Rogue Waves Nathanael Thayer Moss Opening Reception: May 18th 5 - 9pm Last Day of Show: July 6th
A metaphoric exploration of universal relationships and the unknown through restrictions of varying optical forms and planes.
Nathanael Thayer Moss is a multidisciplinary artist/musician working in Portland, OR. Born in Mississippi in 1982, he produces and collaborates on a variety of projects including; painting, sculpture, installation, performance, recording/editing/producing, video, & design. His current work explores transcendental ideas of perfection and simplicism through esoteric design and repetitive geometry as an illusion of control.
Drawing on influences of futurist design, space architecture, video game landscapes, and electronic music, the work mutates structure within constraints and variables. It attempts to bend the rules of formulaic restrictions by balancing design and chaos working in pre-determined parameters as a way to produce meta-iconic imagery. He received his BFA in Painting at Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. www.nathanaelthayermoss.com
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Radio Room Stephanie Simek Opening Reception: May 18th 5 - 9pm Last Day of Show: July 6th
Stephanie Simek has been living in Portland for 6 years, where she has been creating experiments with sound, performance, and sculpture. This is her second show at Place, and is a continued look at her interest with combining disparate materials and pushing the limits of their inherent functional capabilities. This exhibition will consist of various sculptures made from elemental components such as copper nuggets, crystal formations, and rare earth magnets, connected throughout the space by conductive conduit, creating a large-scale AM radio. www.stephaniesimek.com
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Screening room
Safe & Sound? Opening Reception: May 18th 5 - 9pm Socially & Politically Engaged Art Discussion: May 19th 4 - 6pm Last Day of Show: July 6th
Safe & Sound?is a documentary video installation by a collective of artists and community organizers in Portland, Oregon who are concerned the Portland Police Bureau's routine use of excessive force and other methods of intimidation. Using innovative video and audio presentation methods, Safe & Sound? tells stories about police brutality and resistance to police brutality in the Portland community. Safe & Sound? foregrounds interviews with Portland community members including family members of individuals killed by police, survivors of police brutality, and community members who speak out against police violence. Safe & Sound? is funded by a Community Participation Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Community dialogue around police violence is increasing with the recent release of filmmaker Brian Lindstrom’s Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse. In addition, the month of May marks two anniversaries of police shootings that generated immediate community outrage. May 5, 2013 is the 10-year anniversary of the shooting of Kendra James, an unarmed 21-year-old African-American woman shot by police on the North Skidmore overpass. May 12, 2013 is the 3-year memorial for Keaton Otis, a 25-year-old African American man shot by the police during a traffic stop near Lloyd Center. Safe & Sound? provides a reflective space for people to learn about these and other stories and think critically about safety in our city.
Safe & Sound? is a collaborative effort produced by Julie Perini, Assistant Professor of Art at Portland State University; Jodi Darby, Youth Media Coordinator at Portland Community Media; Erin Yanke, Program Director at KBOO Community Radio; and Amelia Cates, teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. School. Christopher Hamann and Ian Wallace have also made contributions to the project. On May 18 the Safe & Sound? website will launch and will contain all of the media from the installation as well as additional interviews and resources.
Ben Buswell/ Brooks Dierdorff/ Jacqueline Ehlis/ Melanie Flood/ Ted Hiebert/ Harrison Higgs/ Tricia Hoffman/ Joshua Kim/ Heidi Kirkpatrick/ Sarah Knobel/ Elizabeth Papadopoulos/ Richard Schemmerer/ Michael Sell/ Jennifer Vaughn/ Chao Wang/ Colleen Woolpert w/guest artist Bea Nettles
The dictionary says the word plain is “free from obstructions (open; clear); a broad unbroken expanse” and I concur. The Northwest is covered in plains, and planes – and contains shapeshifters in the form of artists who use photographic techniques to find a new layer to the oft, flat medium. By its nature a photograph is really only light and that which we derive from it. For this exhibition I sought those activating the possibilities of how this light might be reshaped through dimensionality, slippage, angularity or aspects that are participatory/performative.
Photography has been viewed through these divided filters since the early days of dada and surrealism, though never have we been faced with such virtuality, which by all accounts has caused great erasures and truncation on the hands-on experience. This may be a dilemma for some, and a challenge for others to help de/reconstruct – and I was extremely curious about what contemporary artists were thinking about at this intersection between technology and craft, between image and object. What rose from this ashes of this investigation were seismic scenarios, some defying (and poking fun at) both the standards of the medium and associated physics, others dealing with everyday life and death – still others shed the necessity for the image altogether.
Through the years explorations such as these have been somewhat uncommon or perhaps unpopular due to traditions (restrictions). Consider practitioners such as Robert Heinecken whose innovative photo constructions in the mid-1960s were an unexpected combination of cubism and gaming; or the mysterious objet d'art of Joseph Cornell - assemblage box constructions that were made twenty years previous employing found objects and images to conceive short, obtuse narratives while collecting memories. These works took the photographic image out of context, in short, and found a way to compartmentalize or riff on the fixed sense of parameters of the actual tool itself, the camera. Fast-forward to the mid 1980’s and the elaborate installations of French sculptor Christian Boltanski who furthers the idea that photography can be but a single element of vast works, yet remain central to his focus, resulting in works that read as genre bending. All of these artists have now collectively castaway the days of the ubiquitous ship-in-a-bottle.As far as The Great Northwest is concerned, this vast and wild, wild place that surrounds us poses eternal questions to makers who long some knowledge about our place within it. The grand scapes steep our senses in deeper questions about our disposition in the universe. For one thing, aside from Mother Nature’s ever-changing attitude, biology and other unknown forces have found our arrival here, often by choice. Like tectonic plates, some of the works on view have attempted to allude to what nature poses so subtly. Some works deal with the masks we layer and fabricate to separate (or protect?) us from the trees, mountains and waterways. These guises are at once bold, sometimes elusive, yet the refrain is one that belies geo-logic, offering instead, a resounding tension. Photography as light, in and of itself, allowed me to consider and combine a short program of works that record moving images. These include a slideshow of stills, an elaborate pixel-by-pixel digital work and a piece that plays on double-vision, which also provides the only (intermittent) soundtrack in the exhibition. These works will all be in projected-form for the first time, freeing the trappings of the standard monitor as container for our viewing experience.I’m honored to include seventeen intergenerational artists (b. 1940s-1990s) who manage to collectively express the desire to break down spatial relationships - physically, conceptually or otherwise, each with their own existential or synæsthetic leanings. This collaborative blend of thinking will extend to the viewer an opportunity to look forward from the cast of photographic traditions without discounting its continued influence. This project was made possible with a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
