Sunny Arms Artists cooperative

My passion is using art and design to make spaces more beautiful, interactive and engaging. I photograph spaces in their current state and then use over-lay images of activities and improvements that are appropriate for their environment. These images are then used to make an argument for funding and support for such changes. 

A bit about myself, I grew up in Brooklyn, NY where I studied art, sociology and urban theory at The New School. Following my undergraduate studies I moved to Seattle to pursue my growing interests in the urban planning and design field. I then attended the University of Washington where I received a masters degree in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. The combination of exposure to politics, urban theory, and design has heavily influenced my work. And, since public art and urban design live at the intersection of these numerous areas of study I love I feel it is within this realm that I can make the greatest impact.

I came to Sunny Arms in order to continue to pursue the many facets of this growing and evolving area of the art world, and to live among people with similar purpose and values.

Link to my portfolio.

James Cheng is a Taiwan-born photographer based in Seattle, Washington. He is fortunate enough to have an awesome group of clients and a team that allows him to create moments he loves - beautiful, engaging, and full of life. His images have appeared in Elle (French), Harpers Bazaar, Essence, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Photo District News, MSNBC.com, NBC News.com and many other print and online publications.

Link to website.

Sometimes found lying around in an abandoned landscape is the detritus of human habitation, left behind, forgotten or hidden for untold reasons, possibly banal, possibly related to crisis.  Many such items, having passed their “lives” of usefulness close to, sometimes touching, the bodies of the humans who owned them, are left with a quality – I call it Spiritual DNA - that has a continued life of its own. They carry indelible ghostly traces of their former owners through former use which rubbed off on them and survived the rough and tumble of history.  The objects acquire a memorial aspect that demands and deserves preservation and protection because they enable us to reach through the mystery of time to touch the stories of their former owners. 

I am interested in the relentless survival of spirits as they war with the juggernaut of time.  I’m compelled to imagine stories suggested by the debris and evidence which that conflict leaves behind, such as decay, grime, mold, rust, charring and filmy patinas of dubious origin. My fascination began when I was growing up and taken to visit many ancient archeological sites and antiquities and it was brought to a blinding climax when I took a road trip twenty years ago through the Midwest, that vast archeological site called the American Heartland. It posed all the big questions and has been the driving force behind my art ever since, as I work to scrape and scratch away to elusive answers.

My art takes many forms including constructions, paintings and drawings, tableaux and installations.  I enjoy exploring and experimenting with new tools and materials and I use a wide variety of them, always hoping to hit the jackpot of expression.  Every choice is an attempt to give visual voice to a mystery which absorbs me but seems to forbid articulation or conclusion.

Link to my website.

Janet Neuhauser is photographer and educator, busy either shooting and working on her own photography or teaching it.  As a photographer, she is  an omnivore. Over the years, her work has reflected the type of camera and/or process that interest her at that moment. Three years ago, she started the Pinhole Project, a community based long exposure project that allows people from all walks of life to experience pinhole photography without a darkroom.  Over 3000 people have participated thus far.  She have also been shooting film in a 4 x 5 pinhole camera, scanning the negatives and printing them digitally. These images are primarily landscapes.

Over the last five years Janet has photographed at night in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle, within walking distance of the Sunny Arms.  These images can be seen for the next year at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon in their Viewing Drawers.  The images shown here are a part of that project.

I am a science groupie, so everything I create seems to be influenced by some branch of science: quantum physics, medicine, natural phenomena. I love to take a scientific premise as a guiding principal to organize my images. It could be cloud chamber images from particle physics, old anatomy texts, mathematical patterns, the concept of dark matter, electron wave forms - anything that has an underlying pattern wholly made by nature, divined by us through math. I then filter the concept through my sensibilities and create a design of rich color and rhythmic, dynamic, spatial juxtapositions. My work is inspired by science, but I balance an intellectual approach with exuberant color and energetic form to explore the fundamental energy underlying nature.

I seem to try a new medium with every new body of work. My typical working method combines printmaking, digital techniques and various painting media. I examine analog versus digital aesthetics using a combination of techniques. Cut forms have always been part of my images.  I don’t think in rectangles, but shapes.  The edge excites me.  Like cave paintings, there are no borders, so form can move into the surrounding space.

A love of science and art led me to acquire a BFA and then MFA in Medical Illustration from the University of Michigan. Scientific inquiry directs my work. The mind’s idea of the world, macro and micro, fascinates me.

-Kate Sweeney

Kate has been the recipient of public art commissions and her work is included in public, private and museum collections throughout the US. For full resume and more work visit, Katesweeneyfineart.com, Zinccontemporary.com and Seattleartmuseum.org

Cappy Thompson is a Seattle artist known for her painted mytho-poetic narratives on glass using vitreous enamels.  An innovator in her field, Cappy has taught and lectured extensively.  Her pieces are included in museum, corporate and private collections world-wide.

Her publicly commissioned works include large scale installations at SeaTac Airport, the Tacoma Museum of Glass, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and The Evergreen State College.

She has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Seattle’s Artist Trust and has received Pilchuck Glass School’s Libensky Award for her contributions to glass art.

Link to her website.

Travel opens the senses to the new and exciting and to the other.

Then it opens the senses again on the other side: to the usual and familiar.

It allows us to imagine different ways of being in the world-- -different ways of thinking---of believing. And then it allows us to examine our own ways.

When I return from a trip I spend a lot of time with my photographs and travel notes and then I put them in a pot along with my impressions and ideas and let it simmer on my back burner-- -sometimes for years. Eventually I smell an aroma that calls to me and I begin to translate those experiences into art.

Thon has shown nearly 30 years at the Lisa Harris gallery in Seattle. Her work is in museum and other important collections nationwide and abroad. For full resume and more work visit www.lisaharrisgallery.com