Paper view
Lincoln City’s Chessman Gallery welcomes art lovers into the fold with its latest show, “Beautiful Pulp,” a collection of paper, book and print art by Jane Hodgkins, Julia Goos and Helen Abe-Ichiens.
The show will launch at 4 pm this Friday, Nov. 13, with a live virtual gallery opening tour on Facebook, @Lincolncityculture, led by Gallery Director Krista Eddy and cultural center Executive Director Niki Price.
Several kinds of handmade books, including accordion fold, explosion and traditional book-binding, will be represented, as well as a variety of printing techniques including linocuts, silk screens, nature prints and eco-dyed leaf prints.
Jane Hodgkins had a career in program development and administration in healthcare and education. She has lived and worked in Lincoln County for the past 25 years, during which time she has taken classes in papermaking, bookbinding and eco-dyeing at the Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology, the Newport Paper Arts Festival and the Yaquina Art Association.
Hodgkins began printmaking five years ago after retiring from Oregon Coast Community College.
“I retired at the end of spring term 2015 and enrolled in an art class at OCCC the very next term,” she said. “It was the start of a whole new adventure.”
Hodgkins said she has always been in awe of the effort and thought it takes to design and build things that make a difference to humanity and saddened by the ease with which buildings, art, institutions and programs can be destroyed.
For many years, she had the opportunity to create and launch health education and college programs. In retirement, she has channeled that energy into printmaking and exploring ways to highlight and exhibit prints.
Her works on display in the “Beautiful Pulp” show include a variety of prints incorporated in hand-bound books, accordion books, pop-up books, leather journals, and notebooks.
Julia Goos combines ideas of history and quilting to explore how we piece together elements to construct a larger whole or narrative.
“In my art practice I collect, sort, save, combine, fold, record, and print,” she said. “I construct works that exemplify the remembering and forgetting, piecing and cutting, revealing and concealing, connecting and fragmenting that typify both researching and quilting.”
Goos said her work is not intended to be read as an image of a specific event or site, but rather like a patchwork quilt: inviting viewers to piece together the fragments.
“Remnants from the past often emerge as only shells of history, lacking the meaning that was once held in their use,” she said. “As I look at historical sites and 19th Century quilts from the present day, I am aware of the time involved in creating these objects, but also aware of the stories that existed in their presence.”
Helen Abe-Ichien was born 1951 on a US Air Force Base in Fukuoka, Japan. Her family moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and she went on to graduate from California State University, Long Beach with a MA in Printmaking. She worked as a printmaking instructor at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles; and at California State University, Long Beach. She also worked in an atelier as a printer working with various artists including Judy Chicago, Chuck Arnoldi, Claire Falkenstein and Rafael Soyer. She worked for several years in the Los Angeles area as an arts educator.
Since moving to South Beach in 2014, Abe-Ichien has re-established herself as a printmaker and has been creating prints and reworking them using other various media such as Prismacolor pencils, pastels and watercolors.
Abe-Ichien enjoys the inconsistencies that occur in prints of the same image — sometimes slight and at other times dramatic. She appreciates that each print of a given image resists becoming a perfect and complete but mere replica of the original image.
Often, she uses a print as the basis for additional modification using a variety of non-printmaking techniques as bookmaking. Using unexpected techniques like creating pop-up book images adds action to the prints, activating the viewer and encouraging a participatory aspect to the print consumption.
“Beautiful Pulp” will be on display through Sunday, Dec. 6, at the Chessman Gallery located inside the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 540 NE Hwy. 101. Opening hours are 10 am to 4 pm Thursday through Sunday. Masks and social distancing required in the building.
For more information, call 541-994-9994 or go to lincolncity-culturalcenter.org.