Storm Tharp: PICA TBA visual arts catalogue excerpt

This collection of essays and interviews was published on the occasion of Human Being, a series of exhibitions, installations, and happen- ings curated by Kristan Kennedy, for PICA’s 2010 Time-Based Art Festival. Projects were on view from September 9—October 17 in the classrooms and common spaces of the decommissioned Washington High School in Portland, Oregon.
Copy editors: Patrick Leonard, Scott McEachern Catalog design: Tim Kamerer Typeset in Miller Printed by Bridgetown Printing
in Portland, Oregon.
© Portland Institute for Contemporary Art 224 NW 13th Avenue, Suite 305 Portland, Oregon 97209 www.pica.org
Cover Image: In 2005, the then-shuttered Wash- ington High School was quickly converted by the Red Cross into a refuge for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In the end, the residents were rerouted to Texas, and the school remained empty. “Art and colors are better than sadness” is text from
a handmade card found inside the abandoned High School, written by an anonymous child for the victims of Katrina.
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Human Being
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever.” —Carl Sagan
Wandering around in bodies that support and betray us, we obsess about the material and immaterial. We are a species with mysterious origins, which despite centuries of investigation have yet to be explained. To exist and to question our existence is our destiny. Here, under the banner Human Being, I have gathered a suite of artists’ projects, which attempt to develop a cul- ture around the perception of beauty, aesthetics, philosophy, and this particular human condition.
The artists included mine the deeply personal in order to explore the universal, constructing work that contrasts the confusion of the present with the seemingly concrete nature of the past. They are linked by their distillation of history through a kind of genetic memory or direct refer- ence. They have inherited an art history and a societal history in which the aesthetics, ideas, and morals of past eras appear less subject to the chaos of our world’s present moral and ethical uncertainties.
Confused by inheritance, we wonder: Are we at the endgame of abstract reasoning? Are we so far removed from the literal, the concrete, that we don’t know what it is to be human? Are the fragments produced from our lives worthy of inclusion in our art? Is the search for meaning and beauty possible in a post–everything society?
It is through this questioning that I hope to present not one theory, but many, all of which col- lide and explode when side-by-side, leaving us in a cloud of dust. The very stuff we are made of.