The veteran Portland sculptor takes this year's Bonnie Bronson award...
Read moreThe international video project curated by Laurence Wood and Zoran Poposki will be held at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park in Shatin, Hong Kong, and will feature works by: Arnold J. Kemp, Tricia Sellmer, Lucy Harrison, Daniel Arnaldo-Roman, Zoran Poposki, Laurence Wood, Luis Lara Malvacias, Tessie Word and Damon Ayers, Victoria Hindley, Eva Petric. Arnold Will be in attendance.
Read moreSeptember 10th - October 16th at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL (click on image for more information)
Read moreIt was 1967 when Bob Dylan appeared in his video for Subterranean Homesick Blues, using cards to illustrate a series of sardonic refrains about modern life.
Fast-forward to 2012 and married artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen are channeling the singer’s spirit in their 100 Posterworks photography projects.
A series of wry messages are held up as they deadpan into the camera, creating black and white images that are at first deceptively simple but often bear deeper scrutiny.
Take for example the baby crawling away from a pair we assume to be its parents holding a sign saying ‘GO! GO! GO!’.
Your first reaction may be to smile, then wonder if the image is saying something about the burdens of expectation children can be born with, whether from overbearing parents or a fast-paced capitalist society that urges them to grow up quickly.
For their part the couple say they are aiming to create a “playful, inquisitive, critique” of society and personal attitudes, and say reaction to the photos have been “mostly pretty warm”.
“It started as a mail project; we were sending out the posters to a long list of curators, friends, writers, editors, artists, and institutions and the posters worked in that format,” explains Ryan.
“What was really interesting was the suggestions we would get from others about what type of signs we should hold. Once it got picked up by blogs there was a mixed reception of course - some fair critiques and some amazingly antagonistic dribble.”" -Sam Parker, The Huffington Post UK
Full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/10/100-posterworks-slogan-art_n_...
Read moreGather: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger at Stelo Arts.
How are we connected? What are the ties that bind us? These are some of the questions that Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt have been talking through via their joint residency with Stelo. As we celebrate the culmination of their multi-year residency, you are invited to the exhibition Gather, on view at Stelo August 13 - November 27, 2022. Visitors to the Stelo flex space will engage with pieces from Luger and Watt’s individual art practices, as well as their first collaborative art work, Each/Other. Watt and Luger merged their practices to create this sculpture with hundreds of people from around the world.
The artists asked participants to embroider messages while considering “if acts of collaboration help heal broken bonds with the environment and with each other.” The artworks on view will be large in scale, sculptural, and will involve video and sound. Visitors will be encouraged to spend time in the space being with the work, and connecting with the potential for art to engage our hearts and minds.
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“Vivid Dream (Awakening) is in many ways a prototype and a test. It is a project I’ve been wanting, dreaming, to realize for some time. Gather is the perfect venue for its debut. The piece itself is the result of gathered stories, gathered jingles, and or gathered relationships.” - Marie
Opening Event: Saturday, August 13, 2-5pm.
From 2:30-3:30pm Stelo co-leader Tia Katcharian will lead a walk-through conversation with the artists and local fabrication supporter Neal Fegan from Camp Colton, and Shir Grisanti, founder of c3:initiative.
August 13 - November 27, 2022
Gallery hours: Friday - Sunday, 12-5pm
412 NW 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97209
All programs are free and open to the public and are ADA accessible. Face masks are recommended.
Read moreIn these times of economic desperation, (or even just during the desperation of everyday life in general) it is understandable that people would find escape routes into alternate realities. For some people that is as easy to do as turning on the TV or slipping into a haze of web sites. The...Read more
Arnold Kemps work is currently included in the Berkeley Art Museums exhibition curated by Larry Rinder. Show is called "Hauntology" and the features works that evoke uncertainty, mystery, inexpressible fears, and unsatisfied longing. Artists included in show: D.L. Alvarez, Diane Arbus, Lutz Bacher, Francis Bacon, Roger Ballen, Lewis Baltz,
Carina Baumann, Dirk Bell, Marie Krane Bergman, Debra Bloomfield, Fernando Botero, Todd Bura, Victor Cobo, Jess, Travis Collinson, Bruce Connor, Julia Couzens, Peter Doig, Vincent Fecteau, Linda Fleming, Goya, Robert Gutierrez, Hongren, Alfred Hrdlicka, Rudolphe Ingerle, Tadeusz Kantor, Arnold J. Kemp, Max Kurzweil, Aristide Maillol, Bernard Maybeck, Donal Mosher, Maruyama Okyo, Joachim Patinir, Mitzi Pederson, Laurie Reid, Ad Reinhardt, Patty Robeshow, William Rogan, Felicien Rops, Georges Roualt, Paul Schiek, Ivan Seal, Paul Sietsema, Takahashi Sakunosuke, Antonio da Trento, Luc Tuymans, Unknown Artist, Miller Updegraff, Carrie Mae Weems, and James McNeil Whistler. CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION
PDX Contemporary Art is pleased to announce D.E. May's solo exhibition at LAXART curated by George Baker. November 8th - December 13th. Opening Reception, Saturday, November 8, 6-8pm.
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http://laxart.org/exhibitions/view/de-maybrihalf-distancei/#images
Jenene Nagy “condition + practice” @ Minneapolis College of Art and Design, October 5 - November 6…
Read moreOf the many galleries participating in Photolucida, Portland’s monthlong photography showcase, PDX Contemporary Art’s three-person show is the most effective...
Read moreKristan Kennedy
Curator, PICA
Storm Tharp
High House*
Storm Tharp has been looking in the same mirror for more than a decade. It has moved with him from studio to studio, accumulating paint marks, bits of tape, and various scuffs. The mirror is as great an influence on his work as any other single tool, piece of research, beauti- ful peony, or sad song. For his residency at PICA, Tharp brings together objects and ephemera that provide the hidden, joyful, and meaningful subtext to his work to form arrangements in a room that is part studio, part gallery, and part home: a still life.
+Kristan Kennedy: High House is an arrangement of things and a constructed environment that is both of the studio and of the home. How do you define this space, is it in-between or a blend- ing of the two?
+Storm Tharp: My house and my studio are where I spend the majority of my time—but there are ideas in High House that are about other spaces. Being outdoors, being in the sun, eating alone— these kinds of things. The intent was to showcase real inspiration, or the ideas that fill life.
However, constructing the room and building the stage for High House was so amazing to watch happen. I love the room with nothing in it, as well. The sculpture of the room is inspirational on its own. Something to remember.
Putting this show together has caused me to think long and hard about my tendencies. There will be a very tidy presentation going on. Very formalized; an almost fetishized version of what surrounds me.
+KK: I know that both of us turn to the writings of Agnes Martin from time to time, and I love her quote: “When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” What do you think of beauty and its place in art?
+ST: I have spun this answer for way too long. So many different versions resting in a word document, flooding my mind.
The question almost doesn’t make sense to me. My faith in beautyis so wild and devout that I don’t even think about its place in art. Beauty is everything. It is not a choice. Art is an idea that is beautiful. To question beauty is to broaden beauty. New forms, new ideas: the new beauty. Beauty does not dissolve.
I know it sounds all very correct and Christian-minded of me, but I guess, when you ask me about beauty and art, my mind explodes. I believe in the big picture of that question. I think it’s all beautiful and I think it’s all art. To believe otherwise is like building fences.
It reminds me of the Warhol quote that goes something like, “If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.” I love that!
Perhaps you wanted me to comment on the value of pretty? Because that would be fun. Some other time...
+KK: Who lives in High House, meaning, who is the subject of this space, it is of you or of them? (Them being the people, things, and places you reference, directly or indirectly, in the objects, draw- ings, photographs, and plants in the installation.)
+ST: I love the idea that someone might actually get to live in High House. A shape-shifting existence: a transformer, a reflection of all its facets. A dark-and-hairy-Popeye turns a corner, becoming a lanky, stoned teenager. A sexless figure with crystal eyes and super-human sonar capabilities sits in a chair. Science fiction. An animal. A mother with a moment to herself. A memory.
I don’t know. I guess it’s me. But it’s funny; I don’t think of myself when I think of the things. I think of them. Beauty beyond me. So it’s tricky. It’s like that poem by Wallace Stevens that I sent to you last week: “I am what is around me... A black vestibule; A high bed sheltered by curtains.”
+KK: We have been talking about High House in some incarnation for many years. I still remember our late night studio conversation all those years ago, the one with the bottles of wine... I have a note on my wall that you posted to my door the next morning that says, “Was last night a trick or a sign? by the way that is a good name for a show. x ST.” I think I had just started working at PICA, and we were both on the cusp of solo shows at our respective galleries. Do you think this show is also a reflection of our relationship: artist- to-artist, curator-to-artist, friend-to-friend? And, if so, do you think that the show ends when the exhibition closes? Or will you forever be building High House (and asking my opinion of it)?
+ST: Ha! I will always be building High House, and you will always be subject to its change. But yeah, this show is not the suite of draw- ings that we discussed over a year ago. High House is happening because you were listening and doing some thinking for me. Artist- friend–to–artist-friend. You were looking out for me—challenging me—to look at a drawing not as a drawing but as a cup of coffee, or a plant that grows in a window.
+KK: What does it mean to be human?
+ST: The first thing I did was look up the word, humane. Being humane is a nice way to be human. But it doesn’t seem to address all of the mess and disaster that comes with humanity. What does it mean to be human? To have a conscience, I suppose. To ask ques- tions. To make out with your boyfriend.
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Curated by Blake Shell, The Archer Gallery presents Vantage, an exhibition of artwork exploring perspective - visually, contextually, and perceptually. Featuring regional and national contemporary artists working in sculpture, video, computer animation, sound, photography, and installation, Vantage invites viewers into uncommon worlds, where meaning is reconstructed and reality subverted. CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Read moreARNOLD J. KEMP
WHEN WILL MY LOVE BE RIGHT
The title of the exhibition WHEN WILL MY LOVE BE RIGHT refers to a composition recorded in the 1980s by Robert Winters and Fall. The song is of the genre of music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of...Read more
As an artist (under the name Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen) we’ve been co-creating art and life projects for the past eleven years. Our work is diverse in shape and scope, often functioning in response to the texts we read and to the experience of reading itself, whether on a page, sign,...Read more
“Spun: Adventures in Textiles” is designed to address a chronic problem at museums: getting visitors to look at their permanent collections. Visitors can also learn to quilt in a drop-in studio or join the sewing circle of Marie Watt, an artist-in-residence, a Seneca Indian whose sculptures, made from blankets, will be shown nearby.
Read moreThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), a global leader in art and design education, announced the appointment of Arnold J. Kemp as the School’s dean of graduate studies. Concurrent with this appointment, Kemp joins the faculty of the Department of Painting and Drawing as a professor. Kemp comes to SAIC from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where he is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Painting and Printmaking.
Arnold J. Kemp has been making and exhibiting critically engaging art for 25 years while concurrently writing and publishing critical and creative texts. Since 2009, he has served as a mentor for graduate students in a full-time academic administration role at Pacific Northwest College of Art and VCU. While at VCU, Kemp introduced a rigorously diverse visiting artist lecture series, established a new curriculum and brought a global perspective to courses in professional practices for graduate students. Prior to that, he was the chair of the Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He also worked as one of the founding curators of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
“We’re thrilled to have Arnold join us as our dean of graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” said Lisa Wainwright, SAIC’s dean of faculty and vice president of academic affairs. “The many roles he has played as an artist, curator, writer and lecturer are symbiotic with his personal research, art work and passion for preparing interdisciplinary artists for a lifetime of creative practice. Having the mindset of the artist and scholar within the School’s leadership is key to what makes SAIC, and its graduate programs in particular, so influential.”
Read moreStorm Tharp featured in DOOMTOWN November 4 - January 13 @ PICA ...
Read more"Waiting Room", Heather Watkins' solo exhibition reviewed for the Oregon Arts Ecology Project by Sam Hopple; "...Watkins’ embroideries are strangely soothing, poetically beautiful, and complex. They speak to how we experience the passage of time in moments of uncertainty through the tranquil and meditative act of mark making." ...
Read moreI spoke with Anna + Ryan over coffee in a cavernous academic building about their most recent exhibition, A Series of Rectangles, on view at PDX Contemporary Art through November 30, 2013.
Read moreIncluded in group show "Water"Megan Murphy’s drawings are studies of water, place, and the West. Each piece is printed with a photograph of Silver Creek’s water and layered with transfer lettering. The text reflects on the environmental problems happening in the water. A list of the chemicals, golf courses, household water usage, and warming global temperatures are interwoven with the stories, history, and irony that Silver Creek represents. CLICK ON IMAGE FR MORE INFORMATION
Read moreThis Sunday evening, PDX artist duo Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen will release their new book "A Classroom Reader" at Publications Studio. Please join us for the book launch JANUARY 9, 2011, 6:30 - 9:30 PM @ PUBLICATION STUDIO, 717 SW ANKENY STREET, PORTLAND, OR 97205.
Click on image for more information.