Three artists featured in Manzanita show
Dreamlike figures, meditative landscapes and fire-shaped ceramics fill Manzanita’s Hoffman Gallery when it unveils the June exhibition featuring Dennis Worrel, Mark Andres and Richard Rowland.
An opening reception takes place this Saturday, June 6, from 3 to 5 pm.
The exhibition brings together three artists whose work explores mythology, memory, nature and transformation through dramatically different visual styles and materials.
Worrel’s “Strange Times” responds to what he describes as the chaotic and bizarre nature of modern life. Drawing inspiration from Surrealism, mythology, storytelling, history and pop culture, Worrel fills his work with enigmatic figures, guardians, seers and whimsical animal-human hybrids. His process blends printmaking, drawing and painting into layered compositions rich with color and texture. Many works begin as monoprints before evolving through additional layers of text, stencil work and gestural marks, allowing the image to continuously shift and develop.
Andres’ “Water-Gazer” focuses on the hidden emotional and spiritual rhythms found within ordinary landscapes. His paintings explore the tension between outward observation and inward reflection, searching for what photographs often fail to capture – what he describes as the deeper mysteries of existence, memory, death and renewal. For Andres, painting becomes an act of reconstructing meaning and emotion beyond words, using “cloth, colored dirt and goo” to reconnect artist and viewer through shared experience.
Rowland’s “Ahikaaroa – Conversations with Fire” reflects a lifetime devoted to ceramics, cultural responsibility and environmental stewardship shaped by his Polynesian ancestry and Pacific Northwest community connections. Rowland built his first wood-fired anagama kiln, the Astoria Dragon Kiln, in the late 1970s and later constructed a second brick anagama kiln that was ceremonially named “Ahikaaroa,” or “Fire from Long Ago,” by Māori clay artists from Aotearoa, New Zealand during a 2018 firing in Astoria. His work reflects both the physical process of fire and clay and the cultural traditions carried through generations of artists and makers.
The Hoffman Center for the Arts is located at 594 Laneda Avenue in Manzanita and is open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 5 pm, except the last Sunday of every month. For more information, go to hoffmanarts.org.