CΔCHING OUT@ Artspace 1616

Christine Hodgins

For the month of September, Artspace 1616 housed two exhibits with distinctive style. Work by Christine Hodgins featured her large plaster hanging sculptures, and work by Susanne Isabel Bockelmann featured her large woodcut prints on fragile China paper. Two very different methods of visual art, in one space, and Artspace 1616 does it right, with vision and cohesion.

“A’cross Town,” an art survey of the deceased artist, Christine Hodgins, was curated by Gwenna Howard. Hodgins' body of work was last exhibited in 2012 at the Morris Grave Museum in Eureka, and hasn't been displayed since her passing. The works were hung, drooping from the ceiling in their collected forms. The well-lit gallery may not harken ideas of being deep within a cave or crag, however, the stalagcite forms, pods, cocoons bring the viewer to a place of beginning, on the edge of time and place. Contemporary art forms can be challenging to view at times , but it’s sometimes the questions which arise and the experience the viewer comes to inhabit,  that can be as valuable a process as the artwork itself.

Christine Hodgins

Susanne Isabel Bockelmann’s lives and works in Germany and her artwork, on the other hand, is two-dimensional and hung on the walls surrounding Hodgins’ sculptures. Bockelmann’s linocuts and woodcuts didn’t have to compete for attention in this show, they could’ve completely stood on their own; yet, the two artists and styles comprised a vision of a distant past, “ a longing for places unknown.” Bockelmann’s large scale images of figures and animals cohabitating playfully, sensuously, respectfully reflects the imagery reminiscent of cave paintings from Lascaux and Chauvet.

Susanne Isabel Bockelmann

Susanne Isabel Bockelmann

The dialectical between viewer, artwork, overall show, and the artspace can bring one to question more deeply the role of visual language on culture, and vice versa. When artists, both active and posthumous, share works that unearth a process that continues outside the confines of a gallery space, that show is successful, and Artspace 1616 continues to develop shows which display works of  lasting value and quality.

Sculpture by Christine Hodgins and woodcut print by Susanne Isabel Bockelmann.
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