Van Dyck + Latta: Two Boise artists will talk about their work in ‘Hindsight’

For visual artists, it’s been a long year and a half with the pandemic lockdown, which also shut down much of our cultural connections. Now, as we teeter between opening up and struggling to stay safe, it’s time to plug back into Boise’s arts and gallery scenes.

The show currently on exhibit at downtown’s Capitol Contemporary Gallery, 451 S. Capitol Blvd., brings two such seemingly different artists’ work together.

Sue Latta is a contemporary artist who intriguingly turns photography into sculpture.

Randy Van Dyck works in a traditional painting medium that blends contemporary still-life and landscape techniques with a witty juxtaposition of visual elements and his signature depictions of birds.

But look beyond the surface of the latest work from these two Boise artists and you see the thread that connects them: exploring story and meaning through art.

“All artists are storytellers, whether you’re a painter or a musician or writer. That’s what we do,” Van Dyck said.

“Hindsight,” the second co-exhibit between Van Dyck and Latta, closes at the end of July. But you have one more chance to hear from these artists at an art talk at 5 p.m. Thursday. It’s free and open to the public. Masks are encouraged, as the gallery is small.

Even though their work is divergent in media, there are connections through the use of language — or the lack of it — and the intent to dive below the surface of an everyday walk in the Idaho landscape or the trials we have in our daily lives.

Their first exhibit, “Absence,” happened during the lockdown because Van Dyck kept his gallery open — with a series of open houses with safety protocols — during 2020. This show, “Hindsight,” has been in the works since last year, and encompasses work that subtly looks back at our 2020 experience with its challenges and hidden blessings.

For Van Dyck it gave him space and time to push and shift how he approached his work. For Latta, it allowed her to process that time both consciously and unconsciously and express a mix of sadness and hopefulness.

Time for a creative shift

The art Van Dyck created for “Hindsight” marks a shift in his work up till now that for him feels profound.

He’s well known in Idaho not only for his paintings but also for his contributions to Boise’s arts scene through his Van Dyck Frame and Design shop and the adjacent Capitol Contemporary Gallery. In 2019, he received the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Since opening the gallery in 2019, he’s been opening himself up creatively and now is shifting the focus of his work.

His work up until this painting series was driven by language. He used word-play as inspiration, using a quip or phrase he would pick up in a conversation or on TV, or some random overheard comment. Then he would translate them into literal visual language. For example: “Balancing Time” — a bird perched on an antique pocket watch that is poised on a high wire.

That use of language became a crutch, in a way, he said.

“People were consuming it in a way I became more and more uncomfortable with. Punchliney, like, ‘Oh, that’s really cute’ — I would hear the word cute a lot — and they would go to the next one and never spend time looking at the art. I felt it was getting in the way of people getting to enjoy the work itself.”

So this latest body of work leaves that out. His new series is titled “Transposed.” For it, he started with imagery — photographs taken on hikes in the Idaho wilderness, his love of birds and found bits of nature that tie them together. The pieces now tell a different story, that of an artist coming into his own. The work is meditative and reflective and strikes a tone that feels right for the time.

Without the clever titles, the work speaks for itself, something that Van Dyck relishes.

“Those titles become a crutch in a way and I wanted to try to do something to let the work speak for itself and people are seeing it in a different way,” he said.

In so many words

For Latta, language, symbolism and implied metaphor are integral parts of her process. The language of the moment becomes a window that can open onto a new idea or show a different direction. Sometimes a title comes first, and drives the creation of a piece. Even a cliche she can’t get out of her head can open the way for deeper exploration.

“Titles are very important to me,” Latta said. “Sometimes they’re my inroad into the work. My inside joke. They’re valuable to me as an artist and sometimes lend meaning or a direction.”

Oftentimes, the words themselves become part of the work, as a poem or lyric.

For her piece, titled “Now,” that explores the struggle of being in the present. The words “Where have you been. Where are you going?” float, encased in resin.

“Hindsight” encompasses a mix of large and small pieces — including several works that are part of her ongoing Instagram series, in which she uses the filters in the popular app to process the image in a way that’s out of her control.

“I don’t know exactly what it does to the image,” she said. “I could try to replicate it, but why? I just go with it.”

Latta works in an image transfer on resin process she developed. She prints photos taken with her camera or phone, onto a substrate, then encases one side in resin. After removing the substrate, she pours resin on the other side, allowing the image to float in space. She basically turns a two-dimensional piece into a three-dimensional artwork.

In “Hindsight,” Latta explores a year of extremes.

Right before the opening of “Absence,” in August 2020, Latta’s downtown art studio was broken into and several of her pieces were damaged. One was destroyed. She was initially distraught and disappointed, but the incident actually rallied the arts community. Volunteers turned up to help put her studio back together, and some of the damaged work even made it into the show as it was.

On top of that, Latta’s year of lockdown became a year of loss, as she experienced the non-COVID deaths of two people close to her.

“There seems to be a lot of stuff in the work related to death,” Latta said. “That wasn’t a plan for the work to do that but sometimes it takes a life of its own. We’ve been surrounded by death in large and small ways, so it’s natural for it to come in the work.”

Artists synthesize our collective experience into images. That’s the job, both Van Dyck and Latta say.

‘Hindsight’ art talk

What: Artists Randy Van Dyck and Sue Latta

When: 5 p.m. Thursday, July 29

Where: Capitol Contemporary Gallery, 451 S. Capitol Blvd., Boise

Free