Froelick Gallery is pleased to present our latest exhibition with Joe Feddersen, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (Okanagan, Lakes), featuring recent monoprints, works on paper, and blown glass vessels.
Feddersen's imagery draws on traditional petroglyph forms to call attention to both ancient and contemporary sights and symbols of the Upper Columbia Plateau and what he considers our “hybrid culture”. In the titular series, Echo, we see dark black and red monoprint elements over large-scale pigment prints from photographs of Feddersen's ongoing glass installation work titled Charmed. Deer, horses, coyote-headed men in canoes, tepees and more mingle with such modern silhouettes such as semi trucks, high-voltage towers, bicycles, and radiation symbols in these dense compositions. The Omak Lake and River Road series refer to sites near his home in Omak, Washington, and are electrified by hypersaturated bursts of spray paint, suggesting a relationship between petroglyphs and street art of today. Likewise, the glass works, in their various mirrored, etched, and silvered surfaces, lend another dimension to Feddersen's masterful, centuries-spanning view of the world that surrounds him.
Joe Feddersen lives and works in Omak, WA and was a faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA from 1989 until his retirement in 2009. In early 2019 he created the series Echo in collaboration with Pacific Northwest College of Art's Center for Contemporary Art & Culture. His work will be on view at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University in Two Generations: Joe Feddersen & Wendy Red Star, January – March 2020.Hiswork was included in Weaving Past into Present: Experiments in Contemporary Native American Printmaking at the International Print Center, New York, Autumn 2015. He has been featured in numerous national exhibitions, including Continuum 12 Artists: Joe Feddersen, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution at the George Gustav Heye Center, New York, NY, curated by Truman Lowe; Land Mark, Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA; and was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition and monograph, Vital Signs, organized in conjunction with Froelick Gallery and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, OR. Echo is his tenth solo show at Froelick Gallery.