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Hoffman Gallery

May Gallery Exhibition
Exhibit-Thursdays–Sundays | May 1–31 | 12:00-5:00pm
Opening Reception May 3 | 3:00-5:00pm
Gallery is closed the last Sunday of every month
Hoffman Center for the Arts | 594 Laneda Avenue | Manzanita
Free and open to the public

 

Featuring Works by
Jenny Rideout, Victoria Christen, Robert Sumner

Jenny Rideout – Sails, Freq Flags, and Bonnets for Space Exploration

India ink and acrylic paint embellish my mixed textile constructions assembled from quilts beyond repair, used drop cloths, old curtains, and other found materials.  These colorful, stitched together assemblages are built to be vibrant talismans for interesting times.

This body of work began with an imagining I had of a majestic old tall ship.  I saw intricate patchwork sails, maneuvering the ship elegantly and powerfully along the constantly shifting surface of the ocean.  In my vision the sails were covered in colorful mends, mysterious symbols, sigils, and patterns. The resulting sails are meditations on power, creativity, and the culmination of experiences alchemized for maximum propulsion. Eventually I was inspired to add “Space Bonnets” for my crew and “Freq Flags” indicating a home port, a place to center.

I come from a family of artists, seamstresses, quilters, and sailors. During a recent move, I kept only a few cherished heirlooms: my great-great-grandmother’s treadle sewing machine, a feed sack quilt from my great-grandmother, my mother’s intricate hand-stitched quilts, and my father’s sailmaker’s seaming palm. These objects embody comfort, utility, protection, and beauty—values stitched through generations. This realization sparked a shift in my work from painting to textiles. I now create mixed-media pieces that incorporate painting and drawing but center on the rich textures, histories, and patterns of fabric, embracing their irresistible tactile and symbolic depth.

Victoria Christen – ShapeScapes

I began working with found shapes almost thirty years ago, first collecting discarded felt pieces from a factory dumpster across the street from my studio in Portland, Oregon.

I stored them for two decades before deciding to use them to create an alphabet of over twenty combinations of fabric shapes sewn or glued together.  These have become my foundation for expression, a lens that I use to view and interpret the world around me.

Some of the pieces in the exhibition are combinations of shapes used to represent the beauty and majesty of the Wallowas, where I did a summer residency.  Others are shape-based interpretations of rock formations seen from ocean shores.

Robert Sumner – Visual Music

My work uses the synesthetic, non-verbal communicative power that the visual arts share with the performing arts, especially music, as a jumping off point to explore color, form and movement.

Music and dance have clear analogs in the visual arts:  rhythm, repetition, improvisation, melody and harmony, and even syncopation.  The visual arts add color, texture, transparency, opacity, and the physical capture of the passing of time.

The combination and interaction of these formal elements communicate at a pre- and non-discursive level that is simultaneously more fundamental and more expansive than verbal communication.  The writings of Henri Bergson and others explore the limitations verbal communication places on our understanding of the human experience, and it is precisely the communication and experience that lies beyond these limitations that I strive to explore.

**A Note on Titles:  In order to create titles that were conceptually consistent with my objective of creating imagery that is an open yet suggestive abstract matrix, I developed a rubric to pull random syllables from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which is a remarkable piece of literature in which words create an open yet suggestive matrix.

About Robert Sumner
Robert Sumner is largely self-taught after being disenrolled from the 4th year of his BFA program due to his sexual orientation.  Returning to school a few years later he developed, proposed, and completed an interdisciplinary degree in Arts Administration at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia after which he completed the MBA program at the University of California at Davis.  He has been creating art his entire life but has been doing it full time since early 2024 while residing in Portland, OR.  His practice consists of painting and printmaking.

Additional work can be seen on his website

Click here to view and download event flyer

 


  •  May 1, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 2, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 3, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 4, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 8, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 9, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 10, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 11, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 15, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 16, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 17, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 18, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 22, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 23, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 24, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 25, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 29, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 30, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  •  May 31, 2025
     12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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May Gallery Exhibition

Venue:  

Address:
594 Laneda Avenue, Manzanita, Oregon, 97130

Description:

Situated on the main street in Manzanita just a few blocks west of Highway 101, the Hoffman Center Art Gallery is located across the street from the North Tillamook Library.

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