Remembering Celilo Falls: a mixed-media work by Tuck Contreras

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Tuck Contreras

FURNITURE ART:

Mirror in Fused Glass

The Dancing Ladies

* Historic Celilo Falls

Stereo cabinet with bamboo doors

& RELATED Mixed-Media Mosaics (also combining art glass and copper):

Glass River

& RELATED Mixed-Media Art Projects (also combining art glass and copper):

Sunflower in Glass

project: Remembering Celilo Falls

Remembering Celilo Falls, a work in glass, copper and wood, 48 x 43 in.

Tuck’s Celilo Falls is a folding, three-panel cover for a large flat-screen television.

The intricate piece was commissioned by Brad Mulvihill & Lolly Tweed to grace the front of an LCD television set in their living-room.

Tuck completed and installed the mixed-media work in October 2007.

Detail from Tuck’s Remembering Celilo Falls, showing top section of the 2nd and 3rd panels.

Detail from Tuck’s Remembering Celilo Falls, showing the right half of the first panel.

Detail from Tuck’s Remembering Celilo Falls, showing the intricacy of the glass mosaic work.

Another detailed view of the intricacy of the glass mosaic work in Tuck’s Remembering Celilo Falls.

And another detail from Remembering Celilo Falls, showing the intricacy of the glass mosaic and copper work.

Tuck’s Celilo Falls mosaic draws the viewer back in time to historic Celilo Falls, a magical place located east of The Dalles where, for 15,000 years, Native Americans fished for salmon.

Native American family at Celilo Falls, before the falling waters were silenced in 1957. The man on the left holds a traditional Indian fishing pole.

The Falls are gone now, having been submerged in 1957 when the Army Corps of Engineers constructed The Dalles Dam.

Tuck first learned of Celilo Falls when she moved to The Dalles in 2003 and visited the local history museum. As she tells it: “I went to the local history museum when I first got here and they had a room with images of the Indians fishing. But it was the sound in the room that I can’t forget ... that’s what I wanted to capture. The roar.”

In native Chinookan, celilo means “echo of water falling” or “sound of water upon the rocks.”

You can learn more about the history of Celilo Falls at Wikipedia.

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