Re-collect your thoughts
A vibrant new exhibit, “Recollection” by Northwest-based artist Jill Falk, will light up Lincoln City’s Chessman Gallery from Friday, Feb. 3, through March 20.
Join the opening reception on Friday at 5 pm or take a virtual tour on the Lincoln City Cultural Center Facebook page on Saturday. Falk will deliver an artist talk the following weekend, Sunday, Feb. 12, at 4 pm.
The exhibit is comprised of several collections of evocative monochromatic paintings made throughout the past five years in Portland, Lincoln City and Southern Oregon plus a video installation featuring 12 screens playing at the same time.
“The video installation is a big part of the show,” Falk said. “I don’t think anyone has done anything like it at the Chessman yet. “I built them myself out of plexiglass and wood. I used different colors so it almost has a holographic effect.”
According to Falk, the work in this show was a long time coming.
“I did some video work in school and I tried to put videos onto paintings,” she said. “I used one image from the show ‘Twin Peaks.’ [Gallery director] Krista [Eddy] asked me to do a video installation because I did something similar for my stop on the Lincoln City studio tours a few years ago, but this is definitely a step beyond that.”
The show explores how images we hold on to as memory become anchors for particular states or feeling spaces we occupy at different times in our lives.
“Memory, I think, is its own kind of painting,” Falk said. “We build and alter memories every time we touch them (that’s what the neuroscience says!).”
Falk said her paintings vary in scope from abstraction to higher levels of image rendering, much like a memory or a dream, some parts are clearer or more fully represented than others. The work is mostly focused on the feeling state of memory and less with “accuracy” of an event.
“I see these different formats as holding space to consider the experience and the process of recollection,” she said. “Sometimes we hold a single image large and feel enveloped by it, sometimes memory feels like a series of single images read like a film, and sometimes (like the science says) memory and image feel simultaneous, quantum, like the grids. I foresee the video installation as maybe mimicking the style of the paintings through my edits. I feel as though all of the work that I do as an artist is painting. So, to me, the video work is also painting. I used videos from my archive and collections and incorporated video imagery from the Lincoln City area as a way to help place the viewer in the work and make the show more specific to itself.”
The Chessman Gallery is located inside the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 540 NE Hwy. 101 and is open from 10 am to 4 pm, Thursday through Sunday.
For more information, go to lincolncity-culturalcenter.org or call 541-994-9994.