The art of connection
‘Branchings’ exhibit opens in Lincoln City’s Chessman Gallery
Take an art exploration through the latest scientific insights into natural forest communities at the Kate Saunders and Ger Killeen show “Branchings” opening at Lincoln City’s Chessman Gallery this Friday, Nov. 15.
An opening reception on Friday from 5 to 7 pm will offer wine, appetizers and a chance to meet the artists.
A virtual gallery tour will go live on Facebook on Saturday.
The exhibit features two complementary artforms: kiln-formed glass by Saunders and digital prints with augmented reality by Killeen, which link above-ground and below-ground in vastly complex and surprising ways.
Using images of plants, trees, fungi and animals native to the Oregon Coast forests, the artists try to reveal and communicate what scientist and professor Suzanne Simard calls “the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network.” They are particularly interested in representing the energy and dynamism of these structures and their analogues in neural networks.
Saunders has long worked with natural images in glass, some of which she magnifies beyond easy recognition to produce a radically altered perspective on common forms. Killeen takes these images as well as his own digital prints as occasions for using augmented reality techniques to draw the viewer underneath the surface of the physical artworks and down inside an imagined experience of the understory.
All of the augmentations on the physical and digital artworks are easily viewable in the web browser of any mobile device and need no special app to be viewed.
As an exhibition, “Branchings” is designed to engage the visual, auditory and tactile senses of gallery visitors, encouraging people to follow different branches of narrative as they move around the physical gallery space and peer inside the virtual world revealed through the portal of their mobile devices.
Saunders has employed a unique process with her own photographs, using a photoresist technique to sandblast the images onto the glass and then rubbing enamels into the sandblasted areas to bring out the image. Her work has been shown at the Mount Angel Library, Randolph New Hampshire Annual Exhibition and Cannon Beach Gallery. She was a founding member of the Casbah Art Collective.
Killeen is a poet, digital artist and filmmaker. His work has been exhibited at Digital Art Month in Paris, Web3 Gallery in Manhattan and The Shoreditch Arts Club in London. His digital fashion won an award in 2022 at Paris Fashion Week. His short experimental film, “Mycelial Rhapsody” premiered at the 2023 Fungi Film Fest at Cinema 21 in Portland in November 2023. His most recent book is “Ghost Topologies — Augmented Reality Poems.”
“Branchings” runs through Dec. 29 at the Chessman Gallery, located inside the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 540 NE Hwy. 101. The center is open from 10 am to 5 pm, Wednesday through Sunday.
For more information, go to lincolncity-culturalcenter.org or call 541-994-9994.