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
WEBSITE
INSTAGRAM

Michael Parker
WEBSITE
INSTAGRAM

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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About the Artist

Julian is an Ashland based painter who paints plein air with further work in the studio. His work is influenced by Maurice Utrillo, Stuart Davis and Darryl Hill among others. Julian Bell has worked with the Ashland Painter’s Union and presently shares a studio with Sarah Burns.

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Artist Statement

My goal as an artist is to entertain the eye and comfort the soul. I hope to create images that provide a view of a different world by showing a different view of our usual world.

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: Echo
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There is an echo of the forest in the fallen tree. There is an echo of the fallen tree in the plant that grows from its wasting. An echo is a wave and a reflection. A pattern that diffuses. An echo dies, giving its energy to declare and declare again. Echo’s voice was taken. To the asker she could only mimic his question, “who is there”. Who is there when the tree is felled? Who was there when the forest was new? Who will be there when the words we declare echo back to us as true?

About the Artist

Ben Buswell (b. 1974 in Dallas, Oregon) is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. Buswell’s sculptural work spans diverse media, encompassing ceramics, metals, resins, incised photographs and more. He subjects these materials to physical processes (such as scratching, piercing, melting and tearing) wherein the of accumulation small, repetitive gestures build into a complex whole.

Buswell received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and BFA from Oregon State University. Buswell is a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts (2015) and a two-time recipient of the Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation (2014 and 2011). In 2018, Buswell received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. In addition to Upfor, notable solo exhibitions include Samuel Freeman in Los Angeles, CoCA Seattle, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University and TILT Gallery and Project Space in Portland. His work has been included in Portland2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, and The Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum (2006). Collections that house his work include that of Jan and Patricia de Bont and the public collections at The Portland Art Museum, Portland Community College, Western Oregon University, The University of Oregon, and the Collaborative Life Sciences Building at Oregon Health and Science University.

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Artist Statement

More information coming soon.

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About the Artist

Sarah F. Burns is an observation-based painter working in the European tradition.  For nearly two decades, Sarah has been painting timeless subjects that include Figures, Still-life, and Landscape, while exploring her personal and cultural history. Just like she preserves the truth and beauty of each of her subjects in her paintings, her paintings are physically able to stand the test of time using proven traditional methods and techniques.

Burns is based in Southern Oregon and has exhibited in group exhibitions at The Maryhill Museum, The Arkell Museum, Grants Pass Art Museum, Coos Art Museum, and other notable institutions. When she is not in her studio, she teaches at Project Space and the Community Education Programs at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her work has been featured in American Art Collector, Southern Oregon Magazine, among other publications. In 2016, Burns was awarded the Hudson River Fellowship by the Grand Central Atelier.

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Related Events

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

Saturday, June 19th from 10am to 5pm
Saturday in the Park
Site: Lithia Park

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About the Installation

Site Location: Lithia Park

Title: Augmented Reality with the 4th Wall App

Click here to download 4th Wall for free
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In February 2018, with app developer Drive Studios, Nancy Baker Cahill, artist and Creative Director of 4th Wall, founded the app to challenge traditional experiences of public art, and to increase access to fine art through AR. Blending the physical and virtual worlds enables new creative possibilities and combinations–the potential of which she finds conceptually limitless. 4th Wall serves as a way to collectively share an augmented experience without expensive or inaccessible VR headsets and technology.

In the app, Baker Cahill offers her dimensional drawings translated from VR into AR to users so that they can create their own context and content with the works, locating them anywhere in the world. The app also includes curated and site-specific AR public art exhibitions.

4th Wall’s mission is to always expand and engage a larger and more diverse audience. It aims to encourage viewers everywhere to harness their own creativity and place artworks in all kinds of contexts.

Art truly can be anywhere.

About the Artist

Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her recent AR public art project, Liberty Bell, commissioned by Art Production Fund, earned features in the New York Times, frieze Magazine, Artnet, Smithsonian Magazine and the Washington Post, among many other publications. The project, on view through 2021, spans six historic and culturally significant sites along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. and appeared in Artnews’ list, The Defining Public Artworks of 2020. Baker Cahill was also included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 Deciders.

Her 2018 TED talk, Augmented Reality (AR) as an Artist’s Tool for Equity and Access, launched her international public speaking practice. She has since delivered keynotes at the 2019 Games For Change, 2020 A.W.E. (Augmented World Expo) and has spoken at the Hirshhorn Museum and numerous academic institutions and conferences. Baker Cahill is an artist scholar in the Berggruen Institute’s inaugural Transformations of the Human Fellowship, and will be a summer artist resident at Oxy Arts’ Encoding Futures Residency, focused on AR monuments. She is the Art and Creative Technologies Advisor for the XRSI Safety Initiative, and is a member of the Guild of Future Architects. In May 2021, she will receive the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor.

More Information at https://www.nancybakercahill.com/

Related Events

Thursday, May 13th at 12:30pm
Virtual Creative Industries Discussion: Nancy Baker Cahill
Site: Virtual

Dates & Times: May 15 – July 18
Augmented Reality Engagement and Instagram Event
Site: Lithia Park

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About the Artist

I paint, write, and draw about the intersection of water, history, and domestic life. I work on site, and in a tiny old greenhouse studio in my backyard in Oregon. I was raised in Western Colorado. In 1995, I enrolled at Pacific Northwest College of Art and, with my family, have mostly stuck around Portland.

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MEDIUM
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Artist Statement

I draw and paint places and people.

If I see a thing, I will draw the thing in a notebook. If a notebook is not handy, I will draw it on my forearm, and later put it in a notebook.

I do not have a photographic memory. When I add color to a notebook drawing or use the drawing as the source for a painting, I am relying on a physical memory of the experience, plus whatever information I scribbled down at the time, plus details extrapolated from accidents of the pencil, pen, or brush.

If I see a person or animal do a thing, I pretend to do the thing with my own body before I draw. This way it stays present in my body long enough to remember it onto paper.

If I see some light in a place do a thing, I will pretend to move my body through that space, and feel my body as that space, and feel that light and those colors as a weight. If I am truly paying attention, and if I know what is good for me, I will also write down some names for those colors.

The paper and the canvas are not flat; they are deep, smokey, and open. Every mark we put on them reaches in, hovers forward, or slips back.

I have no memory for words. If someone says something in a place, I must write it down within a few seconds or it will be lost. I cannot carry words like I can carry a gesture. I do not pretend painting exists without words, so when someone says something relevant, I like to have the option of including it.

I use photo references for some historical and some commission work. I believe photography has an important place within painting. However, relying on it for my studio work or my notebooks would interfere with this fuzzy, 25-plus-year-experiment in documentation.

Making the picture distorts and reforms the memory. If I am lucky, the picture takes on the reality of a dream-space, very close, very present.

I mostly limit myself to painting things having to do with water. This is not much of a limit.

Related Events

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

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About the Artists

Site Location: Lithia Park, Find us on the lawn next to the playground.

Whistlegraph is an evolving group of artists and performers currently consisting of Jeffrey Alan Scudder, Alex Freundlich, and Camille Klein. Topics ranging from art and technology to education and expression are explored through a novel art form combining drawing & live performance called whistlegraphing.

Developed by American artist, software developer, and lecturer Jeffrey Alan Scudder in 2019, whistlegraphs are memorizable hybrids of poetry, painting, storytelling and music inviting both artists and audiences to reconsider what qualities should be valued in each of these fields. Examples can be seen on the Whistlegraph TikTok account, which operates a shared sketchbook for the Ashland based group.

Frequent collaborators include artists Ella Fleck, Niki Stebbins, Matt Doyle, Anastasia Lewis, Adam Schwarz, Ash Nerve and an online community of artists & fans who keep up with the practice!

Connect with the Artists

WEBSITE
TIKTOK
INSTAGRAM
TWITTER
YOUTUBE
FACEBOOK

Related Events

Thursday, May 27th at 12:30pm
Virtual Creative Industries Discussion: Whistlegraph
Site: Virtual

Saturdays May 15th through June 12th, 11am to 1:30pm
FREE Family Days with Whistlegraph
sponsored by the Rotary Club of Ashland

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