Gallery exhibits fold masters
Soar into Manzanita’s Hoffman Gallery and check out the latest chapter in its monthly art shows with June featured artists Poppy Dully and Emilio Lobato, who inject magic into everyday objects.
The works, which include creatively manipulated antique books and dimensionally altered paper airplanes, will be on display through Sunday, June 27.
Dully is a painter, printmaker and book artist living in the Pacific Northwest. She has a degree in design and cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and a Master’s in Public Health from UCLA.
“My artist’s books are products of discoveries,” Dully said. “The images follow the storyline and capture visual records of significant thematic moments. I like to explore how we process information. Is it the word or image that you gravitate to first? How does one enhance the other? How does chance change or enhance our understanding?”
The show includes three intaglio prints created using drawings made on Grass Mountain, a property recently acquired by the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.
“These coastal subjects speak to my love of nature and my inherent need to explore and record where I go,” Dully said.
For Lobato, the ocean has long inspired awe, wanderlust and most significantly, rejuvenation. For more than 30 years, he has vacationed with his family on the Oregon Coast in pursuit of those things. For a week or two every year on those family vacations, Lobato became enamored of the rugged coastline that is the exact opposite of the desert Southwest of his childhood.
It had long been a “bucket list” objective of his to return for an extended period, specifically to create a body of work exploring that experience.
“Flights of Fancy” is a series of collage and mixed media on panels produced on the Oregon Coast in early 2019. Using maps of the northwest, historical documents collected in Astoria and Japanese rice paper, Lobato fashioned paper airplanes that he then collaged.
“Flying stunt kites was my wife’s favorite pastime while on vacation,” Lobato said. “Over the years many special memories were created there. I wanted to explore imagery that expressed the whimsy, nostalgia and expansiveness that the coast inspired.”
The Hoffman Center for the Arts is located at 594 Laneda Avenue and is open Thursday through Sunday, from 1 to 5 pm. For more information, go to hoffmanarts.org.