Unique gathering in Kalispell features nine artists

PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works and musings — in the PechaKucha 20x20 format. Every PechaKucha Night city is hosted by a local organization and can create a unique platform to uncover that city’s creativity.

The PechaKucha format is the art of concise presentation, or, as directly translated from Japanese — chit chat.

PechaKucha is a presentation style in which 20 slides or images are shown with 20 seconds each for the artist to speak to each image (6 minutes and 40 seconds in total). The images can be directly addressed, or used to facilitate a story, resulting in presentations that pack a punch and then move immediately to the next speaker. The fast-paced format powers multiple-speaker events called PechaKucha Nights.

Architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham originally devised the energy-packed format, and the first presentation took place in Tokyo in 2003. Presentations from around the world can be viewed on the PechaKucha website, www.pechakucha.org

With PechaKucha Nights now happening in over 1,000 cities around the world, the event’s founders have discovered that most cities — not just Tokyo — have virtually no public spaces where people can show and share their work in a relaxed way. For instance, if you have just graduated from college and finished your first project in the real world, where can you show it? It probably won’t get into a magazine, and you don’t have enough photos for a gallery show or a lecture, so PechaKucha is the perfect platform to show and share your work.

A small team of committed volunteer organizers started the Kalispell chapter for PechaKucha in early 2017 after learning of the format from events in other cities. “PK Nights” are focused on idea sharing and community building. It is 100 percent volunteer and all collected donations go to cover event costs and the PK Global Fund.

More information on the origins of PechaKucha can be found at www.pechakucha.org.

Artists presenting at PechaKucha Vol. 7 — ‘Art and Design 2’

- Tim Carlburg is a full time potter and stay-at-home-father. His focus has been on creating one-of-a-kind functional growlers, flasks and moonshine jugs for breweries and distilleries across the country and his work has been showcased in multiple national (and international) magazines and on national television. When he isn’t busy making pottery, Carlburg can be found hunting, camping, rafting and training for, and competing in, the Highland Games with his wife and daughters.

- Olivia Stark was born in Kalispell and is a mixed-media artist and painter. She began her fine arts degree in the late 1990s with an emphasis on psychology and dance. In the last 10 years her work has centered around internalized dialogue and abstract expression.

- Collin Hamman was born in the Flathead Valley. After double-majoring in graphic design and fine art he moved back home where he had unfinished business with the surrounding wilderness. It is from these wild places that seeps the inspiration and motivation needed to build his career as a professional artist.

- Kat Gebauer was born in Wisconsin. After falling in love with skiing and snowboarding, she moved to the West in 2000 after college and started photographing weddings and mowing stripes in the fairways at Whitefish Lake Golf Course. Gebauer’s passion is action photography, adventures, travel, and her two mini aussies. She specializes in weddings, elopements and real estate, but her main drive is to photograph people performing their passions in the great outdoors, wilderness, and around the world.

- Jeremiah Martin grew up in the Flathead Valley and studied graphic design at Montana State University. After a brief stint away from the Flathead Valley working as a designer for print and web, he returned with his wife Jenny and began working with the ZaneRay Group, a web development agency in Whitefish. He has worked there for 12 years, applying his design and development skills to emerging web technologies to come up with creative solutions for leading brands in the outdoor industry.

- Noelle Sharp is an artist and designer working and living in the U.S. Hailing from Utah and Montana, she has lived and made work in California, Utah, Montana, Manhattan, Navajo Nation, Detroit, Chicago and Iceland. Sharp received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. She is the founder of Aporta, a hand-produced designer textile and accessories company.

- David Secrest was born in Rochester, New York, and gained his appreciation of craftsmanship from his experience as a son of a potter and painter, as opposed to through a formal arts education. Moving to rural Montana after high school, Secrest built his home and studio in an isolated environment to experiment and problem-solve away from the influence of other mainstream artists. Drawn predominantly to iron as a material, Secrest uses forging and casting processes to create his sculptures and benches that are featured in the exhibition. While his works may seem to reference a multitude of historic cultural aesthetics, he prefers those references to be abstract.

- Sharlot Battin is owner, operator, master boot maker at Montana Leatherworks and Great Northern Boot. She creates theatrical footwear for the performing arts.

- Alex Strohl is a Madrid-born, French photographer whose work is characterized by his extraordinary travels. Instead of creating contrived scenes, Strohl creates authentic moments and captures them as they unfold before him—continually blurring the lines between work and life.