the Best Independent Film of the Year 2000 at the New England Film and Video Festival. The film provides insights into the changing life of an artist with degenerative retinal disease and is available on DVD.

Suzan Friedland holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco State University. Her innovations in the world of contemporary textile and mixed media art are documented in numerous publications and exhibitions, including the Textile Museum of San Jose, California and private collections around the country.

Suzan has lectured and taught widely on surface design and has led workshops at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the de Young Museum of San Francisco. She was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Recently Suzan has participated in art intensives at the Palm Springs Art Museum, working in watercolors and ink on paper with Professor Kwok Wai Lau.  She lives in Gualala, California.

Elisabeth Gladstone began working as an artist in wool, spinning, dying and weaving on the island of Jura in her native Scotland and selling her work at a gallery in Edinburgh. She obtained her B.F.A. in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute after studying with Pradip Malde in Edinburgh and with Rondal Partridge in Berkeley. 

Lis has explored a range of media and processes ranging from woolen textiles to hand-formed clay, encaustic, charcoal and watercolor, which she learned from her father David. More recently she has focused on natural media (charcoal, gesso, and pigments), processes and graphic themes that resonate with her imagination. For the past few years she has been meeting weekly with a group of explorative artists via https://imaginalresonance.com.

Featured image by Suzan Friedland