The Inclusion and Distillation exhibit at the Jacobs Gallery was an effort of like minds with one central theme: black and white, polar opposites. Three local Eugene artists, Susan Lowdermilk, Satoko Motouji and Marilyn Robert, had been conversing about an exhibit they wanted to install for the past four years and even spoke about the possibility of a collaborative project. But when it came time to pitch a proposal, the three were so comfortable and interconnected that collaboration proved unnecessary. They each began working on their respective projects independently, yet they ended up overlapping into each other’s mediums.
“We talked about doing collaborative work and maybe having a piece that we all added to, and it just didn’t happen,” said Lowdermilk. “But I was pretty pleased; it seemed like the forms and the shapes and the ideas, its thematic, but still it seemed like our mind-sets were pretty close.” 
All three used similar circular patterns. For instance, Motouji’s pieces “Ascending” and “Descending,” wall hangings using handmade paper and ink, both focus on a circular pattern of rising and falling. The theme is symbolic of changes in human life and the cyclical character of nature. Similarly, Lowdermilk’s zoetrope, which is the centerpiece of the exhibit, lends an interactive element to the display allowing guests to spin the piece while looking through slits in the side wall, viewing a motion-study of a horse that rocks back and forth on a sled while a clock and moon rotate through patterns of time and phases. 
 “The zoetrope embodies the inclusion theme,” Lowdermilk said. “The horse is an image from Eadweard Muybridge. He was a photographer in the 1860s who did pre-motion picture motion-study with a series of cameras. So I saw this image that he had taken of a horse rocking back and forth on a sled, and I thought that was really strange that this horse was acting like a toy.”
 “It’s true that when we were working on the show, we talked to each other, but a lot of it was an example of serendipity,” Robert said. “There are a lot of circular shapes that we used. That’s something that people bring up to us. They say, ‘Wow, did you guys talk about these things?’ And we really didn’t.”
The overlap between mediums is also present in the way in which Motouji deviated from her usual medium of painting with elaborate prints on handmade textiles such as woven merino wool. The textiles add a warm texture amid the starkness of opposition.
Another common shape that emerges in the exhibit is an implementation of the box. Robert, highly influenced by an Asian aesthetic from experiences through tours of Turkey and a grant to study contemporary Japanese textiles, contributed a series of Chinese sewing kits. Motouji’s set of four boxes entitled “Emerging,” features a washed-out ink painting that spreads across the four adjacent boxes. Other boxes of Motouji’s appearing around the exhibit, also featured on handmade paper, have dangling strings reminiscent of paper candy wrappers protruding from the box.
“I’ve got a pretty good mix of printmaking media in the works, and I go back and forth between the format of the book,” Lowdermilk said. “An artist’s book is not a container like a book of illustrations or something. The three books in the exhibit show every decision that’s made; they have to follow the content of the book for me to feel like it’s an artist’s book, which is an art medium in itself as opposed to a container that’s imposed upon it.”
The three-dimensional boxes bring in a completely different element to the exhibit than the wall hangings, which are for the most part flat and two-dimensional, excluding the occasional wool textures.
An Asian theme is heavily present in the exhibit. Motouji’s wall hangings, many of which include extensive Japanese calligraphy, were inspired by her time as an adolescent in Japan.
“Satoko is Japanese and she was also drawing from some aspects of her childhood, which included writing calligraphy and brush painting,” Lowdermilk said.
Robert’s “Interlude in a Turkish Garden,” a print on silk, shows a patterning likely to appear in a Turkish rug and indicative of a modern Turkish garden.
Lowdermilk said the proximity of the exhibit to students will help to make the display a success.
The Inclusion and Distillation exhibit allows the Eugene audience to observe the best in local fine art and will be included in this month’s Last Friday Art Walk. The isolation that is rendered from distilling can rarely find a complement in the acceptance of inclusion.
However, in the small confines of the Jacobs Gallery in the Hult Center, Eugene residents can easily find a harmonious concentration of both.
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