Image: Chad Yenney (detail)
Barnstorm 2023
12-4pm Every Saturday in September
Open Until 8pm on the Last Saturday!
Juried Exhibition in the Gallery, Sculptural Works in the Yard, Live Music on the Punch Stage, and Cold Beer.
Building on a 17-year history of successful art exhibitions and projects across the Northwest, PUNCH presents Barnstorm – a series of pop-up exhibitions activating rural spaces in unexpected ways with art, music and creative installations. The fourth event in the series takes place at PUNCH gallery in the old Thorp fire station. This exhibition references works in all media in the form of digital prints and video work gathered from an international call to artists. For this year’s installment, PUNCH enlisted the help from Meow Wolf’s Senior Story Creative Director, Joanna Garner, to jury the exhibition.
In keeping with the spirit of Barnstorm, the selected works convey a dialogue between urban and rural sensibilities. A concise collection of work was selected from 35 artists out of 400+ submissions. As Joanna states in her juror’s response:
“The quality of submissions for this juried show is a testament to PUNCH’s reach and reputation and a delight to my small-town heart, knowing that we’re inviting such imaginative, thoughtful and insightful art to be in conversation with the realities of rural life in the 21st century…Looking through the 400+ incredible submissions, I was drawn to pieces that play with the relationship of culture and nature: the spaces where humans and the natural world intersect, or where the wildness of being alive cuts through the mundane.” – Joanna Garner, Senior Story Creative Director, Meow Wolf
The chosen works are full of surprise, delight and intrigue. The diversity of imagery within these works include barren and austere landscapes, unexpected slices of Americana, deftly-rendered anatomical drawings and portraits of grumpy people, pixelated twitchers, macho meta Chips, melting banditos and an amusement park ride that most certainly wouldn’t pass a safety inspection.
The exhibition opens this Saturday, September 2, with live music by the Apple Valley Wranglers, a Seattle-based western swing band, proving that you don’t need to go to the Kittitas County Fair this weekend to get your rodeo on!
Additionally, be sure to check out the outdoor sculptures by Stan Cozad and Dan Brown in the PUNCH yard and the line-up of musicians who’ll grace the PUNCH Stage during September:
Sept 2 • 2-4pm
The Apple Valley Wranglers (western swing)
Sept 9 • 2-4pm
Saint September (acoustic roots, strings and harmonies)
Sept 16 • 2-4pm
Bitterbrush (classic rawk and rowl)
Sept 23 • 2-4pm
Riley & Nicole (popular feel-good, with a twist)
Sept 30 (Last Saturday) • 4-8pm
DJ Banshee followed by Seth Garrido (outlaw soul)
About the Juror
Joanna Garner is a playwright, screenwriter, and immersive experience designer based in Santa Fe, NM. For the past 5+ years, she has been the Senior Story Creative Director for Meow Wolf, leading story development and world building for multiple projects, including the Omega Mart exhibition in Las Vegas.
Her work has been developed nationally and internationally, including at the Finnish National Opera, Banff Playwrights Colony, Tofte Lake Center, Seattle Repertory Theatre, On the Boards, with Austin’s acclaimed Rude Mechs, and at the New York and Hollywood fringe festivals.
She has an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas at Austin.
