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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.

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

Leland Iron Works Group Show

2015-10-27 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

I will be participating in an upcoming group show, Breaking Ground, including artists in residence for 2015 at Leland Iron Works! The opening will take place on First Thursday 6pm-8pm, Nov. 5th, 2015 at Pacific Northwest College of Art in the Innovation Lab. Please join us!

Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design
Innovation Studio
511 NW Broadway
Portland, OR, 97209 [map]

Free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

First Thursday 6pm-8pm

My work in the show…

I will be displaying the largest piece of art I have ever attempted, approximately 174″ x 74″.

I am interested in working on mural sized projects, however, this piece was something I wanted to create in a more intuitive and responsive way. Unlike past work, I let go of the sketching process and instead began by working from observation on location. My goal was to capture the sensations and sights that I experienced at Leland Iron Works, known for being a small forest in the middle of leftover farmland. Lee Kelly and his late wife Bonnie Bronson planted most of the trees that now age 50 years. Their intention, Lee says, was to undo some of the damage of over-farming. The result is a magical oasis tucked away amidst disintegrating rural properties destined to become suburban streets and neighborhoods, the rate at which things are going.

This place has an aura of healing in spite of loss and destruction.

While I was in residence, a tree was felled because it had shallow roots and was too near Lee’s studio. Last year, a tree crashed into his studio, wiping out the large deck, since replaced. The limbs and top of the 50+ foot tree were split and chipped. When asked what he would do with the remainder of the major body of the tree, Lee answered that he would let it be a nurse log. He had left a nurse log that had fallen in the middle of the residence a few years back, and now all that remained was a long mound with an abundance of ferns and other vegetation growing across it.

The sense of life and growth is tenacious at Leland Iron Works.

The question that I came to Leland Iron Works with was ‘what does it mean for art to be a part of an eco-system?’ I sat with the many sculptures that inhabit the place and as I drew them narratives came to me. I wrote down these ideas to present along with watercolor pieces and I think the verses start to speak to my question.

While creating at Leland Iron Works, I became enchanted by how the lacework of tree branches, the shadows and dappled light, and the brilliant spider strands slung across my every path, all interrupted my sense of self. The light passes through the canopy of leaves, with its new tinges of gold and maroon, and vibrates off of everything dancing, crawling and composting below. I was surrounded by living material and became conscious of decomposition as transformation into new life. I carried large pieces of unstretched, raw canvas around Leland Iron Works, painting while tuned in to feelings of verdant abandon, of the audacity to thrive, and to create despite, or maybe because of, a great potential for loss.

Veronica Reeves pouring paint on raw canvas supported by branches.

Divination: Veronica Reeves at Red Fox

2015-09-24 by V2R2 Leave a Comment

Divination: New paintings by Veronica Reeves

at Red Fox Bar 5128 N. Albina, Portland, OR

Exhibition: October 2015

Reception: October 5th, 5pm – 7pm

Please join us at Red Fox Bar in north Portland for an opening of new art work by Veronica V. R. Reeves!

“I have been thinking a lot about Painting as a process of divination. Like looking into the flames of a fire, or into your intuition, it’s an act of opening your consciousness to the unknown and letting it speak to you. The unknown can be frightening, but in these paintings, I wanted to focus on the peace of accepting the unknown and working intuitively. I find both painting and unknowing a practice that requires an acceptance that things might very well go awry, a self-trust that you can contend with what comes your way, and a patient determination. Most of these paintings have also been influenced by my current residency at Leland Ironworks where I have been watching the growth of the wooded area and the life forms it supports. It appears to fervently and almost chaotically rush forth, turning death into new life without fear or hesitation. The spiders have especially fascinated me. Of course, spiders have a prominent place among folklore, but I am looking at them as small and delicate organisms who are wise and clever in their craft, spinning their webs in well chosen locations, but living a precarious life nonetheless.”

-Veronica V. R. Reeves

PDX

Divination: New paintings by Veronica Reeves

at Red Fox Bar 5128 N. Albina, Portland, OR

Exhibition: October 2015

Reception: October 5th, 5pm – 7pm

Map for Red Fox Bar: