Crystalline Conversion, 2013, glass and steel
Photo of my installation currently on view at Bullseye Gallery as part of the Chroma-Culture Exhibition. Chroma-Culture will be on view May 1 – June 29, 2013.
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Chroma-Culture
May 1 – June 29, 2013
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 1, 5:30 - 7:30
Bullseye Gallery presents Chroma-Culture, an exhibition focused on color, featuring fifteen artists from around the world. Chroma-Culture will be on view May 1 – June 29, 2013.
Seductive and engaging, color is one of the fundamental elements of our world and yet is also one of the most misunderstood. Throughout history, artists, philosophers and scientists have tried to explain color through poetic characterizations and elaborate analytical and organizational systems. Despite these efforts, conversations about color remain subjective and often tied to parapsychology and cultural philosophy rather than hard fact.
In conjunction with BECon 2013: Chroma-Culture, Bullseye presents a sweeping group exhibition that examines the mysteries and curiosities around color. Each artist, using kilnformed glass, approaches color in unique ways. Color, as in the work by Klaus Moje, can be the subject around which the work is made. It can also be a component of a larger conceptual paradigm, as seen in the flamboyant, pop iconography of Richard Marquis. The cultural, symbolic interpretations of color are exploited in the psychology-driven work of Argentinian-born artist Silvia Levenson and the metaphysic installations of Portland artist Emily Nachison.
Color can be explained scientifically as the sensation of the visual spectrum. It is a physical process in which electromagnetic waves of a particular length stimulate receptors within the eye. These, in turn, are translated into color and form within our brain. Color becomes subjective because the physical process of receiving these waves can vary from person to person. This is where the mystery lies. The expanse between the physical nature of color and our sensation and interpretation of this nature is the rich territory where art exists. The fifteen international artists that are included in Chroma-Culture navigate this area and bring to us works that tackle the visual, psychological, symbolic, and cultural implications of color.
Portland’s biennial BECon is the glass industry’s foremost conference on kilnforming. This year, the event will focus on the use of color in contemporary kiln-glass. BECon explores new ideas and new processes by inviting leading artists from a variety of disciplines to share their knowledge and vision through a series of panels and workshops. The conference will be held on the metropolitan campus of Portland State University.
Bullseye Gallery
300 NW 13th Avenue
Portland, OR 97209 USA -
Natural Philosophy
April 20 - July 13, 2013
Natural philosophy was a diverse field of inquiry based on a heuristic approach to knowledge. Through observation and experimentation, the natural philosophers sought to gain an understanding of the meanings and mechanics of the universe. This cross-disciplinary approach to knowledge was embraced by thinkers such as Sir Isaac Newton, who developed a theory of gravity while simultaneously writing treatises on color. In the 19th century, science disengaged itself from philosophy and split itself into specialized fields of study. The artists featured in Natural Philosophy defy these contemporary divisions, creating works that form new ideas by drawing from many areas of study.Join us for the opening reception April 20, 2-4pm. RSVP required.
The work of artist June Kingsbury combines her interest in philosophy, mythology and biology in macabre sculptures that recall the 16th century wunderkammer. Emily Nachison’s installations draw inspiration from pseudo scientific transformational principles of alchemy. Michael Rogers and Jeffrey Sarmiento collect and rearrange images and artifacts, creating new forms of knowledge through mixed iconography. The elaborate constructions of Mark Zirpel attempt to make tangible the often-invisible principles of the universe.
The practice of natural philosophy may seem quaint in the light of modern discoveries that require enormous research budgets and monumental pieces of equipment, but we lose something when we abandon inquiry to the specialist. The artists in Natural Philosophy pull from diverse disciplines in an attempt to unify the mysteries of our internal worlds with the grand movements of the cosmos.
Location
Bullseye Glass Resource Center Bay Area
4514 Hollis Street, Emeryville, California 94608
Tuesday–Friday 10am–6pm, Saturday 10am–4pm510.595.1318
bayarea@bullseyeglass.com
www.bullseyeglass.com/bayarea -
2013 Cascade AIDS Project Art Auction
Saturday, April 27, 2013
This year I will be creating an installation for the 24th Annual Cascade AIDS Project Art Auction in the concourse of the Memorial Coliseum.
Every year since 1990, CAP has hosted an art auction and party to raise money to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and provide services to those infected or affected by HIV in the Pacific Northwest. Portland’s art community first organized this iconic event, and they remain the backbone of the Art Auction today. The event has flourished over the past two decades, now encompassing 215 works of art and more than 1,500 guests.
All funds raised support the vital work of CascadeAIDS Project. Our mission is to prevent HIVinfections, support and empower people affected and infected by HIV/AIDS, and eliminateHIV/AIDS-related stigma.
For more information on the Cascades Aides Project Art Auction visit: http://capartauction.org
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Duo Exhibition: Isolated Growth
Michael Endo and I have a show opening this Sunday at Gallerie 333 at the Toledo School for the Arts in Toledo, Ohio.
Artist Reception: Sunday, April 14th, 5 -7 pmAddress: 333 14th St # 4, Toledo, OH 43604
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School of the Art Institute of Chicago Interlink Lecture & Studio Visit Series
Next month I will be speaking as part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Interlink Lecture Series.
Visiting Artist: Emily Nachison
Date: Thursday, April 11th at 4:15pm
Location: 112 S. Michigan Room 1307, Chicago, IL 60603
About: Interlink is run by graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Interlink invites artists, gallerists and curators to visit graduate students and to give a noon hour presentation.
The Interlink VAP is run by graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Interlink brings 8 -10 people to SAIC each academic year. The program emphasizes local artists, curators, gallerists, designers, and critics. The typical visit consists of 5 studio visits with graduate students and noon hour lecture.
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Half Cut Tea is an independent LA film company dedicated to the understanding and exploration of artists through short documentary videos.
Half Cut Tea was created by artists Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long. To learn more about their other projects visit:
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Upcoming Exhibition at Vestibule Gallery
Hall of Conversion
Opening Reception: February 9th, 2013 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Exhibition: February 9th, 2013 - March 10th, 2013
Hall of Conversion investigates the transformation of matter. The installation is comprised of suspended glass apothecary dishes that span the length of the gallery. Each dish balances a cast glass sculptural piece that shares the exact same weight and volume as the rest. The glass pieces shape shift from one form to the next, illustrating natural cycles of growth and decay, while retaining the same volumetric proportion. This piece serves as a reflection of our ever-changing, yet never dying, world. Our world is one of transformation and not destruction.
Vestibule Gallery/ Disjecta Contemporary Art Center
8371 N Interstate Avenue
Portland, OR 97217
(503) 286-9449
www.disjecta.orgThe Vestibule is an independent project space housed within Disjecta and dedicated to showing dynamic contemporary art with an emphasis on installation.
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Regional Arts & Culture Council announces a new year’s worth of project grants →
I am excited to announce that I have received an Artistic Focus Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council for 2013.
The Regional Arts & Culture Council announced record funding for project grants in 2013. On December 19th, the RACC board approved $732,440 for an exciting variety of artistic projects taking place between January 1 and December 31, 2013 – including grants to 94 individual artists and 66 organizations and schools in Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington Counties.
Funding for project grants is up 5% over last year because of solid public investments from the City of Portland, Clackamas County, Multnomah County, Washington County, and Metro; and continued growth of Work for Art, RACC’s workplace giving program. It wasn’t quite enough to keep up with the pace of demand, however – RACC received 12% more applications than a year ago. But more projects will be funded starting next year thanks to the passage of Portland’s new arts education and access fund.
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Mary Anne Kluth Reviews “True Places” for Art Ltd. Magazine
The paintings in “True Places” strive to portray an abstract emotional or metaphysical reality, using landscape imagery as a metaphorical setting to examine human experience. All of the artists in the Oregon-based Portland Collective, which includes Hayley Barker, Michael Endo, Tia Factor, Grant Hottle, Ruth Lantz, Kendra Larson, Daniela Molnar, Emily Nachison, Ryan Pierce, Adam Sorensen, and Eva Speer, combine abstraction and figuration, generating works with both an illusory sense of the sublime as well as residue of formal experimentation. Tia Factor’s Majestic So Far (2011), combines washy areas of loose paint with neat rendering to depict a building on a cliff, set against a turbulent green sky. Trees, grass, and tiny figures populate the foreground, dwarfed by a massive, red, heavily reticulated shape suggesting a silhouetted house and landform, resembling a bloody congealed stain on the panel. This composition builds on some recognizable elements of an idyllic pastoral landscape along the lines of Claude, Cezanne or Durand, such as a point of interest in the distance, and abundant vegetation framing the view. Yet the picture is far from idealized. Factor’s color palette of sour yellows, ominous greens and purples, and the aforementioned gory red together impart an eerie, almost threatening overtone, hinting strongly at human vulnerability.
The artists in True Places navigate the tension between figuration and abstraction in personal, idiosyncratic ways. Factor’s paint handling is loose and organic, and Adam Sorensen’s is controlled and methodical. Wellspring (2011), verges on computer-generated, with smooth mountain forms reminiscent of traditional Chinese ink paintings interspersed amongst glowing green cascades and stratified blue gradients tumbling down the picture plane. Like an image of a waterfall frozen over a radioactive ore, Sorensen’s preternaturally still shapes seem imbued with an alien energy, perhaps a font of life force, perhaps gestating destruction. The only sculpture in the show, Ambergris (2012), by Emily Nachison, is a drippy psychedelic mound of excreted pink, orange and yellow textures. The rough, organic materiality of this piece serves to emphasize its artificial coloration; the work glows as if it had fallen out of one of the metaphysical worlds depicted in the surrounding paintings, as opposed to having washed ashore like its natural namesake.
Together, these works articulate a vivid but dangerous world, compelling but unknowable. Though not literally depicting the human visual experience of natural landscapes, they suggest an otherwise unseen realm linked to, but not fully apprehended by, normal physical experiences.Read review online: Art Ltd. Magazine
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True Places was featured as a “Pick” in a recent issue of East Bay Express.
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Make Space Mix Tape
I was included in Make Space’s summer artist mix tape project.
You can download my mix here and check out great playlist’s by other artists at http://make-space.net
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Sticks and Stones Review
Sticks and Stones was reviewed by Cityartsonline.com:
Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones
“This month SOIL Gallery has about it the whiff of a naturalist’s curiosity cabinet. Of course, always lurking beneath that fresh-faced, well-mannered Victoriana is Dickensian brutality and repressed sexuality ready to burst the seams…
Nachison’s work is the most feral of the Sticks and Stones crew. She’s also used taxidermy forms in the past, but for this show has left the forms behind, instead using foam, fabric, resin and enamel to build up gunky, organic sculptures drizzled in black metallic sheen. Black Swan Vignette rises from the concrete floor like an island of congealed enamel. The swan looks literally tarred and feathered. Is Vignette erotic? An environmental disaster? A lustrous sculpture? Nachison’s aesthetic — coyly mysterious yet kind of gross — is just the thing to elicit attraction-repulsion. All these primitive forms, ranging from lumpy, cast-glass mushrooms to resinous cairns, trigger a primal nerve.”
Read the full review online here: Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones by Amanda Manitach, cityartsonline.com
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TRUE PLACES
Image: Adam Sorensen, Wellspring (2011), Oil on linen, 57 x 50 inchesTRUE PLACES
July 14 – August 19, 2012
Reception Saturday, July 14, 2012, 6-8pmSwarm Gallery
560 Second Street
Oakland, CA 94607 www.swarmgallery.comSwarm Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of paintings and sculpture by a Portland-based artist collective. The artists are: Hayley Barker, Michael Endo, Tia Factor, Grant Hottle, Ruth Lantz, Kendra Larson, Daniela Molnar, Emily Nachison, Ryan Pierce, Adam Sorensen, and Eva Speer. The exhibition is titled TRUE PLACES, and is on view from July 14 – August 19, 2012.
The Portland-based artists in TRUE PLACES are connected to each other through an organically formed grouping of ideas and formal sensibilities. Converging over the past year, they are challenged and inspired by one another as they gather monthly in the rotating studios of their peers for critical and social dialogue. Beyond the bond of creative camaraderie, the connections run deep on multiple-levels: the prevalence of paint as the medium of choice, the commingling of abstraction and representation, and the combination of improvisational or process driven techniques with conceptually derived underpinnings. Most significantly however is the prevalence of place as a unifying motif in the work of all eleven artists.
These eleven artists confront the viewer with unique propositions exploring and questioning the theme of “place.” Certain artists use depictions of the land as a mirror to reflect their cultural attitudes towards nature. Adam Sorensen’s landscapes function as both utopian and eerily post-apocalyptic visions, each of which can be seen metaphorically as social concerns in contemporary life. Michael Endo’s paintings offer a societal vision that is either pre-technological or postapocalyptic. Endo suggests that life off the grid might be less than utopic. Ryan Pierce depicts a post-industrial world, a synthesis of two opposing hypotheses to create scenes that speak of the struggle and mystery of the human relationship to the rest of the natural world. As he explains, “One side of me is optimistic, and believes that with a clean slate and cautious determination we could avoid further ecological disaster. This is tempered by another view that human greed and conflict are unavoidable.”
On the other end of the spectrum are the depictions of childlike wonderment experienced in wild places by Kendra Larson and Hayley Barker. Closely tied to the 19th Century Romanticism of painters like Caspar David Friedrich, Larson’s paintings explore the belief that the sublime can be experienced directly and viscerally through solitude in nature. Similarly, Barker focuses the external and internal sensations, exploring the emotional, spiritual and psychological experience of being in nature. Her paintings depict her wanderings and unmediated experiences of the natural world, her body being the primary recorder of her experiences. “Place” is frequently used as a reflection of personal memory as well as an agent to describe the failings and distortions within the perceptions of the human mind. Grant Hottle’s large and colorful works are a combination of nostalgic signs and structures that pay homage to the past as they become distorted by memory and recontextualized to meet the needs of the present. Tia Factor’s latest project is motivated by a longing for travel and romanticizing of places already visited. Using interviews with people who have traveled, she explores the common need to transform nuanced and complex places into simplified places of fantasy.
The works of Eva Speer and Ruth Lantz explore the relationship between space and place and its subsequent effects. Speer’s work contemplates both the passage of time and our struggle to construct a place within it. Her paintings acknowledge our relative minuteness, small blips in the geologic immensity of time, while respecting the struggle to construct a meaningful existence within it. Lantz intentionally distills the act of looking through a veiled understanding of what it is we are trying to see. Her recent work sources a collection of pin hole photographs to investigate the continual translation and fracture of a viewing experience, leaving the paintings to hover in the ether of an undetermined space.
Daniela Molnar and Emily Nachison are both concerned with the intersection of art and science, culture and nature. Employing ephemeral imagery and text from vintage science books and maps in her multimedia collages, Molnar creates visual-verbal explorations into the relationship between internal and external landscapes. The objective, classificatory goals of science mingle with the subjective, interwoven world of the individual, creating a place that is equal parts of different fictions. Nachison’s sculptures and installations are a hybrid of synthetic and natural accumulation, drawing from anthropology, geology, and the decorative arts. Mythology and New-Age idealism become starting points for an investigation into the cultural creation of landscape.
The works in TRUE PLACES supply a multi-layered tension as the viewer tries to find their place in the landscape. The artists explore states of consciousness accessed through the contemplation of space and place. The works supply no easily accessed road maps to direct us through the terrain, only multiple vantage points; no map is needed to find true places.
COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY: Consisting of thirteen artists, “Extra Painterly Discourse” is a group of Portland-based artists who meet on a regular basis for critical and social dialogue. The group formed in early 2011 when founding members Grant Hottle and Tia Factor invited a few artists they each admired to meet in a fellow artists studio for a critique; most of those artists invited one new member resulting in the present number of regular participants. This is the first time the group has shown together.
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
