Chroma Chameleon (2020)
Two person exhibition with Sarah Haven. Gallery One (Ellensburg, WA) 2020
"This past Saturday I found my way to Ellensburg again, this time driving up the Yakima River Canyon to see people boating and fishing.
My purpose for the drive was to view the exhibit by my colleague, John Bissonette, a painter and art instructor at Yakima Valley College. His work was part of a two-person show with ceramic artist Sarah Haven of Ellensburg.
Haven is the Gallery One retail manager and also has a studio practice creating ceramic vessels. Her intrigue with color and pattern makes itself known in the myriad designs she overlays onto her functional, hand-built works.
Gallery One describes Bissonette as “interested in images and information that are in flux. No one object that he makes is meant to be understood as a unified statement or something to be comprehended concretely. Much like memes, search histories and information that comes to us via the digital, any one piece has the potential to be re-imagined at some point in the future.”
What I found about their exhibit, “Chroma Chameleon,” was that it felt very cohesive. The color, line and shape utilized by Bissonette is echoed in Haven’s work. The exterior of Haven’s bowl and mugs are the color of clay with a ring of colored glaze, but the inside is filled with analytic line.
For example, to complement Bissonette’s “Remnant I,” Haven added a similar descriptive line on the interior of her bowls. The pairing of the two artists using similar hues and shades worked well."
-David Lynx Special to the Yakima Herald-Republic Oct 5, 2020
