Heather Watkins: APEX exhibition at the Portland Art Museum

APEX: Heather Watkins
July 20th - October 20th, 2013
Portland Art Museum

Heather Watkins employs a process-oriented, materials-based methodology to create powerful installations. Exploring systems first practiced by Dada artists in the early 20th century, she engages physical and psychic phenomena such as flow, stasis, circulation, time, and the limits of sensory perception to produce an elegant body of work. Her APEX exhibition features black-on-black drawings, ink blot drawings on Japanese Kozo-shi paper, artist’s books, and semi-rigid, ink-impregnated fiber sculptures that express the evocative nature and sensory experience created by manipulating linear forms. Her process intuitively harnesses accident to produce many of her compositions. Watkins’ work is experimental and fresh while taking inspiration from the non-representational tradition of 20th-century Modernists, as well as calligraphic drawings and sumi ink paintings from Eastern Asia.

Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson

APEX is an ongoing series of exhibitions of Northwest-based artists, curated by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art. Supported in part by the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Endowments for Northwest Arts and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Heather Watkins is a visual artist whose studio practice includes experimental forms of drawing and printmaking, book arts, installation, and sculpture. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions regionally and nationally, most recently at PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; The Lumber Room, Portland, Oregon; Hoffman Gallery at Oregon College of Art and Craft; and Nine Gallery, Portland, Oregon. Her work is held in both private and public collections including the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center at the Portland Art Museum, the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Portable Works Collection, the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and Rhode Island School of Design Artist’s Book Collection. In 2010 she was an invited Senior Artist in Residence at Oregon College of Art and Craft, and an invited Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Resident at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She has been the recipient of grants from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and The Ford Family Foundation, and has been awarded residencies at Caldera, in Sisters, Oregon, and at Em Space Book Arts Center in Portland. Over the past twelve years she has served as a faculty member at Lewis & Clark College, the Art Institute of Boston, and Massachusetts College of Art. Heather holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.