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Issue: Fall 2007
Editor's Note

Is it sex? Is it nudity or nakedness? Is it politics or commodity? Is it a verb or a noun? Are we painters, female painters, male painters or figurative painters? Our topic this issue is Gender–as it relates to the arts in content, history, venue, process. At the onset of this elusive, evocative subject we left the editorial door unlocked and ajar. Through it came the creative writers and subjects we hope will stretch your awareness of gender as an influence on art in our region.

Jan Judy writes from her home in Montezuma County and is the editor of Alive magazine. Her interview with Arthur Post, conductor and music director of the San Juan Symphony, delves into gender inside traditional opera plots where the “undertow of energy and passions … animates archetypal male and female struggles.”

Poet Katherine Leiner exposes the deep union between lovers making a public promise to share life side by side. She dedicates the poem to her friends and the delicate feelings they held for each other at the beginning of their commitment.

Photographer Mark Montgomery weaves together the human figure and the landscape in his art. Renee Podunovich, a poet, interviews Mark, reflecting on his poetic lens and conveying the story of the complex processes he uses inside his dark room–a retrofitted 1958 Airstream trailer.

Is the future of visual art contained in a computer monitor? Amanda Turek Ryan, fantasy fiction writer, interviews digital animator Sam Lyons. Which gender dominates, creates and animates those bodacious space women living in the video gaming subculture? Amanda guides us into the seamless architecture of Sam’s arctic stronghold where demons as well as sacred seeds are stored inside his virtual reality.

The aspen forest lives beside us all in Southwest Colorado. It is a potent reminder of botanical strength and longevity. D. Desruisseaux explores the sensate presence of gender in the forest in her experiential narrative written about walking through “the delicate shiver, whispers and sighs and oh so many charcoal eyes.”

Finally, we ask you, the reader, to tally the gender statistics in our exhibition venues. Rose Fredrick, curator of “Masterpieces of Colorado Landscape,” comments on gender in her curatorial process. We remember the spicy, feminist advocacy campaigns of the Guerilla Girls in New York City. And we ask you to increase your awareness of gender discrimination in our regional arts venues. Do inequalities exist?

These stories pleasantly surprised and enlightened us, as we learned about the artists willing to expose the gender issues in their work. We invite you to continue supporting our advertisers, who make it possible to present artists and art topics in Arts Perspective–where, in this issue, boy animation meets feminist gorillas, male bodies grow long tree limbs for hair and Buddha is waiting backstage at the opera door.

Sonja Horoshko, Editor, Arts Perspective

Author's Email: sonja@artsperspective.com