“Light in the Dark”

November 14, 2025 - April 14, 2026

We’re welcoming the winter season with a new exhibit featuring illuminated artwork and the history of how electric light made its way to Olympia’s streets. 

John Corzine

John Corzine was born in Olympia in 1960 at the old Saint Peter's Hospital. After graduating from UW, he began to work in construction. What began as practical carpentry grew into a deeper exploration of woodworking. John has moved into his shop in recent years, a haven where he is free to “waste time” and play.

Experimenting with thin veneers of spruce, maple, and old-growth fir, the artist revels in the hidden beauty within the trees. Each sheet reveals a landscape of grain and color, brought to life when illuminated from within. The use of veneers allows the artist to extend the life of rare materials like old growth fir, preserving and honoring the wood while revealing its inner radiance.

The artist seeks to rekindle our ancient connection to the hearth: that warm, amber glow that draws us together and brings calm. Through each lamp, the artist invites us to remember the comfort of firelight and the peace found in its steady illumination.

Beneath the Bark
John Corzine
Western maple, spalted maple, quilted maple, spruce, fir veneers and reclaimed crate wood bands.

Natalie Coblentz

Don’t Cry Over Spilt Light is composed almost entirely of upcycled materials from the artist’s workshop. As the artist reassembled parts, the act of reuse became a meditation on the cycles of energy in both art and life. One string of LEDs pulse in a slow fade, the giving side, while the other travels along, receiving light. Together, they move like the two ventricles of a heart. 

This work was shaped by the artist’s life history. In a difficult time, they discovered that light offered a way to breathe. When a burlesque troupe in San Francisco invited them to work as a lighting designer, they discovered that working with light professionally and creatively could allow them to come fully into themselves as an inventor and illuminator.

Don’t Cry Over Spilt Light
Natalie Coblentz
LED light, metal, wood, plastic

Nikki McClure and Jay T. Scott

These three sconces represent a collaboration between two artists, and it is how they entered into a relationship: Together, depicting windmills and a flock of birds, was the first piece they produced in 2003 as they learned each other’s style and craft. They continued creating these lamps over time, exploring themes of family and the passage of time across generations.

Nikki McClure’s papercut illustrations are hidden within Jay T. Scott’s veneer lamps when the lights are turned off, appearing as a stable half-tree trunk. When illuminated, light passes through the wood grain to create a warm, honey-colored glow, evoking firelight and the comforting ambiance of a hearth. The artists also describe this glow as captured sunlight, the energy a tree stores as it grows tall.

Resume, Together, Rely
Nikki McClure and Jay T. Scott
Paper, spruce, ash, copper

Dave Sederberg

String Theory explores matter as a precarious and mysterious miracle. String theory is a way physicists try to understand the universe, proposing that everything is made of tiny, vibrating strings, and the way they vibrate determines the type of particle or force they create. Depending on these concepts, the artist expresses vibration and pattern, and alludes to the unification of fundamental forces. 

Black lights throughout the exhibit give this work an otherworldly glow at night, making the fluorescent paint shimmer. Standing ten feet tall with a precarious, off-balance posture, String Theory especially explores the pull of gravity.

String Theory
Dave Sederberg
Wood, steel, plexiglass, mirror, opaque and fluorescent paint, black light