Exhibit at North Bank Artists Gallery focuses on election-year issues

Here’s a rundown of election-year issues: racism, gun violence, human rights, capitalism, democracy, the environment, secrecy and whistle blowers, respect and ethics, civilization versus anarchy.

These aren’t just big, important topics — they’re yuge. Believe me. That’s why today’s First Friday Art Walk opening at the North Bank Artists Gallery in downtown Vancouver is the continuation of a proud and patriotic quadrennial tradition: a community-wide, nonjuried art exhibit that’s focused like a laser beam on politics.

Nonjuried, in keeping with our constitutional guarantee of free speech, means that just about anything goes, as long as it’s relevant to politics. “Any size, any medium, any viewpoint,” the call to artists said. The only real restriction was, you had to submit by the deadline, which was last Saturday afternoon.

The Columbian stopped by on Monday to see what sorts of stuff — and what sorts of viewpoints — turned up. Co-curator Sharri LaPierre was busy sorting through nearly 100 contributions, which was slightly more than expected, she said. They came in as small as a postcard, as large as a triptych of industrial-war-machine canvases (by a former Marine, LaPierre said) and as bulky as a bust of the Statue of Liberty fashioned mostly out of metal bits and pieces including spent bullet casings.

“Liberty or Bust,” the caption says; it appears to be a matter of interpretation whether the statuette is celebrating gun rights or, as LaPierre suspects, lamenting the violence in our nation’s past — and present.

That’s why each contribution is accompanied by an artist’s statement, LaPierre said; by the time the exhibit has been set up for display, names and statements will be up alongside the artworks themselves. “So we have a little better handle on what each one is all about,” she said.

Some of the artists who answered this call for political art are known local names, but many more are younger and “emerging artists” who have never shown their work in a gallery before, LaPierre said. That makes this show a nice opportunity for them and for the public, she said.

Leaning left

In this painted frame, a red-hot Earth is simmering in space; in that photograph, the whole globe has been dumped into a sidewalk trash can. Two rectangles both speak out against oil trains: One is a tiny, old-fashioned, pen-and-ink editorial cartoon, the other a grand-scale political propaganda poster. And these two round, shiny likenesses of our current presidential contenders look like ceramic vases or table lamps until you peer closer and realize that they’re actually a pair of hand grenades.

While not all the artwork speaks to the current presidential contest, a lot of it does, and it leaves little question whom these artists will be voting against (if not for). Donald Trump comes in for the vast majority of criticisms and caricatures; Hillary Clinton, not so much.

“We had a hard time getting anything from the right,” LaPierre said. That’s true every four years, she said.

LaPierre’s own contribution? A tray full of broken glass. This reporter noticed it sitting on the floor by the front window and asked if the gallery had suffered a break in; LaPierre laughed and said her “conceptual art” recalls the symbolic ceiling that Clinton broke through when she became the first woman to be nominated by a major party as President of the United States. (La Pierre had to go to some lengths to find thick-gauge plate glass fragments, she said; most glass shops are careful about disposing of their leftovers, she learned, and won’t hand over dangerous shards to just anybody.)

“Some are funny, some are pretty serious,” LaPierre said. “Some are beginner’s pieces, but a lot are very strong.” Nothing at all has been censored, she said; if there’s any obvious line between civility and hatefulness, or between decency and obscenity, none of the contributors to this show crossed it.

Making statements

North Bank also wanted to include some readings by local poets in its “Art of Politics” opening — but figured that when it comes to language, more care than “anything goes” was probably in order. So North Bank asked Clark County poet laureate Christopher Luna to select some appropriate local writers.

Writing political poetry is inherently challenging because it can wind up feeling like propaganda, not poetry, Luna said — but he knew some writers who fit the bill.

“I don’t write about love and unicorns and flowers,” laughed Edee Lemonier of Vancouver. “I write politically charged stuff about women and women’s bodies and how politics affects that.” And after watching the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, Lemonier said, she feels more charged up than ever.

Is her poetry partisan? “Yeah, very definitely,” she said. And some of the language is quite adult. But Lemonier, a veteran of many readings, added that she’s always mindful of her audience. In this case, she expects art lovers and the general public to be cycling through, so she’s been working on some pieces that are more “family friendly,” she said.

“I feel strongly about making a statement and not holding back, but I want to do it in a way that isn’t going to make people shut down and not want to hear it,” she said. “I want to be respectful of my audience. If somebody doesn’t care for what I say, that’s fine. I just don’t want somebody throwing something at me.”