It was difficult to detect any conceptual throughline beyond that implicit in the title of the show upon first entering Blackfish’s 2025 Recent Grads show in Portland, OR. But, after further consideration, I became aware of a unity that is remarkable given the diversity of the artists and the thirteen programs they have just graduated from. I myself just finished a BA in Art History and expected the quasi-historical art theory problems I find myself preoccupied with to be far more evident in this show by recent grads. However, these artists seemed to be concerned with a wholly different and pervasive theme that at first escaped me.
I was given the impression of connections between the natural coupled with an anatomical detachment from the rest of the body, which are present throughout the show. Many works feature disembodied anatomy. This anatomy seems representative, not of the people it is attached to, but of a place that it embodies for those people. Place is used here as a substitute for the sense of the constraints and refuges implicit in a person’s relationship with a location. The works I’ve chosen to highlight here are exemplary of these paired motifs and themes. Anatomical disconnection conveys the feeling of the body as place rather than identity. In interacting with the body as a place, we experience the multivalent modes of physical setting. The body can be a sanctuary, as in a womb, a nest, or a home. Or it can be a place to which we are subjected, as in a body diseased or forced into something that feels unnatural.
This theme is best demonstrated by the works of two artists. Eva Israelson’s Nest (2025) and Morgan White’s paintings Factory Made and Baby (both 2024). Nest is an immediately arresting work due to its size and the stark contrasts between the materials employed in making it. It is a white circular papier-maché tube in four sections, two feet tall and eight feet wide at its widest point. The space in the center of Nest is big enough for an adult to lie inside in the fetal position. This open space is filled with dirt, moss, plant matter, and small bones. From the aerial view of the accompanying series of photographs, each section of the papier-mache structure resembles a vertebra.
It took Isrealson nine months to complete Nest; a length of time immediately striking for its connection with human gestation. This connection, the natural urge to get inside Nest and occupy the role of fetus, the organic nature of the superstructure, and the natural material inside make it irresistible to think of Nest as anything other than a surrogate womb. A womb disconnected from a body. A womb suffused with the material of the outside organic world.
White’s paintings feel immediately connected to Nest through the themes of birth, gestation, and connection to the natural. Baby is dominated by dark greens and browns, and the medium is laid on with the impasto typical of encaustic (a type of pigmented wax that is applied to a surface while hot and then cools quickly, resulting in a raised and highly textured finish). A faintly sketched nursing baby dominates the panel. The baby nurses on an equally faintly sketched breast which, through the lack of the anatomy it should be connected to, feels disembodied.
White’s other painting in the show, Factory Made, shares the motif of disembodied anatomy along with the use of encaustic. The main figure, rendered in various unnatural blues, is the nude bottom half of a woman’s body, which fades muddily into nothingness at mid-torso in the top right of the picture frame. The thighs are held down in place by a pair of arms and hands rendered in oranges and yellows similar to the background color of the uncertain landscape. These arms come down, unconnected to any body but seemingly part of the landscape, to hold this birthing body down. Emanating from the blue vulva is a procession of three figures with the proportions of adults, though far smaller in comparison to the body they issue from than any human infant.
The artist explained that her use of encaustic and raw wood in her statement for Blackfish’s show was part of an effort to use their medium to both mimic and actually contain the properties of natural tissue. Encaustic’s semi-opacity and malleability are comparable to flesh. Raw wood is simply a product of the natural world and retains some of the qualities of the tree it was taken from. This leaves space for the wood to shape the encaustic, making the painting as a whole a sort of index of the panel. Here, medium and content collaborate to instill associations of the bodily and the organic in the viewer. These themes do not seem connected to identity, but rather view the body as a sort of extension of one’s environment. The un-gessoed wood shapes the encaustic, which in turn shapes the bodies.
The themes of the womb and gestation present in both of these works tend initially towards a simple interpretation. But the bodily disconnection in each and the way they tend to blend the natural with disconnected parts of human anatomy lends a nuance to these works that makes them exemplary of thematic throughlines of the entire show.
Recent Grads
Blackfish Gallery, Portland, OR
July 2, 2025 to August 2, 2025