Artists | Silicon Valley Artist Laureates

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Mary Kennedy Eastham

Literary Arts: Writer

Mary Kennedy Eastham, M.A., MFA has had the good fortune of growing up in a small New England town. She spread her wings and moved to New York City, San Francisco and Malibu which is where many of her stories took shape. Her book, The Shadow of a Dog I Can’t Forget, now in its Fifth Printing, was a 2011 WILD CARD winner in the Hollywood Book Festival and a 2010 Celebrity Achiever Award winner by the National League of American Pen Women. Her poem ‘Points of Love’ a Top Ten winner in the 2012 Poetry Superhighway Contest. Her award-winning poetry and short stories have appeared in over 75 books, magazines, small presses and e-zines in the United States and abroad. The publishing list includes ‘Glamour’ magazine, Paris Transcontinental, the Circle Magazine, THE BEST of Map of Austin Poetry, the Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Superhighway, muse apprentice guild, Pearl magazine and the Red Rock Review to name a few. She has been awarded over $25,000 in Literary Awards. Her work has received a Chekhov Award, an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and she is a two-time award winning recipient of Literary Grants from the ARTS COUNCIL SILICON VALLEY. Mary calls herself a Word Actress letting her characters perform different roles on paper which is of course weaving her own needs, her own fantasies, her love, her loss and her joy into the poems and short stories she writes. She is currently finishing up “Channeling Ava Gardner”, the last story in her short story collection The Possibilities of Love, and is excited to be close to finishing her first novel Night Surfing. Mary’s life has been filled with confusion, chaos, fun and love. She lives in San Jose, California with her beautiful Golden Retrievers.

Chris Eckert

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, I worked for a number of years in Silicon Valley designing and building factory automation. While I enjoyed many aspects of this career, I rapidly became frustrated with its necessary emphasis on production. Equipment design has one goal: make widgets as fast as you can. I wanted to explore the artistic potential of factory automation itself. For me, the machinery was more interesting. What the machinery created was inconsequential. Art and engineering have much in common; both center on creation. But the motivation for creation separates these disciplines. Engineers focus on what they are making while artists concentrate on why they are making. For me why has always been some internal struggle, some idea or problem that makes me confused and slightly uncomfortable. I explore this in my art and the resulting sculpture remains as a record. Occasionally I find resolution, but often I emerged even more conflicted. The simplest question often demands a complex, nuanced answer and the resulting object remains open to interpretation and waits for someone to place it in their own context. It becomes a visual parable.

Ruth Eckland

Visual Artist: Videographer

This is a world of visual over-stimulation. Much of it we become inured to and barely perceive. Eckland crafts videos to represent the unconscious synthesis that takes place in each of us as we absorb that endless stream of ambient information, direct and peripheral; her videos equip us to cope with, transform and utilize the bits of information that we are constantly absorbing. By layering, abstracting, and moving freely along the continuum of time, images in her videos dissolve, elide, conflict, develop. Perceptions are brought into focus. In Eckland’s work, the lens becomes a microscope, under which a single subject may be captured to honor the ebb and flow of movement and the subtle inherent changes; or a complex palette of seemingly unrelated images may be edited together in conceptual harmony. No matter what form the videos take, she defuses preconceptions that tired familiarity with the many genres of moving media can engender by bringing the sensibility of painting, altered photography or experimental film to the works. Eckland’s videos are non-narrative pieces in the sense of any linear storytelling. Rather, they have the form and structure of poetry or a music composition. They are metaphoric, almost dreams, with repetition used like a refrain or a chorus. Interpretation, including associative narrative, becomes a collaboration with the viewer. To enhance this experience of collaboration, Eckland designs her video installations as immersive environments, and installs her work site-specifically. Because the allusive nature of these pieces requires the attention, experience and creative imagining of the viewer to make their own connections and devise their own stories, sound is always integral to and fully integrated with the video, much as in music videos or film scores. Eckland collaborates with several composers who create original music for the works, in a process that is an ongoing dialogue with the visuals as each piece is being created. Utilized in a variety of ways, the sound becomes one more carrier of information to the senses, adding layers of subtext to the visual images and creating a more evocative, immersive experience. Eckland has exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally and finds it particularly gratifying to discover the connection that viewers in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Germany, Singapore, Turkey, The Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and China have made with the work. Some universal language seems to be communicated, some global core touched. Or as Kenneth Baker has said in one of his many insightful reviews of Eckland’s work over the past few years in The San Francisco Chronicle, “Eckland handles video like the medium of collective dreams that we share without knowing it. Apparently she wants us to know it.”

Julie Engelbrecht

Performing Artist: Costume Designer, Set Designer

I am a profesional freelance Theatrical Scenic and Costume Designer with 35 years experience designing for Theatre, Opera, Musicals and Dance. I also create many of my costume designs in my own workshop studio. I have worked as a professional cutter for more than 35 years and have taught and worked in the fashion industry as well. I often work as the production designer, envisioning not only the sets and costumes but also all of the props, wigs and make-up. I find creating every aspect of the stage picture to be very rewarding. It has also given me the opportunity to hone my skills in scenic painting as well is many costume and prop craft areas. I have taught at the college level for 30 years and have taught children’s art classes for the last 15 years. My children’s art program called The Art Box, explores creativity and media by looking at other artists and through the guise of many core education concepts that include math and language.

Yvonne Escalante

Visual Artist: Jeweler, Sculptor

Yvonne Escalante is a metalsmith artist based in San Jose. She is a lecturer at San Jose State University in metalsmithing, jewelry, and small sculpture. In addition to metal, her work also incorporates wood, glass, and found objects. Using these media, she employs mostly traditional craft techniques to produce sculpture that evokes items of manufacture while attempting to bring humor and frank attention to issues of global importance and personal meaning. Recent works have been exhibited at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), City College of San Francisco, and the Oakland Museum of California.

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