Tag: Photography

Colorful collage made of cut paper, using curved lines and circular, two-dimensional, geometric shapes to invigorate a stripped, layered, cacophonous sense of motion and sound. Bright yellows, cool blacks, and subtle accents of red and blue enwrap this piece in boldness and warmth.

Along These Lines

The Alberta Abbey is pleased to present Along These Lines, a group exhibit, featuring a diverse collection of multidisciplinary creatives whose work investigates the common theme of line. Curated by the Pacific Northwest College of Arts (PNCA) Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies (HFSGS) Curatorial Fellow, Ilsa Payne, and Creative Writing Fellow, Justin Duyao, this exhibit will run from April 8 to May 27, 2021.

Artists participating in the show include Alexa Grambush, Ashley Couch, Clara Collins, Diana Oropeza, Elizabeth Arzani, Erin Bodfish, Jen Bacon, Kara Cassidy Hall, Krista Gregory, Lara Higgins, ocean, Perry Chandler, Sandra Rubin, Sarah Abbott, Sarah Rakin, Sarah Rushford, Sky Wilson, Tanner Lind and Tyler Goodwin.

The lines that traditionally delineate the creative genres of the art world are challenged as both visual artists and creative writers come together to explore the notion of the “line” as both expression and concept, within individual and collaborative works of art. 

Among the works featured in the show, some trouble the lines that divide ecological realms, while others capture the essence of fragmented lines of communication, historical and personal timelines that converge, and guidelines that unlock enlightened states of being. Through a broad range of media including poetry, painting, drawing, photography, sculptural and video installation, each artist and writer brings forward their unique interpretations of the concept of line — how they can divide, connect, separate and harmonize.

About the Venue

The 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that operates the Abbey was created in 2015 to sustainably address the need for affordable arts space in the city of Portland. We utilize the building’s 23,000 sqft by offering below-market workspace to artists and arts organizations, affordable event rental spaces, and signature programming that is responsive to the desires of our neighbors and the city’s arts community.

MISSION:

To nurture the arts in NE Portland by providing affordable education, gallery, studio, and performance space to community members of all ages.

VISION:

We envision a local arts ecosystem where community members of all demographics can thrive.

Stark, geometric painting using rich, earthy colors and lines that divide interrupt, follow and work alongside each other. With no concentric focal point, the eye wanders from one puzzle piece to the next, each color its own world, shape and feeling entirely.

New Color in the Times of Slow Coffee

Michelle Maguire is a visual artist, a gatherer of things, and an observer of how the shapes and textures of certain objects, bars of soap and chocolate, brushes and sandpapers, a mop, a dodgeball, complement one another within a space. Kelsey McClellan is a photographer whose images are made of bright, intentional light, stirring prisms capable of instantly clearing cob-webbed minds. When painter Kristin Texeira puts oil paint to canvas, all at once she warmly summons the abstract and oft-elusive shapes of nostalgia, music, feeling.

Color is the magnetic force that bonds this trio, asserting their collective vision. New Color in the Times of Slow Coffee is the result of the asynchronous exploration they shared in a year otherwise defined by insularity and isolation. As ordinary patterns and familiar ways of living continued to upend amid the onset of coronavirus, Kelsey, Kristin, and Michelle found themselves working together in a sort-of artists’ residence. Despite the suspension of traditional “work,” they chose to work together, a continuous exercise in inspiration. They found common studio space between lines of snail mail, text messages, video chats, and volleys of emails.

Kelsey, living and working in San Francisco, California, and Michelle in Columbus, Ohio, first offered a series of ten photographs inspired by the shapes and palettes of Kristin’s paintings. Under stay-at-home orders and reliant on using items already in their respective possessions, Michelle and Kelsey worked together to assemble props and materials to create sets that replicated Kristin’s paintings. From a cabin in upstate New York, Kristin answered each of the curated compositions with paintings that closely (but not exactly) resembled Kelsey and Michelle’s images.

Months blurred by, and Kristin developed five new works, flipping the challenge back to Kelsey and Michelle to manipulate and interpret. Using domestic and utilitarian objects, five similar-but-different, dimensional renditions emerged.

The way it all unfolded was slow, careful, precise. Loose but structured. A daydream with a deadline. This tempered pace, and separation of time and space, carried these three and their work through the year. Each artist’s respective medium blended to expose a colorfully cyclical conversation.

This work suggests a revelation: newness and slowness can truly exist in symbiosis. Unexpected combinations can be born and thrive when we pause to bask in creativity and connection. And that can be the prize.— Amanda Reed

New Color in the Times of Slow Coffee will be on view at Stephanie Chefas Projects from April 3 – May 1, 2021. Stephanie Chefas Projects is located in Portland, Oregon at 305 SE 3rd Avenue on the second floor of the Urban Row building.

A square, black and white photograph of a boy's face with another square of red centered over it, all atop an aluminum screen painted red, against a red background.

Paul Lee: Tambourine Heart

In collaboration with Karma, New York, and co-organized with Ellen Langan, Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with artist Paul Lee on view at the gallery from April 24 through May 26, 2021. The exhibition, Tambourine Heart, features a new series of collages made from Lee’s distinct index of materials–remnants of hand-dyed towels, canvas splattered with paint or mimicking the circumference of a tambourine, cutouts of photos, and window screens.
Since the late 1990s, Lee’s artistic output has often blurred the distinctions between sculpture, drawing, collage, and painting. Characterized by a palpable presence of the hand, the artist’s ongoing formal experimentation and investigation of materiality returns to the same functional objects rendered into reliquary. Imbuing material experience of the familiar with an undeniable numinousness and wonder, Lee’s formal language bends toward subversive, emotional and poetic ends.
Image of a seated figure wearing a white, sleeveless top grips the edge of their chair, which is balanced on the ridge of a roof. The rest of the frame is dominated by a blue sky with wisps of white cloud cover. Powerlines interrupt an otherwise very minimal scene.

Chantal Peñalosa: There’s Something About the Weather of this Place

BEST PRACTICE is pleased to announce a new show of works by Tecate-based artist Chantal Peñalosa. The exhibition will bring together current and past works in photography, painting, and video that broadly address the sociopolitical tensions that pervade the U.S./Mexico border through investigations of the mutual clime, shared firmament, and bifurcated landscape of this charged region.

The camera is aimed at the sky to create photo diptychs that record the subtle shifts in cloud formations that happen in the time it takes to cross the U.S/Mexico border.

A video records a performance work made on Avenida México, a street in Tecate, Baja California, that runs along the border between Mexico and the United States in which the artist assumed eye-level height with a USA border patrol truck parked on a small hill to survey the border by sitting atop the roof of a house. She first sits with her back to the truck and describes the scenery to it; she then turns to face the truck creating a one-sided dialogue with her action.

Another video work reconciles a childhood memory of a colloquialism that explains, through myth, the phenomenon of condensation trails formed by the engines of aircraft “crossing the border” several miles overhead.

Blank canvases coated with white paint were laid on their backs and exposed to the falling ash and soot created by the wildfires that plagued the California/Baja California border region in 2019.

A custom fragrance is crafted through collaboration with a chemist that faithfully reproduces the smells one encounters at and around the Tijuana/San Diego border. This fragrance will fill the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

* * *

Through gestures and actions that intervene in everyday life, Chantal Peñalosa establishes dialogues with entities that apparently cannot respond: memories, rumors, architecture, stones, clouds, aromas, or gestures. Performative actions archived in photographs, sculptures, installations, publications, or videos dialogue with phenomena such as waiting, the unnoticed, and the passage of time, shining light on political and social issues. She has recently been working on art history and literature passages that seem to be forever on standby, having been omitted, forgotten, or rejected.

Her work has been shown in institutions like M HKA Museum, Belgium (2019); ESPAC, Mexico (2019); XII Bienal FEMSA, Mexico (2018); Museo Amparo, Mexico (2018); CCI Fabrika, Russia (2017), La Tallera, Mexico (2015); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany (2015), MUAC, Mexico (2014), amongst others.

For more on Chantal’s work please visit https://proyectosmonclova.com/en/artista/chantal-penalosa/

Photo of a young girl with short-cut bangs, with multiple fragments of images and cut-outs overlaid, including one in the shape of a face, another a section of a face, a splash of pink, and a portion of a photos of the sky.

Toddd Molinari & Francis Dot: apokálypsis: an uncovering

In “apokálypsis: an uncovering,” Toddd Molinari and Francis Dot explore the intense redefinitions of spaces that began in 2020. The ways in which we relate to places, objects, and other people is undergoing a radical shift. Like trees and fish whose growth rings tell the story of their environments, will art made during this time be imbued with the possibilities and consequences of apocalypse? How do our negative spaces have a different energetic charge?

With these questions in mind, the artists created an assemblage installation with multimedia objects, which stand in relation to the questions posed by grander cycles of space. As these unfamiliar edges of ancient sequences surface in our world, the artists hope to uncover new types of relational experiences for the viewers and participants.

Painting of an aerial view of the Golden Gate Bridge packed with protestors, who are marching across it. The one lane of traffic on the bridge is stopped, bumper to bumper,. In the background, water from a flat San Francisco Bay meanders under the bridge.

Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis

Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis brings together seven Bay Area artists ― Carolyn Drake, Rodney Ewing, Andres Gonzalez, James Gouldthorpe, Klea McKenna, Tucker Nichols, and Woody De Othello ― and their deeply personal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and social upheaval of 2020. Their projects emerged from the profound curtailing of daily life that resulted from shelter in place: the disruption of routines and the inaccessibility of studios or materials, the instability in employment, and the delicate and sometimes untenable balance struck between family needs and work obligations. These challenges demanded an adaptive way of working; rather than closing off opportunities, the constraints prompted new approaches and new lines of inquiry.

Individually, the artists demonstrate a startlingly wide range of artistic, emotional, and political responses, a reminder of how this unprecedented period affects each of us differently. Taken together, their work emphasizes our shared experience in this collective crisis.

Photograph of a grid wall of black and white square prints, before which are arranged desks, chairs, and a long table. A sign with the word "Director" rests on one of the desks.

Off the Wall

The impulse to move photographs off the wall and into the open space of the gallery is not new. Since the 1960s, artists have challenged established notions of how a photograph should be displayed. In this exhibition, five contemporary artists expand upon earlier efforts to break free from the confines of the picture frame by transforming photographs into sculpture, including them in complex installations, projecting them onto various surfaces, even creating custom furniture for their display.

Liz Deschenes’s photographs in Off the Wall are sculptural, installed on the floor in space usually occupied by viewers. Oliver Chanarin frames his prints in a typical manner, but controls their display through robotic arms modeled after those used in automated warehouses. Sarah Sze’s intricate installation of still and moving images blurs the boundary between art and life, the virtual and the real. Dayanita Singh playfully disrupts expectations of photographic presentation by showing her work in her own micro-museums. And Lieko Shiga experiments with the gallery space, inviting viewers to experience her photographs by physically moving through them. Together these inventive, divergent approaches engage visitors in unconventional ways that speak to the incredible dynamism of the current moment in photography.

Photograph of a row of seven tall, rectangular hedges lining the edge of what seems to be a parking lot, each with slightly different amounts of stray, untrimmed branches. Behind the shrubbery, industrial walls of various heights and colors compose the background. A single, blurred tire track is streaked across the concrete.

Love Letter to Rachelle Mendez

Categories Love Letters
Photograph of a row of seven tall, rectangular hedges lining the edge of what seems to be a parking lot, each with slightly different amounts of stray, untrimmed branches. Behind the shrubbery, industrial walls of various heights and colors compose the background. A single, blurred tire track is streaked across the concrete.
Rachelle Mendez, A Newer Topographic #4; Indio California, 2017. Lightjet Kodak Endura C-Print, 22 x 18 inches. Courtesy of Rachelle Mendez.

Right now, I live in the suburbs. I linger in the cookie-cutter landscape of Orange County strip malls and office parks, surrounded by the blocky, sprawling institutional architecture of suburban America. In 2011, the LA Times wrote an article about my city finally approving homes in colors other than beige. As I make my way through the identical edifices of a planned community, I’ve been trying to see in my surroundings the accidental loveliness that photographer Rachelle Mendez captured in her series “Minimal Hardscapes of Southern California.”

There’s a playful, subversive geometry that Mendez uses to frame her photographs, transforming buildings and street corners into Mondrianesque blocks of color. The various grays and beiges of the commuter belt become visually interesting hues in their own right, anonymous rectangles of suburban structures arranged with geometric precision. Her eye turns faded paint and scuffed concrete into something sublime.

In A Newer Topographic #4; Indio California (2017), Mendez matches the pale gray of an easily-overlooked building to the off-white of an overcast sky. She turns a stray tire track into a daub of stark black contrast and the faded line of a sidewalk curb into a desaturated ribbon of red. Looking at it, I’m struck by the same shrubs that can be found in corporate parks all over California. The scant bits of greenery are a mere concession to visual comfort, but Mendez captures the way stray leaves escape their recessed alcoves—a sign that, even in suburban Southern California, nature can never be entirely contained.

Photograph of "legs," which are pantyhose stuffed with shreds of paper, wearing ankle socks and blue sandals with a pink graphic of lips on them.

Bumpy Road

Magic Mountain parking

Nougat lectern

veiny influence 

streams

~Petra Poffenberger

Helen’s Costume is pleased to announce our first show of 2021. Bumpy Road features new sculpture and photography by Elizabeth Herring, painting by Rainen Knecht and Scott Hewicker and drawing by D-L Alvarez. Helen’s Costume is a physical gallery space in a modified domestic setting, that sprung out of the 2020 quarantine, in the Montavilla district of Portland Oregon. Your safety is important to us. We encourage you to make an in-person, timed, socially distanced gallery visit through the RSVP link or our website, www.costumeintl.com.

Photograph hanging on a white wall. Center frame, a Black woman wearing a striped t-shirt stands before a black background, facing to the right, evoking the image of a mugshot. Behind her head on the left hangs a newspaper clipping depicting a grid of headshots of people of color below the words "IS THIS THE END?" Just before her torso hangs another clipping, this one a grid with mostly white headshots, reading "WHY IS OUR CITY COUNCIL SO WHITE?"

Sites of Memory

UTA Artist Space is pleased to present Sites of Memory curated by Essence Harden in her first collaboration with the venue, featuring artists Noel W Anderson, Gideon Appah, Natalie Ball, Pamela Council, Janvia Ellis, Anique Jordan, Lebohang Kganye, Basil Kincaid, John A Rivas, Adee Roberson, and Muzae Sesay.

Sites of Memory considers how the act of remembering is a site of critical and generative excess. Contained to reverie, remembering resides in an illimitable space, extending out and in towards what was or what perhaps or what could have been. Finding utility in the photographic strategy of the snapshot, where spontaneity and chance hold the capacity to formulate volumes on otherwise ephemeral moments, this exhibition explores the sensory components in such wanted desires. Titled after Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” the show is guided by her notion that “the act of imagination is bound up with memory” and that remembering is the modality of visions.

The exhibition pivots the work of image-making to a multitude of artistic mediums and materials. Images are exhibited as abstracted paintings, sculptural arrangements, print assemblages, photographic forms, installations, and collage. Diasporic pull, familial legacy, architectural scapes, queered futures, national belonging, and satirical gestures are surveyed as rich sites. The mark of the snap is considered here as an entry to other worlds of image making where snapshots are a task of memory, offering a litany of proof of what mattered then to suggest what is worth remembering now.

“Essence is a curator with an eye on the future of the art world,” said Partner & Creative Director of UTA Fine Arts and UTA Artist Space Arthur Lewis. “She creates compelling stories from the African diaspora in ways that never leave you. This show is a perfect example of how she is able to place her finger on the heartbeat of this cultural moment. We are really proud to be the home for her talents to shine.”

Harden has curated exhibitions at Human Resources, Oakland Museum of California, El Segundo Museum of Art, Eduardo Secci Contemporary, California African American Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Museum of the African Diaspora, among others. She is also a contributor to several publications and has written catalog entries for several exhibitions, including Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow; Brave New Worlds: Exploration of Space; and What Needs to Be Said: Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts. Additionally, she is the recipient of The Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and is an Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellow.

As part of an exclusive print collaboration with Absolut Art, new limited edition prints from Gideon Appah and Muzae Sesay that relate to their works in the exhibition will soon be available on AbsolutArt.com.

Visiting the Artist Space is by appointment only, with a four-guest maximum at any time. All visitors will have to acknowledge via the online appointment system both the health and safety guidelines and their health status before they visit. All visitors will have to wear mask at all times in the artist space. Masks and hand sanitizer will be available on site for guest usage. All guests will have a 30-minute window for viewing the gallery. Guests will not be permitted to the gallery before or after their viewing time. If they arrive earlier, they will be asked to wait in their car until their appointment time. Guests must practice social distancing. There is ample signage throughout the space including arrows on the floor that tell guests which way foot traffic is flowing. Restrooms will be closed to guests and the Artist Space will be deep cleaned on a regular schedule following the close of business each day.

About UTA Artist Space:

UTA Artist Space is an exhibition venue in the heart of Beverly Hills that is committed to showcasing art by globally recognized talent. Since its establishment in 2016, UTA Artist Space has presented notable exhibitions with interdisciplinary artists and creatives, including Derrick Adams, Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Larry Clark, Petra Cortright, Conrad Egyir, Amanda Hunt, Mariane Ibrahim, Arcmanoro Niles, The Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery, The Haas Brothers, and Ai Weiwei, among others. For more information, please visit UTAArtistSpace.com

About Absolut Art:

Absolutart.com sells signed, limited edition, framed prints by emerging and established artists from around the world. Building on Absolut’s thirty-year involvement with contemporary art (from Warhol to Damien Hirst, Keith Haring and Louise Bourgeois), the goal of their global online gallery is to expand access to contemporary art, support local artist communities, and democratize the art buying process. Recent collaborations include an exhibition co-curated with Wu-Tang Clan, a collection of re-imagined classic movie posters with Metrograph cinema, a series of prints to accompany The Hole’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” show, a charitable editioned print with Kehinde Wiley to benefit Black Rock, and a large scale installation at the Oculus with Mona Chalabi and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Artists featured on our platform include Hank Willis Thomas, Shantell Martin, Francis Stark, Samara Golden, Kambui Olujimi, Rashaad Newsome, Brigitte Lacombe, Wing Shya, and Jayson Musson.