Recent Works:
Vanessa Calvert

Exhibition Statement

Fighting Men was opened concurrently with Recent Work by Vanessa Calvert, an exhibition that was in the Museum’s Treehaven Gallery. Calvert is a sculpture and installation artist from Portland who incorporates crafts such as upholstery in her work. She stated that her “work invokes the personal and collective mythology of domestic objects with forms evolving out of household materials and structures…the pieces explore the connection we have with the objects and spaces that surround us – becoming reflections of ourselves, delicately balanced between order and disorder.” Calvert received her M.F.A. in 2009 from Portland State University and her B.A. from Whitman College in 2003. She has shown her work throughout Oregon and Washington, including venues such as the Bellevue Museum, Disjecta, Igloo, The White Box, FalseFront Studio, and Broderick Gallery.

The artwork displayed in Calvert’s exhibition was the result of her one-month stay on the SOU campus as part of the Center for the Visual Arts’ artist-in-residence program. During that time, she created work alongside SOU art students and faculty, invoking her teaching philosophy to help students “develop a growing ability to question what, why, and how they are making work while building a strong relationship with the materials and concepts they are using.”

Back to Past Exhibitions