Tia Factor received her BFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA) and her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions from Oregon to Denmark, Chicago to Tasmania, and exhibited in such notable venues as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Richmond Art Center (CA), Oliver Art Center (CCA, Oakland), Southern Exposure (SF), Pacific Northwest College of Art, Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery (UT), Torrance Art Museum (CA), The Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe) and the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, OR. Factor has been featured in art magazines and online publications including Bear Deluxe, Stretcher, Artweek, New American Paintings, NAU NUA (Spain), and art ltd. She was a RACC Professional Development Grant recipient and an artist in residence through Arts Tasmania and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) and at the School of Art + Design (Portland State University) and is the program director of a yearly study abroad art course in Berlin. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Factor’s work is concerned with the concept of topophilia or the emotional connections between the physical environment and human beings. She often incorporates the social element of interviewing others which becomes the jumping-off point for her paintings. She observes how people describe place, recording the distortions, emotions, projections, aspirations, or romanticized elements that come in to play when describing personal experiences of place. While referencing the tradition of historical landscape painting, often utilizing idyllic, romantic and pastoral imagery, Factor blurs the boundaries of representational space with a passion for abstraction and the physical gestures of painting itself.
Factor’s PDX Window Project, entitled (Harm)ony Cocoon, is a large-scale landscape painting glimpsed through rips and tears in a barrier covering the window of the project space.
The work reflects the common human impulse to dream-up a “better place” and turns a critical eye on our American culture that designs, manipulates, “imagineers”, and privatizes landscapes into places of fantasy and perfectionism. Using her experience in a gated community in Hawai’i to frame questions around the darker sides of utopia, Factor’s visual references derive from sources that range from neo- communal entities, lifestyle communities, gated communities and golf/leisure communities; they speak of luxury, leisure, excess and exclusivity while simultaneously hinting at a looming chaos in the form of ecological destruction and dwindling resources.
