Valise Docked at Slip
A Collective of Vashon Island Artists
on view August 5th through August 28th
Opening reception August 12th, from 6-9pm
About Valise: “VALISE stands for Vashon Artists Linked In Social Engagement. We chose these words for their humorous, ironic, and activist bent. The gallery is dedicated to presenting subjects and media that are daring and unexpected. We want to stir our audiences. We want to challenge members to initiate fresh work. We want to share the venue with the community and inspire new ideas. Half of our shows are by collective members and the other half are by artists from Vashon and beyond, regional and nationwide. The goal of VALISE gallery is to be an important and accessible art venue for the community.”
Leonard Yen
Lenard has called Vashon island home for fifteen years and his color abstractions have been exhibited in numerous Seattle and island shows. Through his use of gradients and sharp edges, he explores the shifting forces of motion and stillness, foreground and background, focus and dispersion. A former owner of cafes in Seattle, he has taught 3D computer animation at the Art Institute of Seattle and holds a masters degree in music composition from UC Berkeley. He is a member of VALISE gallery and collective and can be found at lenardyen.com
Rachel LordKenaga
Rachel is an oil painter and art therapist who uses art making as meditation, exploration of memory and emotion, and catharsis. She is passionately fixated on color and capturing a moment.
Corrine Lightweaver
Corinne’s artistic journey began in painting, with wildlife as her favorite subject, and has also included forays into other media, such as ceramics. A diagnosis of breast cancer led her to discover collage and assemblage, an apt metaphor for piecing her life and body together again. Corinne has written and published two art books, In the Breast of Health: Healing from Cancer through Art and The Psyche's Gifts: Art, Art Making, and the Journey from Mental Illness to Mental Wellness.
Dot Cherch
Dot Cherch is a Washington native, originally from the foothills of Mount Rainier and now based on Vashon, close to where she visited her grandma as a child and teenager. Dot uses her connections to the Seattle area and key moments in her life to create art that focuses on everyday objects and the emotions that go with them. Since joining VALISE in 2019, Dot has experimented with gouache on wood, as well as mixed media miniatures. She also creates animations and weekly illustrations for the Kids’ Poetry Club podcast. Dot is currently working on pieces for a 2023 joint-show with her father, pop artist Bill Ding, inspired in part by iconic Seattle locations.
Jiji Saunders
Jiji is a painter who uses installation art, sculpture, photography and film to scaffold her work. Thematically Jiji is interested in the natural world and feminism, especially ecofeminism. “Ecofeminism seeks to eliminate the ‘parallel’ forms of oppression of women and nature” (Hunter, 2018). Jiji explores themes such as hiding, sexuality, coming of age, and ecological restoration. Jiji uses the interplay of multiple mediums to depict a single theme, and her exhibits feature several mediums exploring one body of work. In her recent show called Hiding, Jiji imagined and painted shelters and caves. She depicted the shelters both in encaustic wax and water on a slate drawing board. The water paintings disappeared within minutes. She photographed them as they faded and transferred the images onto encaustic landscapes. As the final exploration of Hiding, she constructed a life-sized grass shelter based on her original paintings. In another exhibit, Jiji painted images of desertification. Then she constructed and installed a six-foot square sand table and sculpted the landscapes in glass and garnet sand. “When I delve into an idea using many mediums, I begin to understand the underlying messages and the next turn in my work.” Jiji works in her studio on Vashon Island.
Pascale Judet
Pascale Judet turned to art in the early seventies after dropping out of graduate school in philosophy at U.C Berkeley.
She has been working full time as an artist for the last 50 years.
She works mostly in acrylic, and lately have been focusing on drawing on paper, often with collages.
Gregory Burnham
Gregory was born and raised in Batavia, Illinois, graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin and has lived on Vashon Island for 44 years. He is self-taught and gets a kick out of making stuff and sharing it.
George Wright
Moving from Minnesota to Western Washington in 1976 was a bold move for the whole family. I had been studying at the University of Minnesota, in the sculpture department. Bronze casting was the department that consumed most of my time. Coming to Vashon meant commuting to Seattle for continuing metal work. I found Pratt and did some work there under the tutelage of some fine artists.
The arts community on Vashon held more painters than metal workers, so in time, I turned to painting. For years, I used oils and only in the last several years, have I discovered and worked in hot wax, or encaustic. The layers of multiple colors and textures, have more depth and to me interest. I have sometimes added foreign shapes and materials to the story. I believe they can not only add interest but be a counter balance.
Sharon Shaver
My extraordinary 8th grade art teacher introduced me to modern art concepts, turned me loose with oil paints and canvas and helped me get a painting in a student art show at SAM. He lived on in my head, cheering when I became a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Years later he smiled his approval when I showed my paintings at galleries in Cincinnati, Ohio and NYC, and the Columbus Ohio Art Museum. More recently, I felt him cheering when I joined the VALISE artists’ collective on Vashon Island, where I’ve shown my work the last few years. Animals, fish, mountains, humans and trees almost always make appearances in my paintings, the humans usually much smaller in relationship to everyone else than in ‘real life.’ Years of living in Alaska where humans are few and salmon and bear, moose and old-growth forests are plentiful taught me to see differently.
Hite Von Mende
There is nothing better than going into your studio to start a painting. Sometimes it comes together right away, But when it doesn’t, roll up your sleeves. Failed attempts just mean “you are not done.” I have had the opportunity to study painting with some wonderful artists, live, and now online. Industrial sites, rodeos, animals, landscapes, climate change, endangered species, and portraits interest me. I have received a number of awards, but there is still no short cut for working hard on a painting. It is a wonderful place to put your head and hands. I am fortunate to be a member of Valise Gallery on Vashon Island where I live. The artists that are part of the Cooperative are wonderful and inspiring.
Bill Jarcho
I have always been drawn to the playful, whimsical, and weird side of things. From discovering Mad magazine and George Pal Puppetoons as a kid to later falling in love with independent animation, Monty Python’s, Mummenschanz, Heavy Metal magazine (not the music) and the work of Calder, Klee, Miro, and Red Grooms, (to name just a few), my work has always had a similar irreverent spirit.
Throughout my 40 years in the Arts, I have been an animation director/ producer, creative director, teacher, cartoonist, creator and performer of giant puppets and puppet shows, and director of The Conscious Cartoons International Animation Festival. Yet since leaving all this behind in 2019, I have joyfully focused exclusively on making sculptures, paintings, and 3-Dimensional boxes in my studio on Vashon Island WA.
Robert Passig
Robert is a contemporary painter and installation artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. He recently returned to his native territory after living in the San Francisco Bay Area and for years in South Asia.
His passion for art that brought him to Central Washington University for a Bachelors in Art and to the University of California, Berkeley for his MA and MFA. Passig remained in San Francisco for some time as a practicing and exhibiting artist. Receiving a Fulbright to teach, research and develop his art in Colombo, Sri Lanka, dramatically impacted his life personally, creatively, and professionally. For the next few decades, he taught art in the US Embassy schools in South Asia.
He has regularly exhibited his works in Asia, the United States and in Europe where he has been an annual resident installation artist at Europos Parkas in Vilnius, Lithuania.
After the experiences overseas, he returned as a much-altered person to a very different America. This is at the core of his current work which he his shock and empathy for the discarded and invisible detritus of society. This topic continues to be investigated in paintings and installations.
Jesse Johnson
Jesse Edward Johnson is the author of the novels Yearbook and The of Nothing Much, both published by Paul Dry Books. His works of visual poetry have been exhibited in galleries throughout the Pacific Northwest.