Review

"Storms", Resist-Dyed Silk.

Valerie Doran Bashaw
New Works in Jewel Tones

5-8 p.m.
(Opening Reception)

Kaw Valley Arts & Humanities
756 Armstrong
Kansas City, Kansas
913.371.0024

Hours after Second Friday: Wednesday-Friday, by appointment during business hours.
Runs Through: Jan. 2

Artist's site: http://www.wovenwind.net
Gallery site: http://www.kvarts.org

A lot of things come together in Valerie Doran Bashaw's show at Kaw Valley Arts & Humanities.

East meets West. Fiber meets bamboo and dye. Fiber meets bleach and more dye. Light meets pigment, and the two fall in love and make colors. The end effect is somewhere between soft stained glass and diaphanous abstract painting ... but without Bashaw's resist-dyed silk art losing its own identity.

New Works in Jewel Tones, which runs through Jan. 2 with a Second Friday "Follow the Dotte" art walk reception from 5-8 p.m. today, contains both silk hangings and mixed media collages. The former are done in the Japanese arashi shibori style, a resist-dye method using bamboo.

Bashaw explains the process she used to create these new works:

Each piece of fabric has been dyed and overdyed, sometimes bleached and again re-dyed,  resulting in layers of pattern and color.  I then machine sew the strips together and it is top quilted with transparent nylon thread.  Some are framed, some hang freely from a top bar. There is a wonderful luminous quality to the varying types of silk and how it accepts the color and patterning.

It is vividly patterned and the colors are pure as jewel tones. This new work revolves around themes of weather, thunderstorms, sunshine and more.

All of those elements (including the "and more") appear in Storms, today's featured piece. The streaky strips in gray and blue call to mind sheeting rain and wind-driven snow, while the warmer-colored elements suggest sunsets following -- or preceding -- a summer thundershower. There's fury in the fabric ... but there's calm, too.

There's another meeting, then: the tranquil encountering the turbulent, each passing in its turn.

No computer reproduction can do full justice to the strengths and subtleties of Bashaw's work, though. To see it as it really is requires yet one more meeting ... a face-to-fiber encounter.