Matters Dark and Luminous (2023) is an environment for telling stories through interactive sound, generative animation, and simple puppetry. It is a diminutive stage for mixed reality performances, a concert hall for miniature instruments, and an intimate twenty-first century campfire.
Artist Statement
Matters Dark and Luminous (2023) is an environment for telling stories through interactive sound, generative animation, and simple puppetry. It is a diminutive stage for mixed reality performances, a concert hall for miniature instruments, and an intimate twenty-first century campfire. I am a trans-disciplinary artist with equal backgrounds in the performing arts (music composition, technology, improvisation, and performance) and visual arts (interactive art, video art, digital fabrication, kinetic sculpture). I craft performative relationships between non-human systems (machines, computers, processes) and human experience. I utilize emerging media to develop new forms of meaning and to provoke the exploration of self in a technologically saturated environment. This results in work that constructs “the machine” in a variety of guises: as a source of false magic and illusion, as a vehicle for participation, and as a poetic form of surrogate communal memory. Time, narrative, humor, and illusion are all central tools in this process.
Artist Bio
David Bithell is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and performer exploring the connections between visual art, music, theater, and performance. Utilizing new technologies and real-time interactive environments, his work brings the precision and structure of contemporary music and audio practices together with an understanding of performance, narrative, and humor drawn from recent theater, live cinema, and performance art. His output ranges from interactive installations, sound art, and generative animation to live performance and experimental music compositions. His works have been presented at major venues in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Highlights include: the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada), the Portland Biennial, the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), SPARK Festival of Electronic Music and Art (Minneapolis), Ghent International Film Festival, Pixilerations [v.6], the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the MANCA Festival (France), the IS ARTI Festival (Lithuania), and at numerous colleges and universities in the United States. He has received grants and commissions from Meet the Composer Commissioning Music / USA, the American Composerʼs Forum, the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and the Oregon Arts Commission. He currently is a Professor of Art and Emerging Media at Southern Oregon University where he is chair of the Creative Arts Department and is a core faculty member of the Center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts (EMDA).
Park in One Hour Parking behind the SMA or on the street.
June 21st during Summer Solstice sunrise at 5:34am, a performance by Art Beyond artist Chella Maize will be performed with her work titled, Pony in a Pit.
Saturday, June 17 from 10am to 3pm
Art Beyond Plein Air Painting Event & Family Day Activities
Take a walk in the park and observe and interact Plein Air artists. The public is encouraged to engage with the artists between 10am-3pm to talk about their work and process. Artists will be invited to show one piece created at this event at the Crystal Ballroom in Ashland Springs Hotel on Saturday and Sunday, June 24 and 25. Artwork will be available for sale at 80% to the artist and 20% to Project Space for processing.
Park in One Hour Parking behind the SMA or on the street.
Susanne Homes is a building you may be familiar with if you or your parents are Southern Oregon University (SOU) alumni. It housed generations of students before being abandoned six years ago due to flooding. In the years since, it has sat largely empty.
In collaboration with the SOU programs of; Honors College, Creative Arts, Sculpture/4D Collective and the Schneider Museum of Art, these unused dorm rooms have been turned into installation spaces for student artists. SOU Honors College and Art students have been given the opportunity to completely transform these spaces free from limitations.
The second and third floors of Susanne Homes are open with artwork to be explored.
Come experience these artworks for the opening of Suzy Three and Suzy Two, with the artists present on June 15th, from 1:00pm to 4:00pm. Artist tours available 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Saturday, June 10, from 2pm to 4:30pm
‘Kayumanggi Project” – An Introduction to Clay Harvesting and Processing with Juan Santiago
(2 Locations) Meet artist Juan Miguel Santiago at the Emigrant Lake Trailhead parking lot on Old Greensprings Hwy at 2pm. From OR-66 E/Green Springs Hwy 66 make a sharp left onto Old Green Springs Hwy where you will see an orange traffic cone with balloons. Drive all the way towards the lake and make a right onto the parking lot. https://goo.gl/maps/BrSnyjAi6zfM8icf7
We will spend 20 minutes to 1-hour max harvesting very accessible “wild clay” samples as he shows you how to locate, identify and harvest. We will then take our samples to Gambrel Gallery in Ashland at 1980 East Main St. in Ashland (about a 13 minute drive) where Santiago will share the whole process of preparing the samples ready for working. He will lead our short drive to Gambrel Gallery and Gambrel Arts where other “Art Beyond” exhibitions are on display. https://goo.gl/maps/A9149owULaHQpZ366 Our time together will also include a tour of the gallery, gardens, and Juan’s studio as well as an opportunity to see the other exhibitions within the property. There will be cold drinks and snacks!
What to Bring: Prepare as if you are hiking from a sunny warm to a hot afternoon and bring a sun hat, sunglasses and hiking shoes/sandals. Hydrate well and bring your own water in a bottle. If you are looking forward to processing your own clay samples, bring a 5-gallon bucket, a handheld gardening shovel, and a small towel for muddy hands (these tools are optional).
Hither is the culinary vision of Corrie and Wesley Reimer. With over a decade of combined experience in New York, Portland and San Francisco, the couple brings an abundance of talent, knowledge of quality food and wine, and connections with the best farms and purveyors.
A stoneware Teddy Bear sits atop the inside of an aluminum water tank. Radio Collared, shackled yet free, they allude and elude the relaxation of a soak instead hovering just below the reflective meridian of resource which is endless cycled and recycled through their vessel via their tool of perception.
Artist Biography
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 arts. He holds a Masters in Visual Culture from PNCA and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin, Vienna, London, Milan, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Marfa. Ryan currently resides in Baker City, Oregon.
Available for viewing 7 days a week, sun up to sun down.
The Mary Campagna Sculpture Garden at SOU is located adjacent to the DeBoer Sculpture Building. To access, use Schneider Museum parking lot and walk down or use the SOU Parking lot accessible from Indiana Street to the immediate left after passing the sculpture building. There is a driveway that leads to a metered parking lot. Street parking is free.
Featured Artist
Michael Parker
WINTER WORMS WATER WORKS WEEK METAL
Medium: 100,000 worms, insulated plinth, salvaged sink, solar pump, dawn redwood
Date: 2023
Artist Statement
This sculpture starts at the ground: the site of a school, many things before it, and at this moment, a new concrete circle. Stacked upon the circle, hidden from sight within the 55” x 33” plinth, a dozen crates house winter worms living and decomposing food scraps. The insulated box’s yellow and pink stripes refer to the fleeting favorite colors of the artist’s three-year-old child during the month of construction of this sculpture. On top of the plinth sits a liferaft of dawn redwood branches, a non-native tree was taken down on the edge of campus after it failed to thrive. The raft supports a salvaged sink, older than the artist’s parents crying slowly and continuously from two holes where bees drink the tears. WWWWWM.
The rafted sink will spend a day in a local waterway followed by a procession of performative mourners. Join us for an experimental group cry.
Artist Biography
Michael Parker’s art practice shifts scale, material, and temporality while making things such as juicy ceramic installations at Human Resources, recumbent obelisks along the LA River, Steam Eggs that the public has sweat inside of from Wilshire Blvd to the Inland Empire, artist-run spaces in construction sites such as Cold Storage, collaborations with Lineman learning how to control power at LA Trade Tech, and 40 “arch du triumphs” with the first framing the Port of LA. Parker lived in downtown LA from 2001 to 2018 when he left after publicly battling an eviction case. While living in LA, he started teaching sculpture at CSU Long Beach in 2011. Housing precarity, magnified by becoming a new parent, led him to relocate to Southern Oregon University two months before the pandemic struck. Parker’s goals in this new place are to help establish Southern Oregon as a part of the contemporary art dialogue. He has recently started an artist-run-space, Suzy Three, on the campus of SOU in an abandoned dorm. Additionally, this winter he helped initiate a new artist-in-residency program with the town dump. Born in New York in 1978, he graduated from Pomona College with a BA in 2000, worked on an ambulance as an EMT all over LA County for five years, and then earned an MFA in New Genres from USC in 2009. 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. He is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Southern Oregon University. Headshot image credit: Sam Frost
The artwork is located on the exterior of the building and is visible from the road.
Featured Artists
Alyse Emdur
be mine but
Medium: LED lights, Plexiglas
Date: 2023
Artist Statement
As a teenager, I wore an acrylic yellow sweater. It did not get a lot of use in Florida and I don’t know where it is now but its message stayed with me. It featured embroidered frogs hopping on lily pads with foxtails and tiny pink flowers. Along the length of the left sleeve read in green block letters, “BE MINE BUT”. The right sleeve read, “DON’T EXPECT MIRACLES”. The origins of this sweater are ambiguous. I found it at a thrift store and it appeared to be both mass produced and hand embroidered. My work is often inspired by found text and images- vintage books and cartoons, outdated magazines, contemporary vernacular photography. I collect, archive, and represent the ephemera of our culture. My work investigates American idealism through the act of looking and playing with our artifacts.
For Art Beyond, I am recreating the text of that sweater with Neon lights and will install it in the industrial landscape of Dead Indian Memorial Road in Ashland. The sign will be a visual break from the area’s business advertisements and for passersby, it will create a question. Be mine but don’t expect miracles? Be mine but accept me for the complex human who I am? Be mine but it will be hard work?
I wish to thank Brett Hassell of Hassell Fabrication for graciously hosting this installation at his roadside location.
About the Artist
Alyse Emdur is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Ashland, Oregon. Her drawings, paintings, collages, installations, and lens-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, The LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, the Stranger, Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Cabinet Magazine, Huffington Post, the Atlantic, BBC News, Wired Magazine, Vrij Nederland Magazine, Art Papers Magazine, COLORS Magazine, and Foam Magazine.
Her work has been exhibited at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Library Foundation of LA, Institute of Contemporary Art LA, Odd Ark LA, Rogers Office, Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, The Newspace Center for Photography, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, High Desert Test Sites, Machine Projects, Rutgers University, The New School Parsons School of Design, University of Michigan, Evergreen State College, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Los Angeles Valley College, 356 Mission, Haverford College, Clark Humanities Museum at Scripps College, Loyola Marymount University, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, Arcadia University, California Museum of Photography, Nina Johnson Gallery, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Noorderlicht Gallery and Melkweg Gallery in the Netherlands, Lambent Foundation, University of Texas Visual Arts Center, University of Southern California, Bezalel University in Israel, Bas Fisher Invitational, Twenty Twenty Projects, La Montagne Gallery, Laura Bartlett Gallery, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Department of Safety in Anacortes, WA, In Situ in Paris, France, The LAB in SF, Jack the Pelican, Guild and Greyshkul, and The Cooper Union.
Her public commissions have been funded by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the City of West Hollywood, Heart of Los Angeles, and the Music Center in Los Angeles. Her book Prison Landscapes was published by Four Corners Books, London in 2013. Emdur is a graduate of the Cooper Union and holds an MFA from the University of Southern California.
Please note that the artworks are located along the road, fence posts and available routes to Vesper Meadow. Full map here:
The Vesper Meadow Education Program is building a culture of land stewardship and strengthening community connections through partnership with scientists, Tribes, artists, educators, and other community leaders.
Medium: Letterpress prints, metal mesh, found wood panels and posts, staples, nails, metal mounting hardware, digital photographs
Date: 2020 – 2023
Artist Statement
Oregon state law requires that no trespassing signs must be “no smaller than eight inches in height and 11 inches in width, contain[ing] the words ‘Closed to Entry’ or words to that effect”. Adhering to sign standards, this collection of letterpress prints mimic signs of land ownership and control, but extend invitations rather than messages of exclusion. They send calls for self-regard and accumulatively draw attention to the fence as an enabler of settler colonization, attention to the illusion of land ownership, and attention to the history of the American West as a constructed entity.
Words to that Effect is an ongoing project of site-specific installations that catalyzes a new engagement to the fence in the American West and its accompanying signs as a sprawling symbol of state settler powers. It provokes an imagining of release and possibilities to dismantle exploitative systems of people and land. All bodies are implicated in the aggressive political, environmental, and economical unrest. It encourages and invites all to nurture a radical ethico-political engagement with our individual accountability – this is to say that this engagement is about accommodating and recognizing and allowing for sensitivities to other ways of being and experiencing. This is to recognize that this type of engagement is open-ended, dynamic, and has no solid assurances or outcomes and is unsettling in its nature – but, it is a process all must begin to engage in with forthrightness and without seeking reward. By seeing the structure that holds all captive and practicing a nurturing accountability to varied experiences and the un-commonalities between them all, a constructive potency can be cultivated that can guide a liberation of possibilities outward from the power and limitations of a settler state.
About the Artist
Hannah Bakken Morris hails from Malheur County, OR and works in print media, performance, sculpture, photography and installation to explore identity, the body, landscape, and place. Her works comment on land use in the United States and how the historical and contemporary narratives of the American West intersect with constructions of identity, economies, nationhood, and the environment. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Southern Oregon University in 2017 and her MFA in Print Media and MA in Critical Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2020. Hannah is currently the Assistant Director for the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA and when not working she seeks to commit her time to riding her bike, gardening, fly fishing, cooking, practicing karaoke in her truck, screen printing shirts and sewing cycling soft goods for her small business with her husband and spending time with her pets Ed, Al, and Wallace.
Park in the back left corner at ScienceWorks. The artwork is between ScienceWorks and The Farm at SOU.
Science Works was founded in 2002 as a private response to a crisis in public science education, ScienceWorks is committed to inspiring wonder and stimulating creative exploration through fun interactive science. ScienceWorks’ Museum Hours are Wednesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Learn more at: scienceworksmuseum.org
The Farm at Southern Oregon University is a center for sustainability. The student-led organic farm produces healthy, sustainably harvested food for the SOU community. It is a hub for education, student and faculty research and community outreach to the Rogue Valley. Projects on The Farm inspire a generation of ecologically-committed leaders who promote a vision of living and working sustainably in community and on the land.
Learn more at farm.sou.edu
Featured Artist
Sari Carel
Mud Songs For Anni
Artist Statement
Mud Songs For Anni explores themes of sustainability and regeneration while paying tribute to the seminal Bauhaus artist Anni Albers.
Built with raw rammed earth, and using natural and recycled materials, the piece highlights sustainable methods, and puts an emphasis on minimal additions to the waste stream.
The Bauhaus movement is associated with utopian notions of abstraction, industrial design and urban living. Less known is the deep inspiration that Bauhaus artists such as Anni Albers took from nature. Albers’ fascination with botanical structures and her close reading of Goethe’s ‘The Metamorphosis Of Plants’ informed her weaving and textile works throughout her life.
In today’s world, when we need to reimagine how we live, build, eat, move from one place to another and discard our trash, revisiting this little-known historical tether between nature and the built environment is at the heart of this project.
For this piece Albers’s small-scale textile piece titled City (1949) is approached as an inspiration and a kind of blueprint for a large, outdoor sculpture made from raw rammed earth. Mud Songs For Anni invites visitors to explore soil through sculpture and this highly sustainable, ancient method of building.
A kind of map inspired by City depicts where elements of the sculpture come from in the original textile. The map is handmade with cyanotype sun-prints, layered with gouache accents and continues to foreground materiality and visual engagement as it explores larger environmental themes.
Why Soil, Dirt and Mud
This project asks us to reconsider and reacquaint ourselves with the very dirt beneath our feet, a rich foundational substance that is rife with cultural meaning and environmental significance.
Soil and dirt are at the core of historical and indigenous traditions of construction and agriculture, which today are also at the forefront of the fight against the climate crisis. Earthen construction methods offer great potential for a substantial reduction of carbon emissions. They are not just the past They are the future.
The dirt beneath our feet is home to a world rich with cultural meanings and ecological wealth and yet we rarely notice it. Mud Songs For Anni beckons us to reconnect with this material and all that it can do.
At the end of the exhibition, Mud Songs For Anni will be dispersed back into the earth. The other elements in the piece will be packed together and saved to be used in future artworks.
A special thanks to the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Zero Foot Hills, art residence and Aimee Burg, Clay Space Space, Janine Sopp and Nina Berinstein.
Artist Biography
Sari Carel’s is a multi-disciplinary artist and environmental activist based in Brooklyn. Carel’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally in venues such as Artists Space, Dumbo Arts Festival, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; LAX Art and Young Projects in Los Angeles; Genia Schreiber University Gallery in Tel Aviv, and Haifa Museum of Art in Israel and Locust Projects in Miami. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, including C3 Initiative, Portland, OR, AIR at the Stundars Museum, Finland; AIR Vienna; the Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship and the LMCC Residency on Governors Island, New York; the Bundanon Residency in Australia, and most recently KODA’s Land & Environment Residency in NYC. Her recent public project The Shape Of Play, exhibited in Boston’s North End, was commissioned by JARTS and curated and produced by Now & There. Her solo exhibition, The Sun Is A Mouth Of Blue, took place last year at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR.
A More Perfect Circle, an art and activism project curated by KODA is slated to open in New York this Fall.
Take a walk in the park and observe and interact Plein Air artists. The public is encouraged to engage with the artists between 10am-3pm to talk about their work and process. Artists will be invited to show one piece created at this event at the Crystal Ballroom in Ashland Springs Hotel on Saturday and Sunday, June 24 and 25. Artwork will be available for sale at 80% to the artist and 20% to Project Space for processing.
Available for viewing 7 days a week, sun up to sun down.
Sculpture, downhill adjacent to the Japanese Garden in the Sycamore Grove at Lithia Park (look for our signage. Hint, it’s up in a grove of trees.)
Lithia Park is the largest and most central park of Ashland, Oregon, United States. It consists of 93 acres of forested canyonland around Ashland Creek, stretching from the downtown plaza up toward its headwaters near Mount Ashland.
Medium: Mix of natural and locally cultivated material and airplane cable
Date: 2023
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, help us celebrate and steward our home places. Each piece is a conversation with the nature of carefully selected materials, their arrangement determined through form and structure as much as through manipulation.
The orderly sycamore grove in Lithia Park, inspired by French tradition, is among the oldest parts of the park. This piece reflects the juxtaposition of order and wildness alive here and present in all parks; where human manipulation collaborates with nature’s whim to create something beautiful.
Artist Biography
Isabella Thorndike Church grew up with Lithia Park as her front yard and her mother’s flower farm as her playground and first job. Inspired by her upbringing, she works with locally cultivated and found flora which she designs into both indoor and outdoor, semi-permanent art installations. Isabella is a florist, a farmer, a builder and an enthusiast about all things outdoors.
Special Events
Art Beyond Plein Air Painting Event & Family Day Activities
Saturday, June 17 from 10am to 3pm
Sycamore Grove – Adjacent to the Japanese Gardens
Take a walk in the park and observe and interact Plein Air artists. The public is encouraged to engage with the artists between 10am-3pm to talk about their work and process. Artists will be invited to show one piece created at this event at the Crystal Ballroom in Ashland Springs Hotel on Saturday and Sunday, June 24 and 25. Artwork will be available for sale at 80% to the artist and 20% to Project Space for processing.
An initiative of Gambrel Arts, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in Southern Oregon, the Annex’s mission is to nurture diversity and creativity in our region by offering artists studio space, showcasing their work through exhibitions and events, and providing opportunities for short-term residencies.
All That Jazz is a colorful, original installation set in the open air in the center of Ashland.
It invites you to come and engage with art in nature and to interact with the work.
People, young and older, will find it enjoyable, a place to play, read, write, meditate, or dream.
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 have always been a part of Miri’s life since childhood. Her formal education was in graphic design, where she worked as a freelance designer and producer of unique recycled paper products and specialized in packaging.
During 2004-2010 Miri studied various glass techniques, and from 2011-2012 she studied metalsmith in a private studio and started to create jewelry with glass. In 2012 Miri won the jewelry award at Bullseye’s Glass Emerge competition. In 2015 she participated for the second time at the Israeli Glass Biennale at Eretz Israel Museum, where her work Desert Spirit has been acquired by Baroness Ariane De Rothschild. In 2018 she participated in a professional residency at North Lands Creative Glass, Scotland, UK. In 2021 she participated in a professional residency at Pilchuck Glass School, Washington, USA. 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.
Hannah Bakken Morris
Words to that Effect
Medium: Letterpress prints, metal mesh, found wood panels and posts, staples, nails, metal mounting hardware, digital photographs
Date: 2020 – 2023
Artist Statement
Oregon state law requires that no trespassing signs must be “no smaller than eight inches in height and 11 inches in width, contain[ing] the words ‘Closed to Entry’ or words to that effect”. Adhering to sign standards, this collection of letterpress prints mimic signs of land ownership and control, but extend invitations rather than messages of exclusion. They send calls for self-regard and accumulatively draw attention to the fence as an enabler of settler colonization, attention to the illusion of land ownership, and attention to the history of the American West as a constructed entity.
Words to that Effect is an ongoing project of site-specific installations that catalyzes a new engagement to the fence in the American West and its accompanying signs as a sprawling symbol of state settler powers. It provokes an imagining of release and possibilities to dismantle exploitative systems of people and land. All bodies are implicated in the aggressive political, environmental, and economical unrest. It encourages and invites all to nurture a radical ethico-political engagement with our individual accountability – this is to say that this engagement is about accommodating and recognizing and allowing for sensitivities to other ways of being and experiencing. This is to recognize that this type of engagement is open-ended, dynamic, and has no solid assurances or outcomes and is unsettling in its nature – but, it is a process all must begin to engage in with forthrightness and without seeking reward. By seeing the structure that holds all captive and practicing a nurturing accountability to varied experiences and the un-commonalities between them all, a constructive potency can be cultivated that can guide a liberation of possibilities outward from the power and limitations of a settler state.
About the Artist
Hannah Bakken Morris hails from Malheur County, OR and works in print media, performance, sculpture, photography and installation to explore identity, the body, landscape, and place. Her works comment on land use in the United States and how the historical and contemporary narratives of the American West intersect with constructions of identity, economies, nationhood, and the environment. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Southern Oregon University in 2017 and her MFA in Print Media and MA in Critical Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2020. Hannah is currently the Assistant Director for the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA and when not working she seeks to commit her time to riding her bike, gardening, fly fishing, cooking, practicing karaoke in her truck, screen printing shirts and sewing cycling soft goods for her small business with her husband and spending time with her pets Ed, Al, and Wallace.
Lisa Jarrett
Migration Studies (No. 49, The crime = running, a constellation)
Medium: Textile flag printed from cyanotype, 109 in. H x 144 in. W
Date: 2023
Artist Statement
Migration Studies (2018-present) is an ongoing project. I work with drawing, sculpture, and installation to examine hair care and beauty routines within Black culture as a bridge to themes about inventing our own survival. These routines are rituals wherein we claim beauty standards existing beyond and before dominant narratives. I use the tools of these ritual practices as drawing materials whose histories both trace and extend our lost languages and homelands. These material and formal choices reflect my broader interest in repetition and reproduction as tools of consumer culture and cultural preservation. I am curious about how our personal/private routines (and the attendant products and purchases) live within our imaginations, conversations, and stories while also connecting us to our collective past and future. The art object is the transformative mechanism by which different systems of value become visible and knowable.
About the Artist
Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free? She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 14+ year investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design where she teaches classes in Art + Social Practice.
Annabel Lee Allen’s passion for pottery began at the age of 17 when she found a potting wheel in the basement of her Boarding School, Hyde, in Bath, Maine. She was self-taught during her time at Hyde, which allowed her creative process to develop. She then went on to receive formal instruction at Bennington College, where she learned to throw large forms and the fundamentals of production pottery. She continued her education at Southern Oregon University with the brilliant mentor Jim Romberg for five years. She also spent several years creating and teaching at Lil Street studio in Chicago. She has always been intrigued by organic forms in nature, fractals, seashells, decay, and symmetry. These themes recur and continue to inspire her work today. She has been a potter for over 38 years, and she has loved every minute of it.
Learn more at TikTok: @butterfliesunicornz Instagram: @annabelallen
Chella Maize
Something Burning High Up in the Air
Medium: Plaster, burlap, acrylic paint
Date: 2023
Artist Statement
A hundred and fifty years ago the horse depicted in this sculpture lived, breathed, and was conscious. Now, I invite you to cuddle with his ghost.
Emile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal is set in a coal-mining town at the end of the 19th century. Zola describes the brutal oppression of workers in this industry as they struggle for a better quality of life.
In the mine lives Bataille, a pit pony (a horse brought below ground as a baby to work pulling carts in a mine).
Now, with advancing years, his cat-like eyes sometimes took on a far-away wistful look. Perhaps in his misty dreams he could dimply see the mill near Marchiennes where he was born, by the banks of the Scarpe amidst broad, wind-swept meadows. Something used to burn high up in the air, a sort of huge lamp, but his animal memory could not quite recollect what it was like. And there he stood shakily on his old legs, vainly trying to remember the sun. (Zola, 68)
Today, on the top floor of an abandoned dormitory, Bataille rests. Each morning, the sun rises in the window above his head and bathes him in light.
Across town, Bataille rests with his body on the earth as flowers and grass bury him in smells, soil, and life.
About the Artist
Chella Maize is an artist who lives in Ashland, OR. Their practice is interdisciplinary, including 2D mark making, sculpture, installation, performance, and social practice. They recently co-taught an Honors College class at Southern Oregon University titled “Contemporary Expansive Art Practices” which culminated in a curated exhibition in an abandoned dorm alongside a published zine documenting the artist run project. Their creative and engaged work has helped foster a community of both artists and non-artists. Chella was recently interviewed on Jefferson Exchange regarding their position as a current artist in residence with Recology Ashland. They are also working with a group of Advanced Documentary students to document the inaugural cohort of artists in the AIR. Their work has been exhibited in the Meyer Memorial Gallery, the Thorndike Gallery, the Retzlaff Gallery, and the Boise Cascade Gallery, all parts of the Ashland Based Center for the Visual Arts galleries in 2020, 2021, and 2022 and the Liberty Arts Gallery in Yreka, California in 2021. They are receiving a BFA in Studio Art with a minor in Ethnic and Racial Studies from the Southern Oregon University Honors College in June 2023.
Xavi Panneton
Deep Space Murmuration
Medium:
Date: 2023
Artist Statement
The black & grey-scale background is composed of broken geological shapes which entered into my visual vocabulary from a studio accident. I had some old plastic shelves that broke one day, sending my paint crashing to the floor. Upset, I decided to smash them to bits. I noticed the interesting shapes of the pieces and saved them to arrange into compositions, which I then photographed and turned into digital graphics to use as layers in my painting works.
The colored murmurations in the foreground are derived from my ongoing photographing of water ripples and love of the living patterns reflected on the surface of water in different settings. Lakes, ponds, rivers, calm, windy, sunny, cloudy. The subject provides infinite visual interest.
I have a history of creating work with an unlimited color palette, but lately I have been interested in creating works with more focused, limited color palettes which create specific moods and high visual impact.
About the Artist
Contemporary American Painter, Muralist, and Designer
Xavi Panneton, born 1977, is an artist with an evolving aesthetic where abstract, graffiti, and visionary art meets modern design. He approaches his craft with a unique perspective made possible by his history of creating works across many genres. He is presently utilizing experimental processes that embrace both technology and mixed media to advance abstract expressionism for the 21st century.
Medium: Clay, iron oxide wash, duct hose tubing, metal
Date: 2023
Artist Statement
This work is based on a children’s hand clapping game. By counting 1,2,3 forward and backward, it is an infinite game with no beginning nor end, and creates rhythm and musicality. When two people play a clapping game their hands create a circle. They touch, they look into each other’s eyes and when they get confused, they burst into loud laughter. Then start again.
I wanted to mimic this game by creating a circle of clay columns and placing it outdoors to invite ideas of playgrounds and play. I am curious about concepts such as places and spaces having their own essence and how their physicality impacts people. I hope visitors will experience the circularity and rhythm of the sculpture by walking in, around and between the installation and also interact with the natural environment it is placed in.
My work is grounded in a personal interpretation of the Golem in the Jewish mythology. Golem in Hebrew means ‘raw material’ but also pupa, the transformation stage of the insect between immature and mature stage. According to the myth, the Golem was created from raw clay dug from the river bank. This work refers to the story in several ways.
I am attracted to the “imperfect” and “unfinished” aesthetic. One can see the finger marks, the rawness of the piece, the “defects” and “failures.” I see beauty in the process of making, where things are emerging, transform, take shape. During the making, I am never sure where the work will lead me and how the end result will look like. This way of working leaves room for exploration and for problem solving.
Like palms reaching up to the sky, clay emerges from the ground and rises above it, forming formeless shapes that look like they were built by children and are about to collapse. But just like kids, they are not as fragile as they seem, but rather strong, confident and playful.
About the Artist
ahuva s. zaslavsky lives and works in Portland, Oregon. ahuva graduated from The University of the Negev with a BA in behavioral sciences and completed her MFA in Visual Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, earning the LR Visual Studies MFA Thesis Award. ahuva’s multimedia works are examinations of the relationship of space and place to memory and trauma. Through painting, printing, sculpting, writing, and other mediums, her investigations permeate the social and domestic, the cultural and psychological, historical and environmental. In her recent work, ahuva grounds her personal interpretation of the Golem in Jewish mythology which includes ideas of circularity, cycles, dynamics of destruction and construction, and the interrelationship between the creator and creation. ahuva’s work has been shown locally and nationally. ahuva completed the Art/Lab fellowship in 2022 and was named to GLEAN Portland’s 2022 artist residency. ahuva is the author of Between These Borders Wonders A Golem (First Matter Press, 2022).
Available viewing hours (Please note that these hours change as we shift from Spring to Summer)
May 20th – June 17th: Sunday 1pm-9pm, Monday – Thursday 8am-9pm, Friday 8am-5pm, and closed Saturdays
June 18th – July 15th: Monday – Thursday 8am-8pm, Friday 8am-5pm and closed Saturday and Sunday.
Hannon Library has become a cultural, social, and learning center of Southern Oregon University and the region, hosting lectures, musical performances, and other events and supporting student learning, research, and success.
¡Provecho! by Justin Favela was commissioned by Boston Properties for the iconic Prudential Center in 2020 and created by Favela while in residence at Southern Oregon University (SOU) alongside SOU Creative Arts students. The Prudential Center installation was curated and produced by Now and There, a public art curatorial organization located in Boston, MA. This large-scale pinata-inspired tapestry was created to reflect and celebrate the strong cultural and economic significance of Latinx people.
¡Provecho! is fabricated from long strands of gossamer fabric meant to mimic the traditional tissue paper ornamentation found on the common party piñata. By spotlighting the piñata, a Mexican form that’s become ubiquitous across North America, Favela embraces stereotypes in order to dismantle them, spurring consideration of the many cultures that co-mingle in our favorite traditions, gathering places, and day-to-day interactions.
Artist Statement
As a multidisciplinary artist, I am interested in exploring the notions of authenticity, place and identity using familiar materials to make large-scale installations, sculptures and paintings. My interest in art history, Latinx culture, community, celebration, home and my obsession with pop-culture inform my practice with the intention of dismantling institutional hierarchies.
Artist Biography
Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and known for large-scale installations and sculptures that manifest his interactions with American pop culture and the Latinx experience, Justin Favela has exhibited his work both internationally and across the United States. His installations have been commissioned by museums including the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas and El Museo del Barrio in New York. He is the recipient of the 2021 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. He holds a BFA in fine art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Photo by Mikayla Whitmore
Willow-Witt Ranch is a 445-acre gem in Southern Oregon’s Cascade Siskiyou National Monument. Willow-Witt Ranch is dedicated to the conservation and restoration of a unique ecosystem in the Southern Cascades, and the headwaters, wetlands, and forests that arise there. The Crest is the non-profit at the ranch, cultivating connection to the natural world and education on the values of ecology and of the complex web of food and environment by operating a small certified organic farm and Farm Stay accommodations. Willow-Witt Ranch is also home to Oregon’s first dedicated natural burial ground The Forest Conservation Burial Ground.
From Interstate 5, take exit #14, Hwy 66. Drive east 1 mile, turn left on Dead Indian Memorial Road and continue 6.6 miles. Turn left on Shale City Road, a paved Bureau of Land Management road, just after a large powerline crosses Dead Indian Memorial Road. Shale City Rd is a loop … take this end, marked by: “Grizzly Peak Trail,” a sign for our Farm Store, and nine mailboxes. Follow Shale City Road (you are now on public forest land) 3.2 miles. You will cross two cattle guards and a well-graveled road on your left with a “Grizzly Peak Trailhead” sign. Continue on Shale City Rd 50 yards further, and turn right at our driveway, which has a sign. Follow it 3/4 mile to the Farm. Watch for the “Family Forest” and “Watershed Friendly Steward” signs at our entry gate. If the electric gate is closed, the keypad will have instructions for opening.
Reaching to Reap, is an interactive piece that presents viewers the opportunity to remove and strip bare the blossoms from each of the sculpture’s main branches. An act of collection, of intimacy, and transformation. The structure is taken from the gesture of embracing and by turning this motion upwards it quickly connotes forms found in nature. The scale of the work creates a presence while the color allows it to melt into the landscape. The gold petals catch the sunlight, adding a glimmer or spark. Viewers are invited to use the wire cutters presented in the smaller adjacent piece to trim the structure of its golden petals.
About the Artist
Anna Kruse received her Master of Fine Arts at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She completed a Post Baccalaureate at the Oregon College of Art and Craft before moving to Maine to work at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. She obtained her B.A. with honors in Psychology and Studio Art from the College of Wooster. Anna is the Visiting Artist Scholar and Teacher in ceramics at Southern Oregon University. In 2021 she was nominated and awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture. She was invited to be a resident artist at Township 10 during the summer of 2020 and recently completed a residency at Peninsula College. Anna has shown her work in Ohio, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.