painting the post-natural
I’m thrilled to be a part of this group exhibition through the Gallery of the Future created by CETI !
Walk through this virtual exhibition space modeled after the idea of an abandoned mall beginning Friday, 10-23-2020. I can’t wait!
I will be teaching two classes this fall, 2018. Take a look!
and
Intuitive Making: Images of the Divine Feminine
The Otto Petersen collaborative public mural is finally installed and dedicated. We officially unveiled the mural on June 21st, 2017, surrounded by friends, supporters, students and their parents, and community leaders. Kelly Powell, a previous principal of Otto Petersen, started out the dedication with praising the power of community involvement. Outgoing principal Whitney Hessong finished up with a long list of well deserved thank yous. We called up the 14 students who contributed designs to the mural and in ensemble, -this was my favorite part, they ripped the paper off the mural to the cheering of the crowd that spilled out into the street. This was after all the attendees had meandered through the building to see over 1200 pieces of student art, a student produced puppet show, and the performance of the scappoose Band Mentorship program including students from Otto Petersen Elementary, Scappoose Middle School, and Scappoose High School. What a wonderful night, a wonderful end to an arduous 7 month art venture, and a great beginning to what I hope will mean more public art projects in my future!
http://www.pamplinmedia.com/scs/83-news/363334-243439-otto-petersen-mural-reflects-community-spirit
http://portlandtribune.com/scs/83-news/364025-244640-art-for-all
#ottopetersenmural
#elementaryschoolart
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 Brown-Smith 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 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 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 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 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 Brown-Smith 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 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 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 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.
(On 4/11/2017 I posted an update for our progress, here: Otto Petersen Elementary Mural Update)
Last December, artist Jennifer Hanson and myself, Veronica Reeves, both parents of children in the Scappoose school district, were contacted to see if we would be interested in volunteering on the Art Committee to facilitate Otto Petersen’s theme of the year: Art. One of the big ideas for this theme is a tile mural that will permanently be affixed to the front of the school near the entrance. When complete, the mural will measure about 7.5′ x 19′!
My passion for this project has been galvanized by the students who are already passionate artists. Also, I am struck by how unaccustomed and even fearful many of the students are to drawing, using watercolor paints, and to basic art knowledge such as, what is a mural? For this reason, I am doubly committed to my volunteering position, even though it takes its toll on my professional art practice and even on my home and family life. I personally have benefited from working on this project, and that’s the power of practicing art; it opens your eyes to meaning beyond monetary value.
Rather than launch into a full arts education advocacy rant here, I want to talk about my experience with the mural project. Jennifer Hanson and I were put here by divine purpose to be midwives to this project… Why do I believe this? Because we have been in sync on every decision that has come our way! -and there are more decisions ahead as this project culminates in an evening of art including the public presentation of the mural and a school wide student art show at the end of the school year! Here are some of the steps we’ve gone through so far:
What was the purpose of this mural? We believe the purpose of this mural is to represent the community at Otto Petersen Elementary school. This means the students, teachers, staff, and volunteers. With the students first in mind, we decided the mural should come from the students. We also decided we wanted the mural to be more collaborative, and even though we were potentially going to find a design based on 1 or 2 or maybe 3 students ideas, we wanted to find a way to allow some autonomy when students make the individual tile images. As we researched tile murals, we and the arts committee were drawn to the murals in which the individual tiles came together to create a large design. This meant that it was probable that some students would have to work on a tile that might be pretty simple, i.e. a tile that is all green or all purple. So, one question we asked ourselves was, how do we keep those simple tiles interesting to a student who wants to be more expressive or creative?
Call for Student Proposals. We presented the idea for the mural project to the students, and told them we were requesting submissions for mural ideas. We presented three times, once for 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. The one real guideline for the mural was that it had to have an owl (we emphasized barn owl) because of the school mascot, “Hootie the Owl”, and because of the story of a real barn owl that was rescued at the school after flying into a classroom window, who teachers and students called Hootie. The students overall seemed very excited about and interested in this idea, which was very encouraging. One student who I had not met yet spontaneously hugged me after one of our presentations. 🙂
How to draw a Barn Owl. It seemed like a good idea to make up a brief lesson on how to draw a barn owl. I felt very strongly that it would increase participation if the students felt encouraged about
drawing, and if we got them started on a piece of paper that was roughly proportional to the wall we were going to be working on. I created these printable mini-zine instructions and went with Jennifer to each of the 17 classrooms, leading the students through the instructions and answering any questions students had about the design. FAQ’s included: Do we have to draw one owl? Do we have to draw a realistic owl? Do we have to have a tree? (we originally said that the design should include a tree, but we recanted and said to just have some sort of a background). This drawing lesson included slides of art and photos of owls that we wanted the kids to see as examples for opening up their imagination. One student asked if their owl could be wearing a hat. “Of course you can draw an owl wearing a hat, this is YOUR mural!”, I said.
Choosing the final design. From a school of 480 students we received 112 submissions! That is roughly 25% of students who independently participated in this process. They were not required to submit a design, some teachers were able to give their students time to work in class on their design! Other teachers did not see this as a priority, which breaks my heart since this mural is a historical monument to and for our community. It was Tuesday night when we met to pore over the submitted drawings from students. The decision for a final design could have been a real mother bear of a process if Jennifer and I hadn’t been so focused, or good at communicating, or disagreed at all. Instead it was a little cub bear of a process, because it was still A LOT of work, with quick thinking and flexibility required of us, and that was just in coming up with a design! Our strategy was to lay all the submissions out on tables in the library so we could look at them all at once. Many ideas were repeated: barns, moons, trees with hollows where nests were found, owls with hats, owls with pencils or books or report cards, references to local landscape and other local animals. I said, “Let’s put all the ones we like together in one section.” We compiled a total of 13 (a magical number) that contained elements we found meaningful and charming. I scanned those 13 pieces, opened them in a graphics editing program on my lap top, selected and resized the elements that we wanted to retain from each student drawing, then printed them out. For the next two days we worked during school hours, plus some, to alchemically develop what this mural was to be. We went over the colors by hand, crisping up black lines, brightening up greens, deepening browns, cutting them out, and collaged it all together onto a background of purple sky with a glowing moon, and rolling green hills, which I painted. A rainbow, mosaic owl here, a mouse there. A nest of baby owls wearing pestle mortar hats here, a regal owl in front of the moon there. A horse in a flowered meadow here, three mountains including an erupting Mt. St. Helens there. The Scappoose “World Peace Candle” here and a drawing of Otto Petersen Elementary there! This represented our final design and was to scale at 9.5″ x 24″. We proudly transported this picture to the school to show Principal Whitney Hessong for her blessing and approval, which we received!
Scanning and Printing a scale version. Next, Jennifer took our baby (the final mural design) to Willamette Blue Printing and printed two larger versions, each 30″ x 84″. One we keep as a reference, the other we sliced up into 2″ squares. These would be the squares that students would copy onto larger 6″ squares. We used a delightful tool called a rotary blade to expedite this job!
Multi-media tiles and Print Transfer process. While Jennifer and I researched murals, we were coming up against the reality of time. The school’s “Year of Art” was already half way in with little art action having taken place. We were asked to have a mural completed by the end of the school year. That meant barely six months to research, implement, complete, and install the mural. As luck would have it, Jennifer was directed to Finishline Graphics as an option for actually printing the tile designs onto the tiles. This meant the students could work on paper with any media they like, opening up the options for variety within the mural design itself. We are one week in to this process and have just started the scanning. As the students come into our designated classroom space for making their tiles, we have tried different strategies to maximize the mere 45 minutes to duplicate the small tiles onto larger, 6″ squares, such as pre-selecting tiles for a group. Again, here there isn’t just one answer; this is not a one-size fits all process. Sometimes we pick out a section for the group that are headed to us next, but then a couple students are dissatisfied with the tile they are assigned, it seems to be equally either because it is too simple or because it isn’t simple enough! We for an outcome where everyone is happy, even if that might not be possible. One of my favorite moments was when the CSS (special needs) class came in and most of the group wanted pieces that were more complex. I had wrongly assumed that they would want simple tiles! They worked very hard on the tiles they had chosen and they did an astounding job. I felt humbled by this surprise lesson and reminded myself not to limit students because of my expectations.
Scanning and Printing on the Tiles. So far we are happy with the way the color is retained on the screen. We hope to have the first test tiles completed in the next couple of days! (On 4/11/2017 I posted an update for our progress, here: Otto Petersen Elementary Mural Update)
Here is a sampling of some of the student submissions for the mural design!
Veronica Reeves
Bright Spots
Reception Saturday, Sept. 24th 5-8pm
Solo show of new paintings @VergePDX *
Portland, OR, USA
On view by appointment Sept. 7 – 30
*Email alanna@vergepdx.com for location, appointments, or questions.
An asteroid crash lands on a planet conducive to life. It is carrying proteins, seeds, spores, and data from another world that faced a cataclysmic event. Through layers of masking, spray paint, spills, and hand painting techniques, I visualize places of post-dystopian sanctuary. Pulling from aesthetics of digital games, visionary art, images of outer space, and earth processes, Bright Spots hints at fragments of new life slowly unfolding against the odds. As long as there is RNA, and DNA, it’ll be okay.
