Loved and hated in equal measure, as resident source of hot gas Jerry Saltz has called them, “…a harmonic convergence, a cattle call or a clusterfuck,” biennials have become a thermometer for place and time in contemporary art. Whether it’s Venice, New York, or in this instance Portland, a biennial poses a question: what should I, as a viewer, pay attention to right here right now?
Curated by Jackie Im and Anuradha Vikram, Oregon Contemporary’s latest Artists’ Biennial answers the question with the question: “What does it mean to care?” The notion of care—and in fact the etymological roots of the word “curator” come from the Latin cura—is an apt concept for this iteration of the exhibition, the first after the pandemic. The artists in the exhibition grapple with the many reverberations of trauma since the pandemic—to the self, others, community, and the world. Thus, care becomes instead a loose framework through which a desire for healing is visualized. The title itself, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song, is a quote taken from Maggie Nelson’s indomitable The Argonauts, where the author explores the challenges of motherhood and childcare in the context of queer family-making. Like Nelson’s masterpiece, many of the works in the exhibition explode the typical connotative meanings of care, using it to highlight the proponents of fragmentation, suffering, and disruption inherent to our current historic moment—a time of widespread geopolitical conflict concurrent with an increasingly radicalized conservative movement that is actively working to cause harm, especially to communities it deems outside of a white heteronormative Anglo-Christian hallmark. Artists in the exhibition combat this threat; and while many of the works in the exhibition have little to do with the notion of care, collectively they speak to the ways in which art can offer meaning and resistance.
The most poignant interpretations of the curatorial theme came from artists who understood representation as a form of care, often speaking to legacies of violence both historic and current within their communities. Visitors to the gallery first pass by a photographic image of a stone tunnel. The camera of a nearby iPad or smartphone transforms the image into a world of associative bubbles that become video thanks to the magic of augmented reality. A gateway both figurative and digital, Horatio Hung-Yan Law’s Portal (2023) gives viewers access through their devices to the Portland Chinatown Museum, where curators speak about the history of Chinese Americans, correcting past narratives seeped in racist rhetoric. The stone tunnel becomes a powerful reclamation of the racist term, a “shanghai tunnel,” an antiquated and derogatory term associating criminality with Chinese Americans.
Painter Srijon Chowdhury expanded into three dimensions with a metal entryway, entitled Sigil Gate (2023), which welcomed visitors into the gallery and functioned as both a protective spell for those displaced in Palestine and also an exhibition within the exhibition. Chowdhury’s longtime collaborator André Guré used the armature to display works from Palestinian artists, whose works cry for a future grounded in autonomy and liberation.
Epiphany Couch’s quieter Burdened With More Beautiful Things (2024) uses stunning multimedia photo-printing to speak to the impact of settler colonialism on self and community. Juxtaposed images of home, natural materials, and indigenous processes, like beadwork, recall the devastating history of displacement of Native people in the United States through forced relocation and racist laws that define and separate people from their community, like the tribal blood quantum requirements. Simultaneously questioning and representing this history, Couch’s work replies simply, “indian enough,” borrowing from the writings of Ponca poet Cliff Taylor.1
All three artists, Couch, Law, and Chowdhury, understand the biennial as an opportunity to give space to their communities and reclaim or correct narratives surrounding those distinctive perspectives. Each artist enacts care in their work—portals that reveal both literally and figuratively—those stories in the gallery space.
Several works in the exhibition obscured the notion of care to the point of irrelevance but still had something poignant to say. For example, a standout video piece from Sarah Rushford entitled Elk woke here once (aware of the world already) (2024) probed the idiosyncrasies of language and slippages in meaning, as two hired actors performed each other’s poetry. A dazzling installation of layered digital prints and elegant blown glass atomizers, Carla Bengtson’s immersive installation, Other Nations (2024), drew from her extensive research of olfactory camouflage, speaking to the dichotomy of human beings’ connection to and distance from the complex world of animals. In contrast, speaking to the built environment, Marcus Fisher’s This Map is Not the Territory (2024) plays next to Bengtson’s piece in the gallery, immersing the visitor in a sound bath of birdsong, construction clanging, and everyday life, a sonic drink of Portland’s neighborhoods. It’s difficult to see how care maps on each of these thoughtful works; however, they each underscore a longing for connection, whether it be interpersonal or with nature, place, and self.
Im and Vikram favored artists whose practices are research-based and required additional engagement beyond viewership to fully grapple with these layered works. The artistic layman would likely find the exhibition challenging to experience, as information was not readily available in the form of a wall label and required the constant reference of the text-heavy gallery guide. Happenings added to the feeling that this iteration of the Artists’ Biennial was created to serve the artist, not the surrounding community, where the biennial acted as a gathering or site through which connections between creatives could be forged and cultivated. Oregon’s community of artists does require our care. Like the mythic ship, the Argo, whose components can be fortified, replaced, and renewed, this year’s biennial became a way of giving space to these important voices, or to borrow from Nelson, the biennial is our Argo: “Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as ‘the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.’”
- Taylor uses lowercase in his work, thus the lack of capitalization here. ↩︎
2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial
Oregon Contemporary
April 26, 2024 to August 4, 2024
This review was made possible by generous support from Critical Conversations, The University of Oregon Center for Art Research (CFAR), and The Ford Family Foundation.