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.