Untitled Magazine

Finding His Path: Troy Mathews ‘16

khanson@pnca.edu (Killeen Hanson) — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 00:12:00 GMT

Five years ago, Troy Mathews ‘16 was living in a garage and struggling to stay focused and motivated. At the same time, he was also working as a school bus driver and telling his young passengers that they could be and do anything they wanted.

One day, they flipped the question around on him, “Is this what you want to be, Mr. Mathews? A school bus driver?”

It wasn’t. Troy had dreams of pursuing painting as something more than an activity between his AM and PM shifts. “I saw painting as something that could fulfill me as a human being, could give me purpose in life. I would go to First Thursday at PNCA and dream of seeing my paintings up on those walls.”

So Troy took the risk of applying to PNCA and was accepted.

“I got the acceptance letter, but I also got the bill. And I had to tell PNCA that I couldn’t make it, thank you for the opportunity, but this is way outside my price range.”

But then PNCA emailed Troy again, with the news that he had been awarded significant scholarship funding from PNCA’s donor-supported general scholarship fund. A PNCA education was now possible.

“Those scholarships felt like PNCA was betting on me, so I had to bet on myself,” said Troy. “And I’ve kept that in my heart since I’ve been here.”

Scholarships allow students like Troy to focus on color and composition instead of on whether they need to work another shift or get a second job.

“My story is not unique,” says Troy. “There are a hundred students just like me. And we all want to say thank you. You’ve made our time at PNCA possible.”

Troy graduated this winter with a degree in Painting and is already pursuing a Master’s degree in arts education. During his time at PNCA, Troy has been challenged by his teachers and inspired by his classmates.

“I’m finding my voice in the world and have had time to figure out what I want to make in the world, how I want to say things. I’ve discovered that my practice not only includes an artistic practice, but a curation practice. I’ve been able to go to the Venice Biennale. I’ve been taken to a world where art is on the highest level and seen that as a possibility. Being here has been a blessing.”

Making Her Own Way: Lindsey Walker ‘17

khanson@pnca.edu (Killeen Hanson) — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 23:40:00 GMT

Lindsey Walker ’17 started her college career on a very different path. As a psychobiology major at UC Davis, she planned on a career in science, but a desire to study art and explore her creativity led her to PNCA.

“My dad is a trained craftsman. He taught me how to draw when I was little,” says Lindsey, who wondered if a career as an artist would be too self-indulgent. In the end, she decided that if she didn’t give voice to her creativity, she might always regret the missed opportunity.

At PNCA, Lindsey found teachers and mentors who have encouraged her to take control of her education and explore a variety of mediums and techniques. As a General Fine Arts major, she can take on a range of projects that spark her curiosity and inspire her. “I am assembling a skill set – painting, screen printing, bookmaking, design,” she says. “I’m not afraid to work outside of my comfort zone.”

One such project yielded a generous scholarship and an amazing professional opportunity: as one of three finalist for the Argyle Winery Scholarship, Lindsey designed a stunning wine label featuring an abstract figure in black on a bold yellow background. The image symbolizes the cycle of nature that is so much of the Argyle story. Lindsey’s label design, along with those of two other students, was chosen and a three-bottle trio called The Art of Sparking was born.

Lindsey’s path has been challenging. She started PNCA with enough money in the bank to pay for her housing for three years, but spent the first two weeks living in a hostel and her car while she was approved for an apartment. She balanced school with work during the first three years but for her fourth and final year, she has left the part-time job behind to fully focus on her classes and her thesis.

Lindsey is grateful for the generous financial aid and scholarships she has received from PNCA, making sure to “apply for every merit scholarship she could find.” Looking to the future, she is considering a variety of opportunities – a Leland Iron Works artist residency, a Fulbright Scholarship, an Asian Arts Council Grant, and graduate school. Wherever she lands, she will take a full complement of skills with her, as well as a strong work ethic, confidence, and insatiably curious mind.

Samantha Wall Wins Top Honor at Contemporary Northwest Art Awards

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 22:39:00 GMT

Samantha Wall, who earned her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) was honored with the top $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer prize selected by the Museum’s curatorial staff at the Portland Art Museum’s 2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards (CNAA). She was chosen from among the eight artists included in the Museum’s fourth biennial awards exhibition.

This is not the first such recognition Wall’s work has received. When she graduated with her MFA in 2011, she was given the MFA Grant Award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. And the Foundation has continued to support her work with residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2013 and 2016. The Ford Family Foundation named her a Hallie Ford Fellow in 2015, and Wall was nominated for the Brink Award from Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery and was a CNAA nominee in 2012 as well.

Wall makes drawings in graphite and charcoal and sometimes ink that can be of imposing scale. Her drawings feature portraits of women and touch on questions of identity and emotions around identity, particularly for women of mixed ethnicities. Recently Wall made a series of prints with Matthew Letzelter through Watershed, PNCA’s professional print publishing program, and she’ll further explore prints at Crow’s Shadow in Pendleton, which awarded her a Golden Spot Residency. Wall is represented by venerable Portland gallery, Laura Russo Gallery.

For the CNAA’s, Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art at the Portland Art Museum, and invited curatorial advisor Jessica Hunter-Larsen, curator of IDEA Space, Interdisciplinary Experimental Arts, at Colorado College, culled through 200 nominations “from respected regional arts professionals of outstanding contemporary artists from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. Nominees were selected on the basis of quality, innovation, relevance to community or global issues, continuity of vision and dedication to studio practice.”

Rose Bond Installation Honors Chinese Community in Portland

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 15:17:00 GMT

CCBA, a new animated installation by Rose Bond, Lead Professor, Animated Arts, explores the relationship between the Chinese community and Portland with glimpses into the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) in the early to mid 20th century. This piece is part of the Beyond the Gate exhibition on view February 29 – June 21, 2016 at the Oregon Historical Society (1200 SW Park Ave) in Portland. Encompassing objects like Chinese opera costumes, theatrical sets, bilingual text, audiovisual media, and interactive visitor stations, Beyond the Gate aims to illuminate stories of contact and trade between China and the West, focusing on Portland’s Old (1850-1905) and New Chinatown (1905-1950).

Bond had previously done an animated installation in Old Town/Chinatown which led to this invitation. Bond notes that the CCBA was a vital center of community, recalling for example that students would attend language classes in the afternoons at the CCBA after public school let out for the day.

Here is a preview of CCBA:

CCBA_Bond from Rose Bond on Vimeo.

Bond has created major, site-specific installations for a number of locations, including Broadsided! at Exeter Castle in England (2010) and Gates of Light at the Museum at Eldridge Street in New York’s Lower East Side (2004). Her multi-channel installation, Intra Muros, premiered at Director’s Invitation in the 2007 PLATFORM Festival and has been mounted internationally in the Utrecht City Hall during the Holland Animation Film Festival in 2008, the 2011 Nuit Blanche in Toronto and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb 2013. Bond’s composite animation, Memoria Mortalis, was screened in competition at Sundance 2001 and toured nationally with the Ann Arbor Experimental Film Winners. Her hand-drawn (direct animation) films are held in the Film Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

She is currently working on a commission for the Oregon Symphony.

History Professor Pens One-Act

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Fri, 4 Mar 2016 23:16:00 GMT

History professor David Ritchie has written a one-act play, “A Little Horseplay in the Library,” to be performed in a readers’ theater format this Saturday at 1pm at Portland’s West Slope Community Library (3678 SW 78th Avenue).

According to a story in the Times, “The play itself is set in a library, with the premise of famed Civil War general and former president Ulysses S. Grant meeting his Confederate counterpart and battlefield rival Robert E. Lee long after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.”

Ritchie has been a patron of the West Slope Library for 26 years. He set the play in a library as a “thank-you” to West Slope. Ritchie who joined the faculty in Liberal Arts at PNCA in 1987, has published more than a hundred articles as a freelance writer and editor.

Illustration Students Accepted into Scholarship Competition

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Fri, 4 Mar 2016 18:05:00 GMT

Congratulations are due to four of our Illustration students whose work has been accepted into the 2016 Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Competition:

Elana Gurewitz, Kitkitdizzi, 2016. colored pencil, ink, Photoshop.
Vance McDermott, Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, 2016. graphite, digital.
Tess Rubinstein, Porch Crawler, 2016. cut paper, block printing ink, scratchboard, colored pencil, pigment pen.
Emily Schwartz, Selfie 1, 2016. digital.

Every year since 1981 the Society has held the Student Scholarship Competition. Over three hundred works are chosen from more than 8,700 entries submitted by professors of college-level students nationwide. A jury of professional peers, including illustrators and art directors, selects the most outstanding works created throughout the year. Pieces are accepted based on the quality of technique, concept and skill of medium used.

From the Society’s endowment, generous contributions from private and corporate donors, and proceeds from an annual auction of member-donated artworks, scholarship awards are granted to about 25 students whose work is deemed the best of the best.

Each spring the Student Scholarship Exhibit is held in the galleries of the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators, where awards and certificates are given to the students during an opening reception.

Weber ‘14 Accepted into Prestigious Film Festivals

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Thu, 3 Mar 2016 00:11:00 GMT

Both the prestigious 2016 Holland Animation Film Festival in Utrecht and the 2016 Ann Arbor Film Festival will screen Almost Nothing: House Fire, a work of experimental animation by Animated Arts alumnus Micah Weber ’14. Department lead faculty Rose Bond notes that the international Holland Animation Festival receives upwards of 2,000 entries each year and accept fewer than 50 works for screening. While making this work, Weber has been offering his expertise to current students as studio assistant for Video and Sound programs and Animated Arts. See more of Weber’s work on hiswebsite.

Demian DinéYazhi’ Awarded Art Matters Grant

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 19:25:00 GMT

Demian DinéYazhi’ (Intermedia, ’13) has been awarded an Art Matters grant, one of 25 grants of 5,000 and 10,000 USD “for ongoing work or projects that break ground aesthetically and socially.” His award is specifically to support ongoing work.

DinéYazhi’ is a visual artist, writer, poet, curator, and organizer who describes himself as a “transdisciplinary warrior born to the clans Tódích‘íí‘nii (Bitter Water) and Naasht‘ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) of the Diné (Navajo)” whose works and projects address issues around queerness, decolonization, and indigenous survivance.

Among other projects, DinéYazhi’ is currently accepting submissions for #QTPOCzine, a new zine that “challenges the current stasis in the queer community.”

Micah Weber Interview by Matt Dan - 2015

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 19:40:00 GMT

I am sitting here with Micah Weber, a 2014 Animated Arts graduate from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Tell us a little about yourself.

I am 30 years old, and I started my undergrad later in life. I came in with all these ideas of being a painter, drawer. I grew up down in Eugene, and I spent a long time working by myself. I went to community college, worked retail, and did the things people generally do after high school for perhaps too long. I had a parent who was really sick, and I took care of her. I was in my sophomore year at PNCA when she passed away.

Your work seems to pull from Robert Breer and structuralist filmmakers. What made you switch from painting to Animated Film?

Just watching it, making something move was so much… I didn’t feel like I was repeating myself at all, even though there was an obvious authors hand involved. When I was painting, I started to feel like I was looking at other peoples work and wanting to replicate what they were doing. For an art student I feel like that’s a problem. When I started working with moving images, it was all new. It didn’t seem like I was making anybody else’s work. I was making my work and it was like a trap, or a dare with myself that I had to be in this place of being new. I liked that this new work never became closed in the sense that there’s a compositional or conceptual resolve. I understand that this can be frustrating at times, but I don’t think many things in life are as resolved as art.

When I think of a nice painting I think of it as still and resolved, a moving image is this constant state of motion.

That’s the interest I’ve had with moving images. That’s why I like structuralist filmmakers, and people like Breer, Brakhage, or even George Brecht. There’s this sense of a lack of story arc, and if there is one it’s a material story arc. I guess there are always these two things to think about – am I paying homage to material, or do I want to tell a story? The thing that I’ve always liked about these artists is that they’re doing both. They are telling stories, but it’s completely akin to noise at times. They’re not following a prescribed narrative structure and that’s kind of where I’ve been for a while. A lot of that comes from trying to figure out how to talk about something I find difficult to talk about. With my thesis film [Almost Nothing: House Fire] I realized the only way I could talk about grief and mourning was to talk about how I couldn’t talk about it. It became in this way, a sort of place for potential.

Yeah I remember someone saying, “Motion is the enemy of form.” Using motion to deter language, like narrative is a complete structure. We just watched your newest film 00:03:54:29. There are images of things like animation registration, snapshots, vector-based lines. To me there seems to be these strings through themes of architecture, material, and form. There still seems to be a structure where it folds out rhythmically for rhythm’s sake.

Yes, these last two films I’ve made started out with doing animated drawings in Flash. The structure comes out in the shooting process. I remember in my early days at PNCA I was talking to Laura Heit and she was asking me to do storyboards, thumbnails and the like. I didn’t like doing that and she told me, “That’s because you’re not an animator.” It came down to not thinking in movement, but in another way. So one way to think of it was to have something moving already in place. I can do that in flash because I can make the line work quickly. Then I edit the playback. I watch it loop and say “Oh this one little line turns slightly counter clockwise in a way I don’t like” so I fix it. So it’s all in post-production and the hard part is making the material to edit in the first place. That model replicates itself down the line, and while I’m shooting. I’m also interested in spending time with still images. So I like just photographing still images and trying to figure out how to tell a story that way. La Jetee is probably the most obvious connection you could make.

Looking at your most recent film, the editing seems to make a statement on its digital condition. You’re taking something that is digital into the physical, printed realm and shoot it back into the digital with a camera to edit it on a computer. I’m curious about how you make those decisions.

I’ve been thinking more and more about how the way I’ve been editing… I don’t really write poetry, and I don’t really read a lot of poetry, but in some ways it’s like poetry. I always think, “OK, it’s these images, this word next to this word, and having a larger perspective – then we need to have a return to a previous word.” Maybe it’s how the two images look next to each other that’s interesting to me. There’s this image I have of house framing that I’ve been using a lot. It comes back from this photograph I’ve inherited from my parents, it depicts a wall that’s basically unfinished and you can see the framing and insulation in it prior to adding drywall. As a composition I thought it was interesting. There’s no context to it at all. It was just this upward shot of a bare wall, and ever since I just thought, “OK, that’s my philosophy. My program as an artist is that image right there” and I draw on that a lot. This sort of incomplete image, it’s like a stop. There’s no story here, it’s a dead end, but it’s not finished yet. So there are these constant contradictions, things get put next to each other that just don’t go together. There are all these hidden meanings in these images and the goal is at times to just flat-line whatever expectation the viewer may have in hopes something else is brought to the foreground. And the sound has a lot to do with that too. Which is where I think the poetry part resides.

I’m curious about the sound in your work, and what it is – It sounds mostly like an abstract composition.

I think the sound is like the way that the images are shot. There’s no filters, or added digital effects. These are just photographs. The titles aren’t a digital effect either, I print the titles out and I shoot the titles. The sound is very much the same way. I record things day to day with a field recorder, and in that sense it becomes like a documentary. I’ve been thinking of this work as “anti-narrative documentary.” What is a documentary if it has no story to it?

Yeah, I remember you listed yourself as specializing in documentary on the Society for Animation Studies website.

That’s what it’s always been about – is shifting the lens – I’m interested in animation as being a document. Not being representative of anything other than what’s there, and that’s where structuralist filmmaking is evident in my practice – or Stan Brakhage in his cameraless films, or Tony Conrad and his Yellow movie. I also think there’s something of a visual poem in the document at the same time.

How do you see the distribution of your work happening? I remember seeing your work on display in Blackfish Gallery once and it’s kind of like… the question of where your work goes parallels with the idea of keeping your work unresolved, because it’s not fitting into commercial animation, or a commercial gallery.

I have everything on Vimeo, just as a means of securing it, and I’ve been applying to numerous festivals. I’ve had luck with festivals, but I have also found that towing the line between fine art and filmmaking doesn’t always fit in very well with the work that is typically shown at big name festivals. And as for galleries, the work I am making doesn’t always fit within that context either – at least conceptually – I’ve never liked the way short films look when looping in a gallery setting – whether on a monitor or projector. It seems like the only way that kind of thing works is when it’s understood as a full on installation – and that’s a different type of experience too.
So instead of hiding everything on Vimeo where nobody can see it, I’ve been channeling everything to my website so it can only be accessible from there and I’m still controlling its means of being viewed. Although I still think that’s also a futile task.

Do you find that existing on the webspace has been any more effective?

No not at all. The internet is cool, I don’t think it’s on its way out, but I think this thing about having ten-thousand followers on Instagram is like being just on the other side of the train tracks. The glass ceiling is within sight, and we’re supposed to be honored because we can see it. I don’t really buy it and the thing with Internet validation is tricky. I think that power still functions in a very tower kind of way. It’s easy to get caught up in how many ‘likes’ you get on a video.

Yeah, and Vimeo will have their priorities and tastes in festivals and the like.

I am interested in community in a very big way. I always think about what Marina Zurkow said, that the auteur is not the paradigm of the future. I think that’s funny because a lot of the artists I really like are kind of auteurs – and animation is really conducive to that kind of work. I’m thinking about other ways of working, other models. Because I do have people in my life that are making very personal films, like Zoe Bullock for instance, and I want to design a model for distributing my peer’s work regardless of how disparate the content. I kind of have a production studio in mind where filmmakers can focus on building their own coherent body of work through research-integrated practice and then have the ability to publish collectively as a group or larger entity with like-minded peers. I’m really interested in wrestling that back.

…
Micah Weber (b. 1985) is a moving image artist and 2014 PNCA alumni currently residing in Portland, Oregon. His work has been seen at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival in Houston Texas, Automata in Los Angeles, Experimenta in Bangalore India, The Forks in Winnipeg Manitoba, and throughout Portland Oregon. Weber’s current projects involve a continued work exploring connections between memory and the relationship language has in respect to politics surrounding death. His new film, dracaena marginata, is due out in March 2016. (mh-wbr.com).

Lou Watson’s Suite Sandy Boulevard

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Thu, 3 Sep 2015 15:57:00 GMT

In a return to the site that is the subject of the work, Lou Watson’s multimedia piece Suite Sandy Boulevard was performed at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre on Sandy Boulevard on June 7, 2015 after having been developed and performed as her Intermedia BFA thesis project at PNCA. In her own words, Watson describes the suite as “an experimental concert which takes NE Sandy Boulevard (specifically between 57th and 82nd Avenues) as its theme.” Comprised of eight movements, Suite Sandy Boulevard incorporates video, music, and live performance. The detailed program notes for Suite Sandy Boulevard served as the written component of Watson’s thesis.

Modeled upon the structure of a musical suite, Suite Sandy Boulevard brings to life Watson’s idiosyncratic relationship to dwelling adjacent to Sandy. Fascinated by the effects of side-looking, or viewing objects and concepts along oblique sightlines, Watson drew inspiration from the everyday as well as a presiding interest in local history. In 2014, as part of a fellowship with the Oregon Heritage Society, she created the project Roadside Attraction: Situational Aesthetics and Place-Identity of NE Sandy Boulevard (57th to 82nd). Sandy has also featured in several videos made by Watson, including “Commute” (2014), which reimagines Sandy’s road markings as a musical staff and its traffic patterns as notes in order to play the sounds of the boulevard.

Watson was inspired to develop the suite during an extended period spent in close proximity to Sandy whilst staying at home to take care of her son who had broken his leg in a bike accident on the same road. During this time, Watson became more attuned to her neighborhood, noting her irked reaction to early morning disturbances (hence the title of one movement in the suite, “7am Blows,” referencing a neighbor’s predilection for leaf blowing in the wee hours), and many other particulars of the mixed-use NE Portland road. She would later translate her observations and multidisciplinary research into humorous vignettes, such as operatic recitations of billboard slogans and spot-the-difference games using photographs of Sandy storefronts, for the different suite movements.

For the performances of Suite Sandy Boulevard, both at her thesis presentation and subsequently at the Hollywood Theatre, Watson conducted a thirteen-member ensemble. Although most of Watsons’s choreography is highly specific, components of some pieces were intentionally left open for improvisation. This element of spontaneity and the fact that the score itself is designed to reflect the present state of Sandy—for example, the lyrics of “The Billboard Duet” reflect the content of specific billboards at the time that the piece is performed—reflect Watson’s attention to the ever-changing status of place. Watson draws heavily on humor, which elevates Suite Sandy Boulevard far beyond twee observation or irony Watson’s project of finding creative and intellectual stimulus in daily life. “I use humor in all of my work,” she says. “I can’t help it. It’s just the way that I communicate . . . There’s something really magical about wordplay. People groan about puns, they’re missing something wonderful.”

Watson objects to didactic interpretations of Suite Sandy Boulevard. Rather than commenting upon specific local politics or gentrification, the suite, Watson explains, the piece “is about the present.” Her goal of capturing a slice of Sandy’s identity is connected, she explains, to a broader interest in reinvigorating individuals’ sense of wonder in the everyday. Watson clarifies, “I’m interested in the universal place of feeling bored or unenchanted, whether you’re a homeless person or a mayor, and my work is about trying to pull yourself out of that grey place.” Suite Sandy Boulevard reflects this attitude and offers the audience a myriad of playful entry points for considering the intersections of individual perspective, urban layout, and local history. Diagonal streets, Watson notes, are rare. Through her research, she’s learned that streets that run slantwise through gridded city layouts are typically older roads that have been incorporated, often somewhat awkwardly, into later city planning. Suite Sandy Boulevard uses wit and side-looking to identify wonder in the quotidian and Sandy itself thus becomes a vehicle for Watson and her audience to muse upon the specifics of a given location, playfully engaging Sandy in the present and thereby learning about its past. As for the future, Watson is interested in revising the score so that the suite can reflect the goings-on of other diagonal streets.

Centrum 2015 Emerging Artists

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 14:30:00 GMT

Congratulations to all of Centrum’s 2015 Emerging Artists, especially PNCA alumni Thomas Gamble, Katy Knowlton, and Rebecca Peel. They will be heading to Centrum’s month-long residency that takes place this coming October 19 through November 16, 2015.

Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency invites a cohort of six visual artists who have graduated from a graduate or undergraduate program within the last five years, to be in residence at Centrum for one month. Each artist is provided with housing, studio space and a stipend, while they spend the month creating new work or refining existing work. Centrum’s process of selection for the 2015 Emerging Artist Residency began in January when program manager Martha Worthley contacted educators from the Northwest region to nominate artists of merit from their college and university programs. Worthley works with independent jurors who review the applications and make the final selection. This year’s jurors were Scott Lawrimore, curator at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Visual artist C. Davida Ingram and Nina Bozicnik, curator at the Henry Art Gallery.

Centrum is now in the second year of its initiative to support artists at the beginning of their career trajectory. Last year, Residents included alumni Morgan Ritter and Leif J. Lee.

Located in Port Townsend, Washington, Fort Worden—a turn-of-the-century army base–Centrum is a gathering place for artists and creative thinkings in the midst of saltwater beaches, wooded hills, and open fields framed by stunning views of the Olympic and Cascade ranges and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Filming State of Oregon Craft

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Mon, 6 Jul 2015 18:42:00 GMT

Process is an important aspect of craft. The story of a crafted object’s making, and its makers, is often necessary to grasp its significance. To address this need, Museum of Contemporary Craft educates its visitors about the community of people that surrounds an object. Its latest exhibition, State of Oregon Craft, presents a particularly strong case for this approach to curation.

Oregon is a state filled with makers. From Pendleton to Otis to Eugene, diverse communities are united and interconnected by craft. Aware of the importance of the people behind the pottery, saddle, or neon glass skeleton — examples of which are on display at the Museum —, curators Nicole Nathan and Namita Gupta Wiggers traveled around the state to visit the places where Oregon craft is being made. Portland-based production company Blacktop Films accompanied the curators on every stop of their pilgrimage. They were enlisted to create films that tell the stories and profile the artists and artisans behind the objects on view in State of Oregon Craft. The result is an exhibition that unifies maker with object.

Each member of the Blacktop Films crew sports an artistic background, and two of the group are graduates of Pacific Northwest College of Art. Perfectly equipped to work alongside curators, Blacktop Films was involved from the earliest stages of the exhibition’s design. Says producer Cintamani Calise, “Considering the museum-goers experience was a big part of our film design. Most people will come in and browse through the various parts of the exhibit, passing each piece swiftly and usually moving through a crowd. This means that the museum environment is best for a short film (less than 5 minutes) and less dialogue with more emphasis on visuals.”

State of Oregon Craft is a rich, cinematic exploration of context and location. Objects and films combine to create a holistic experience that deepens our appreciation of Oregon as a hub for makers from all backgrounds.

Visit State of Oregon Craft through August 15, 2015. View the films that accompany the exhibition on Vimeo. More information about Blacktop Films can be found here.

Review: Sascha Braunig at Foxy Productions

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 15:31:00 GMT

“Let me introduce myself. I am a vibrating color illusion with multiple indentations for the rolling pleasure of your eyeballs. Shh! (There’s a daisy on my mouth and) I’ve got unrolled, snake and no-hair locks. I’m a looker, I’m a sucker and I touch electric.”
-FigureHeadSubject Press Release, Alexis Knowlton

Sascha Braunig’s oscillating oil paintings that were exhibited in April at Foxy Productions, seem to present the viewer with portals into an optical universe of her own making. In an unsettling marriage of Surrealism and Op Art (coined superficial realism), Braunig’s canvases reveal uncanny portraits that walk the line between artificiality and naturalism. This opening marks Braunig’s third solo show at Foxy Productions. Notably, several of her paintings are also included in the current New Museum triennial. The artist received her training at Cooper Union and Yale, and currently lives and works in Portland, ME.

In FigureHeadSubject, nine paintings hang throughout the gallery, all portrait-size or smaller, eight rectangular and one round. Working with a mostly muted complementary color palette, Brauning brilliantly manipulates pattern and value to create illusionistic renderings of forms and surfaces. Trippy rippling patterns of polka dots, chevrons, wavering lines and spheres flow together, wrapping and twisting into the semblance of human forms. In “Saccades,” a field of pearly spheres coalesces into a figure, composed in subtle blue-greys and warm oranges. The central character is at once humanoid and empty of humanity, an apprehensive balance of flatness and form.

Braunig’s humanoid figures often distend and echo across the picture plane, radiating fluidly in and out of their backgrounds, as in her painting “Feeder.” In “Hilt,” an androgynous character clings to and softens over a railing, covered in a pattern of shimmering gold spots. Figure, foreground and background slump and fold together as the subject swells into and is contained by the frame of the painting. Several subjects seem to consist of rolled up Play-Doh snakes. These intestine-like tubes fold around and over themselves, rendered real by an ingeniously subtle side-by-side application of hot and cool colors.

In a space to the side of the main gallery, a clay mask hangs alone in the center of the room, suspended at face-height from the ceiling by a clear string. This sculpture, the only three-dimensional work in the show, presents the viewer with an invitation to momentarily embody one of Brauning’s figures via the mask. The sculpture is composed of several rows of squiggly forms aesthetically parallel to those seen in the paintings.

Braunig’s figures seem to exist in an eternal now—lifeless, deathless, genderless, suspended in an unknowable and perhaps parallel universe. The surface of each painting is treated with the same lavish attention to detail, the artist’s dedication to her medium of choice evident in the careful hyper-realistic handling of the paint. The result is at once hypnotic and ornate, analog on the edge of digital, a vibrant wedding of psychedelic and psychological power that emanates from the painted figures in an intoxicating glow. FigureHeadSubject imparts upon its lucky viewers a glitched-out mind-bending dreamscape buzz.

image:
Sascha Braunig, Hilt, 2015.

preview image:
Sascha Braunig, Saccades (detail), 2014.

Oscar Murillo: Casting Off The White Gloves

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Thu, 28 May 2015 18:13:00 GMT

The walls and floor of the Museum of Modern Art’s show Forever Now: Painting in an Atemporal Age are vitalized by Oscar Murillo, 29-year-old Colombian-born artist based in London. On view December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015.

The selection of Murillo’s work at MoMA includes eight unstretched canvases in a heap on the floor. At first glance, the haphazard pile appears to be a specific and intentional arrangement—a sculpture built from paintings. However, the wall didactic discloses that these floor pieces are touchable, moveable, and interactive. In an environment where standing close to a work results in buzzers or reprimand, the impulse to ask a docent for permission might remain, and the opportunity to touch brings both hesitation and delight. Visitors pull and unfold each piece, run their fingers along the crudely applied paint, feel the canvas bend and flex, study both sides of the work, and even wear the canvases, wrapping up in a Murillo and snapping a selfie. After finishing their investigation, visitors re-pile the pieces in a new configuration—a new composition on the floor. Murillo activates visitors, literally pulling them into the work as both performers and exhibit designers, and the pile of paintings transforms into a participatory installation.

The didactic states: “by allowing his work to be touched by all, Murillo challenges—not without humor—the fact that contemporary paintings by some artists have become so valuable and so sought after that they cannot be touched or even closely examined by the average viewer.” This transgressive act has a tongue-in-cheek quality as the Murillo paintings hanging on the walls surrounding the pile of unstretched canvases remain relegated to the tradition of untouchability. Are we to assume that these works are any different than those on the floor? The text also nods to the recent explosion in market value of his work. Paintings that were purchased for four figures are being flipped at auction for six. By achieving this level of success in the art market, Murillo is able to permeate the upper class. Buyers believe they’re taking home a status symbol, but the work insinuates otherwise. He incorporates dust and dirt, walks on his work while making, folds and cuts his canvases, and paints with blunt implements, such as a broomstick. These acts question notions of preciousness, and in turn are critical of the very mechanisms and people through which they are being purchased.

Murillo’s work, similar to his life, has revolved around ideas not only of class, but of displacement, movement, and culture. In his paintings, words such as “yoga” and “milk” seem to take on more of a sense of cultural nostalgia or style than serving as explicit signifiers. They are removed from any context, displaced into singularity not unlike a sort of cultural logo. A sense of displacement is also evident in his construction of the final compositions. Canvases are cut into sections, laid on the floor, moved around and reconfigured, and then sewn together. The stitches and seams are left visible, as evidence of the process of restructuring. The dirt and dust also relate to the idea of displacement and global movement, and because dirt is ubiquitous, he describes it as a democratizing agent in the work. Touching Murillo’s paintings, there’s a mixed bag of sensation—they feel gritty, dirty, unctuous, thick, rough, sensual, and known. They don’t feel opulent, they feel familiar.

Murillo has been written off by some as a derivative Basquiat copycat whose fame was cultivated by collectors rather than critics and curators. After spending time with his work, and reading interviews with the painter, this appears to be a shallow discernment at best. Looking beyond his skin color and hair style, one finds a painter questioning classist access to art, carving out a place for performativity and visitor interaction within the walls of the institution, and redefining preciousness. It is extremely rare for work at MoMA to permit engagement on more than a passive level. Here instead is an exhibit that is tactile, kinetic, and thoroughly active. For those heavily indoctrinated with museum etiquette, simply put: the exhibit is a hell of a lot of fun.

images:
installation view, Oscar Murillo, Forever Now: Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, 2015. Eight works installed on the floor; oil, oil stick, dirt, graphite, and thread on linen and canvas, 2012-2014. photo: Rebecca Mackay Rosen Carlisle

Post-Bacc Resident Awarded Full Ride to Stanford

lradon@pnca.edu (Lisa Radon) — Thu, 7 May 2015 18:12:00 GMT

Joining the ranks of Stanford University’s exceptional MFA in Art Practice candidates is Post-Baccalaureate Resident Becca Kahn Bloch. Initially trained as a printmaker with bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies from Oberlin College, Bloch sought to develop her portfolio and skill set before applying to graduate programs. During her time at PNCA, Bloch has broadened her practice beyond printmaking to include painting and sculptural work, and was accepted to six distinguished MFA programs before accepting a place at Stanford University with full tuition remission and a teaching assistantship.

The Master of Fine Arts in Art Practice at Stanford University is among the most prestigious in the nation. Acceptance is limited to just five students per admission cycle. They will dedicate two years to intense study with world-renowned professors at the vast Palo Alto campus. This is the department that produced artists Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell.

Bloch cites the perfect balance of flexibility and rigor of the Post-Baccalaureate Residency program, as well as the invaluable mentorship of Chair Nan Curtis, as elemental to her success. The Post-Baccalaureate Residency program at PNCA expands the creative potential of its students through mentor-guided independent studio work and coursework to increase breadth of skills and knowledge. Graduates of the program are fully equipped to pursue the most prestigious professional and educational opportunities available. In Bloch’s words, “Before I came to PNCA and participated in the post-bacc program, I was unsure of my trajectory as an artist. Now I am confident in my direction and am excited to continue pursuing a career in art.”

You can view Bloch’s work on her website (beccakahnbloch.com). For more information about the Post-Baccalaureate Residency program, visit pnca.edu.