Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Finding the Light
High Desert Museum, Bend, OR
Temporary outdoor installation
It is the scattering of atmospheric particles that creates colors within the sky. The breaking of light, despite the polluted air, is moving to our eyes as color. My favorite sky is when it is painted in shades of indigo, the upper atmosphere swallowing traces of violet, leaving the remains of blue which are more sensitive to our eyes. At dusk and dawn, the sun hugs the horizon line, its sunlight scattering more, traveling a longer distance, finding its way to us while the blues of the sky surrender to a chromatic spectrum of reds, pinks, and oranges.
Kevin Necessary’s Finding the Light also uses sunlight to scatter color. Rising 20 feet high, the architectural structure is composed of three bodies that, through distance and movement, meld together into the illusion of a monolith. With weathered steel bones holding fragmented stained glass, its geometrical forms are refracted on the land in which it occupies. This light translation is through the unique work of shadows. As the sun moves, the light stretches, becoming darkness while staying saturated in color.
Standing before it, I felt as though I had wandered into an open-air cathedral where there is no God (mostly because I don’t believe), but instead, a divine presence of sky, light, and land and their eternal conversation. As an anchor in motion’s wake, the structure remains still as light shatters around and inside it, pressing color into soil, each dispersion a syllable only the sky can leave behind.
Reflection: How would you describe the feeling of light?
Claudia Hollister: Mesmerizing Blues
Waterstone Gallery, Portland, OR
October 1–November 2, 2025
Unlike in Finding the Light, where light is in motion, in Claudia Hollister’s Mesmerizing Blues, light is still. The flourishing blues and softened greys emerge through a cyanotype process, a chemical reaction between light and a UV-sensitive solution. This process hovers at the threshold between photography and printmaking, both mediums of multiplicity, turning blue into blues. This distinction matters because blue is a color, but blues is a condition, a feeling of deeply sown sadness.
The gallery is filled with this plurality of blue. Each cyanotype alchemizing a historical matter, conjured through a historical method. The prints are layered, collaged, a gathering of stilled light and shadows where the shadows are light and the lights are shadows. Here, the luminosity waits and seeps. Hollister draws these images from her garden, where she has documented the flora bloom and fade each season since the 2020 lockdown. The cyanotype captures this birth and death seamlessly. It’s a feeling of grief that washes over me, the garden’s sublimity flourishing towards its natural undoing.
There are fauna: nymphs, mermaids, muses, butterflies, all spectral figures suspended in Prussian blue. Though sunlight births the cyanotype, all I see is moonlight. The subjects float in mythical darkness, their stillness feeling hushed and nocturnal. They seem bound, tethered to a density of paused time, caught in a gravitational pull with nowhere to go but where they already are.
Reflection: How do you practice stillness?