Saranac Art Projects set to make splash

There’s a fresh, new gallery in town – the Saranac Art Projects.

The nonprofit exhibition space occupies two connecting storefronts on the ground level of the historic Saranac Building at 25 W. Main Ave.

The free gallery is poised to explore cutting-edge, contemporary art in the American West.

“We want to focus on people who are dealing with interesting ideas but who are a little under the radar,” says Megan Murphy, gallery director.

Murphy and a small group of advisers have been putting the gallery’s concept together and working through its nonprofit status for a little more than six months.

“It started out as a small idea,” she says, “and just took on a life of its own.”

The Saranac Art Projects’ board of directors includes some heavy hitters in the region’s visual arts community.

In addition to Murphy, a painter and founder of Artocracy.com, there are Ben Mitchell, art curator at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture; Chris Bruce, director of Washington State University’s Museum of Art; Nancy Brown, Spokane architect; and Wes Mills, an internationally exhibited artist based in Missoula.

“What is perhaps unique is that Saranac Art Projects is fundamentally an educational space,” says Mitchell in an e-mail, “and is an integral part of the greater fabric of development and dialogue that the Community and Saranac buildings represent.”

The buildings also house Thin Air Community Radio (KYRS, 92.3 FM) and the Magic Lantern, an art-house cinema.

Building owner Jim Sheehan “has been really helpful and supportive in getting the space started,” says Murphy.

First exhibit

The premier show, opening today, features two very different Montana artists: sound artist Steve Peters of Missoula and photographer Raymond Meeks of the Bitterroot Valley.

“Neither one of the artists is working in the commercial gallery system,” says Murphy. “It is a really interesting dynamic.”

Peters’ sound installation, “Here-ings: A Sonic Geohistory,” is the result of a project for “The Land,” a venue for site-specific environmental art in central New Mexico.

“Wishing to develop an intimate relationship with the site rather than impose his own noise upon it,” says Murphy, “he devoted himself to the act of listening to the sounds that were present during each hour of the day and night over the course of a full year.”

In sharing his findings, “Peters encourages us to offer our own attention to the subtle poetry that surrounds us,” Murphy says.

“His work reminds us that, beneath the surface of the commonplace, the extraordinary lies waiting to be revealed.”

Peters’ installation consists of a dozen speakers hung throughout the gallery, with each having a different sound emitting from it.

“It is very austere but very beautifully done,” says Murphy. “It is really thoughtful.”

As a complement to the sound installation, there’s also a series of haunting photographs by Meeks.

He is also showing a small series of “unique artist books” that are a blending of found books and his striking black-and-white images.

“He finds these old books and actually takes them apart and inlays his own photographs and poems in them,” says Murphy.

Meeks’ work “embraces notions of family and place, lyrical stories of loss, the impermanence of happiness, and the evanescence of a shifting landscape,” according to the Rocky Mountain School of Photography Web site.

Coming next

“One of the exciting new roles the Saranac Art Projects will play in the community is bringing in work by artists that would perhaps not otherwise be seen here,” says the MAC’s Mitchell, who will curate the next show opening in November.

That exhibit will feature sculptors Jennifer Reifschneider of Missoula and Patrick Marold of Denver.

Reifschneider’s mixed-media sculptures, which explore the nature of containment, are “hard to describe,” says Mitchell.

For one of her pieces, he says, “she took an old student dictionary and over many hours in her studio meticulously wound it in white thread, literally hundreds of yards of white thread, creating a miniature, mummy-like object that is at once beautiful and puzzling.

“What is knowledge, the object asks. How do we search for and uncover knowledge?”

Marold, a former studio assistant of Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, has made large-scale works in Europe and the Rocky Mountain region.

“We will include five of his carved works from the ‘Drouge’ series,” Mitchell says, describing them as “elegant, minimal, sensual and evocative organic shapes.”