Cullom Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of color woodcuts by Sara Tabbert. For her first show at Cullom Gallery, Tabbert has incorporated her characteristic attention to the elemental beauty in natural forms of wood, water, ice, and stone, into a new series of prints based on the artist's recent trip along the famed Great Northern Railway, nicknamed The Highline. Tabbert's series of ten reduction woodcuts considers the ‘little pieces of something’ sprinkled my human life amidst the stark topography and grandeur of America's Rocky Mountains and the Northern Great Plains.
In a nod to ukiyo-e landscape designs by Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), Tabbert's views from Glacier Park, Montana to Fargo, North Dakota, along a well-known and linear route, recall the ukiyo-e master's Famous Views of the 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road. Also in keeping with the format of many of Hiroshige's prints, Tabbert's Highline uses the tall and narrow paper size known as tanzaku or 'poem strip' (roughly 14 x 5 inches). Whether hinting at a view through a cracked shoji screen, or capturing what the eye sees in a flash through the window of a speeding train, a landscape (by definition in the West, a horizontally-oriented view) seen in tanzaku format challenges our notions of perspective, scale, and scope, instead emphasizing the strata of a landscape's fore, mid, and background, as seen bottom to top.
Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, Sara Tabbert received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Grinnell College, Iowa, and her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she studied with Karen Kunc. Sara Tabbert's prints and wood carvings were showcased in the solo exhibit, Near Water, at the Anchorage Museum, from December 5, 2008 - January 25, 2009. Her prints are among public and corporate collections including the Anchorage Museum; Swedish Medical Center, Seattle; and Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska.
The Highline & other new work
November 5, 2009 - January 2, 2010
Cullom Gallery
313 Occidental Ave S
Seattle, WA 98104
206.919.8278
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