BY KAREN BOSSICK

An artist grieves the blind eye man has turned to the extinction of animals at Gail Severn Gallery, while another artist tries to create a feminist dialog at Gilman Contemporary.

Tonight’s Gallery Walk—from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at Ketchum galleries--runs the gamut from beautiful landscapes to provocative art made with a variety of mediums, including delicate paper sewing patterns.

GILMAN CONTEMPORARY, 660 Sun Valley Road, will feature the work of John Westmark in an exhibition titled “On the Fold.” Westmark uses delicate paper sewing patterns applied to canvas to create strong female protagonists, stoic martyrs, fantastical beings and even the hapless everywoman.

He embellishes the garment patterns with text inspired by feminist writing, creating a narrative alongside the existing assembly instructions to complete the familiar dialogue presented to women throughout history. The text and pictorial narrative are designed to disrupt the stereotypical notion of women’s work in order to create a feminist dialog into the visual conversation.

“My ongoing education about gender comparisons, inequality and the ever-shifting ground of feminist politics fueled my interest in this body of work,” said Westmark.

In addition, Gilman Contemporary is featuring the work of abstract painter Joanne Freeman in an exhibition titled “These Days.” The title was borrowed from a song written by Jackson Browne in the late 1960s that offers comparisons to the artist’s state of mind where the realities and upheavals of the external world collide with the inner workings and solitude of her studio.

“The hard-edge process of cutting shapes and layering color onto treated raw linen recalls qualities of mid-century low-tech graphics, colorfield painting and collage,” she said.

GAIL SEVERN GALLERY, 400 First Ave. North, will showcase the work of Washington State artist Robert McCauley, in addition to the work of Judith Kindler, whose story is told in today’s Eye on Sun Valley story “Judith Kindler Makes Her Mark on Venice in New Exhibition.”

McCauley, who works in a tiny 9-by-14-fot studio adjoining his Skagit Valley home, is grieving the loss of the salmon. He’s worried about the polar bears threatened with extinction. And he’s bemoaning the clear cutting of forests, which he says is hidden behind small 10-foot greenbelts on either side of the road.

McCauley has spent a lifetime painting the original natives of North America from bison to bears, utilizing his art to speak to environmental ethics and humankind’s impact on nature.

“The polar bear has been the Arctic canary for a number of years,” he said. “You’ll find dark skies in the background of my bear paintings--a storm on the horizon.”

The son and grandson of loggers, he was born and raised in Mt. Vernon, Wash. Upon his return following a stint at teaching in the Midwest, he found that things had changed in his absence.

“The river used to have all five salmon species. But it’s disintegrated to the point where there’s no more fishing,” he said. “And the Dungeness crab harvesting has disintegrated, as well.”

Gallery Owner Gail Severn compares McCauley to Edward S. Curtis. Curtis documented the disappearing culture of the American Indian, while McCauley is documenting disappearing wildlife.

He shows how the world turning a blind eye by pulling shades over eyes of bear or taping their mouth. He paints bears, bison and fish boasting numbered tags, and he assigns his paintings names like “The Great North American Indigenous Trout Census” and “The Great North American Polar Bear Census.”

“The census project reflects my notion that we see ourselves as caretakers of nature. We have the sense we’re in control of nature and that I find a little bit annoying. We’ve lost our sense of wildness. We’ve lost our sense of wild.”

HEMMINGS GALLERY, 340 Walnut St., will feature “Strata”—the work of Jeff Juhlin. Juhlin has spent decades studying western landscapes, especially the Great Basin and the high arid desert of the Kaiparowits Plateau in southern Utah. And he encapsulates it in his mixed media works utilizing layers of paper, ink, paint and wax.

“I seek to reflect a sense of stillness, vast space and the visual history of time evident in the western landscape,” he said. “My paintings allude to the raw typography and the amazing colors and light from where I live. In this environment, time often reveals itself in the form of rock strata that is both built up and worn away by the elements in a continuous process.”

SUN VALLEY MUSEUM OF ART, 5th and Washington streets, recently kicked off a new exhibition titled “Bodies of Work: Art & Healing,” in which several contemporary artists use art to explore and process their experiences of medical illness and others’. In this exhibition, fruit may take on the appearance of brains, while other works draw inspiration from EKGs.

KNEELAND GALLERY, 271 N. 1st Ave., is featuring the work of Eric G. Thompson, a self-taught artist newly residing in Fairview, Utah. At 52, he’s had the pleasure of being represented in museums all over the country and featured in publications like American Art Collector and Southwest Art, winning awards with both local and international salons. He has studied the Masters to develop the fine art of oil, the unforgivable watercolor, and the dying art of egg tempera, an old-world medium that few master due to its difficulty and nuance.

Also featured are James Moore’s unique three-dimensional wall mounted sculptures, which feature wildlife in bronze on travertine mounts. They are an original alternative to a painting and his work captures a blend of realism and abstraction in a collage of elements that form a vignette of the animal and its environment.

The exhibition will also feature life-size and tabletop sculpture by Montana artist Ott Jones.

SUN VALLEY CONTEMPORARY GALLERY, 320 1st Avenue North in the former Friesen Gallery, will feature the work of Sage Barnes titled “Bloom.” . Barnes pairs street art sensibilities with fine art. And this colorful exhibition will tantalize those who are salivating for color following a somewhat white winter.

BROSCHOFSKY GALLERIES, 360 East Ave. N., features fine art with a focus on the American West. There’ll be new photographs by renowned photographer David Yarrow, including that of a bull rider in a rodeo, one titled “Bear Market,” and another that will intrigue former Pan Am stewardesses called “Come Fly With Me.” The gallery is also showing a selection of works by Andy Warhol, Theodore Villa, Russell Chatham and Kollabs.

MESH GALLERY, 4th and Leadville, features fine art photographs of the Sawtooth Mountains and other mountain vistas surrounding Sun Valley.