News
Volta New York Art Fair 2023
We are pleased to be exhibiting at VOLTA New York, May 17-21, 2023 with a solo booth by Nick Blosser.
Nick Blosser works primarily in egg tempera and watercolor and paints from small study-drawings that he creates while out in the woods and fields. He chooses places that might look quite ordinary at a cursory glance, but are ripe with intrigue that he can explore in his work. After receiving the Rome Prize in 1984, he spent time studying the Classical masterworks in Italy, and this knowledge of the art historical past has deeply influenced his work in both form and material.
Nick Blosser approaches the world quietly and carefully, observing and noting the patterns, colors, and magic of nature. His paintings capture the quivering aliveness of nature. The more time spent with a Blosser painting the greater the rewards as one notices the many subtleties of shading and abstract composition the trees, branches, brambles, hills, and sky make. The paintings continue to hold one's attention year after year.
Please join us at the fair with a complimentary ticket, courtesy of PDX CONTEMPORARY ART.
To receive your pass, follow the link below, click “Get Tickets”, and enter the code: PDXVNY
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/volta-new-york-2023-tickets-551518916927The passes will grant you access to the fair during the following hours:
General Admission
Thursday, May 18 | 12pm – 9pm
Friday, May 19 | 12pm – 8pm
Saturday, May 20 | 12pm – 8pm
Sunday, May 21 | 12pm – 5pmVOLTA New York, Booth #B4
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Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18 Street
New York, NY 10011Heather Watkins | Artist Talk Cooley Gallery and Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Heather Watkins will have artist talks at the Cooley Gallery on occasion of her exhibition Dark Moves, as well as at Portland State University in conjunction with Blindspots and Throughlines in the Broadway Gallery at Portland State University.
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Dark Moves Artists Fabiola Menchelli +Heather Watkins in conversation
Saturday, May 6, 11:30 am, Reed chapelThe Cooley opens at 10:30 am before the event
Join Menchelli and Watkins with curator Stephanie Snyder as they discuss their individual and collective practices. Reed chapel, Eliot hall
Refreshments served!____
Heather Watkins: Blindspots and Throughlines Artist Talk
THURSDAY, MAY 11 | 6:00 PMRSVP : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/heather-watkins-blindspots-and-throughlines...
Since the beginning of Fall 2022, Heather Watkins has participated in a year-long residency at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, working with faculty and students in two Freshman Inquiry learning communities. Through workshops, guest lectures, studio visits, and other creative pedagogies, Watkins collaborated with students to create new avenues for understanding and experiencing Watkins’ two public artworks, located on the PSU campus: Score (2014), Lincoln Performance Hall; and Soundings: Opening, Fathoming, Grounding, Searching, Returning (2020), Vanport Building. In this artist talk, Watkins will deliver an overview of this initiative in community-engaged learning that has allowed her to reanimate previous artworks with special attention to artistic process and modes of interpretation. She will also talk about her role in the inaugural curricular exhibition Beautiful Questions, which is currently on view in the Broadway Gallery in Lincoln Hall. Finally, Watkins will discuss the development of a publication (which she received a RACC Arts3C grant to produce) that will encapsulate and archive this exciting and multifaceted project.
Lecture will be held in Lincoln Hall, RM 225. This program is free and open to the public. ASL interpreting will be provided.*
Read moreNancy Lorenz | Tiffany & Co
Nancy Lorenz was commissioned By Peter Marino to creat panels for the newly transformed flagship on Fifth Avenue, now known as “The Landmark”.
Read moreJenene Nagy | University of Wyoming Art Museum
Jenene Nagy’s solo exhibition “While Navigating the Distance Around the Sun” will open at the University of Wyoming Art Muesum on April 22, 2023 - July 29, 2023.
There will be an artist talk as well as an Artist led workshop in conjunction with the exhibition.
Salvagio Art Talk Series – Wednesday, April 26th - Free
Enjoy a reception at the UW Art Museum from 5:30–6 PM, Jenene Nagy’s Art Talk is from 6–7 PM.Artist-Led Workshop – Friday and Saturday, April 28th and 29th
4/29 – 10 AM-12 PM at the Laramie Plains Civic Center – Phoenix Ballroom. Space is limited.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/public-workshop-with-artist-jenene-nagy-tic...Through artist-led prompts and creative experiments, develop a personal symbol that honors and celebrates your identity. During this two-part workshop, participants will use lino-cutting techniques to create a personal flag.
More information about the exhibition and the programming can be found here:
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https://www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum/exhibitions/upcoming/jenene-nagy-exhibiti...Georgina Reskala | Artist Talk at SFAC Galleries
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
7:00 p.m. (Doors at 6:30 p.m.)
Free and Open to the PublicJoin Crossing Lines/Lineas que Cruzamos artists Arleene Correa Valencia and Georgina Reskala for a conversation about migration, materiality, and the power of memory. Moderated by Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography (SFMOMA).
APRIL 12, 2023
7:00 PM TO 8:30 PM
SFAC MAIN GALLERY
401 Van Ness, Ste. 126,
San Francisco, CA 94102Full information: sfartscommission.org/calendar/arleene-correa-valencia-and-georgina-reskala-shana-lopes
Read moreGeorgina Reskala | Woven Voices/Voces Entretejidas: A collective textile workshop with Georgina Reskala
Join Georgina Reskala at the San Francisco Arts Commissions for “Woven Voices / Voces Entretejidas” a textile workshop that brings people together to create a collective work.
“For this workshop, participants are invited to share their stories and write their fears, troubles, heartaches, and wishes on a piece of fabric and attach them to a larger textile work on view in the gallery. By joining in community and engaging in the act of sewing we can begin to mend ourselves and our world. Reskala invites you to ‘leave’ your troubles and wishes on the tapestry where she will hold space for them and for you.
Reskala started this project three years ago at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to stay connected with her loved ones. After seeing how impactful this simple gesture of holding space for others was, Reskala grew the project to include women’s voices from places far and wide. With this workshop, she continues to hold space and heal together with newfound community.Materials provided by the artist including hand-dyed fabric using avocados from Mexico. Refreshments also provided.”
The event will take place on MARCH 25, 2023 from 1:00 PM TO 4:00 PM at the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery
401 Van Ness, Ste. 125,
San Francisco, CA 94102RSVP recommended but not required.
Full information on the workshop available here: https://www.sfartscommission.org/calendar/woven-voices-voces-entretejidas
Read moreJenene Nagy | Camp Colton Community Day: Session III
Jenene Nagy will be an artist-in-residence at Camp Colton as part of Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation’s printmaking residency.
There will be an open studio and community day on March 25, 2023.
Jenene will have an artist talk at 1:15 pm.
Full information and a list of events can be found here:
https://www.campcolton.com/events/communityday3Camp Colton
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30000 S Camp Colton Drive
Colton, OR
97017Marie Watt | New York Historical Society Friday March 10, 2023. 1 pm est
oin the New York Historical Society on Friday, March 10, at 1pm (ET) for On Being and Belonging in America: Recalibrating Dialogue and Gallery Space for American and Native American Art. This conversation centers on the Peabody Essex Museum’s new installation of Native American and American art, exploring the challenges and rewards of combining two collections to consider what it means to belong in America, and how artists have the power to transform what we see and how we think.
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https://www.nyhistory.org/programs/on-being-and-belonging-native-america...
Photograph by Robbie McClaranJeffry Mitchell | "THIS Compost" Fairbanks Gallery
Jeffry Is a visiting artist at Oregon State University College of Liberal Arts|School of Visual, Performing and Design Arts. An accompanying exhibition of his ceramic, textile and works with and on paper artwork is on view.
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"THIS Compost"
02/27/2023 - 04/07/2023
Oregon State University - Fairbanks Hall
Monday-Friday 8:00 am - 5:00 pmHeather Watkins | "Dark Moves" exhibition at The Cooley Gallery, Reed College
DARK MOVES
Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins
February 16 to May 14, 2023
12 to 5 pm, Thursday to SundayFabiola Menchelli and Heather Watkins are artists deeply invested
in the sensory nuances and perceptual intricacies of luminescence, as well
as its orbital complement—darkness (and shadow). With methodologies drawn from poetry, cosmogony, and scientific experimentation, the artists transform materials through meticulous and embodied forms of touch and transference. After decades of engagement, the artists have become the mediums of these transmissions—receiving and reciprocating the energies that breathe through their work, and their bodies, turn by turn.Conceptually and physically, it is the infinite granularity of darkness that grounds their sight-lines. Shadow becomes a medium in the artists’ hands, multiplying the organic curves and honed edges of their work across the hemlock floors and deep, azure walls of the museum. Menchelli and Watkins synthesize color, line, and form in ways that dematerialize modernist geometries, diffusing planarity into soft-hued angles and flowing pours.
The artists are seekers of the indefinable in-between, where intentionality and unconscious meet—rising like a sunset on the other side of the earth.Working together over a two-year period, and working between Portland, Oregon and Mexico City, the artists studied one another’s processes and intellectual interests, discussing readings, and collaborating with the Cooley on the design of the exhibition. As they opened to one another’s work, and themselves, Menchelli and Watkins considered the phenomenology of the exhibition from artistic, as well as, personal perspectives.
Menchelli states: “Heather and I kept having conversations about blindness and the experience of darkness—not as a cold and distant place, but as a place to inhabit and observe.” The voids and folds throughout the exhibition become moments of reversal, refraction, and disappearance—particularly in the center of the Cooley, where a hexagonal room with open ends echoes the internal geometries and shadows of Menchelli and Watkins’ work. As viewers move through, and around, the hexagon, their bodies describe the lemniscate—the symbol of infinity (∞).
Fabiola Menchelli brings radical, new dimensionality to her most recent color photograms, transforming them into kinetic, sculptural events. This occurs when Menchelli mounts the completed prints onto a thin, stainless-steel plate that she bends, via machine, along the folds of the image. Menchelli explains:
"I make this work in complete blindness in the darkroom, folding the photographic paper and exposing it to various color filters, sometimes solarizing the prints in the developing bath, pushing the image to its limits.
The process feels like a blind choreography of unscripted motions—a set
of unrehearsed variables that I improvise each time. The uncertainty of the process frees me, and frees the work from the prejudice of preconception.
It is a process of learning and unlearning—of experimenting and ‘failing
better’ each time, to use Beckett’s phrase. This unraveling feels uncertain
and exciting. It has made me reconsider the fixed mechanisms of observation
that we impose upon the body, upon observation, and upon our perception
of ourselves. The act of observation goes beyond vision and can be a gentle and generous approach—pushing against the historical violence of the camera, shooting and capturing images that capitalize reality. Instead,
I want to turn the lens inward, even remove the camera all together, and let the physical structure of the medium define itself, expanded and unfixed—
liquid, open and multiple.’’The completed pieces become an abstract portrait of the interaction
between Menchelli’s body and the photosensitive paper, as they dance in
total darkness for hours at a time. We feel this choreography in the layers
of translucent color and shape that travel the peaks and valleys of the steel. The finished pieces exude strength and volition, yet retain the poetic lightness that characterizes Menchelli’s visionary, camera-less photograms. Fabiola Menchelli brings radical, new dimensionality to her most recent color photograms, transforming them into kinetic, sculptural events. This occurs when Menchelli mounts the completed prints onto a thin, stainless-steel plate that she bends, via machine, along the folds of the image.Heather Watkins’ refined, and weathered, standing sculptures resemble textiles and drawings deconstructed into dimensional form. The rising arrangements begin on low plinths, delineating plots where time slows to the pace of Watkins’ sophisticated dialogue with form, and its shadow. Watkins enacts and re-enacts the elements of each installation in situ, over days, and weeks, as though writing or interpreting a text. The work’s phenomenological grammar is her private poetry. In fact, her small, atmospheric ink drawings—Before Things—interpret the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. They are hidden within the space, on the cusp of luminescence. Atop the arrangements’ formal stacks of reclaimed wood and pedestals, designed by the artist, paper sculptures bend and arc. Their elegant and sinuous contours shimmer with the evidence of their past lives as drawings—gorgeous black ink-pours that Watkins held at the edges, and guided to resolution. Dark upon dark. To create the present-tense objects, Watkins excised the flowing lines, shifting them from darkness to light. Watkins offers a beautiful description of the process as it relates to her broader vision of perpetual creation:
"The works in the exhibition take the process of creation through multiple, successive actions and gestures, each move informed by the last. The ink drawings that I transform into sculptures, for instance, trace my body’s movements as I guide the liquid across the paper, working with, and against, gravity, and participating in their formation in a vulnerable, yet physically immediate way, with heightened senses. I return to them with a blade, tracing their edges, drawing them out, and lifting them into new realities. Freed from their grounds, the fluid lines become something else—spatial, precarious, open, and unbounded.’’
Processes of sustained transference have evolved throughout Watkins’ work over decades. In Dark Moves, they are accompanied by numinous gold reliefs, created by imperceptible forces that oscillate with a fluid lyricism, in dialogue with Watkins’ evolving, sculptural project.
Like cosmic sisters, Menchelli and Watkins embrace the dialectic of darkness and light as a dialectic of purpose—an illusion of permanence allowing the mind to pause and reflect: and beyond that, to survive. What cosmic phenomenon is more fundamental to how we imagine ourselves than our struggle for self-realization through the earth’s diurnal rhythms? We live this moment every night—the moment dark and light separate—and we are born, wondering. As the curator of the exhibition, it has been a remarkable experience gaining so much knowledge about, and supporting, these two brilliant and dedicated artists. I am full of, and shadowed by, enduring gratitude and affection.
— Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director,
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Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art GalleryMarie Watt | W Magazine
Marie Watt was recently featured in W Magazine!
“Doing It Their Way” by Jori Finkel highlights five contemporary Native artists who are bringing ancestral techniques and materials into a contemporary art context.
Congratulations, Marie!
The article is available here:
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https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/contemporary-native-artistsAn Open Conversation with Tad Savinar and Linda Tesner
Artist Tad Savinar and curator and arts writer Linda Tesner discuss Savinar's new show "M U S I N G S FROM THE FUTURE," showing January 11, 2023 to February 25, 2023 at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART.
The exhibition marks Savinar's 50th year working as a artist.You can listen to the talk here:
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https://youtu.be/zvGhCHGB9KMJoe Rudko | Getty Museum
The Getty Museum recently published an article on Joe Rudko. as well as added his piece "B/W" to their permanent collection.
Congratulations, Joe!You can read the full article here:
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Artist Joe Rudko on the liberating power of collage
https://www.getty.edu/news/cut-and-paste/Tad Savinar | Art Focus KBOO interview
Tad Savinar was recently interviewed for Art Focus on KBOO radio.
"On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, at 11:30am Joseph Gallivan interviews artist Tad Savinar about his new show M U S I N G S FROM THE FUTURE, which is on now at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART though February 25. Savinar talks about the parlous state of politics and the planet, time spent at home during COVID-19, and outsourcing fabrication of his sculptures."
You can listen to the interview here: https://kboo.fm/media/113855-tad-savinar
Read moreJoe Rudko | The Stranger and Portland Mercury
Joe Rudko was the featured artist of the week for both the Portland Mercury and The Stranger. Congratulations, Joe!
You can read his interview for the Stranger with Corianton Hale were they discuss distorting perceptions, breaking rules, and the strange power of memory.Read the full interview here:
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https://www.thestranger.com/visual-art/2022/11/28/78744883/joe-rudkos-ab...OPEN THANKSGIVING WEEKEND
In A Spoon Is, Watt investigates the complex history of a silver spoon from
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the Buffalo History Museum’s collection of Hodinöhsö:ni’ objects.
The photogravure depicts a silver spoon that was rumored to be made from
silver coins received by a Seneca family who sold their land as a result of the Buffalo Creek Treaty.
During this time, Hodinöhsö:ni peoples, including the Seneca, were coerced into selling their ancestral lands.
This led to a rupture between nations and tribes. The event broke with the concept of a “dish with one spoon” often employed between tribes and in the context of treaties to avoid violent conflict. The “dish” represents the land that is to be shared peacefully and the “spoon” represents the individuals living on and using the resources of the land in a spirit of cooperation.
The text around the spoon reveals and amplifies the complicated story of this animate object, while also acknowledging the history of spoons in Hodinöhsö:ni culture. The handwritten language further reflects on spoons as a method of conveyance, community, sustenance, craft, and tradition.Marie Watt | Visiting Artist Lecturer at University of Oregon
Marie Watt will be the Visiting Artist Lecturer at University of Oregon Thursday, November 10 at 4:00 pm. Lectures will be in Lawrence Hall, Room 115, 1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403 and will also be live streamed and archived on the UO College of Design YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkb9sZzZWwEXut43HyuC0Xqr6k-DR_YPR
Marie Watt: Calling Companion Species
Thursday. November 10, 4:00 pmMore information:
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https://artdesign.uoregon.edu/art/events/visiting-artist-lecture/marie-wattA Conversation with Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen
Please join us Saturday, October 22, at 10:30 am for a conversation with Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen on the occasion of their exhibition sandwiches for every meal.
sandwiches for every meal is a gathering of works inspired by searching for moments of quiet attention where we might notice the architecture of rural road signs, fall asleep while reading, accept the feeling of speechlessness, dismantle our old textbooks, watch a rocky shore or the changing qualities of the moon. Where we might explore the possibilities of silence, fish all day, remember what it's like to be part of a crowd or make layered forms of sustenance from simple means.
Please RSVP for the conversation at info@pdxcontemporaryart.com.
Read moreAdam Sorensen | The Stranger & The Portland Mercury
Adam Sorensen was the featured artist of the week for both the Portland Mercury and The Stranger. Congratulations, Adam!
You can read his interview for the Stranger with Corianton Hale discussing nature’s grandeur, studio rituals, and the spirituality of painting here: https://www.thestranger.com/visual-art/2022/10/03/78560771/adam-sorensen...
Read moreNick Blosser | Ortlip Gallery Houghton University
Nick Blosser's exhibition "Territory" is now open at Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University in Houghton, NY.
More information about the show can be found here: https://www.houghton.edu/alumni/nick-blosser-exhibit-territory/
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Houghton University is proud to announce the exhibition of artist Nick Blosser’s paintings titled “Territory” on display from September 2nd through October 9th in the Ortlip Gallery at the Center for the Arts in Houghton, NY. All are welcome to attend the exhibit’s opening reception on September 2nd from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. with a Gallery Talk beginning promptly at 7:00 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. If you are unable to attend that evening, the gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 9:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m.Blosser received both his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from The Ohio State University and went on to teach Art at Milligan College in Johnson City, Tennessee from 1991-2021. He has exhibited extensively throughout the country from New York City to Portland. In 1985 he received the prestigious Rome Prize and was selected as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He has received multiple fellowships and endowments including the 1991-92 National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
In recent years, the subject of Blosser’s paintings is what some might call “the everyday.” Blosser writes, “Each painting could be a new experience because I was getting my ideas from a source that provided ever replenishing motifs – nature. And, I could still use my love of form, shape and color and their abstract possibilities, but wed them with stuff from the natural world that many people encounter on an everyday basis but take for granted. From that time forward every new painting became a unique experience, and I’ve never become bored with painting nature as a starting point.”
To more fully appreciate Blosser’s work one must suspend realism and view it as abstract. In other words, Blosser removes layers of what the literalist perceives, distilling his subject to the raw, bare essence. Somehow, by this stripping process, he draws out a far deeper beauty that many of us are prone to overlook. Richard Cummings wrote in the July 2011 issue of Ruminate Magazine that part of Blosser’s artistic brilliance is his ability to make his subject matter something that we all can relate to and feel a sense of familiarity with. Cummings states, “Far from a sentimental experience of nature, Blosser peers more deeply, seeing beyond the outward forms, allowing us a glimpse of the spiritual essences of the rolling hills and countryside. The trees, the bushes and even the hills are filled with presence and beauty. Though his subject is northeast Tennessee, the world that Blosser reveals in his egg tempera and watercolor landscapes describe the subliminal mystery of every landscape. His work points to the ‘more’ of existence and rejects the ‘only’ of the superficial.”
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