New exhibit opens Friday at Moses Lake Museum

MOSES LAKE — The opening reception for a new exhibit featuring Seattle photographer M.R. McDonald and Yakima artist John Barany is scheduled for 5 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center.

Admission is free.

“An Urban Archeology” features McDonald’s photographs of places, mostly in Seattle and Portland, where posters and handbills are displayed. “Collaborations: Wood plus 1 equals:3?” is a series of collaborations between Barany and other artists, starting with Barany’s wood creations.

McDonald said he first started thinking about the possibilities of photographs of poster walls while at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The campus and adjoining streets “were full of kiosks and telephone poles that were jammed with posters in all states of decay; it was a very target-rich environment,” he wrote.

Seattle is the subject of most of the photographs in the Moses Lake exhibit. “Torn paper, splashes of paint, layers of events, parties, concerts, exhibits and who knows what else take on a life of their own,” wrote McDonald’s friend and fellow photographer Tom Elliot. McDonald calls the results urban archeology.

Barany is a retired pulmonary and critical care physician and took up woodworking after he retired. “I am a lathe-bound wood artist,” he said, and he had a lot of works in progress. He was at an exhibit opening in Ellensburg, talking with the other artists, when he got an idea. “I wonder if they would want to do their kind of art on my kind of surface.”

So he contacted other artists – painters, photographers, artists who work in ceramics and cloisonne. The artists pick out a piece from “my many, many cubbyholes (in his studio) of my unfinished work,” Barany said, and add their own ideas. The artworks go back and forth between the artists until they’re done, “or not done.”

From the collaboration, “you get more than the sum total of the two – or do you?”

Each collaborator is different, he said, the finished creations have produced some surprises. “Oh yeah. It happens with virtually every one. Where did they get the idea to do that?”

The reception also features an “Adult Swim” program, also from 5 to 8 p.m. or until supplies are gone. The Adult Swim features craft projects for adults; Friday’s project is making stamps using self-adhesive craft foam sheets. Adult Swim was inspired by the swimming pool tradition of setting aside a time for adults.

Adult Swim is free.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.