CCAI's 'Lockdown' exhibit continues at WNC's Bristlecone Gallery

Artwork triggered by the Pandemic, including a creation that symbolically depicts hundreds of thousands of U.S COVID-19 victims, is on exhibit at Western Nevada College.

The largest art work, created by Nevada artist Paula Chung, memorializes each fatality with a small embroidered spiral. Chung and artists Nancy Raven and Ted Rips are featured in the exhibit, titled "Lockdown", presented by the Capital City Arts Initiative.

Chung’s unconventional creation honoring each covid victim is sewn on Japanese rice paper. It extends one-third of a mile when fully unfurled. The free exhibit is open to the public until Dec. 22, Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., at the college’s Bristlecone Gallery on the campus (2201 West College Parkway).

When the Pandemic began, Chung said she felt personally compelled to memorialize the people who had died. She chose a spiral to symbolize life in her creation titled “requiem”. Using rolls of Japanese rice paper, called Dragon Cloud, as a foundation for her machine embroidery, she began stitching one oval for each life lost. She uses two different colors of thread to increase the depth of the thread color, currently, using blue and orange. Each paper scroll is 60’ x 11” and holds an estimated 8,684 spirals.

Chung tracks her progress on a calendar and to-date has made about 390,000 spirals on 45 scrolls extending to over one-third of a mile in total. She said she hopes to continue her work until the Pandemic ends. With her husband and pet cats, Chung divides her time between the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and Southern California.

Raven, of Carson City, said she reacted to the covid lockdown with a burst of energy and began carving printmaking blocks. In the early 1950s, her then fiancé and later husband, was in Japan and sent her a letter every day that included a small drawing on the outside of the envelope. In 2020, she used these drawings as a point of reference and revisited decades of her own notebooks to make the six-dozen small prints. Using linoleum-blocks and printing on black paper, Raven created several series based on Kids, Geishas, Landscapes, and Japan. After printing, she hand-colored each image.

“I had his letters and all these sketch books from the years when my children were little, and doing these prints was a good way to pass the time during the lockdown. I worked with the images that I loved,” she said.

Rips’ more than 400 glass cubes counted the lockdown days in brilliant color. He built mostly black cubes to represent covid itself and white ones to represent antibodies, he said. “As our nation began slipping into an unimaginable tragedy, this project began as a way for me to regain some sanity. Locked down under our Southern California stay-at-home order, I decided to get off the couch, walk away from the TV, and try to get creative in my studio. This gave me the chance to express myself in a way I never imagined.

“Confined to a 2” x 2” x 1 3/4” format and using glass as my medium, I created Covid-Cubes to mark time in isolation, create a unique color study, and memorialize this once-in-a-lifetime event,” Rips said. “When the story is finally told, I think someone will write about the fact that many people actually ‘found themselves’ in 2020. People learned to write, create poems, make music, adapt in ways we never thought we could. Some artists like myself, who doubted our talent, found it.”

Chris Lanier, professor of digital art at Sierra Nevada University, wrote the exhibition essay for Lockdown, which CCAI published as a gallery handout and online archive. Working in digital animation, web production, and comics, Lanier said he enjoyed producing hybrid forms. His animations have screened at Sundance film festival, and he won the Grand Prize for Internet Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. His art criticism essays have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including The Believer, Comics Journal, HiLobrow, Furtherfield, Rhizome, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Carlos Ramirez, a Western Nevada College Latino Leadership Academy student, provided a Spanish language translation of the show’s wall text.

Western Nevada College is a component of the Nevada System of Higher Education with campuses in Carson City, Douglas County, and Fallon. CCAI is an artist-centered nonprofit organization committed to community engagement in contemporary visual arts through exhibitions, illustrated talks, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online activities.

The Initiative is funded by the John and Grace Nauman Foundation, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Kaplan Family Charitable Fund, U.S. Bank Foundation, Southwest Gas Corporation Foundation, Steele & Associates LLC, and CCAI sponsors and members.

The Governor’s Office of Economic Development provided additional support through its Nevada Pandemic Emergency Technical Support Grant for 2021.

For additional information, please visit CCAI’s website at www.ccainv.org.