About the Installation

Site Location: ScienceWorks Hands-On Museum
Titles: Guardian of the Forest and Joy of the Dance
#artbeyond2021

Guardian of the Forest
The Guardian of the Forest peers down from an ancient cottonwood, asking the viewer what they can do to help the earth. Viewers are encouraged to write their pledge onto fabric pieces located in the basket that hangs nearby, and that can be tied to surrounding branches as prayer offerings. I travelled to the land of my ancestors in Ireland a few years ago, and came across a few “rag trees”. In Celtic culture, Rag Trees, also known as “raggedy bushes”, of Ireland or Scotland are often found near sacred holy wells. Usually, Hawthorn, Ash, or Whitethorn trees are chosen as rag trees, and are hung with scraps of fabric or pieces of clothing. The fabric used in rag trees is symbolic and meaningful, as it usually indicates a desire or dream, or else a need for help with a problem. Typically, help with an issue, or increased good fortune, is believed to come when the fabric disintegrates from the effects of time and exposure to the elements. According to legend, by the time the rags have rotted through completely, the problem will have resolved itself. 

Joy of the Dance
These are dark and challenging times we are living through. The ecstatic communal joy of dancing to live music feels like a distant memory. The experience of collective dance is an ancient and essential part of being human and one of the many sacred things we have lost access to during this pandemic.

My installation celebrates the joy of the dance with figurative sculptures crafted out of driftwood and needlefelted wool, dancing around a tree. There is something deeply elemental, ancient and holy about figures dancing together. This installation is created both as a reminder and as an offering : an invitation to a visceral memory of joy that is still possible.

About the Artist

Corbin Brashear is a fiber artist and teacher who creates whimsical mixed media sculptures, masks and tapestries using found natural objects and needle felted wool which she exhibits at fine art and craft shows around the Northwest. Her work is profoundly influenced by the rugged wilderness of her remote homestead in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon. She lives simply, off the grid, which has allowed her to deepen her artistic expression and offers her the raw materials such as driftwood, kelp and lichen, with which to work. In addition to creating her own art, Corbin has made it her life’s work to create opportunities for creative exploration for children. She has spent the last 25 plus years working to create programs to nurture and inspire the creative life of the children in her own community. She loves sharing the limitless freedom and potential of needle felting and has been facilitating needle felting workshops for 15 years both locally and at art retreats all over the West. Most recently, Corbin collaborated with a local animator, Deanna Morse, and a team of children to create a short film “Recipe for Birds” which has been shown at film festivals both internationally and here in Ashland at the Ashland Independent Film Festival.

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Artist Statement

I am inspired by the shapes and organic forms I find in nature, such as driftwood and kelp. I am intrigued by the past stories of these objects, and the forces that shaped them into what they are now. I love the challenge of integrating these beautiful found natural objects into my art and creating a new story, full of whimsy and wool.

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About the Installation

Site Location: ScienceWorks Hands-on Museum
Title: Freedom Submarine
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On the 4th of July, 1979, I was nine years old when I had my first big idea: it began as something that I thought would make me happy during a difficult time, when my home life had some conspicuous similarities to the current state of Covid lockdown: I was not able to easily leave home, both for my youth and the logistical challenges of navigating my parents’ deteriorating relationship, and I was isolated because the last of my four siblings had left for college the previous fall. I decided to take the family’s “portable” TV set outside to my happiest place (beneath the mimosa tree), plug it in with a string of extension cords, and watch a special showing of the Beatles’ animated feature Yellow Submarine scheduled for that afternoon on Channel 5 — WNEW — in the NYC-metro area. It was bold, it was risky, and it remains my earliest memory of attempting something unusual that I associate with my current creative interests in conceptual art.

About the Artist

I have been teaching and practicing narrative design and interactive writing for 30 years, since I became the first student at Brown University to pursue a digital-media degree through the Literary Arts program. My pioneering work in online storytelling includes the internet’s first hyperzine, “Albert Hoffman’s Strange Mistake” (1993) and the web’s first interactive novel, “Sunshine ’69” (1996). I went on to experiment with nonlinear storytelling in real space, through a string of successful commissions for public art installations with grants from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) in 2000 and the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Arts Council in 2001.

I participated in the Schneider Museum faculty showcase exhibitions in 2015, 2017, and 2019. The last was a nonlinear-narrative project in virtual reality titled “Hypertext Hotel.” I would like to thank Miles Inada, who not only made that fun portrait of me at the top of this page, but whose attitude towards art and friendship affects everything I’ve worked on since moving to Ashland eleven years ago this summer. I tucked a bit of his animation artistry into the video remix. Can you guess what shot it is?

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Artist Statement

When I was hired to open the Center for Emerging Media & Digital Arts (EMDA) in 2010, we held our first open house (in 500 square feet of CS-East with some nifty windows) within 30 days of my arrival in Ashland. Besides an interdepartmental center serving the entire university, EMDA became a place for students faculty and staff to connect with intercollegiate consortiums as well as a resource center open to everyone in the community: With the mission of addressing real-world challenges using the power of digital media, in a few months EMDA had partnerships with essential business and nonprofits like the Ashland Chamber, the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Britt Festivals, and Southern Oregon Film & Media. In other words, EMDA has always been about getting out beyond the walls of the university, and that’s why I am so excited about Art Beyond.

On the opening day of the Hypertext Hotel exhibition at the Schneider Museum in 2019, we learned that the PC we planned to run the VR installation on during the show did not have a powerful enough CPU. We scrambled to find an alternative, but there was not a powerful enough rig at the university that could be dedicated to the museum for the required length of time. I reached out to the owner of Medford’s Cyber Center, Anthony Kaiserman, and he stepped in and kindly donated a computer for the show’s entire six-week run. After that, he became a mentor to our students and more involved with the SOU Alumni Association. I have always believed in the credo “make virtue of necessity” — in fact, sometimes a solution yields even greater rewards than addressing the original need. In the case of Freedom Submarine, the TV was donated for free by a stranger in our community who responded to an inquiry on a local, online marketplace.

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About the Installation

Site Location: ScienceWorks Hands-on Museum
Title: Field of Dreams
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Field of Dreams is about journey and transformation, both in the process of making it and in its life as a field of dreams for me and the viewer. 

Sand heated to 3090 degrees Fahrenheit transforms into glass, an amorphous solid. The word, amorphous, comes from the ancient Greek god, Morpheus, the Bringer of Dreams and the Maker of Shapes. 

Dreams and fantasies are woven as a metaphor in this work through the raw and delicate materials, speaking of transformation in my life. 

Field of Dreams is installed at the museum’s yard in a six foot tall raised bed of soil. Materials: Borosilicate glass tubes, sand, hand pulled glass threads, bamboo sticks. Technique: Torch work, constructed. 

Dimensions: 50f x 4f x 20” 

Year: 2021

Site Location: ScienceWorks Hands-on Museum
Title: Desert Bloom

The desert series is a group of abstract sculptures that celebrate the beauty and the colors of  earth. All the colors in these works are a result of reactions of glass fused with metals.  I call it Alchemy glass.  

Desert Bloom is inspired by the red Poppies that bloom during winter season in Southern  Israel. The work combines glass and embroidery and is a collaboration with Desert  Embroidery, a Bedouin women’s association from that area. 

Materials: Glass frits, silver powder, cotton threads, metal wire  

Technique: Fused glass frits, embroidery, constructed  

Dimensions: 30x20x20 inches 

Year: 2017

About the Artist

Miri Admoni (b. 1954 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is a mixed media, glass, and jewelry artist, who shares her life between Israel and the USA. Arts and crafts were always a part of Miri’s life since childhood. Her formal education was in graphic design, where she has worked as a freelance designer and producer of unique recycled paper products and specialized in packaging. During 2004-2010 Miri has studied various glass techniques, and in 2011-2012 she studied metalsmith in a private studio and started to create jewelry with glass. Nature has always been the greatest source of inspiration. Initially Miri was inspired by her surroundings in Israel, the rich and diverse nature scenes between the Mediterranean Sea and the Judean desert. That led to the creation of the Alchemy glass series and the collaboration with Bedouin women artists. Now Miri lives and works from her home studio in Oregon, where she continues to explore her relationship with nature.

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Artist Statement

In my work I show the many contrasts that exist in nature and life: order & chaos, obvious & hidden, transparent & opaque, fragile & durable. I channel the natural world into my work by translating personal memories and experiences into emotional and abstract landscape expressions. That transition between how I feel and the outcome of my work is sometimes a mystery to me, but I believe that like in nature, everything has a reason. Creation teaches me to follow my intuition and my heart, to do what I love. It always gives me hope.

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About the Artist

Deb Van Poolen has been a painter for 25 years. Exhibiting her work in Washington D.C., Oregon, Montana, Michigan, and occupied Palestine.

When Van Poolen began painting in 1995, veteran artist Harriet Rex Smith gave Deb a table to use for five months in her large mountain studio in Southern Oregon. Harriet’s mentoring of Deb jump started her early art career of creating and marketing landscape, floral, and portrait paintings.

Deb’s most recent works have integrated science and art with the aim to help people grasp the global significance of the biodiversity present in this northwest region where the Cascade, Siskiyou and Klamath mountains converge. She makes large paintings illustrating profound diversity in species.

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Artist Statement

Related Events

June 11th – June 13th, 1-3pm
What is Plein Air?
Site: Mt. Ashland

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About the Artist

Phyllis Trowbridge has been working outdoors, painting and drawing in the landscape year-round for over 30 years. Since moving to Oregon in 1992, she has exhibited her work in local galleries and participated in numerous invitational and juried shows, including the Bowery Gallery, NYC, the Schneider Museum of Art at SOU, the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, and the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum.  She has pursued painting residencies at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Red Cinder Creativity Center, and the Vermont Studio Center.  Phyllis’ work is represented in the collections of the City of Portland Regional Arts and Culture Council Portable Works Collection, Portland Community College, and the E.R. Jackman Foundation of Oregon State University.

After graduating with a B.A. from Hamilton College in New York State in 1987, Phyllis went on to receive her M.F.A. in painting from American University in Washington, D.C. in 1990.  Her undergraduate degree included a semester of art studies in Lacoste, France.

Phyllis has taught painting and drawing classes and workshops in Oregon since 1996. She currently teaches at Portland Community College.

Artist Statement

My paintings and drawings each represent an attempt to express and convey my deep connection with the natural world and the feelings it evokes in me.  Those feelings are grounded in a passion and reverence for the land and a love of the outdoors.  Since I work outside most of the time, the experience of the weather, the wind, the sounds I hear, the temperature, the “sense” of the day, all play a part in the creation of my work.  Though what is most compelling to me in the landscape – its unpredictable light, weather and moods – can be its most frustrating aspect.  These changes can drive me crazy, yet I embrace them because they change the way I think, forcing me out of ruts I am getting into, and opening me up to new ideas and unexpected directions.   More than anything else I welcome and appreciate the opportunity for quiet observation and the ideas, the insight, and the direction that doing the work brings to me.

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Related Events

June 11th – June 13th, 1-3pm
What is Plein Air?
Site: Mt. Ashland

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About the Artist

I was born in 1981, and grew up in rural Idaho among the farm lands of the Snake River valley, the historic land of the Shoshone people. I earned a BFA in Illustration from Boise State in 2006 and an MFA from The New York Academy of Art in 2009.

Artist Statement

My art stems from my experiences of being of mixed race Hispano-Indigenous and as an ELL person growing up in a predominantly White geography. The rural isolation where I grew up provided an opposition between preservation of traditional cultural practices and creating more distance between dominant culture and myself. The land itself became incredibly important and spiritually linked in my upbringing and it continues to be a subject in my work. My landscapes are about space, visually and spiritually. They encompass a contemplation about the past, my past and the present.

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Related Events

June 11th – June 13th, 1-3pm
What is Plein Air?
Site: Mt. Ashland

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About the Installation

Site Location: Mt. Ashland
Title: Elemental
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During my many walks out in the woods, I am often struck by the places where branches and entire trunks create graceful, arching forms. Whether for ceremony, domestic beautification, or structure, humans across the globe also create arching forms.

Modern humanity has caused untold destruction, in large part by seeing ourselves as separate from the natural world.

Through Elemental I use both manufactured and wild materials—rebar, lichen and branches—to create an archway that welcomes visitors to walk through, around and sit below its curves. The piece implores humans to see themselves and the natural world as essential constituents of one another.

About the Artist

Isabella Thorndike Church is an artist who grew up with the CSNM in her backyard, although it wasn’t a monument until she was eleven years old. Her medium is natural, local flora materials such as sticks, flowers, weeds, grass etc. She creates both indoor and outdoor installations which may resemble a chandelier or an organic configuration crawling up and emerging from the wall. As a profession, she is commissioned to execute floral and plant designs and builds for celebrations and ceremonies. With opportunities to engage in gallery spaces, this becomes immersive, larger than life installations that are site specific environments.

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Artist Statement

Everything I do begins in the field and the woods. There, the colors and textures of the natural world arrange themselves according to the seasons. I believe that local, seasonal flora, collected or cultivated responsibly, are healthy for us and for the earth. Each piece is a conversation with the nature of carefully selected materials, their arrangement determined through form and structure as much as through manipulation. Through the resulting design I hope to evoke a sense of place, time and wonder.

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About the Installation

Site Location: Mt. Ashland
Title: No Fillings For A Copper Plate
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“No Fillings For A Copper Plate” is comprised of a series of sign-forms made of Copper, Steel, Brass, and Aluminum.

About the Artist

Ryan Kitson was born in Mt. View California in 1977. He attended Southern Oregon University in the late 90’s before moving to New York City to pursue a career in the fine art. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Vienna, London, Milan, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Marfa. Ryan currently divides his time between the Pacific Northwest and NYC.

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About the Installation

Site Location: Mt. Ashland
Title: After EF!
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After EF! is a near human sized wooden sculpture that frames a view of nature. The frame contains the phrase “visualize industrial collapse”, a slogan used by the environmental group Earth First! The artwork invites you to gaze through it and ponder your relationship to civilization.

About the Artist

Robby Herbst is an inter-disciplinary artist. His work explores ways language informs social and political movements. His art takes the form of; drawing, publication, organizing, group-work, and object making. He instigates the geographically sited critical-landscape projects of the Llano Del Rio Collective. In 2016 he completed the public project New New Games, a series of events in California’s Bay Area, supported by Southern Exposure and Headlands Center For The Arts. It explored contemporary forms of worker subjectivities through historic and contemporary forms of play. A concurrent exhibition of drawings was held at Commonwealth & Council gallery. In 2015 he co-organized Chats About Change; encounters addressing social change and social practice in Los Angeles supported by LACE and CalState LA. He’s a co-founder of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. He’s been awarded a Mike Kelly Foundation grant, a Warhol Arts Writer’s Grant, the Graue Award, funds form Danish Arts Council, the Durfee foundation, and Rema Hort Mann. He’s been an artist in residence at the Headlands, Villa Montalvo, ACRE, and Provisions Library. A graduate of CalArts (MFA 1999), he’s taught at CalState Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, Goddard College, and Otis College of Art.

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Artist Statement

More information coming soon.

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About the Artist

David Gordon has been painting and drawing his whole life. He received a BFA from the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston. He has painted and shown work in Vermont, Nova Scotia, Oregon and Hawaii and currently resides in Ashland, Oregon.

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Artist Statement

I consider myself an intuitive painter. I paint representationally but rather than honing a set technique, my process is based on looking and seeing. From direct observation I translate what I see spontaneously by feel. Especially at the beginning I put paint down loosely and quickly without worrying about getting it right, knowing that I can paint over these initial explorations. I’m often surprised at how many of these purely spontaneous brushstrokes turn out to be spot on! They don’t get painted over but stay to the very end as part of the final piece! As the painting progresses, I try to keep this spontaneous approach and continue to feel my way through – not getting more careful but getting more precise because I am building on information that I already put down. To say that I feel my way through the paining is more literal than it might seem. I almost do feel what I see. I reach for it with as much of a feeling sense as a visual sense.

Direct observation, painting in incredible natural places and working spontaneously by feel are what keep me inspired and give my paintings the breath of life. I want to share this inspiration with those who look at my work. Inspiration is an amazing space to hang out in and I know that it is accessible to everyone – not just artists! If I can bring you there or encourage you to take steps towards your own inspired state, then I have accomplished what I set out to do. I also aspire to communicate the beauty and feeling of the land and the places I paint and to help others appreciate the beauty around them.

Related Events

June 11th – June 13th, 1-3pm
What is Plein Air?
Site: Mt. Ashland

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About the Installation

Site Location: Mt. Ashland
Title: It’s a Small World on the Bunny Slope
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Are you a parent of a toddler?  For many children, the pandemic has made their world smaller. Very young children are coming into their own awareness during this most unusual time. Are they gravitating toward something that feels pandemic induced?  Do you feel the social isolation of 2020 – 2021 has drawn them towards an unusual obsession? Artists Michael Parker and Alyse Emdur are making a series of sculptures titled It’s A Small World on the Bunny Slope of these things which will be exhibited on the bunny slope of Mt. Ashland.

About the Artists

Alyse Emdur is an interdisciplinary artist. Her drawings, paintings, videos, and photography based projects use earnest humor to face loneliness, existential crisis, social struggle and the desire to escape. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Cabinet Magazine, Huffington Post, the Atlantic, BBC News, Wired Magazine, Vrij Nederland Magazine, Art Papers Magazine, and Foam Magazine.  Emdur is a graduate of the Cooper Union and holds an MFA from the University of Southern California.

Michael Parker’s art practice shifts scale, material, and temporality while making things such as juicy ceramic installations, recumbent obelisks, steam eggs, artist-run spaces, and public sculptures. Parker started teaching sculpture at Southern Oregon University three months before the pandemic began. Previously he lived, taught and made art in Los Angeles. With solo and cooperative projects at Materials & Applications; Craft Contemporary Museum; LA County Arts Commission; Annex LA at M+B Gallery; Artists’ Loft Museum Los Angeles; Descanso Gardens; Palm Springs Art Museum; Current LA Biennial; LA Department of Cultural Affairs, The Getty Museum; Southern Exposure; High Desert Test Sites; Human Resources; Pomona College Museum of Art; The Armory Center for the Arts; Machine Project; California State Parks at the Bowtie; Los Angeles Trade-Technical College; Cold Storage. He holds a BA from Pomona College, an EMT-1 from UCLA, an MFA from USC. Parker is a recipient of the California Community Foundation’s Emerging Artists Fellowship, Center for Cultural Innovation Artists’ Resource for Completion Grant, Public Art Residency at Heart of Los Angeles and Printed Matter Award for Artists.

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Alyse Emdur
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Michael Parker
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Artist Statement

We moved to Ashland a few months before the pandemic with a three month old.  The pandemic has made getting to know this place and community slow so we wanted to work on a project that connected us to others’ experience.  We often wonder if and how the pandemic is affecting very young children.  Ultimately, this is a collaboration between two first time parents as they grapple with this moment in world history.

Related Events

Thursday, June 24th at 12:30pm
Virtual Creative Industries Discussion: Alyse Emdur and Michael Parker
Site: Virtual

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About the Installation

Site Location: Mt. Ashland
Title: a late hybrid
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This installation consists of three elements. The first is a full body suit encrusted with Wolf Lichen gathered from highway shoulders in the deserts of Central Oregon. The second is a video recording of the artist performing in the lichen suit. The third is a human silhouette constructed from juniper branches, the lichen’s original host. These three companion objects create an origin story for a creature that is neither human nor plant, a creature that blurs the border between the animate and inanimate.

Harvesting note: The lichen for this project was harvested over the course of three months. As much lichen as possible was picked up from the ground rather than plucked from trees. When harvested from trees it was taken only in very small amounts from areas where it was quite plentiful, and the harvest was spread over wide areas of space.

About the Artist

Anja DuBois is a visual artist based in Central Oregon who specializes in video art and video installation. Her research interests include posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, and human-plant relationships. She uses performance and sculpture in combination with moving image to explore the intimacy between humans and their surroundings.

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Artist Statement

How do we establish intimate connections with our surroundings? My projects are always born of a desire for intimacy between myself and my surroundings, and yet the closer I look the more alien everything becomes. My solution has been to lean into this strangeness and dissolve myself as much as possible into the landscape. In this instance, the first step towards dissolution was to become lichen, a not-quite-plant with which I have very little in common (it’s much more resilient). I think of this less like camouflage and more like a quick hop out of my body and into another way of thinking and being. The result is something wholly hybrid, not human, plant, or animal– it is a creature with a new and unfamiliar perspective.

By examining my surroundings on a very intimate level, and allowing them to transform me emotionally and physically, I question my own desire to collect, categorize, control, quantify, and understand the world around me. As I walk through hallways of glass cases of animals and minerals and cosmic artifacts in natural history museums, I see the excitement, love and curiosity of the people who put them there as clearly as I see their ignorance, violence, and desire for ownership. The glass between specimen and human is a division that symbolizes the separation between humans and other forms of life, a division I am constantly seeking to erase.

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