Smokescreens IV
Monotype from Woodblock, 22 x 30 Inches, 2018
Wilderness Reflections: Loowit/Mt. St. Helens
Site-Specific Installation; Reflective Mylar, Support Structure, Found Objects, Display Dimensions Variable, 2018
Counting Trees IV
Screen Print, 14 x 11 Inches, 2019
Smokescreens XV
Monotype from Woodblock, 22 x 30 Inches, 2018
at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, November 2019.
at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, November 2019.
at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, November 2019.
at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, November 2019.
at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, November 2019.
at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, November 2019.
Axis is proud to present “Containment,” a solo exhibition by Summer Ventis. In the city, we often feel distant from the landscape. The natural world, however, asserts itself in spite of—and sometimes through—the ways in which we try to contain and control it. The works in this exhibition explore our relationship to landscape through these attempts at containment and control. Identifying tags are consumed by the trees they are meant to catalog. The tent we use to get out into the landscape is also what isolates us from it. Years of extinguishing forest fires result in blazes that are far beyond our control. Even as we attempt to contain the landscape, the landscape always contains us. The harm we do to our surroundings often comes back to harm us, but perhaps the opposite is also true. In examining the consequences of our actions, we may have the opportunity to reverse them, to contain and be contained by the landscape in ways that are restorative rather than destructive.
Summer Ventis’s work uses the printed surface to address internal and external landscapes and their intersections; the imprints we leave on each other and our surroundings and the imprints that our surroundings leave on us. She received a BA in Art from Grinnell College and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work has appeared in national and international exhibitions, including “Liminal Space” at the DMZ Museum, South Korea and “Collectivity” at Durden and Ray Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; and is held by collections including those of the Denver Art Museum and Proyecto ‘ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recent solo exhibitions include “Emigrant Lake[s]” at the Oregon Governor’s Office and “I looked up at the sky and saw what I had put into the ground” at the University of Iowa. She is Assistant Professor of Printmaking at California State University Sacramento.