The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center is an unusual exhibition space. There is a small indoors gallery, but the bulk of the exhibition is on display in a Northwestern temperate rain forest. This sounds weird. If you want to see a forest, there is the perfectly good Olympic National Park right nearby, but as a venue for exploring the way we see, it works.

When you walk through the woods you look at things a certain way. In the Northwest there are tall trees, green ferns, branching salal and a great green undergrowth. The tones are brown and green, and the sunlight is filtered. One is used to finding little details - mushrooms, trilium flowers, slugs, salamanders, maybe a deer or mountain beaver. Here the artists get to play with your expectations, and some of the works - wood sculptures, hanging canoes, spider webs, crushed glass, colored windows, gateways, cairns, and other fascinating forms - are set into this sylvan background. There is a confusion of the man made and natural.

There is also a great view of Port Angeles harbor, Victoria, the San Juan Islands and beyond. The Fine Arts Center is a great place to drop by with children. Just finding the art works is a pleasant challenge, and there is a stone labyrinth for them to follow in one of the fields. Even on a rainy day the center is a neat place to visit.

For more information, check out the official Port Angeles Fine Arts Center web site.

For more on Port Angeles and the North Olympic Peninsula, see our Kaleberg home page.

© Copyright Kaleberg Symbionts 2007