Walking into the art gallery on the lower level of the Riverside Arts center, located at 76 North Huron St. in Ypsilanti, a person would find himself or herself surrounded by the “On the Wild Side: Art of Nature.”
The exhibit will be up through Oct. 30 and is free of charge to all visitors. The gallery usually receives 300-700 visitors a month. So far there have not been many visitors to this exhibit, but it is expected that somewhere between 400 and 500 people will come.
It features three artists: Lori Taylor, Marie Rust and Lisa Ramlow from Bear Tracks Studios in Pinckney, Mich. Each artist has an individual style within her work that allows them to fit together.
“I’m not sure I would’ve jumped at the chance to see birds and foxes,” said Holly Smith, 59, an employee in Eastern Michigan University’s President’s Office for 33 years. “But now that I’m here there is a nice warm, cozy outdoor feel. The photograph in the corner makes me want to jump into the car and go up north. I had no idea something looked like that in Michigan.”
Smith was referring to a photograph featuring a part of a northern Michigan shoreline by Rust.
Taylor has a background working for nature centers, where she learned the skills of taxidermy and utilizes this by incorporating actual animal pieces into her works. Her work “Comes Coyote: A Reliquary” contains a real coyote tooth and fur.
Taylor layers these different materials in order to make her work pop and “float” to tell a story. Some of her work will even contain words of poetry.
“Lori seems to create a world and Marie pulls subjects from it, then with Lisa’s woodwork and helping with the other two’s frames it all ties together,” said Dee Overly, the Riverside Arts Center’s gallery director.
Taylor is a mixed media artist interested in the Native American culture and children’s literature.
“I like to listen to the land and I am always interested in its stories,” Taylor said.
Much like Taylor, Ramlow enjoys working with raw material, except she prefers to work solely with one material, wood. Ramlow carves wooden sculptures into natural shapes, from a canoe, to the wild moose or giraffe, but all these sculptures are actually boxes.
“I like the idea that they are functional as well as pieces of art,” Ramlow said.
Most of her boxes are single animal shapes that correspond with many of Rust’s single animal drawings.
“Less is more,” Rust said as her philosophy. “That way you become more engaged by the subject, just do the minimal amount to let animal speak for itself.”
Her photography also is subject driven featuring flower petals instead of the whole flower in order to catch just a part of something.
All three artists mostly choose Michigan subjects to relate to their Michigan audience but admit to branching out to other interests on occasion. Smith has been a collector of art since the 1980’s and was once the curator of art shows for the Depot Town Center, and yet this exhibit was surprising to her.
People who believe they cannot relate to an animal or nature filled exhibit might, like Smith, see everything from a different perspective after their visit.
