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Lindsey Aarts delves into the rich history of commercial gillnet fishing on the lower Columbia River in this exhibition, offering a lively and engaging series that exudes the charm of storybook illustrations while bringing to life an era that helped define this region. She approaches her subject with reverence for the river, the salmon, the people, and the times they lived in. 

Months of research and interviews with local fishermen, conducted while artist-in-residence at Astoria Visual Arts, laid the foundation for narrative collage and watercolor artworks that offer a glimpse into the heyday of gillnet fishing. Aarts experiments with relationships between image and word, adding snippets of text to evoke history, give context, or allude to controversy. She has created works of visual poetry with a magical folk-art lilt, laced with phrases that transform local history into legends of a time and lifestyle at the edge of living memory.