Artist Talk - Kathy Roseth: Magic Lake

Gallery 110 is delighted to announce Magic Lake, a contemplative and peaceful solo exhibition by artist Kathy Roseth. This collection of oil paintings offers a unique journey into a realm where the natural and spiritual worlds intersect.

Roseth invites viewers into an imaginary landscape teeming with lakeside creatures—lovingly rendered Canada geese, coots, ducks, crows, and herons. The birds navigate a surreal environment, partially veiled by a web or netting that represents a translucent separation between the waking world of everyday experience and the always present invisible world that humans sometime sense but have difficulty accessing.  It’s an old idea that in Western tradition goes back to Plato, and which has many non-Western versions.  

Roseth is particularly inspired by a Haida version described by the Canadian poet

Robert Bringhurst in The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii (University of WA Press, 1991). According to Bringhurst, the Haida people live “in intimate familiarity with that membrane…that stretches skin-tight and resonant over everything in the world,” through which animals freely pass back and forth but humans need animal or spirit escorts. The Haida vision is of a beautiful, wild natural world dominated by non-human creatures with great spiritual power.

Roseth has undertaken to paint the lakeside birds stepping over and through the veil that separates the natural and spiritual worlds. “Most of the veil imagery in these works is a traditional American quilt pattern, ‘Storm at Sea,’ a pattern I used in my years as a quilter,” says Roseth. “It lacks the austere power of Haida imagery but has a movement and beauty of its own and helps place the paintings squarely in my own cultural tradition.”

Kathy Roseth was born in Iran of medical missionary parents and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Wausau, Wisconsin. She began painting in high school and continued, on and off, into young adulthood, when she changed direction and for twenty years made quilts in the Amish tradition. In 2003, she began taking classes at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, which she attended full-time after retiring in 2013 from a career in nonprofit low-income housing.

Magic Lake will be on display at Gallery 110 from October 3 through November 2, 2024. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday from 12–5pm and by appointment.

Artist Talk: Saturday, October 12th, 2-4pm with writer and critic Rebecca Brown. Learn more about the quilt patterns and more!