Gale Wagner, Free Flight / Free Spirit

Three New Exhibits Open July 11 at Sanchez Art Center

Opening Friday, July 11, are three new art shows at Sanchez
Art Center. The Main Gallery features sculptor Gale Wagner’s beautifully made
airplanes in Free Flight / Free Spirit,
an exhibit curated by Jerry Ross Barrish. In the East Gallery, Nordic 5 Arts
presents Runes Revealed, and the West
Gallery offers Art Guild of Pacifica’s exhibit titled Full Circle. The opening reception is from 7 to 9 pm on Friday,
July 11, with music provided by Rob Hughes and Allen Lee of Vivacé.

Sculptor Gale Wagner has loved airplanes since boyhood. At
age 5 he made his first models with plywood and coffee cans. He has been a
full-time sculptor since his military service in Vietnam. He studied with Dale
Eldred at Kansas City Art Institute, then with ceramic sculptor Peter Voulkos
in California. An enthusiastic and outgoing personality, Wagner helped found
the Pacifica Rim Sculptors in 1988. During his years of making large public
artworks, working with steel, glass, and other materials, Wagner would rest
after completing a big project by making an airplane. Now, to our great
benefit, he has returned to his early love for aviation with a passion.

Wagner’s planes are powered by rubber bands, but they are
very far from model airplanes that come in a kit. His free-flight planes are
made with painstaking care and, as he says, with great joy in each phase of the
process. He carves and smoothes each delicate balsa wood connecting strip;
hand-dyes thin coverings of tissue paper, dying, drying, and re-dying to
achieve a color he loves, spending up 200 or more hours building just one plane
. . . and then he goes out and sets them free up into the sky! Wagner says he
made one plane three times, because the first two disappeared in flight, borne
upwards on a thermal wind, never to return. There is an indescribable beauty in
these free-flight planes, an ineffable compound made of the artist’s joy, skill,
and craft, his respect for materials, and the pure love of making art.

Gale Wagner will talk about his work with Curator Jerry Ross
Barrish on Sunday, August 10, at 4 pm. This discussion is free to the public,
and promises to be both informative and entertaining.

Showing concurrently is Runes
Revealed, an exhibit by Nordic 5 Arts, a group of Bay Area artists of
Nordic/Scandinavian descent. (The “5” in the group’s title refers to the five Scandinavian
countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.) In this mixed media
exhibit, the artists take an in-depth look at part of their heritage, the
ancient and mysterious early alphabet called runes. This script of the Old Norse and Vikings predates the
introduction of the Latin alphabet in the 12th century, and was not only a simple
representation of sounds. Each rune was imbued with symbolism, mystery, and an
association with specific gods in Norse mythology. The artists chose one or
more runes, either by drawing randomly from a bag of “divination runes,” or by
choosing a specific rune that spoke to them. They then created contemporary and
personal artistic interpretations using various mediums, painting, prints,
sculpture, textile and photography. Each piece is accompanied by the meaning of
the rune(s) and a description of the work.