as easy as falling off a log

Artists

• Rankin Renwick

Statement

When I was working at Powell’s, a new employee came up to me and asked me my name and what I was into.

I told her, “Fucking and nature.”

I must not have enunciated clearly, as she responded, “Fucking AND nature?” or “Fucking IN nature?”

I said, “It’s all good, either way.”

This is a show about the forest and fucking. I tell people this and everyone gets a big smile and says things like, “I can get behind that.” Two things that a lot of people seem to be into, not just here in the Pacific Northwest, but everywhere I think.

I’ve even heard former loggers talk about the feeling of seeing, then cutting giant trees, and they are talking in terms of passion and lust. Maybe its lustmord, but lust all the same.

I’ve been wearing the same necklace since I was 16. It’s a little silver circle with a tree silhouette cut out of it. I’m into the trees, always have been. I climb a tree every night to get to my bedroom.

Once, in the early 80’s in Chicago, I was walking along the lakefront at night during a crazy fall thunderstorm. The wind was going wild, whipping the trees about, and the sound of the leaves in the wind induced an orgasm in me that began in my right ear and then continued through my entire body. During that time, I could hear the trees speaking, but I could not understand them. I had had a skull fracture and all my senses were super-heightened.

My neurosurgeon eventually shipped me out of Chicago to a Gentleman’s farm in upstate New York that my aunt and uncle owned, because my senses were so heightened. He sent me to nature as cure.

A lot of this show came from my time spent at a residency at Caldera this past March. That was the longest time that I spent off of cement in my recent life. 30 days. Not long enough. The trees were talking to me again. They probably have never stopped talking to me. It’s me who stops listening at times. They were talking not through sound, but through image. Alive, sparkling, vibrating image. Silver, black and dead, yet still talking to me.

Fecund this earth is. We are.

- Vanessa Renwick, 2010

As easy as falling off a log…..
This show would not exist without the amazing generosity of these here folks!
The artist wishes to thank:

Sam Coomes
Von Tundra
Brian Pietrowski
Dan Anderson
Tim Scotten
Montana Maurice
Brian Borello
Ned Ludd
Jason French
Anne Greenwood
Kristan Kennedy
Kent Richardson
PICA
Sarah Miller Meigs
Sean Tejeratchi
Ann Ploeger
Caldera
Katie Weinstein
Tricia Snell
Foxy Humper
Ryan Pierce
Jim Evered
T C Smith
Mill End Fabric Store
Aaron Heuberger
Stephen Cleary
Jon Raymond
Viva Soffian
Mel Mundell
James Winters
Stefan Ransom
Terence Dodge
Midori Hirose
Carl Klimt
Rod Pulliam
Graham Bell
Adam Sorensen
Charlotte Good
PDX Contemporary Art
and Jane Beebe