BY KAREN BOSSICK

Sun Valley artist Sally King Benedict has built an impressive following with major solo shows and features in Elle Décor, House Beautiful and Southern Living.

And recently, she announced that Freya will feature her unique designs on its accessories. Freya is showcasing Sally King Benedict’s work on its straw hats, handmade in Ecuador out of palms that are harvested and woven through a traditional process.

“I have always been drawn to Freya due to their artisan handwoven products,” she said. “I loved the idea that my sketches were going to be hand embroidered on each hat – an incredible culmination of art and fashion…just in time for sunny weather.”

You can meet Sally and see her work when Hemmings Gallery, 340 Walnut Ave., in Ketchum, unveils a new exhibition of Sally’s called “Tap Into” during tonight’s Gallery Walk.

The free walk, from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight—Friday, July 5—will showcase artists’ work in several Ketchum art galleries.

Benedict’s new exhibition at Hemmings Gallery invites people to immerse themselves in a world of abstraction and loose representation that evokes thoughts of a tropical paradise and other scenes.

OTHER EXHIBITIONS:

* Kneeland Gallery, 271 N. 1st Ave. N., will feature the work of Andrew Bolam, Lori McNee and Dave LaMure during its artist’s reception tonight from 5 to 7:30 p.m.

This is English-born Andrew Bolam’s first exhibition at the gallery. His love of the American West is evident in his images of deer, elk and bears roaming through aspen trees, as well as his Native American subjects. He builds abstract marks into recognizable imagery and uses silhouettes of animals to elicit an emotional connection to his paintings.

Dave LaMure’s large-scale vessels and wildlife bronzes capture the rhythm of life in the various animals portrayed on them. And Lori McNee’s imagery is ornamented by detail while rich in symbolism.

* Gilman Contemporary, 660 Sun Valley Road, is featuring the work of photographer Nick Brandt’s underwater series SINK/RISE and Seonna Hong’s “Freytag’s Pyramid.”

While Brandt has been showing with the gallery since its opening in 2007, Hong is new to the gallery.

A Los Angeles painter, she draws on novelist Gustav Freytag’s pyramidic dramatic structure to chronicle the ebb and flow of life and memory. Her figures are typically women, who drive the narrative through liquid-like dreamscapes. Each canvas reveals moments of chaos and calm, reality and fiction, illustration and abstraction and tension and resolution.

• Sun Valley Museum of Art, Fifth and Washington streets, is showing photographs Tina Barney made between 1976 and 1980 when she was living in Ketchum and taking photography classes at the then-Sun Valley Center for the Arts. The photographs that make up the “Homecoming” exhibition depict the interactions and tensions that occur among family and friends during moments of leisure—at weddings, and at a ski race.
• Gail Severn Gallery, 400 First Avenue North, features the work of Betsy Margolius, a Denver artist who recreates the sense of beauty she finds in the unique curved line of a rose, the elegance of a tree branch and the shape of a stone through paintings on paper, printmaking and oil paintings on panel.
• Sun Valley Contemporary Gallery, is showing the work of several artists, including Sarah Winkler, whose stints in countries from Malawi to Norway have been a source of inspiration for her depictions of geological landscapes.
• MESH Gallery, 4^th and Leadville streets, showcases photographic landscapes of the Sawtooths and other locales taken by Jeffrey Lubeck. His latest photographs include “Sawtooth Sunrise at 20 Below.”
• Saddletree Gallery, 360 East Ave., never ceases to surprise given the cowboy images provided by Hllary Maybery, the wildlife giclee art prints by Dolan Geiman and the local fish characters painted by avid fisherman Mike Pepper.
• Broschofsky Galleries, 360 East Ave., will feature a selection of works by Western artists ranging from Edward S. Curtis to Billy Chatham.