Wildcraft Ink Making
Create Your Own Ink and Sink Some Carbon with Rosa Quintana Lillo
Thursday September 1 and Friday, September 2, 1-4pm


Join our very own Rosa Quintana Lillo, curator of the Ranger Station Art Gallery, for a hands-on, wildcrafted charcoal ink production workshop. Experiment with charred materials collected by Rosa, such as acorns, beechnut husks, fir bark, avocado skins, bone, egg shells and more! Come by the gallery to play, learn and sequester carbon. All the materials you need will be provided. Make a batch of ink. Make a drawing. Take home the ink we make together! 
In Rosa Quintana Lillo’s 30-year-long art career, she has worked as a studio technician for many artists while maintaining her own artistic practice. Rosa draws and paints every day and is always on the lookout for an interesting residency. The combination of working for herself and others has allowed Rosa to learn to work with many media and be influenced by artists from all over the world. Rosa has always been invigorated by artistic and intellectual interaction.
Rosa’s latest explorations are with charcoal: playing with it as an act of hope in times of climate change. By turning organic matter into charcoal, as her ancestors did, she can sequester small amounts of carbon and then either turn them into inks for painting or into soil amendments appreciated by both plants and animals. Whatever the charcoal becomes, the path it takes to reach its destination lends itself well to conversation.
As an immigrant and displaced Mestizo of Latin American heritage, Rosa strongly relates to fluid, playful and intuitive ways of making a mark. Living here on the West Coast of Canada has greatly influenced her practice: from addressing politics and climate change, to studying bird extinctions, and relating to the Northwest Coast art forms, both historical and modern. Rosa’s art has become an intuitively-driven mish-mash of forms influenced by technical experimentation and accentuated by painterly indulgence.
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Artist Biography
 
Jesse Klassen graduated with his BFA from the University of the Fraser Valley in 2018. Since graduation Jesse has worked on his studio practice as well as towards founding the Abby Arts Collective, a contemporary studio space which officially opened its doors early 2020. Also in 2020, Jesse started his MFA at the University of Calgary with a focus in painting and is set to graduate 2022.
Working in a wide variety of visual media including painting, sculpture, and performance, Jesse comments on the contemporary religious experience and it’s complexity.  Through abstract and surreal imagery Jesse’s work engages in the art of visual storytelling, earnestly exploring a historical and personal spiritual narrative. 
Artist Statement
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Of Eden, Sirens, And A Single Passion is an exhibition of abstract surrealist work exploring themes of ancestral identity, spiritual expression, and mythological story telling.  The title of the show reads from left to right describing these three themes in relation to past, present, and future.  Consistently depicted throughout this body of work is the use of color, texture, and several symbols and images.
One of the common images present is a simple silhouetted figure.  These figures or Ghosts, as I call them, are minimalist by design inspired by the linework that is common in street art.  Each ghost is a reference both to our ancestral past as well as our ancestral future.  They serve two purposes.  The first is a simple reminder that we, within the narrative of human history, are not alone.  The second is to stand as witnesses to our endeavors and remind us that we are not alone in our engagement on these subjects. The title piece in this exhibition is inspired by several lines of poetry by Josh Garrels and J.R.R. Tolkien: 
 
“Trouble has beset my ways, and wicked winds have blown
Sirens call my name, they say they'll ease my pain, then break me on the stones
But true love is the burden that will carry me back home” - Josh Garrels Ulysses
 
“Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”  - J.R.R. Tolkien Lament for the Rohirrim
 
The song lyrics by Garrels tells the story of Odysseus trying to return home but finding his way constantly blocked by angry gods, mythical beasts, and temptations beyond imagining.  Garrels imagines the story as an impossible task, one where even the bravest of heroes falls short.  And yet, throughout the narrative, the abstract possibility of triumph remains ever present.  Similarly Tolkien’s work describes a hopeless situation where ordinary people are stacked against powers beyond their comprehension.  In this lament the speaker lives in a time where great heroes no longer exist but great evils do and so he asks the question, who will do the impossible? The task has been left to the ordinary people and yet, just as in Garrels lyrics, the abstract possibility of triumph remains ever present.
Inspired by these works, Of Eden, Sirens, and A Single Passion, asks the same question but in a contemporary context.  With all that the world has to offer us, with all the tragedy and turmoil “who” will dare to do the impossible.

The Skeena Paintings: Ava P Christl

​July 11 to August 23, 2020
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These new paintings express my personal connection to the land and river of my youth. The locations in the images have been re-imagined through time and memory to express the geography of my northern heart-home in all its wonder, mystery and spirit.
I have mixed childhood memories with recent observations, reality with imagination, and used multiple panels in order to show multiple aspects of a particular location. Although the paintings are of actual specific places, the images are situated somewhere in the realm of imagination and distorted through time and the vagaries of memory.