Art Shows

A View from Here: Elisabeth Jones Art Center

2020-08-21 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

Elisabeth Jones Art Center in Portland, OR, USA invited artists to collaborate on a project called The View from Here in response to a global lock down of communities. For this group exhibition local artists were paired up with international artists and asked to depict each others’ views. This was left open to interpretation. Jaggie Red Jar and I traded thoughts and images. Our paintings visit the realm of portraiture, borrowing images from each other’s social media.

This exhibition is viewable by appointment at Elisabeth Jones Art Center until September 20, 2020.

A portrait of Jaggie Red Jar by Veronica Reeves — My painting of Jaggie’s world.

Presences: Paintings by Veronica Reeves at The Joinery, Portland, Oregon, USA

2018-07-05 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

Presences: Paintings by Veronica Reeves

Reception: Aug. 9, 6-8 pm, 2018

The Joinery

922 SW Yamhill St, Portland, OR 97205

Hours: Monday – Saturday 10-6, Sunday 11-5

Free and open to the public.

In paintings in the traditions of surrealism and abstract expressionism, Veronica Reeves examines the way consciousness exists in layers of emotion, thought, domestic spaces, digital spaces, and wild spaces, questioning the construct of separation. Reeves’s paintings depict figures interacting with landscapes that seem familiar but are unrecognizable, absurd, and dreamlike. Through saturated colors, inverted colors, juxtaposing hard edges with spills, brushwork, and spray paint, Reeves creates visuals of an imaginal realm that reflects our world.

Reeves received her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015 and her BFA from Colorado University at Denver in 2008. She has shown her work nationally and internationally including New York City, Portland (Oregon), Denver, Seattle, Tokyo, and Berlin. Outside of her studio practice, Reeves co-organizes and art shows with Dispersal Collective and Danma vs. V2R2, an artist collaborative. Reeves has had residencies with Signal Fire Arts, Rainmaker Artist Residency, Leland Ironworks, and co-directed Next Gallery in Denver, an artist cooperative gallery. She was an artist-in-residence at Otto Petersen Elementary school during which she co-coordinated a permanent tile-mural project in collaboration with students and staff.

I am interested in the ways in which we create ourselves in relationship to our environment with particular regard to the way we interact with the Earth directly versus the intermediaries that technology and industry become. Painting connects me to an ancient lineage of observation and intuition. By incorporating abstraction, I invite the viewer to invoke the matrix of imagination while at the same time dampening limitations on the identity of figures and landscape.

Artist, Veronica Reeves, Ex Nihilo, abstract expressionism, surrealism, painting, portland, oregon, — Veronica Reeves, Ex Nihilo, 2018, oil, acrylic, and Flashe on canvas, 40″ x 40″

Inaugural Page Space alumni art showcase at PNCA

2017-09-12 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

I am happy to announce that I have a piece on view in Unlimited, an alumni art showcase at Pacific Northwest College of Art. PAGE Space (or the PNCA Alumni Gallery & Exhibition Space) is a dedicated place for the PNCA Alumni community to show their work on the PNCA campus. This salon style show includes work from 85 alumni and will be on view until Nov. 5th. The opening was on Sept. 7th, and I was pleased to see work from students who graduated decades ago, as well as most recent grads. I enjoyed a wonderful intermingling of old and new faces, and the entertainment of matching people up with their work.

PAGE Space is a curatorial project brought together by alumni Lauren Stumpf and Jessie Speiss Werner. Preceding their proposal for this project, there wasn’t a dedicated space for showing alumni work on campus. PNCA has a rich cast of characters among its alumni, along with rising stars who recently graduated. I’m looking forward to the future alumni shows as they will likely develop to be more complex and interesting.

Unlimited at PAGE Space

511 Building – Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design
BridgeLab
511 NW Broadway
Portland, Oregon, 97209

Free and open to the public.

The Goddess Show at Rainmaker Artist Residency

2017-03-29 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

Eryn Boone, (detail) Goddess Arising, 2016, gouache on paper, 30"x30" — Eryn Boone, (detail) Goddess Arising, 2016, gouache on paper, 30″x30″

The Goddess Show

Exhibition run: April 7-29th 2017

Opening reception: Friday, April 7th 6-9pm

Rainmaker Gallery at Rainmaker Artist Residency

2337 NW York St. #201, Portland, OR

Gallery hours by appointment: v2r2please@gmail.com

The Goddess Show, Organized by Rainmaker resident artists Rachel Rosenkoetter and Veronica Reeves, brings together West Coast artists whose work grants audience with feminine divinity and spirituality that is sovereign from patriarchal ideology. Hayley Barker’s shower curtain pieces alter space, filling it with a blissful, divine feminine face. Jason Berlin’s sculptural work consists of banal objects that have been queered, made unfamiliar, yet inviting, in this way framing the limitations of identity within normative gender expectations. Eryn Boone’s prism-esque paintings flow from her paintbrush intuitively and symmetrical without guiding instruments such as a ruler. Her bright, gouache colors are uniquely mixed for each piece of the painting as it unfolds organically, rather than linearly. Rachel Brown-Smith’s visionary paintings seek the essence of what is feminine, the spirit, the divinity held by the body but not limited by the body. Anna Fidler’s Harmonic Convergence depicts women dancing around a cell tower, in celebration of a new era, perhaps one where free flowing information helps us undo limitations to joy. In Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings, she seeks freedom for the female form, representing the figure in an inaccessible way, a space that is obstructed, where the viewer is waiting for permission to be granted. Veronica Reeves explores the feminine and maternal in relationship to environmental crises, evoking empathy for the figures in her paintings and small clay pieces.

Exhibition View – The Goddess Show

Exhibition statement: The Goddess Show seeks to reclaim the feminine, our bodies and the earth as sacred. As artists, we reject the patriarchal religious paradigm’s negation of the physical and sensual world, and the toxic misogyny, body hatred and disregard for the planet that result. Instead, we seek to understand the world as a complex web of interconnection, breaking down binaries that falsely fracture the world into unequal pairs- male and female, spirit and matter, mind and body, reason and emotion.

As sisters and sibs we unite in this crucial moment of cultural and planetary healing to create art objects that embody the Divine Feminine. The Goddess manifests herself as earth mama, destroyer, daughter, warrior, protector, one that renews, mystery, lover, beast, reveler, dark mother. In contemplation of these many aspects, we awaken to a wisdom as old as humanity itself.

Through the combined efforts of our artistic labor, we create here an incomplete portrait, unveiling a few of the many faces of the Goddess like facets in diamond turned under brilliant light.

Hayley Barker – The Goddess Show

Hayley Barker makes gestural, expressive drawings and oil paintings about ecstatic experience, trauma, and nature. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles in venues such as Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Egyptian Art & Antiques, LACA, the Women’s Center for Creative Work, and in the Pacific Northwest at Charles Hartman Fine Art, and Disjecta. New American Painting and The Harvard Divinity Bulletin have featured her paintings. Her work was named the best show in Portland of 2014 by Art Ltd. Magazine and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Oregonian, Willamette Week, Portland Monthly, and Visual Arts Source. This spring she is publishing a book of essays, “Vintage Self Help,” with Cherry & Lucic in Portland, Oregon. The book launch will be featured in the premiere exhibition of Bozo Mag, in Beverly Hills, April 2017.

Jason Berlin – The Goddess Show

Jason Berlin received his BFA from Oregon Collage of Art and Craft and his MFA in Visual Studies at Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon. Berlin works in the medium of oil painting, sculpture, installation, collage, and curation. In 2016 Berlin started Stall Gallery as a curatorial project and in 2016 was awarded six month artist in residency at Rainmaker artist residency in Portland, Oregon. Berlin’s work has been exhibited in numerous art shows in the Pacific Northwest, and in group exhibitions in New York, France, and Vancouver BC. Berlin splits his time between the rural country side of Longview, Washington (his home town) and urban life where he lives in Portland, Oregon.

Eryn Boone – The Goddess Show

Eryn Boone is a Holistic practitioner and artist. She lives with her husband, musician Jackson Boone and their daughter Aura in Astoria, Oregon. Eryn graduated with a BFA in painting from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. Working in gouache on paper, Eryn begins each piece in the center, organically drawing geometries by hand and working her way outwards. She believes that art is alchemical medicine, having great potential to change one’s consciousness by opening portals of healing, love, release, and joy.

Rachel Rosenkoetter – The Goddess Show

Rachel Rosenkoetter is a visual artist living in Portland, Oregon. Born and raised in MO, Brown-Smith received a BFA in Painting from Missouri State University and her Master of Fine Art in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Utilizing painting, collage and installation, her work investigates mysticism and states of being. She is a current resident at Rainmaker Artist Residency.

Anna Fidler – The Goddess Show

Anna Fidler Anna Fidler’s large-scale works on paper are composed of glittery mica-enriched acrylic washes and colored pencils. Her work depicts invented landscapes, mythical happenings, and unseen energy in the universe involving such diverse subject matter as basketball, vampires and Victorian era feminists. Her work has been exhibited worldwide in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Washington D.C and has been shown in The Portland Art Museum’s APEX series, The Boise Art Museum, The Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science, and Art, The University of Southern California, and The Japan Society in New York. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. Fidler has received numerous grants and awards, including an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, a Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant, and Residencies at Painting’s Edge in Idyllwild, California.

Elizabeth Malaska – The Goddess Show

Elizabeth Malaska earned her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). Her work has been exhibited nationally at various institutions including Portland’s Nationale, Froelick Gallery, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland Center Stage, University of Oregon’s White Box gallery, and San Francisco’s California College of the Arts, where she also received her BFA. She was named a finalist for The Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, MA. Malaska received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund in 2015 and a Project Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council in 2016. Most recently, she was honored with a 2016 Individual Artist Fellowship through the Oregon Arts Commission. She has lectured, taught, and mentored at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon College of Art and Craft, and Eastern Oregon University. Malaska lives and works in Portland, OR. She joined Nationale, in Portland, Oregon, as a represented artist in the spring of 2013.

Veronica Reeves – The Goddess Show

Veronica Reeves is a current resident at Rainmaker Artist Residency. She has lived in Washington, Hawai’i, Indiana, Colorado, and Oregon. She has shown nationally and internationally, including Portland (Oregon), Denver, New York City, Berlin, and Tokyo. Her paintings explore a feminine and maternal perspective on the environmental crisis.

Curatorial Project – Dispersal: Mail Art in Kolaj

2017-02-25 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

As a current resident at Rainmaker Artist Residency, in Portland Oregon, I and fellow resident artist Jason Berlin co-curated an exhibition titled dispersal: mail art! I got interested in working on a mail art project as I kept learning that artists and friends in my life were participating in mail art, mainly Jason Berlin and Matthew Rose. When I work on a curatorial project, it’s usually because I see connections sprouting before my eyes among the members of my arts community. All I have to do is create the conditions for this sprout to grow and blossom. It doesn’t feel like work, it does take time and energy, of course, but the results are usually unexpected and magical when I’ve opened up space for artists to do what they will.

The show exhibited work that was mailed in from all over the U.S. and also from Spain, Denmark, Japan, Canada, and France. Dispersal: mail art, exhibited in October of 2016, doesn’t end with us. We are redistributing the artwork, so each artist will receive someone else’s artwork, along with a list of all participating artists’ addresses. This is the celebratory aspect of mail art, that it isn’t about commodification of artwork, but about sharing it, sending it, receiving something, “add and pass”-ing. So, today, Jason and I spent several hours stuffing legal size envelopes with art and a mini-zine that includes images of everyone’s artwork who participated.

You can read a review of dispersal: mail art show in Kolaj magazine #18!

dispersal: mail art exhibition gallery

Radiant Angle solo show at Rainmaker Artist Residency December 9th, 2016

2016-11-29 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

I am pleased to present Radiant Angle, my solo painting show as an artist resident at Rainmaker Artist Residency. Inspired by the fluidity of the paint, I employ painting as an intuitive practice that opens up potential for the resulting compositions. Travel and dreams also serve as origins for the imagery in my work. In Radiant Angle, surreal landscapes become figures that suggest the divine feminine, shifting and glowing along with the use of iridescent, fluorescent, and metallic paints.

Veronica Reeves received her Master’s of Fine Art in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015. She has shown nationally and internationally including Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Denver, Portland, Seattle, and Spokane. Her recent awards include residencies with Signal Fire and Rainmaker Artists Residency. Reeves graduated with her B.F.A. from University of Colorado at Denver in 2008.

It is increasingly urgent that we as humans regain a sense of harmony through healing the broken connections between ourselves and our planet, and through honoring that dependent relationship. Being in natural places and wild places offers a reminder that we are on a finite planet, that our health depends on the health of the planet, and for me personally offer bliss, peace, and healing. By the looks of current events, we have much healing that needs to take place and I will be donating 50% of sales of work from this show to Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock. Please join me on Friday, December 9th, 6pm-9pm at Rainmaker Artist Residency to view these current works of mine. I am also available by appointment to show you my paintings.

I have had the honor to be steeped in natural settings for much of my childhood growing up in the Pacific Northwest and for a short time in Hawai’i. Being in natural and wild places is like a healing balm for my soul where I recognize I am a part of a greater creation that provides physical and spiritual nourishment. I want to thank my friends at Signal Fire, Leland Ironworks, In Sacred Balance, as well as my partner, artist Dan Ma, for also showing me the love that the Earth shows us and for experiences and support that helped make these paintings happen. <3