For The County, his current exhibition at the James Harris Gallery, Claude Zervas has created a series of works that lie at the confluence of contemporary mediums, conceptual-based art, and Northwest sensibilities.
Zervas’ subject matter here is the landscape, and he treats the phenomenon in the broad context of Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets: it is less an external, observed reality than it is a manifestation of an internal, subjective state of being. Within its quiet drama, the artist finds a mirror to the self.
A Bellingham native and Seattle resident, Zervas sees his reflection in a familiar, characteristically Northwest setting. But unlike his famous predecessors, who rendered it darkly in oil paint, Zervas realizes this environment coolly with light and projection.
Nooksack, one of the two primary works in the show, is a sculptural model of the Whatcom County river made of thirty-two nine-inch florescent bulbs and hundreds of feet of white-plastic insulated electrical wire set in within the gallery’s black walls and carpet. The current flows through its cords and filaments just as water courses through the river’s channels and sloughs.
In Forest #3, a six-minute video of trees seen from across a clearing, a static image degrades from photographic realism to Cezanne-like geometric representation and ultimately to a gray, monochromatic abstraction. As the transformation begins, the white bark of the birch trees appears to come alive, expanding as they distort the digital canvas.
Both the glow of the string of lights and wire against the dark background and the bright expanding pixels of the birches in foreground of the woods bring to mind – in a curious sort of way -- the white brush-stokes of Mark Tobey. They are artistic manifestations of a life force that emerges from the surrounding darkness, both an action and metaphor of human consciousness.
We see this force again, in a more lighthearted vein, in La Buche, where soft, multicolored, gumdrop-like bulbs pulsate within the knot-holes of coarse cedar bark.
