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Exquisite Gorge II: Doubling Up – The Creative Power of Collaboration.

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.” 
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf’s words above referred to the role one’s gender plays in the act of creating art and the need to stop thinking about it in order to find a voice that is not trapped in bias. They equally apply, I thought, to the problem of making art when more than one person is involved: a marriage of opposites has to be consummated when you are coming from different directions and want the work to preserve the authenticity of each collaborator.

A complex, complicated task, particularly if the partnership extends beyond the work on hand – try sharing an artistic partnership and being actually married to each other, as is the case for Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore, my most recently visited artists for the Exquisite Gorge II project.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

Artists and Community Partners:

Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal
Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett
Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight
Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith
Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista
Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake
Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica
Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher
Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer
Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún
Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore

The Exquisite Gorge project has the notion of collaboration built in. The various artists all work together on bringing about the final product, a representation of the river and region comprised of many individual works of art. However, during the process they are completely independent of each other, as is the case with any Exquisite Corpse venture. You blindly link into a collectively assembled chain, your individual creation perhaps guided by a rule (entrance and exit of the river at a specified height location in the sculpture, in the current case), but certainly not derived from direct interaction with the other contributors.

The artist couple and Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Curator of Education, in the Oregon City workshop.

The project also is heavily indebted to what the community partners bring to the venture. In some cases it is a true artistic collaboration, when community members participate in the act of creation, like the members of the various fiber art guilds, the individuals who help crochet and knit for the yarn bombing, the Lewis&Clark students involved in fabrication. In other cases collaboration consists of providing venues for education, hosting artist talks, putting up workshops, supplying all kinds of supports – the project would not work without all the libraries, the art centers, cultural societies, tribal leadership and, of course, sponsors and granting agencies involved – all deserve outspoken recognition for being partners in art.

and everyone…. when it all comes together, it works. Glimpses from the workshop.

It is different, though, when you try to bring two minds, two artists working in different media, 2D and 3D respectively, together to make a single piece of art. By all reports, the process was long and hard for today’s featured artists, yet, from everything I have seen so far, quite fruitful.

It probably helped that the partners shared artistic projects before, though these were often curatorial. Wilson and Premore co-founded Art in Oregon, for example, a statewide nonprofit that intends to “foster culturally rich regional communities through partnerships, advocacy, and investment in artists, businesses, educational spaces, and community spaces.” It has become an invaluable resource: their ArtShine.org website provides a platform for OR artists that extends beyond the metro area, including regions like Lincoln County. You can search for artists by region, by name, by type of media. The curated database, to which artists can freely apply, is like a digital gallery that allows people interested in purchasing or displaying art to contact artists directly, a tool to connect artists to community.

Wilson and Premore also co-curated individual exhibitions, the 2019  An Artistic Heritage in Lake Oswego and You are Not a Robot in 2020 among them. The latter was intended for the Lakewood Festival for the Arts but had to be put online due to the pandemic.  

___________________

Tammy Jo Wilson grew up in Madison, WI, and received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and her MFA from San Jose State University. I met her in 2019 when I interviewed her as a participating artist in the first Exquisite Gorge project, at Lewis&Clark College where she has worked in the art department as the Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager for the past thirteen years. I subsequently wrote about her curatorial work here.

In the meantime Wilson was also appointed as Arts Commissioner for the City of Oregon City in September 2021. In 2021 she made a splash in the Oregon art landscape with her curation of the exhibit Black Matter, which features work by a dozen Black artists, with a variety of media: mixed media pieces, sculpture, digital prints, portrait and narrative painting, photography, and more. Oregon Arts Watch’s David Bates ranked the show at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg among his favorites of the year. The traveling exhibition can currently be visited at A.N.Bush Gallery at the Bush Barn Art Center in Salem, OR.

Her own artistic output has not suffered, despite her various occupations. Her most recent solo show, Figure Ground, in the Roger W. Rogers Gallery of Willamette University this spring, was well received. In our conversation she explained how her approach to art unfolds from within, a visual voice that emerges to the outside as a representation of the internal emotions. Organic structures and surrealistic landscapes reflect that.

For the EG II frontispiece she decided to focus on the aquatic plant life that provides protective cover and/or nutrients for fish in the river, duckweed included. Duckweed can be supportive of fish populations and has been of great interest to scientists trying to find more productive, resilient ways to grow food in times of climate change. But the plant is also known as invasive when not properly managed. It deprives the water of oxygen, killing both fish and beneficial algae. It readily absorbs certain toxic metals helping to clean polluted environments, but then it is toxic itself and requires safe environmental disposal, which is costly. Figure ground reversal here as well, depending on what aspect of the plant you look at. Edgings of the plants will be printed on gauzy material that will flow through the frame like the Columbia river water, reminding us of the fragility as much as the resilience of nature that has been exposed to polluting forces for centuries.

The “water” will immerse a life-sized sturgeon, sewn by Premore, and surrounded by river stones covered in moss, fabricated from a substrate felted with raw wool, another important element in a region that has seen an increase in sheep ranches supporting the local economy.

Owen Premore grew up on a farm in the Willamette Valley, near Eagle Creek. He was surrounded by nature, but also by adults who modeled spatial thinking (architects and engineers were immediate relatives) as well as crafting – he learned to crochet as an eight-year old, taught by his Italian grandmother whose own mother had been a textile artisan, well versed in the difficult art of tatting.

He received his BA from the University of Oregon and his MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University, where he and Tammy met. Next he spent a decade or more at OMSI, curating and installing some 13 traveling exhibitions, some as large as 6000 square feet. The job required extensive travel where he lived in hotel rooms for weeks at a time, with his only escape from the stress of the day found in needle arts at night. Many of the crocheted works originated from those times, often depicting the fare at his disposal, from diners to hotel bars. Ready to stay closer to home, Premore has been the Directing Curator of the Art About Agriculture Program at Oregon State University since 2018.

His focus on interactive installations, often with kinetic and auditory components led to enormous skills in building environments with salvaged ore prefabricated materials, providing museums and galleries with technical support. His workshop contains pretty much every tool know to man(kind,) with metal and wood working stations that enable Premore to create his sculptures. His work has been exhibited in several group and solo shows since 2002, most recently at Joan Truckenbrod Gallery in Corvallis.

Where Wilson works from the inside out, Premore’s artistic process often functions in the opposite direction: taking the impressions derived from the environment and letting them feed his creative thought. For the EG II project he traveled along the Columbia river, looking a various sites, lured by the fish hatcheries and the fish ladders at the Bonneville dam. He became fascinated with the white sturgeon, its incredible size, the biggest fresh water fish in the world. These creatures can live up to 150 years, they are beautiful – and dangerous to your health. State health officials recommend that you limit your intake of river fish to a few meals a month because these bottom feeders have ingested so much polychlorinated biphenyls — or PCBs  – that the levels in their flesh is exceeding official screening values. Man-made pollution endangering environment and subsequently ourselves. Man-made obstacles damming the river, trapping wild fish to ever shorter spawning journeys.

It is the blending power of things, aquatic plants that protect and harm, fish that nourishes and poisons, that is captured in the installation. It is fiber art as much as environmental commentary, blending a sense of awe with disquiet.

For me the immediate association of envisioning this huge fish in the frame (I only saw a model on a worktable nearby) was that of another, iconic work of art, that had a dead shark trapped in Formaldehyde, slowly rotting until replaced by another specimen, also killed for the purpose, Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Like much of Hirst’s work, it lent itself to outcries, the absurdity of selling a (second) killed creature for $12.000 million to collectors, expressing the obscenity of the contemporary art market. Here’s a fun book that delivers details: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, by Don Thompson. “A Dead Shark isn’t Art!” filled the headlines after Stuckism International Gallery offered a parody.

Why did it come to mind, other than a fleeting visual parallel, when thinking about a carefully sewn fish, stuck within fabricated aquatic overgrowth, surrounded by felted stones? It was the symbolism of a trap, a trapped fish and a thought-trap, inviting us to figure out its meaning and significance. In fact, Premore had shown Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Curator of Education, and me a small fiber installation of a trap earlier during our visit, part of a series of mixed media works, that had already alerted me to the concept of trap.

Red Trap 2, 2012  Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, mono-filament, mahogany, rubber.

On Left: Blue Trap, 2008  Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, monofilament. On Right :Red Trap 1, 2008  Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, mono-filament

And of course, they were things trapped all over the place, some mysterious, some identifiable.

Between that trap and Premore’s kinetic machines that use all kinds of repurposed materials and his sense of playfulness, I was also reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s Trebuchet. Duchamps, who loved puns, called a coat rack that he had nailed to the floor, after forgetting to mount it and constantly stumbling over it, trebuchet – a trap. The term is similar to the word trebucher, a classical chess move where a pawn trips an opponent’s move. And certainly that “trap” on the floor trips up the viewer. Of course the (creative) act of choosing a prefabricated object, ignoring its utilitarian function and giving it a title that implies new meaning, was the beginning of the move towards conceptual art – Readymades paving the path for what we are seeing today.

Original Version:
1917, New York
lost
coat rack nailed to floor
assisted readymade
no dimensions recorded

Replica, Milan, 1964

Much has been written about couples comprised of famous artists. How their intellectual exchange influenced their work, how their relative standing in the art world kept one of them in the shadows, often undeservedly so, how competition affected their creativity. In no particular order, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin., Dora Maar or Francoise Gilot and Picasso come to mind, or Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Lee Miller and Man Rey, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst. There were Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn.

Of more immediate interest are couples who actually worked together on creating a shared (vision for a) piece of art. There are famous ones like Jeanne Claude and Christo, or Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Or some new to me, like Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, who met as art students in 1995 and have been creating politically engaged conceptual works ever since. The way they describe their creative process is perhaps not so far from how Wilson and Premore proceed (speculating here, folks!):

“…they arrive at their concepts by ‘throwing out ideas and free-associating’. However, Allora admits that there is a downside to having two minds working on a project: they argue a lot.” (Ref.)

There are artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble, who often work with trash, literally, shaping piles of refuse into the most amazing shadow representations, frequently of themselves. Obviously not averse to materials signifying the opposite, either. Unless that is sarcasm, telling by their website, not out of the question…

Left: THE GAMEKEEPER’S GIBBET, 2011 Solid sterling silver gilded in pure gold, metal stand, light projector — Right: REAL LIFE IS RUBBISH, 2002 Mixed media, light projector.

Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison have been together for over 20 years, making riveting art based on shared interest in dance, printmaking and photography, focused on the evolution of the anthropocene and our impact on the environment.

First of May (2015)

Red Sun 
2022 
photolithography 

Then there is MINIMIAM, comprised of photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida. Their name is a play on words by combining miniature and “yummy” (in French, it’s “miam”). Their installations consist of food that’s inhabited by tiny people who interact with it like it’s a real world to be lived in. Obvious, why this work came to mind, right?

P’TIT-TOUR (2003) – Bike. cycling. Tour de France. donut. pastry. cake. sweet. coffee. sugar. race. team. sport. spoon. pink. icing.

DELICABAR SUMO-PLOUF (2005) – Sumotori. Sumo. Cherry. chocolate. Sebastien Gaudard. splash. cake. Japan.

Owen Premore Crocheted Doughnut

I do appreciate wit! And I guess the collaborative process in developing art is closely aligned with the process of making a long-term relationship work: it can be demanding, contentious, vexing, inspiring and, let’s be honest, occasionally exhausting. But ultimately it is astoundingly rewarding.

We will see the full artistic results in August.

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Flash in the Pan

1: a sudden spasmodic effort that accomplishes nothing

2: one that appears promising but turns out to be disappointing or worthless – Merriam Webster

William Merritt Chase Peonies 1897

This was me, last week. Sort of. Make the hair white, make the peony bouquet more modest, make it camera in hand instead of fan, and you’ve got the picture. Peonies have been a magnet for visual artists across centuries. They are lush, come in a range of colors, can be arranged in dramatic tableaux. And when the petals fall, they serve as a perfect memento mori. It doesn’t hurt that they last in the garden only for a short time. The fleetingness spurs desire to create something more lasting.

Here are some of my favorite paintings, as per usual the European fare I grew up with, Dutch, Russian and French masters.

Vincent Van Gogh Roses and Peonies (1886)

Pierre Auguste Renoir Peonies (1880) Eduard Manet White Peonies (1864)

Henri Fantin-Latour Vase of Peonies (1881) Alexander Gerasimov Still live with peonies (1950)

No massive bouquets for me, at $3 per stem, but the five I ended up with held a wonderful surprise in store. I had unwittingly bought Paeonia Coral Charm, a peony variety known for its color transformation while blooming. (Photographs are all of the same bouquet, across a week or so.)

The variety was registered in 1964 and colors switch from coral to cerise, orange and, finally, white across its lifespan, in the vase as much as on the stem in the garden. Quite a spectacle to behold.

Peonies are a flash in the pan – they come and go in the garden in the blink of an eye. That phrase, flash in the pan, has its origins debated. Some say it originated in the 17th century when Flintlock muskets held small amounts of gunpowder in a pan. When the power flared up without a bullet being fired, it was called a flash in the pan. Others claim it has to do with the experiences during the Gold Rush of the 19th century. Prospectors’ excitement when they saw something glint in the pan was dashed when it did not turn out to be gold.

In any case, for a moment I had had high hopes that one could use the phrase regarding UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – alas, he did survive the no-confidence vote on Monday, albeit facing a substantial rebellion and a weakened leadership position. I’m not going to bore you with details of my distaste for the man (and his party’s politics) but instead share something that brightens my days occasionally.

There is someone on Twitter called “Shakespeare Replies” – @TheBardAnswers.

He or she provides appropriate citations from Shakespeare’s works for current political situations and is about as much a fan of Johnson as am I…

I have collected some of the ones that made me laugh across time – hope you enjoy them as well.

And secondary commentary on Nadine Dorries’ support’

Alas, not always are the text sources referenced, but it is just fun to anticipate when the next one will come along.

Or this one:

And finally, other targets as well:

Shakespeare, of course, wrote about practically every plant there is, except for peonies – at least I could not find anything in my go-to-guide, Botanical Shakespeare, which lists and cross-references the names of plants with the plays, sonnets and everything else. Best of all: they offer planting instructions of the flora appearing in any given play. For June you could chose A Midsummernight’s Dream, for example, and learn which of the mentioned plants are good for your zones, how to plant them and a lot of biological information about them. (All contained in link above.)

Might as well go plant some peonies, given that I cannot use Sonnet 29 for a certain Prime Minister quite yet…

Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

And until we can say “So long, Boris,” we’ll listen to “So long, Eric….“

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Art on the Road: Correlations in Corvallis.

cor·re·la·tion – /ˌkôrəˈlāSH(ə)n/

  • a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things.
  • the process of establishing a relationship or connection between two or more measures.
  • interdependence of variable quantities. – Oxford Languages

The carbon-monoxide alarm decided to go off in the middle of the night. Try to figure out what the pattern of shrill beeps means, when you’re cold, rattled, and the dog is howling downstairs. Instructions are on the back of the gadget, in miniature font size, and so with much squinting we learned that a sequence of five beeps in a row signaled that the gizmo had reached the end of its life span. Short altercation ensued of who of us two was privileged to fling it into the garbage. Back in bed at 1:20 a.m., sleep, of course, remained illusory. Luckily, I had additional patterns to sort out, my head still filled with the impressions of the previous day.

“Art is beautiful. Requires a lot of work, though.” Quote by Karl Valentine, found in the artist’s studio.

I had been invited to a studio visit and guided tour through an exhibition at The Arts Center in Corvallis by the artist Hanne Niederhausen. As luck would have it, one of my readers had pointed out the two-person show, A Journey: Hanne Niederhausen & Judith Wyss, and established contact with the artist, otherwise I would have missed it. Which would have been truly unfortunate.

Niederhausen was born in Germany shortly after World War II, we are of the same generation. We both arrived in the U.S. around age 30, and so we share a set of experiences that comes with uprooting as adults, both from the country of origin and the nomadic life of the academic circuit. After years of transitions, she and her husband settled in Boca Raton, FL before they moved to Oregon five years ago after retirement, to be closer to their children.

Glimpses of the current studio.

I am drawing out the biographic parallels because they undoubtedly create some affinity, the familiarity of the mother tongue, the echos of the lived experience of being considered an American when visiting back home, a German when defined here. Neither fish nor flesh, as they say in the old country. More importantly, though, the parallels guided – whether appropriate or not – my reaction to and assessment of the art before me, through the lens of continual reinvention that comes with an immigrant’s path.

Don’t let the occasional impish smile of this slender woman deceive you. Underneath lies a powerhouse creative mind. The artist received her M.A. at the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe in Germany, and a B.F.A. from Florida Atlantic University. During her early career she worked and taught as a fiber artist, but expanded across the years into work with multiple media, book arts, edging, painting and photography among them. Proof of the quality of the work and the fact that the world still occasionally embraces renaissance (wo)men, can be found in the list of her national and international exhibitions, and presence in international art collections.

Sketches on studio wall

As I see it, two overarching principles define the content across her use of diverse artistic processes. One principle is Niederhausen’s sharp observation of her environment and the desire to document the impact of that surround. I believe careful exploration of one’s world is a necessary, though not sufficient condition to adapt as an immigrant or continual traveler. You need to orient yourself in new places, not just out of curiosity or appreciation of novelty, but as a tool for (psychological) survival as much as anything else. With the intense observation comes an appreciation of detail that might well be lost to those who have the privilege of being rooted in a place for good. Documentation helps to keep score of where you are, and place yourself within a context, a counterweight to constant change.

On Left: Uprooted (1995) Edging, Chine Collé / On Right: Sanssoucie (1995) Edging, Chine Collé

The early edgings depict a sense of place, but also hint at the artist’s position within it, a marker for memory, when the next change arrives. The castle on the right, for example, was home in Austria during graduate school, Sanssoucie the French for worry free, the Sorry board game marks a reminder of hours of play with the young children. (The German name for the game by the way is Folks, don’t get angry! Why use one word when you can use many? Today’s photographs are a mix of work from both, studio and exhibition. I particularly liked how conditions of the latter “shone a light” on some of the subjects, like the lamp in the upper left corner of Uprooted, reflections that were not just the typical nuisance, for once.)

Later work employs local materials that have the memory of place imprinted within, to address particulars of the environment. One such example is the use of discarded hurricane shutters as the metallic substrate for engraving with an electric dremel, drawing with ink and painting with shellac. The plates themselves have permanent scratches and scars from frequent exposure during Florida’s hurricane season, occasional labels on the back for placement (e.g. lower left patio window) and invite one’s imagination to interpret the mark making in ways related to anxious morning hours expecting the environmental damage.

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning (2011) Engraved Metal, Ink, Shellac (details below)

From the same environment under duress:

Caution (2007) Starbook

Still other work is focused on the act of letting go, oscillating between the accumulation of inherited objects, the preservation of memory and the freedom of traveling light.

Letting Go (2019) Mixed Media

(The silver tongues were used to lift sugar cubes into tea or coffee cups in every Bougie household…)

The second connecting principle is a mastery of establishing correlations which emerges throughout the artist’s body of work. What she assembles and how she assembles is driven by an eye for connections, parallels, and correspondences. It can be most directly found in used text, where associations and equivalences rule. But it is always integrated in the visual elements as well, if you look for concurrences. Have I floated enough vocabulary to express my sense of interrelationships when looking at this work? It’s pretty striking. It also is prime territory for inviting speculations. Here’s an example.

The flag book Isaac and Simone or The Relativity of the Horizon (2014) consists of pages densely covered with photographs of scribblings or calligraphy, some squares centered in the pages, and the – warranted – question at the outset “Am I really absorbing any of this.” There are lots of numbers, dates and male and female names, maybe a simple referral to favorite kids’ names in any given year? Lovers writing their names on tree branches? Then again, putting Isaac and relativity in one sentence does trigger an association with Newton and his Inverse Square Law. So what’s Simone got to do with it? Perhaps de Beauvoir’s third volume in her biography, The Force of Circumstance, that argues for very different forces affecting us just as stringently as physics, with loss forever on the horizon? I had no clue. That makes it so exciting. Our imagination might or might not be correlated with the artist’s intent, but the search for a tie-in links us nonetheless, particularly if you have an overly-active imagination like mine… (Hint: I learned it was kids or visitors scratching their names on bamboo trunks. Sometimes a name is just a name! Must remember…)

Isaac and Simone or The Relativity of the Horizon (2014) Flagbook

Niederhausen got interested in books at a time when she explored Florida Atlantic University’s collection of special books at the Jaffe Center. She explored assemblages with writing, drawing, prints and photographs, forever changing the parameters that constituted a finished work. I found work mounted in her studio particularly poignant. Here is one that nods to the plight of those incarcerated, counting the days.

another one that gives a tip of the hat to the impact of Duchamp’s 1951 bicycle wheel, and another book that simply caught my eye because of its beauty,

and last but not least one that speaks to all of us struggling with serious illness. Or maybe to shared fears. Who knows.

One of my favorite books at the exhibition (and I say that as someone who loathes cooking and loves eating!) is a two-sided flutter book, In Praise of the Art of Cooking. As the artist explains, the concept was born out of the realization how much art making and cooking had in common, ideas leading to concoction. Photographed images of discarded vegetable matter enhance the drawn art.

Photographs of the tools of the visual artist are juxtaposed with those of the cook, again associating one or more variables. A clever addition of quotes by famous artists, changed by a word or two to apply them to culinary rather than visual arts, stressing how easily they are related, added a bit(e) of fun as well as a dollop of art history.

Miró’s original words were: “I try to mix colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” We might as well add another Joan Miró quote that applies to Niederhausen’s output: “The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.”

Food is a recurrent subject matter. From whimsical assemblages that put constructed meals on place settings reminiscent of Judy Chicago,

Mellow Meal (2011) Assemblage on Table

to picnic baskets that contain bamboo plates covered with assemblages depicting the whims, seductions and dangers of the food industry, Niederhauser again documents the peculiarities as well as quotidian matters of her environment.

Last Picnic Mixed Media and Photography on Bamboo Plates with Hatbox.

***

Generous souls at The Arts Center allowed for entry before visiting hours, so I avoided sharing a public space with many people, for which I am truly grateful. The gallery is located in an old church, within a pleasant setting of green spaces, with ample parking. The space is big enough for both artists’ work to be hung without interfering with each other. I unfortunately could not review Judith Wyss’ installations and glass work as well, since I had come to focus on an artist who has re-invented herself multiple times and with whom I had occasion to have serious conversations. I believe there will be another review of the full exhibit in Oregon Arts Watch in days to come.

What struck me about Niederhausen’s later work – and I wonder how much that is age related – is how she has freed herself from the need to prove something, be it impressive print making skill and etching technique, or important or clever ideas.

I was taken by a series of paintings that correlated simple mathematical concepts, a hint of geometry or Fibbernacci numbers here or there, with a riot of color and bursts of random patterning, really the one exhibit in the hall that I associated with unfettered joy.

Q.E.D. Quod Erat Demonstrandum (2013) Mixed Media. Detail below.

An even more recent series, Dreams and Diversions, is the most fluid of the lot. It felt more wistful than joyous, but true to self and the principles of observation and correlation. The patterns originated in discovering beansprouts on the kitchen counter that had dried up over night (observation/documentation.) They take on a life of their own, however, floating through various constellations, linked to amorphous landscapes, associated with jewel-like shapes that might have naturally blossomed in some imaginary world, correlating with an increasing sense of being untethered. They seemed like visions of entering a different dimension – perceived by this viewer as an intuition of aging and beyond, one that was more empowering than threatening.

Dreams and Diversion Series (2016) Water Media, Graphite on Yupo Paper – Details below

What happens to you when you age, as an artist? When physical factors limit what you can create or what process you can use for creating? What cognitive factors play a role, perceptions of futility, perhaps, or of the need to use shrinking time wisely? Do you frantically produce or do you withdraw? Do you fear that your repertoire of ideas might finally be exhausted, haunted by worry that you only repeat yourself? How do you keep yourself convinced that you have something to say and the means to say it in novel ways? Will the cessation of art making leave a huge hole, or will it provide some freedom in your fatigued existence? Questions I ask myself and plan on asking other artists in their 70 and 80s, Niederhausen included. I hope that the answer reflects an urge to create, in perhaps reduced fashion, but create nonetheless. Lots of time to rest later. Yes, it involves a lot of work, but art is beautiful!

Vacancy # 1 (1992) Edging

A Journey: 

Hanne Niederhausen & Judith Wyss

May 19-June 25, 2022 –

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm

The Arts Center – 700 SW Madison Ave, Corvallis, OR 97333

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Happy Birthday, Ken Hochfeld!

We had it all planned. My friend had an exhibition of his latest work at Lightbox Gallery in Astoria. I was to come on a Monday when the gallery is closed to the public, so I could look at his photographs, safely away from potential sources of infection. Wouldn’t you know it, it did not work out, I was under the weather and the trip had to be canceled.

The work is back in Portland now, and this weekend I got a one-on-one presentation on Ken’s porch, safely outside and yet protected from the endless rain. It was the day before his birthday.

Cape Horn, WA

I want to talk a little bit about this photographer friend of mine and the way I believe he approaches his work. The lack of feedback when you are not a famous artist in the limelight can be anything from annoying to discouraging at times. We all should make more of an effort to share our reactions. So here are some observations, and some guesses.

Historic Columbia Highway at Rowena Crest

If you look at Ken’s website, one thing is immediately obvious: he is willing to take risks, over and over again, by exploring new methods and new subjects with a vengeance. That is not the norm in the world of photography. Most successful photographers have their shtick and stick to it – why fix something if it ain’t broken? It allows the viewers to instantly recognize your work, a marketing plus, among others. It allows you to refine your technique with a particular subject, it keeps you in a comfort zone.

Olin and Hazel Oliver  1972 (From his book They Call it Home – The Southeastern Utah Collection)

In contrast, Ken’s path as a fine art photographer has been variable across the decades. He has tackled portraiture, color photography, both in spontaneous and in staged settings. His work interacts with our natural environment in a multitude of ways, from descriptive, documentary landscape photography, to capturing the mood or essence of a place, to using nature as a symbolic stand-in for more personal exploration, preferably in black&white, often in the sepia tone range, sometimes in collaboration with people who provide text.

Titles of series clockwise from upper left: Madrone Wall Expressions – Rock(s) – Landscape Americana – Unboxed – Whole – The Trees.

As someone myself who gets easily bored and also likes to stretch herself artistically as much as intellectually, I feel quite drawn to work that shares some of those characteristics. You never know what comes next, and so are kept on your toes, wondering about the newest project, both in terms of method and ideas.

I grew here-lump of stone,
settled in my nest of sticks
waiting for an Irish spring,
waiting for a four-leaf clover
        to kiss me awake.
(From the series Waiting, text by Gay Walker.)

The most recent work consist of diverse series. Ken captures the Columbia river with a nod to the history of photographers who came before us, with fresh eyes, nonetheless. Some of these images were created while he kayaked on the river in order to get vistas inaccessible from land. If you have ever held a camera or/and tried to paddle in those waters you know how daring an approach this is – yet the photographs are nothing but serene. Here is the artist statement:

“Pages: The Majestic Columbia River”

The Columbia River has been a popular subject for photographers since the early days of the medium over 150 years ago.  Many wonderful photographs of the river are shown in galleries, museums and the pages of books highlighting the historical importance of the work itself while depicting the beauty of the Columbia River. 

The photographs shown here are my own pages of some favorite scenes of this powerful and intensely beautiful resource we have in our backyard.  I hope that with the exhibitions at LightBox today, we can celebrate the majesty of the Columbia River and recognize its significance while remembering it as an existential heritage of those who were here long before the first settlers arrived.

Horse Thief Lake, Columbia River Gorge, WA

For the other project, Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River, Ken spent several years photographing the people (some familiar, some met on the road, quite literally) and the landscape of a region resistant to change. Scandinavian fishermen, Chinese immigrants who worked in the canneries, farmers who tried to make a living, make for a hard working populous in a region prone to earthquakes, floods and fires.

“Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River”

There is a special character and history in the small communities found along the Lower Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. This work begins to examine the places and the people who live there.

The communities of the Lower Columbia on the Oregon side along Highway 30 west of Portland and on the Washington side near Highway 4 west of Longview were settled primarily by Swedes and Finns long before roads were built. They depended upon Columbia River tributaries and sloughs for access, so these developments became known as Riverboat Communities. When roads were built the riverboats became obsolete.  While fishing and canning were once the primary source of commerce, the canneries are now of the past.  Cattle and sheep are raised by many of the locals and fishing is still active. Most importantly the communities depend upon water management of the sloughs via dikes constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and managed by hired locals to minimize pasture flooding, but flooding is still common during the wet season. In Brownsmead in particular, new construction is seldom seen because of the scarcity of available undeveloped higher ground, so changes to the area are rare and most of the locals like it that way. 

Clatskanie River

Watermaster walks the Columbia River Dike near Brownsmead

I’ll skip over all the stuff relating to technique that I know nothing about in the first place, given that I still use a point&shoot camera on automatic mode, grateful if I manage to get what ever captures my attention in focus. Seems to me, though, that Ken’s images are flawless, when it comes to the way light was captured and space laid out.

Clockwise from upper left: Ed and Jan Johnson, Brownsmead – Scott Fraser, Midlands District – Ray and Denise Raihala, Brownsmead – and Brooklyn, NYC transplant Carol Newman, Brownsmead (community treasure, heart and soul – and brain! – of the local radio station KMUN/Astoria. I’m an ardent fan, in case you wondered, of her and the show hosted by her, Arts Live and Local.)

Instead, I want to try and express what much of Ken’s nature-based work seems to reflect for me. For lack of a better phrase, I think the images evoke a state of longing. I can’t quite put my finger on what is longed for: establishing a connection between photographer and viewer through successfully communicating what was seen?

From the series Rivers and Streams

Longing to freeze the moment in time when awareness of the beauty of our surround registers, once again, pretending we can make it last forever? Longing to prolong that state where we can focus on the cliffs, the woods, the meadows, the rivers, oblivious to pain or the daily demands on us, our worries and obligations, in blissful isolation? Or, in reverse, longing to belong, while out there all alone, forever wondering if people “get” what one is producing?

From the series Rock(s)

Longing to find a pictorial language that expresses oneself when words fail? Whatever it is, a feeling hovers above the surface of these photographs, or within them, that still believes in possibility – longing can be answered.

Bughole Road

Sometimes the longing is on the melancholy side, sometimes it captures joy about what’s seen, the deep desire to depict and share. Sometimes it is more attached to what is photographed, sometimes it seems more linked to the one doing the photographing. Wherever the scales tip, one thing is true for the work: it does not shy away from, or, really, it comfortably seeks and displays emotion. If I compare it to the traditional (and majority male) landscape photography that I know, that is special.

High Water on Wirkala Rd. Deep River, WA

Surprise me with what’s next down the road! No Dead End for you!

Music today of Finnish origins like many of the Brownsmead immigrants, related to light, appropriate for a passionate photographer.

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Exquisite Gorge II: Making the World a Better Place.

“If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.” – Ruth Bernhard (1905-2006).

Ruth Bernhard’s words tugged at my brain during my most recent encounter with one of Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II artists. Bernhard was a pioneer among women photographers best known for her abstract images of female nudes. The artist created a portfolio of work across her lifespan that politicized the private long before the public feminism of the 1970s. Mentored and adored by some of our photographic greats, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, the German photographer tried to make us see what is often not visible, pushing the viewer away from the typical objectification of nude models towards an empathy that allows some tenderness to emerge, but also visions of female desire.

Being willing to see more than what is “visible” is important for both, the viewer of a particular work of art and the one who creates it. This is especially true if the art is informed by anthropological and historical considerations, as is the work of Lynn Deal who will provide a fabric sculpture for Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II exhibition this summer.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

Artists and Community Partners:

Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal
Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett
Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight
Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith
Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista
Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake
Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica
Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher
Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer
Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún
Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore

Deal, born in England, was raised in New Mexico and spent much of her adult life in Oklahoma and some years in Texas. Her interest in fabric and design dates back to her childhood and eventually brought her to the Pacific Northwest, a fertile region for fiber artists, where she joined the Columbia FiberArts Guild. Deal’s background in all things fiber is rich: she earned a BA in Design and Human Ecology from the University of Oklahoma and received her MA there as well, then worked in various roles, director, curator, exhibit and education director and site manager among them, for the Metcalfe Museum, the Tulsa Historical Society and the Texas Historical Commission among others.

Antithesis (2001) The traditional layers of quilting are reversed, the ties are purposefully elongated rather than traditionally short.

Once she realized that clothing and costume design, the typical occupations for many interested in working with fabric, were not for her, Deal focussed on researching and exhibiting domestic textiles at the intersection of private creation and society’s structural conditions. That exploration included studies of cross-fertilization between women crafters who belonged to different classes and races in the 19th and 20th century South of the U.S.

A specific area of interest was the quilting of a Louisiana plantation owner, Cammie Garrett Henry who opened Melrose Plantation to visiting writers and artists, making it an important community during the Southern Renaissance—a period of intense artistic production between World War I and the end of World War II. Henry, a White woman, incorporated motifs and techniques from indigenous Hawaiian work into her quilting. The quilts of her Black domestic servant, Clementine Hunter, on the other hand, started to display motifs that described the architecture and daily views of the White plantation world around her. Hunter, mostly admired for her folk art paintings, became one of the best known artists of Louisiana. Rather than staying away from what would today be termed “appropriation,” these women integrated various cross-cultural elements that enriched their work.

Parallel Paradigms (2016) A piece contemplating reproductive inequalities and risks.

Deal’s artistic practice is clearly informed by both the historic techniques and configurations she immersed herself in, and the way a deeper view of the world could be communicated in crafted work. Her wall hangings and sculptures do require intense visual exploration, since an immense load of detail work sometime delays the appreciation of the larger picture. So much to look at, in terms of varied materials, methods of stitching, application, patterning, and color.

She loves it all, the spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidering, dying, carding, and quilting. No technique is left behind – nor are types of materials; wool, tulle, silk, cotton, beads and buttons, silkscreens panels, odds and ends abound. What emerges are stylized portraits of a world as perceived, “wool her paint, stitching her brush, fabrics her inspiration,” as she phrased it. Seemingly innocuous titles invite the viewer to go beyond the plethora of detail and explore possible meanings. Here is a perfect example: At the Party.

At the Party (2016) Excerpts

The quilted scroll shows the appliquéd figure of a young Black girl or woman, dressed up, hair beaded, behind a wrought-iron fence, covered with Mardi-Gras beads and seemingly random cotton loops, once used to make potholders by domestic workers whose hands were not to be idle. The prominent fence, however happily colored and skillfully embroidered, excludes the figure, puts a barrier between viewer and subject, and can almost be perceived as a small cage. No amount of magnolia pinks and stereotypic New Orleans’ festive cheer with its abundance of beads can ultimately obscure the reference to slavery and racial segregation.

Looking beyond the easily visible, of course, is required.

Similar insights reveal themselves, when you contemplate some of the other, unfortunately timely topics:

Global Tech (2016) Layered silk screen panels, embroidered beads, Prairie points.

Or here, a recent sculpture by the artist, Keen Waters (2019) alluding to the fragility of the river eco systems, the harm induced by dams to fish runs, pollution at the bottom.

Keen Water (2019) Excerpt.

For the Exquisite Gorge II project, a rich silken river, stitched with metallic thread reflecting light, will flow underneath a canopy of colorful gauze leading from sunrise to sunset, forming the letter M to honor Maryhill Museum. On the bottom, fabric covered container lids will remind of the plastic pollution ubiquitous to our waterways.

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I consider Lynn Deal an heir to an age-old practice of, however subtle, political expression through the crafts. Traditionally relegated to the female domain, a domestic chore or diversion, craft was always perceived to be a lesser cousin to the fine arts. True even if and when it enhanced the social status of the patriarchs displaying the incredible handiwork of their female household members, whether in French castles, American plantations, English country manors or churches, producing true works of art like the Bayeux tapestries. If you looked closely enough, however, it had a voice.

The combination of textile arts and politics is nothing new then. In the last decades, it has become a defined movement known as Craftivism, popularized by Betsy Greer and groups like the Craftivist Collective, founded by Sarah Corbett. The goal is to use craft to change or improve on what is wrong with our world, a goal clearly contained in Lynn Deal’s artistic pursuits, to create with solidarity and respect, to provoke thought and help women to express themselves in ways that might include producing in private spaces, on a small scale, rather than commercial production.

The artist and carding tool, carded wool.

Cooperative work is included – with many eyes and hands creating statements that can range from environmental concerns, to feminist issues, to anti-war unity. The medium of knitting or crocheting is entering the public space, with yarn bombing or other kinds of textile decoration. So is quilting, and in some instances embroidery. (Ref.)

Marianne Jorgensen Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank (2006) (Protest against the war in Iraq – the pink covering consists of more than a 4000 pink squares- 15 x 15 centimeters – knitted by volunteers from Denmark, the UK, USA and several other countries.)

Craft has historically been a mode of direct action. Take one of the earliest examples, the 19th century Female Society of Birmingham, whose members sewed innocuous “work bags” (traditional holding your embroidery needles and sewing) which they filled with anti-slavery literature and sold across Britain (over 2000 of them!) The materials were carefully chosen – East India silk, satin and/or cotton – materials that were thought not to be produced from slave labour. Each bag contained a card that stated the choice of materials and asked the new owner to boycott slave labour goods. With the proceeds the women supported the anti-slavery movement in the 1820-30s. (Ref.)

The late 19th century women’s suffrage movement used handcrafted banners and embroidered sashes, with the Arts and Crafts Movement interacting with the women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Europe, in the campaign for the right to vote. The same could be found among the women of America’s National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1869. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution and used symbolic colors (yellow for light, white for purity and purple for loyalty) on their hand-crafted banners.

Nashville Equal Suffrage Association 1920 ( Source Tennessee State Museum)

There are also many versions of quilts made to protest social issues, from Georgian slave Harriet Power‘s story quilts,

the work of slave descendants at the community of Gee’s Bend in Alabama, to the 1980 International Honor Quilt, instigated by Judy Chicago, that honored mythological and real women as well as women’s organizations in its 549 quilted triangular pieces.

International Honor Quilt (University of Louisville/Hite Art Institute (2013)

Lynn Deal’s studio

There is also the incredible quilting work by Gina Adams, a descendant of both Indigenous (Ojibwe) and colonial Americans. She produced a series of quilts (2015) called The Broken Treaty, cutting out the letters of entire Broken treaties–these were pacts written by the United States and Canadian Government and signed by Native American Tribes — from calico cotton, the fabric that made White Americans very wealthy. The letters are placed on weathered antique quilts that were made during the time the treaties were signed.

Embroidery takes on new forms in the hands (and from the creative brains) of contemporary craftivist artists. Australian artist Michelle Hamer, for example, provokes with image of billboards, stitched to great effect. I fear her 2013 work is taking on renewed relevance in our current Supreme Court debacle.

Michelle Hamer (2013) We’re All Gonna Die, Girls.

Craft, fiber and methods of working fiber, clearly have been transformed into a tool of communication with others outside the domestic sphere. Artists use their skills in manipulating fabric and wool to create not just something beautiful, or interesting, useful or simply endearing, but to make us think about what it takes to make our world a better place. In its public appearances, from pink hats worn at demonstrations to AIDS quilts laid out at the Mall, crafts have assumed an important role in American society.

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Upwards Endeavors (2015)

I am fond of beads. As a teenager one of my most cherished possessions was a multi-string bracelet of tiny glass beads, faded pinks and purples. It had been acquired from hippies who proudly proclaimed themselves grave robbers, stealing pieces of the ornamental flower wreaths fashioned from these beads from old French and Italian graveyards, long exposed to the weather and neglect. The frisson of such a violation added to the attraction of a 16-year old, no doubt.

Years later, while traveling through Northwest Africa in 1971, hunting at bazaars for antique Millefiori glass beads (not the fake ones for tourists) that had been part of commercial trade during colonial times, became a game.

Nowadays, jewelry made by a talented friend using Venetian glass, is a source of joy.

I have mostly associated embroidered beadwork with indigenous art, a pillar of Native American tribal design, for example. European colonial settlers brought glass beads, replacing previous beads made of copper, shells or bone. This led to adaptive, often ingenious changes in working with the materials:

“Faced with the challenge of integrating these new materials, women turned to familiar basketry techniques for ideas, adapting traditional basket-making methods to weave beads and native-made fibers into bags, caps, straps, and hair ornaments. Visual evidence for this can be seen in the motifs found on 19th-century woven bead work from the Pacific Northwest, which correlate directly to those used by women on their baskets and flat bags. This presentation will provide examples of loose-warp woven beadwork from three Native American tribes in the greater Pacific Northwest: the Tlingit of Southeastern Alaska, who focused more on embroidered beadwork than loose warp weaving; the Wasco of the Columbia River Valley, who wove beads until about 1915 at which point loose warp weaving techniques were gradually replaced by beading “on a frame;” and the Pit River Indians of Northern California, who created some of the most idiosyncratic objects, shaping their tubular bags in unusual ways.” (Ref.)

Bead embroidery can be found in Japanese history as well, and has played a significant role in African cultural history. Little did I know how much bead work was also represented in European work, even though I knew about the commercial bead manufacturing centers in Italy. Pretty mind-blowing, when you look at examples like these from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection:

King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza with allegories of the four continents, after 1662. British. Silk thread on silk, beads, H. 8 x L. 31 1/2 x W. 27 in. (20.3 x 80 x 68.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Clearly Lynn Deal has a lot to work with, having found her own ways of integrating beads into her sculptures. They are elements of joy, of playful attention magnets, small messengers of harmony against backdrops of unease. Work that makes you try and find a balance, as it was intended to do.

Then again, Frankie, the pet rabbit, couldn’t care less – having free run of the studio makes for a happy life, no further improvements needed.

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A sense of place

My twitter feed regularly sends me images of three artists, without me ever having followed those sources. Riddle me that! I like two of them very much (Max Ernst and Varo Remedios,) but had never heard of the third one, Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898). He was a Russian Realist (in contrast to the other two surrealists,) and I now recall I included one of his paintings in a recent blog about people wandering through landscapes. But that’s it.

Pine on sand # Heuer #photography

In any case, looking at Shishkin’s landscapes, painted around the area of St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia, I was struck how many of them resided in variations in my photographic archives, without ever having set foot into Russia. The scenes were photographed in Europe and North America. The fact that similarities can be salient, just as dissimilarities can, seemed noteworthy in light of the fact that I know so many people who are currently moving away or have moved away from places they have called home for years. Not everything will be unfamiliar!

Stone in the forest # Heuer #photography

For the younger ones, the reasons for moving have to do with increased flexibility of the workplace, allowing to do your job long distance. For those I am most familiar with, a continual change of location implies mostly excitement, and has also been the norm between college, grad school, post docs and so on. Relocation of us older folks is a different thing – often done to be closer to family, to be of mutual support, sometimes done to find environments easier on an aging body or to escape into (visions of) tranquility. Not an entirely new phenomenon, if you think of the many East Coast “snowbirds” who annually tracked to Florida in the winter from the Northern states (again, I am aware it is the privilege of a certain class.)

Oaks # Heuer #photography

You give up a few things when you move. Your familiarity with the lay-out of your city and environs, your ease of finding your way, your knowledge of where to find things (in shops or nature,) not to mention your doctors, dentists, and last but not least the friends who remained (this latter one is for older people often a reason to move rather than to stay – people around you are no longer.) And your sense of place, your attachment to and pride in the place you call home, will be disturbed, although, as we will see, it can be reestablished on the other end with remarkable fluency.

Mounds # Heuer #photography

There is a whole research enterprise in various scientific disciplines that explores the (dis)advantages of a sense of place that comes mostly from having lived somewhere for a long time, if not all of your life. (I got my information here and here.) Definitions vary as do approaches, it can be confounding to try and get a grasp of it.

For psychologists, it is the experience of a person in a particular setting, feelings and thoughts included. In geography, it’s called topophilia, the affective bond between people and place or setting. For historians it is a sense of place that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom, reinforced by what might be called a sense of recurring events. For anthropologists, place attachment is more than an emotional and cognitive experience, it includes cultural beliefs and practices that link people to place, a symbolic element tying us to shared history.

The tree in the field # Heuer #photography

Let’s stick with the psychology: the feelings and thoughts about where you live. They can be influenced by numerous bonds. There is the biographical tie, you were born here or lived here for a long time. The bond can be based on spiritual relationships, you feel a sense of belonging within your people’s history, for example. You can be tied to a place for ideological reasons (let’s skip that…) or due to an accepted narrative (creation myths, stories of origin.) And, importantly, the relationship can be a commodity: you choose a place based on desirable attributes, grand children high on the list (!), life style preferences, health advantages and so on. Last but not least the tie to a place can be involuntary, a bond by material pressures, constrained by economic dependency or lack of choice (and I am not going into the legislative proposals floating around that in the future women will only be allowed to leave a state if they prove they are not pregnant.)

Sandy Coastline #ivanshishkin # Realism

Sandy Coastline # Heuer #photography

Note, for all of you who move(d) with mixed feeling: the element of choice is one that can (re)establish a sense of place, a positive attachment. Given that our notions of a somewhat ideal community change across the life span, it follows that we would want to relocate towards something closer to our ideals. It might not be easy, but then being stuck in an increasingly lonely place isn’t either. It might not be your first choice, but at least you have a choice, in contrast to people displaced by involuntary reasons.

Mirror Lake shrouded in mist # Heuer #photography

The research bears out that you increase the likelihood of positive attachment to a place with increased participation in a community, with benefits for the environment in return (the more attached people are to a place, the more they invest to protect that place, urban or rural). I think community participation is particularly difficult if you are older, and now constrained by the pandemic dangers for many of us. Nonetheless, focussing on ways to integrate with people who share interests or political goals might be the way to go. Joining walking tours to explore the architecture or history of a place might help. Even if you loathe group activities or don’t feel up to take history courses, there are ways to familiarize yourself with the place on one’s own. Worthwhile exploring!

(And on a totally selfish note: I miss every single one of you who is moving/has moved…. you are putting a dent in my sense of place! And welcome to the ones moving in!)

Grass # Heuer #photography

Music by a quintessential Russian composer. (And YES I do not cancel Russian artists if they have no affinity to current events.) “The 14th symphony is scored for soprano, bass, and orchestra and dedicated to English composer Benjamin Britten. Comprised of 11 texts by Federico Garcia Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke, the theme of mortality unites these varied texts. The result is a highly unorthodox, engrossing reminder that death is always waiting.”

So we might as well make the best of our remaining time, moving and all!)

Forest Landscape # Heuer #photography

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From Pervasion to Perversion

per·va·sion/pərˈvāZH(ə)n/noun

  1. the process of spreading through and being present or perceived in every part of something. Oxford Languages Dictionary

I wish the sculptures I am presenting today would not trigger associations of something malevolent, if not evil, pervading the space around us, creeping in, sliding through, erupting through protective barriers and consuming the space we inhabit. It is remarkable work by a Brazilian artist, Henrique Oliveira, and does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the national and international assaults on human rights, or the authoritarian creep, or the misogynistic and racist slime surrounding us, but I could not force my brain to see it any other way. Then again, that is what extraordinary art does, mirroring the world as is.

It’s not just gloom. It really is a state of fear, or worry morphing into anger, if not rage, when encountering the next bit of horrifying news. People are killed in wars, killed by heat in Asia not known in these dimensions, needlessly dying of a virus for lack of organized protection. Now we learn that the old Christian men (and woman) in power in this country have decided to take rights away that they consider not “historically rooted,” tolerating the death of countless women, never mind their loss of control over their own bodies.

per·ver·sion/pərˈvərZHən/noun

  1.  the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended. Oxford Languages Dictionary

The draft of a leaked majority Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, points to a future that perverts everything liberal democracies have fought for, to an extent that is hard to fathom. It is not just about the right to safe, legal abortions. Alito’s draft opinion explicitly criticizes Lawrence v. Texas (legalizing sodomy) and Obergefell v. Hodges (legalizing same-sex marriage). He says that, like abortion, these decisions protect phony rights that are not “deeply rooted in history.” (Which is, by the way, exactly how Justice Robert Taney argued in the Dred Scott decision: “no African-American, free or enslaved, had ever enjoyed the rights of a citizen under the Constitution. For more than a century leading up to the ratification of the Constitution, blacks had been regarded as beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race … and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”)

Never mind the selective reading of “history.” It was not until the 1820s – 1840s that abortion got criminalized in this country. The right to determine the fate of women’s own body has been assigned for over 50 years now, 20 % of our 244 years as nation. Not enough history? More importantly, look at the 9th amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by people.” Evolving rights were acknowledged, because not all future developments could be known.

If you connect the assault on the right to privacy, the pointer to the historic past, and the discussion found in conservative think tanks and law schools, we have to worry about assaults on all the rights that have been granted: the right to racially-integrated schools highly among them, to inter-racial marriage, to gay marriage, to life-saving gender-affirming medical care, and the right to vote in fair and free elections.

What sounds like nostalgic longing for a past by retrogressive justices is really a toxic power tool to re-establish complete control over those who served in prior centuries: the poor, the non-white, the 3/5 of person, the female contingents of our societies that were subjected to the preferred standing of property-owning males.

I recommend to read this Atlantic article by Adam Server for the details of Alito’s SC decision draft. I urge, if you have the time, to go back to an older book, that presciently spelled out what we are embarking on, while analyzing similar movements of the past: Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt wrote this book after World War II had ended, fully convinced that even darker days were ahead, with totalitarian ideals going to surge and rule. Maybe her timing was bit off, but what she feared is slowly emerging across our world. Looking just at our own country, the U.S, inequality has risen to unthinkable heights, elections are under attack in systematic ways never seen before, from simply not accepting election outcomes to manufacturing every possible obstacle to free and fair voting, or means of influencing voters via hidden funds and manipulated mass media.

We do live in a world in which it seems, as she wrote, “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.” In fact, you don’t even have to organize the masses any longer, if you have found ways to suppress them. Arendt looked back at the history of Nazi Germany in particular, but also European racism and imperialism in general, and warned: Human rights are not to be taken for granted. “To have such rights, she observed, you must not only live in a state that can guarantee them; you must also qualify as one of that state’s citizens. The stateless, and those classified as noncitizens, or non-people, are assured of nothing. The only way they can be helped or made secure is through the existence of the state, of public order, and of the rule of law.“

Think through who qualified as non-citizens in this country before the addition of the 14th amendment to the Constitution. For that matter, refresh you memory of all the “historically rooted” rights women did not have in 1787. Here’s a good reminder. And here is what an evolving legal system that incorporates the enlightenment of our times looks like: White women couldn’t vote before 1920. Women of color couldn’t vote until 1965. Interracial marriage was illegal until 1967. Americans with disabilities act was signed in 1990. Being subjected, subjugated, controlled again seems to be the nostalgic dream of the men who are now able to make the law – or, as I see it, a mockery of it.

Alas, Hannah Arendt also reminds us of another aspect of history – then and now. She pointed to the passivity of many people in the face of authoritarian rule, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda. “In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” And talking about propaganda – the airwaves, 24 hours after the drop, are filled with uproar over the act of leaking, conveniently suppressing the core of the message, the threatened loss of constitutional rights.

I truly fear, though, that after some initial ruckus, that passivity will hold here and now again. DO prove me wrong, to my eternal delight.

All photographs above are from Oliveira’s work, referenced on his website.

Images below are a compilation, shown before, from my series Tied to the Moon, about women’s experiences and life events, for timely reasons.

Music today is wishful thinking.

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Unintended Consequences

My German readers currently have the opportunity to visit an exhibition called Macht! Licht! at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The title is ambiguous – it could mean “Turn on the Light!” or “Power!Light!” The latter English translation is also ambiguous: power can refer to electricity per se, or to the uses of electric light in the context of surveillance, monitoring, torture or even destruction. (Ab)using power in the political sense.

You figure out how I took these photos of my shadow….

A description of the exhibitions contents:

Based on selected works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, a fascinating spectrum of works of light art is presented in the darkened hall of the museum, the conceptual levels of reflection of which focus on the following (socio-)political areas: utopia/dystopia; ecology/biology; economics; violence/power; control/monitoring; advertising/manipulation; enlightenment/obfuscation; border/exclusion; public space etc.

I have obviously not seen the exhibition, but was made curious by one of the projects that is mentioned in the write-ups of the show. A collaborative team of artist Nana Petzet and biologist(s) explore the unintended consequences of artificial light used in cultural contexts – light shows during outside concerts, public nighttime events, festivals of light, etc.

Old Elbtunnel,Hamburg

Portland Airport

Parking Lot Boston, MA

The project, stretched across some years, was called Lichtfalle Hamburg (Light Trap – the link can be read in English.) It mimicked (in greatly reduced fashion with a single boat) the conditions of blue light that the City of Hamburg uses during Harbor festivals that illuminate the public landscape and night sky.

Photocredit: Helge Mundt

(“Cruise Days” they are called. It is one of those festivals, where 12,000 light sources – mostly blue fluorescent tubes – are strung in the port area and the HafenCity. Over a period of five weeks, with the aid of 40 km of cables and a team of 40 assistants, they were mounted onto buildings, quay sections, cranes, jetties, pontoons, launches, ferries, tugboats, docks, operational vehicles, trees, bridges etc.)

Photocredit: Hamburger Hafen Marketing

What would the light do to insect populations? The team counted and observed the behavior of about 16 orders of insects, moths among them but also large swarms of dayflies that usually hover above the river. Surprise, the results were of great concern. Insects are attracted to these light sources and fly around them to the point of such exhaustion that they don’t find their way home, basically dying in situ – something called the “vacuum cleaner effect. The land on surfaces and dry out, when exhausted, unable to reproduce before their death.

Hamburg Elbphilharmonie

This matters tremendously for pollination in times when we already see a huge reduction in numbers of insects due to destroyed habitats and shifts in temperatures that many species cannot adapt to. In other words, those lovely evenings celebrated with light, lifting our spirits, have truly bad consequences for agricultural environments

Old Elbtunnel, Hamburg – San Francisco Airport

Light pollution is often mentioned in terms of disrupting sleep patterns in humans and flight patterns for migratory birds, leading to huge losses there as well. We now have to add insect to the list. Here is a short intro to light pollution by National Geographic, Light Pollution 101. It discusses the problem of waste of energy as well.

Hamburg Elbphilharmonie – Hamburg Harbor Water Recycling Plant

Here in Portland, OR we have the annual Winter Light Festival that brings light art to the river for a short period of time, and the Willamette Light Brigade, who, in their words, harness the power of artful lighting to transform the cityscape by lighing bridges and advocating for the importance of night-time identity and place-making. There is WinterFest with light art in Central Oregon, and there are numerous night markets around the year that add extra lighting to city scapes that have already a high dose of light pollution through street lighting and shops windows etc.

Staircase in Ljubljana, Slovenia

For those interested what daily excessive use of light in a regular manner does to our environment, here is a relatively recent article in Nature that shows ho much research is going on in the environmental and ecological sciences. Truly interesting. And here are pictures of Portland’s light pollution and a link to the International Dark Sky Week 2022 (April 22 -30) that gives tips about how to reduce light pollution in our own households.

Photographs today are of instances where my eyes got caught by light patterns, inside as well as outside. Some of these are from Hamburg, where the Light Trap project took place.

Staircase in Paula Modersohn Becker Musem in Bremen – Stage scenery in Portland Armory

We have for the longest associated light with something positive. It offers protection, carves out social spaces, secures movement at night. Light art certainly has an enthusiastic following. It looks like we need to ask some serious questions about what the consequences are and was we are willing or should sacrifice in order to pay environmental protection more than lip service.

Advert in San Francisco – Art in Montreal – Lit Sign at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island

Here is a video that shows some of the work shown in Macht!Licht! and some other European light art. The language is German, but the images speak for themselves, Guantanomo reconstruction of a white torture chamber included.

Frei Hafen Hamburg

And here is Hamburg’s son, Brahms, played at the Elbphilharmonie – the building in some of the photos above. Pink lights and all….

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Heading to Hillsboro

The Oregon Humanities offers a terrific program called Dear Stranger. It is an annual letter-exchange project that connects Oregonians with each other, to share bits about their lives, their experiences and beliefs. You send a letter in and they randomly swap it for another one sent back to you. This year’s topic revolves around care: who cares about what, whom, where do you see care and where its absence. You can still join, the deadline is in June, I believe.

I wish I had gotten one of these letters, years ago, from someone living in Hillsboro. It would have helped me discover a vibrant community, devoted to the arts, caring for education and inclusivity. It’s sort of absurd that I have hiked and photographed in neighboring Jackson Bottom Wetlands Preserve for years on end, and never ever set foot into the town nearby, so easily reached by the MAX Blue line or by car with plenty of free parking.

Maybe you all knew all along. But I am not the only one who had no clue what’s on offer. When I visited the Glenn and Viola Walters Cultural Arts Center by invitation of the gallery specialist, Karen de Benedetti, I uttered something along the lines of “I didn’t know this existed!” This seems to be a sentiment frequently voiced by visitors right next to the belief that the building is a church. Which it was, and a beautiful one inside at that.

The Walters opened its doors in 2004 and has since served the community in many ways. Like the Parks and Recreation, Cultural Arts Division, all the Walters’ programs are part of the City of Hillsboro. What used to be a sanctuary is now a performance space with a stage, a fully equipped, concert-quality sound booth, and a program that includes something for every interest, from music to dance to the spoken word, diverse genres and cultural perspectives included. Of the 16 performances in each annual series, 6 are grant funded by the Performance Series Grant Program, providing opportunity for local groups to join the series. There are also other grant programs that support local artists and arts organizations. Cultural Arts Manager Michele McCall-Wallace is one of the forces at work to shape these programs at the Walters as well as the town’s cultural arts action plan that envisions future developments.

Entrance Hall and Performance Space at the Walters

The large space with its beautiful wood-work ceiling arches can also be rented for social occasions, from weddings, to quinceañeras, to celebratory luncheons, fundraisers and so on. Another, perhaps even more important way to serve the community, is the educational program offered by the center.

Melissa Moore is responsible for the education and outreach program which offers a wide variety of learning opportunities, from painting, to dance, theatre, music, drawing, and more. Among them is a fully equipped ceramics studio that welcomes students of all levels and provides access to its kilns for those enrolled in the classes.

From pre-school to seniors, with scholarships available, art education is prized, as is community involvement. The center, in partnership with the Washington County Office for Aging, Disability, and Veteran Services, offers a Memory Café, for example, which is designed for people with memory loss, early stage Alzheimer’s or a related dementia, and their families. Trained guides help participants experience art in a gentle environment.

Various local-non-profits engage with youths in programs at the Walters, in ways that contribute both knowledge and occasional gifts. The Hillsboro police department, for example, donated and fitted helmets at the end of a class that had kids create designs and then paint a skateboard. Skateboards reminded me of Hillsboro author’s Blake Nelson’s novel Paranoid Park, made into a movie by Gus van Sant. Remember? The film won, among others, the Cannes Film Festival’s special 60th anniversary prize. Nelson these days has an interesting travel blog, by the way.

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Gallery space upstairs and downstairs

I had come to explore the current exhibition, Fire & Ice: Magic from the Earth, at the Walters’ art gallery which covers a set of spaces upstairs and downstairs, wide open and more intimate, respectively. Sensitively and tightly curated by de Benedetti, the exhibit alone is worth a trip out to Portland’s Western neighbor. The work is divided between ceramics and photography, the latter of frozen constellations captured by notable PNW fine art photographer Don Jacobson. Some of the icy landscapes might make it into the history annals, if the current warming climate trends continue (never mind this strange snowy April weather.)

Don Jacobson: Eagle Creek #1

Don Jacobson Ice Cathedral – Lower Multnomah Falls #2

Don Jacobson – Porcelain Basin #2

The ceramics were created by the folks at East Creek Art, a community art studio in Willamina, OR, that serves students, artists and educators, offering an introduction to and use of the West’s first Anagama wood burning kiln. Making these objects requires firing the wares in a collaborative process that takes several days of round-the-clock stoking, with flames and ashes creating the incredible patterning on the art.

Aubrey Sloan and Joe Robinson Flotsam

Cooper Jeppesen Tripod Vase

From left to right: Jenna Lee Wood-fired ZigZag Planter; Katy McFadden A Union; Chris Schwartz Wood fried Temmoku Vase; Elijah Pilkington Altered Stoneware Vase;

Jess “Squirrel” Komaromy Old Rosie.

What struck me most was not just the beauty of individual pieces, but the communal richness of the show: art ranged from works of absolute beginners to masters of the form, reinforcing rather than distracting from each other. Instructing new generations in an ancient Asian methodology.

Cooper Jeppesen East Creek Basket #1

Lew Allen Ashfall (Excerpt) Carrie Gibbs Oregon’s Elusive Bigfoot 2020 “Barely Made It!”

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El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho – Miguel de Cervantes

About a quarter of Hillsboro’s population (in total now well over 100.000 inhabitants, thus Oregons 5th largest city) could probably read Cervantes in the original, given their Hispanic background. I can only manage in translation: “One who reads and walks a lot, sees and knows a lot.” And walk we did during this visit, as well as drive, guided by yet another friendly person willing to devote some of his work day to showing me around.

Karl LeClair, a recent transplant from Idaho, is the new Public Art Supervisor in the Hillsboro Parks & Recreation universe. He guided me to three points of interest beyond the Walters, relevant to the appreciation of public art. (Further reading, in agreement with Cervantes, will involve this link to the Public Art Archive, a fount of information.)

We looked at the Hillsboro Civic Center and the adjacent Plaza first. The few remaining Sequoias across the street are reflected in the building, and a bold piece on its walls traces the needle branches.

Brian Borrello Sequoia Frond (2004)

The Plaza itself is a lively place when the weather warms up and Tuesday night markets resume. It is lined with basalt boulders that reveal their secrets with differing degrees of ease – 30 petroglyphs have been carved by Lillian Pitt (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs/ Wasco/ Yakama) in an installation called Riverbed. It is a timely reminder that the city is located on Tualatin Kalapuya (Atfalati) land (I wrote about some of the Kalapuyan tribal history earlier here.)

Lillian Pitt Riverbed

Inside the Civic Center the visitor is greeted with colorful art on the elevator doors, glass art on the stair well, and a gallery space, the Shirley Huffman Auditorium Gallery, that contains permanent as well as changing exhibitions, currently showing work of some of the faculty that teaches at the Walters.

Hampton Rodriguez Diversity

Linda Haworth Father Time (2004) – John Groth Grand Staircase (2004) – Walters’ Faculty show Creative Brilliance – Skateboard included!

Another gallery space can be found at the recently opened Hidden Creek Community Center, a stream-lined, state-of-the-art facility for sports, education and meeting rooms. OPSIS Architecture collected tons of well deserved awards across the last two years for this first-of-its-kind mass timber building that blends into the adjacent forest. Situated close to a site designated for a large affordable housing development, the wood and glass structure is functional and inviting. Better still, with a large solar array on the roof of the community wing, natural ventilation, water conservation measures, and balanced daylighting, the Community Center is enrolled in the Energy Trust of Oregon’s Path to Net-Zero program and is expected to achieve net-zero energy use.

The public art above and below is by acclaimed Seattle public artist Norie Sato, a front entry steel wall with embedded tiny mirrors that reflect light and a free standing sculpture, E+MergenCe: Energy and Memory.

There are clearly numerous decentralized spaces for art in this city, and, as LeClair told me, conversations have often looked to find ways to coordinate and harmonize the isolated showings and offerings. As a City of Hillsboro program, the Cultural Arts Division of Parks & Recreation operates under the guidance of the Hillsboro Art and Culture Council (HACC) which is a citizen advisory committee appointed by the Mayor and City Council. The City’s Cultural Arts Action Plan captures the spirit of critical mass within Hillsboro advocating for the growth of cultural assets that benefits the local community and guides the work of Cultural Arts in serving the community. 

Here are some of the upcoming programs at the Walters – just so you get a glimpse of the variety on offer.

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A Thousand Words June 7 – July 22, 2022

Joy Cartier, Mark Dunst, Jane Kearns, Stacey Stoudenmeyer, & Eliza Williams

On display Jun 7 – Jul 22

First Tuesday’s (June 7 & July 5)

Like the pages of a book, artists Joy Cartier, Mark Dunst, Jane Kearns, Stacey Stoudenmeyer and Eliza Williams explore the messy, imperfect space between thoughts and words. Layering paper, paint, and meaning over time, the artists merge simplicity and complexion, with captured emotions and expressions to tell abstracted stories.

Upcoming programs:

First Tuesday Art Walk, May 3rd 5:00 – 8:00 pm (Walters)

Lee Kelly dedication, May 17th 11:30 – 1:00 pm (Public Works building)

Rasika Dance Friday, May 20th 6:30 – 7:30 pm (Walters)

Barro Mestizo Friday, May 6th 7:30 pm (Walters)

Grupo Borikuas Friday, June 10th  7:30 pm (Walters)

Rejoice Friday, April 22nd 7:30 pm (Walters)

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***

And then there was the unexpected detour to the Hillsboro Public Works facility. Think transportation, sanitary sewer, and storm drainage, housed in a modern structure, designed by the same LRS architectural group that built the Civic Center. In front, an unwieldy, huge sculpture emerges through mist and rain, seemingly dropped from the sky like an alien crustacean. It stands there stubbornly, daring us to find a linkage, any association at all, to the building behind it, which I failed to come up with. Not that it mattered: Lee Kelly’s 30 year-old Untitled (Omark) piece breathes freely on its own. A powerful, abstract Cor-Ten steel structure stretches all of its 14x26x36 feet size into space, solidly anchored on stout columns, beckoning with openings under its arches.

Rumor has it that the sculpture by Kelly, who passed away last month, was in limbo at its old location and destined for the steelyard. Originally commissioned by Omark Industries, (Oregon Saw Chain Company in its beginnings) it stood at their business site along Macadam Ave, at the Willamette river. When property changed hands nobody knew what to do with the piece. Kelly’s representative, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, came to the rescue, as did Hillsboro’s Public Art Program, and this new location was secured. A dedication ceremony is slated for May 17th.

Lee Kelly Untitled (Omark) (1992)

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Portland, OR April 2022

“Dear Stranger,

I hope this letter finds you well and able to explore some of what our state has to offer. I immigrated to the US in 1981, and have lived in PDX since 1986. I am interested in practically everything, except sports and cooking. (Yes, people like that do exist.)

Art has a special place in my world and I admit that I have not been particularly informed about what Oregon provides state-wide, or even in my own vicinity. My bad. One of the remedies was an exploration of Hillsboro, a small town west of Portland.

Since the topic of this year’s pen-pal exchange is “care,” let me report that I just discovered how much Hillsboro and its organizations, its art- and public service-related staff, all care about the arts. Work for the arts. Educate about the arts. Invest in the arts.

There seems to be an implicit understanding that private and public art does not just enrich physical environments, or boost local economies. Art can raise community pride, promote civic discourse, connect neighbors and their communities in all their diversity and/or shared history. I am grateful that a single proactive gallery curator got me out to a place where all of this seems to be happening! Let me do you the favor in turn – head to Hillsboro!

Sincerely,

Another Stranger.”

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The Glenn and Viola Walters Cultural Arts Center

150 E. Main Street, Hillsboro, Oregon 97123

Hours of Operation Monday through Thursday: 9 am to 9 pm Friday: 9 am to 5 pm Saturday & Sunday: Closed except for special events & private rentals 

Exhibit Reception for Fire& Ice: Tuesday, May 3, 5 to 8 pm

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Exquisite Gorge II: Of Harm and Healing

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people’s bodies, from communities, as if there’s no limit, as if there’s no consequence to how we’re taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people’s bodies are breaking. We are taking too much. – Naomi Klein This changes everything.

***

Golden sun, ewes and their lambs dotting the landscape, swaths of mustard-seed flowers radiating yellow against blue skies, all after days of hailstorms and dark clouds – the drive down from Portland to a rural hamlet East of Eugene felt like a journey into spring. A red barn inviting, a small river gurgling in the backyard, blue wood hyacinths beckoning under shady trees – it seemed like I had landed in a fairy tale. Mind you, having grown up in a small village, I am under no illusion about the down-sides of remote country living, but in spring there is no more enchanting place to be.

The artist at the Mohawk River in her backyard, with house and studio.

I was visiting with one of the participating artists of Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project, invited to see her studio and talk about plans for a fiber art sculpture to be exhibited on August 6th, 2022 together with multiple other ones, all aligned to celebrate successive parts of the Columbia river.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

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Ophir El-Boher somehow manages to combine a multitude of roles, all with a seeming serenity that makes you immediately breathe more easily in her company. She is an apparel designer educated in multidisciplinary design at the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts in Israel, where she grew up. She received her M.F.A. in Collaborative Design, Sustainable Fashion from Pacific Northwest College of Art three years ago. She is also a studio artist, an educator and scholar, and last but not least a social activist concerned with social justice issues in general and ethical-sustainable models of fashion in particular.

El-Boher’s studio is a joyful, bright place, much like its occupant. Surfaces are covered with everything from whimsical postcards, mementos, samples, instructions, to design sketches, philosophical treatises and clothing materials, echoing the multiple perspectives that inform her creativity.

Here is a video of the artist describing her approach, filmed in connection with a recent solo exhibition of her design patterns at Fuller Rosen Gallery.

The artist embraces fashion as much as she is aware of the destructive aspects associated with the production of ever more clothes. In our form of economy the textile industry plays a huge role in pushing the economic core unit, the commodity, to keep sales up. One way to seduce people into ever increasing consumption is to lure them with newness, and fashion delivers exactly that novelty, suggesting your social inclusion and/or attractiveness will be enhanced if you follow the trend of the moment. Consumption stimulates production, and the other way round – so what’s to complain about?

Plenty, it turns out, certainly since the first Industrial Revolution which introduced automated cotton, worsted wool and yarn spinning in factories in Europe, where cheap labor (including child labor, with children exempted from compulsory education) was used to spin materials harvested by American slaves. 10-hour work days 6 days a week, work-related accidents and illness-inducing working conditions were the norm. Fashion, once a domain for the wealthy, was quickly discovered to serve profit interests quite well, directed at ever larger swaths of populations, ever more cheaply made for quick discarding, and ever more cheaply sold to larger numbers of people who got addicted to constant change.

This is not all in the past, of course. If you look at the conditions of textile workers in the developing world, where production has been outsourced, you find everything from workers being exploited and harassed, made sick by enormous environmental pollution, to coordinated efforts to drive wages down and minimize environmental consciousness. Numerous non-governmental organizations, like the German FEMNET, that I happen to be familiar with, are currently trying to observe and report on the conditions in textile production. They push for new laws like the European supply chain law adopted by the EU on February 23, 2022 which establishes rules for compliance with environmental and human rights standards in global value chains, with more work to be done to combat gender inequalities and discrimination in global value chains. A sustainability movement, however, has a long way to go.

***

El-Boher’s focus is on another aspect of the problem with fashion’s churn to discard the old and buy the new. Her concern can be easily visualized if you think of textiles (and really most of the stuff we buy) as a link in a mode of linear production. The line goes from extraction of the resources needed to manufacture a good, to production, to distribution, to consumption, and finally, to disposal. Eventually the resources we extract will run out and disposal of the evermore accumulating waste existentially harms the planet’s health. Here is a short, clever video intro to the concept. And here is a longer article outlining the many factors that need to be checked to see if clothing can truly be called “sustainably made.”

We can deal with some of this, El-Boher argues, by changing this system from a linear to a circular one, by reclaiming what already exists, and refashioning it into something that has more value: upcycling discarded clothes into new ones, or into different objects, or incorporating them into art.

Upcycle: transitive verb: to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item : to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value) – Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I was somehow reminded of the old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, one of the original upcyclers, spinning straw into gold. Remember the story? Miller oversells his daughter to the king, claiming she has magical power. She is locked in the palace, required to spin straw, best used to line the bottom of the bull-pen, to gold, desired to line the coffers of the king. She gets help by a little man appearing out of nowhere, having to bribe him with first a necklace, then a ring, and finally the promise to give him her first-born. King marries miller’s daughter, baby arrives, little man comes to collect and for some inexplicable reason gives her a three day respite to find out his name which would release her from her promise. Spies hear him, again inexplicably, shouting his name around the fire side, and he angrily splits himself apart when he realizes he lost his prize.

Upcycling, re-using in general, is an important first step towards sustainability. (I wrote about the Buy Nothing network earlier here.) However, it, just like our own decision-making as consumers to buy less or buy mindfully from acceptable sources, puts the burden of changing an unsustainable system onto the individual. It cannot be the whole story. The necessary systemic changes are a different, more complicated matter, requiring a close look at capitalism as a causal link in fashion.

***

El-Boher is trained as a collaborative artist and revels in her work with other creative minds. She found the perfect match for the Exquisite Gorge II project in her community partner, the Desert Fiber Arts organization in Kennewick, WA. The non-profit guild was founded in 1974 and has served as a center for teaching and experiencing weaving, spinning, knitting, basketry, felting and more. Their goal is

  • To promote participation in and appreciation for fine craftsmanship related to the fiber arts.
  • To encourage the development and interest of the craft field within the arts, in education, therapy, marketing, and the community as a whole.

and workshops, equipment and individual and community support have made it a flourishing environment for creative expression. The artist told me that the members of the guild who committed to working with her on the river project were supplying brilliant ideas and practical solutions to the plan that they developed as a team. She is this week engaged in a series of in-person workshops at the Guild that help in creating the varied materials needed for the design. Each one of them more interesting than the next.

The design grew from early conversations about the history of the land and the people around the upper parts of the Columbia. Entire populations were displaced due to damming the river, disrupting existentially and culturally important salmon runs and access to the river also for Pacific Northwest tribal nations (I had previously written about the effects of dams on Native American life here). The landscape was changed and wildlife corridors disturbed with the erection of endless electricity towers and later wind turbines. Countless container freight trains arriving from all over Washington State these days are filled to the brim with trash, destined for landfills in Northern OR, Eastern WA and Idaho, which use the emanating methane gas to produce electricity.

There is a need, then, to tell of the harm, and the scale of it, related to the landscape and its inhabitants, harm done by human agency, best represented by human hands. However, and this is part of El-Boher’s vision, those very hands can be involved in healing as well, crafting an alternative future. Her favorite color, blue, just might reappear in unsullied skies, less polluted oceans and a healthy planet when viewed from above.

The team decided to have natural materials depict the intact natural past and possible future of the region and contrasting it with a view of materials and objects that introduced so much environmental destruction. It does so in a way that, in my view, incorporates ALL aspects of the word “to spin.” The original term referred to the act of spinning a thread from raw materials, a fundamental task of many in the Fiber Arts Guild. A different way to understand “to spin” is to think of it as spinning a yarn, telling a tale, which the team does with visual cues. And the very last meaning of the word, rotating around an axis, is intended to be represented as well. The fiber-art design contains six panels that represent harm and healing on alternate sides, spinning around a center axis if there is enough wind and the mechanics can be figured out.

***

Like many Hebrew words, the artist’s first name, Ophir (אופיר,) has different roots, with some sources claiming it refers to gold, wealth, or riches, and other roots denoting a connection to ashes and being exhausted or depleted. “That means that the name Ophir would probably have reminded a Hebrew audience of the fleeting virtues of wealth, or at least the corrupting qualities of material wealth relative to the eternal wealth of knowledge and wisdom.” (Ref.)

Pickled Jeans, my favorite!

Which brings me back to the previously mentioned fairy tale, most famously presented in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm. The story has a much older provenance, though, believed to have emerged in the Bronze Age (4000 years ago!) and can be found across varied cultures from Europe to Asia. Much to unpack and who knows what is right. But one theme is certainly greed, on behalf of all of the men involved, the father, the king, the goblin. Greed for material wealth that can potentially lead to disastrous outcomes.

Another theme is hubris, or overconfidence, cross-culturally often embedded in tales that teach and warn.

There is the issue of sacrifice, often stressed in interpretations of the tale as one that instructs us to appease the gods if we want a good harvest or things to end well in general.

And then there is naming. The goblin offers a way out of the disastrous loss of the child by tying it to something he thinks is unknowable, his name. The tale suggests, though, that you can acquire knowledge, with motivation, due diligence, perhaps a piece of luck contained in Rumpelstiltskin’s overestimation of his own power. What you know, what you face, what you name, will allow self-protection or protection of others. Naming potential evil is the first step to meet its consequences.

This is what this art does: it names. It alerts us to a story, gives us perspective, potentially warns. It spins a tale and offers visions of mending. An indispensable tool in the fight for a more sustainable future.

I know I have cited this particular author a lot lately, but the words apply here as well and seem a fitting pointer to El-Boher’s and her colleagues’ work:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin As Much Truth As One Can Bear (1962.)

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