2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards
Feb 13, 2016 – May 8, 2016
The Museum’s fourth biennial awards exhibition, 2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards features eight outstanding artists including a two-person artist’s collaborative. Four of the eight artists are immigrants, coming to the Northwest from Asia and Europe and contributing to the exhibition’s conceptual strength with a fresh view of America. Works in the exhibition address global and regional humanist issues —prejudice, belonging, war, the evolution of power, omnipresent technology, and the environment. Ranging from large-scale installations to intimate ceramic portraits, the multimedia exhibition showcases works in combinations of neon, video, glass, drawing, painting, and clay with innovative approaches to both new and traditional media.At the opening reception one artist will receive the $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer prize selected by the Museum’s curatorial staff. From nomination to final prize, the biennial awards process delivers a two-fold benefit: It allows the Portland Art Museum to identify a number of the Northwest’s exceptional talents, and it provides the museum with a far deeper understanding of the new work taking place in the region by both established and emerging artists. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, artists’ lectures and other exhibit related programs.Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art, and invited curatorial advisor Jessica Hunter-Larsen, curator of IDEA Space, Interdisciplinary Experimental Arts, at Colorado College, received over 200 nominations from respected regional arts professionals of outstanding contemporary artists from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. Nominees were selected on the basis of quality, innovation, relevance to community or global issues, continuity of vision and dedication to studio practice. Hunter-Larsen and Laing-Malcolmson reviewed the applications to select 24 four finalists, from which the group of seven award winners was chosen.
Organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art.
Using drawing and video, Haven employs words and geometric spatial relationships to illustrate the fragmented bombardment of technology on the human psyche in the new millennium. With language and mixed media, she binds together two- and three-dimensional imagery to create elegant modernist objects that suggest unanswered questions.
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Lead Pencil Studio, Seattle, Washington
Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo use video, sculpture, drawing, installation and photography to reveal spatial qualities of the built environment that influence human behavior. This combination of styles expands the understanding of the constructed surface, which scripts a large portion of human movement and perception.
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Dana Lynn Louis, Portland, Oregon
Louis is inspired by the human body and its connection to timeless and fascinating systems of the natural and constructed worlds—linking time, space, and energy through dynamic multimedia installations. Creating spaces with intimate and large-scale drawings, light projections, and sculptural objects, she uses glass, light, and shadow to achieve a glitteringly magical environment.
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Helen O’Toole, Seattle, Washington
O’Toole creates a prolonged moment where the painting’s vast space evokes an image with a resonating emotional depth. Metaphorically employing the moody landscape of rural Ireland, she channels a deep-seated pain and misery resulting from a past lived amidst a compilation of grudges, suspicion, and violence.
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Akio Takamori, Seattle, Washington
Takamori’s new, 40-foot-long, lyrically painted clay installation addresses the war torn world through the faces of its threatened children. In our contemporary society of a great mix of people, these diverse faces remind us that life begins unblemished by clashing ideologies. Additionally, a series of serene ceramic landscapes quoted from historic Japanese and European paintings provide a hopeful and contemplative view of the natural environment.
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Willem Volkersz, Bozeman, Montana
Volkersz has an immigrant’s fascination with America. Arriving in Seattle from Amsterdam shortly after World War II, he began photographing a newly discovered landscape of billboards, vernacular architecture, and neon signs. Over time, he became fascinated with roadside art and pop culture: larger-than-life advertising figures, postcards, and travel souvenirs. Volkersz creates a charmingly critical narrative around his Dutch heritage and American citizenship.
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Samantha Wall, Portland, Oregon
Wall seeks to communicate the interior emotional state that separates one’s sense of self from their body. Growing up as an ethnically diverse child in South Korea and the American South, she learned to navigate between social and cultural boundaries. Her quietly powerful work utilizes modest materials, such as graphite or charcoal, to build a supple, interlaced texture of marks which are suspended on the surface of paper.
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Please note this program has been moved from Saturday, April 24th to Friday, April 23rd due to rain.
Mobile Projection Unit presents an outdoor digital installation series at the Portland Art Museum, reimagining space at an epic scale and unraveling hidden mythologies. The Epic Ephemera series ranges from a group screening of experimental media work rooted in ritual, sculpting canvases atop architecture to reveal the poetics of the natural world, to bringing leading pioneers of audio/video/coding to Portland through a digital portal. Epic Ephemera reinvents public space and shared experience, transcending the limitations of our screens.
SIGNALS is a collaborative project by artists Nicolas Sassoon (Vancouver, BC) and Rick Silva (Eugene, OR) that focuses on immersive audio-visual renderings of altered seascapes. Sassoon and Silva share an ongoing theme in their individual practices; the depiction of wilderness and natural forms through computer imaging. Created by merging their respective fields of visual research, SIGNALS features oceanic panoramas inhabited by unnatural substances and enigmatic structures. The project draws from sources such as oceanographic surveys, climate studies and science-fiction to create 3D generated video works and installations that reflect on contamination, mutation and future ecologies. This exhibition digitally maps the work onto the Museum’s courtyard and features a live soundtrack by Pulse Emitter.
http://ricksilva.net/
https://www.instagram.com/ricksilva.jpg/
https://twitter.com/ricksilva
http://www.nicolassassoon.com/
https://s-i-g-n-a-l-s.com
http://www.w-a-l-l-p-a-p-e-r-s.net/
https://twitter.com/Nicolas_Sassoon
https://www.instagram.com/nicolassassoon
Pulse Emitter approaches electronic composition from the perspective of a master craftsman, harnessing a fine-tuned sense of narrative development and a penchant for juxtaposing contrasting synth voices from far-flung corners of his arsenal of softsynths, app-based programs, and hardware instruments. While he conjures time-lapse vistas of galaxies and nebulas in our mind’s eye, the sophistication of his arrangements and the universal beauty of his harmonies pushes the lens inward on the self, resulting in a journey that is as personal and internal as it is celestial.
https://pulseemitter.com
https://pulseemitter.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/PulseEmitter
https://www.instagram.com/pulse_emitter/
https://www.facebook.com/pulse.emitter
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxem2CLMZkuSvHaNlmpIu6A
The Epic Ephemera series is supported by the Museum and Film Center’s Re:Imagine Artist Fund, an initiative expanding our commitment to supporting artists in a reimagined cultural sphere. Learn more.
Mobile Projection Unit is funded in part by the Precipice Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Calligram Foundation, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Northwest Film Center, and Portland Art Museum. The Epic Ephemera exhibition is coordinated for the Portland Art Museum by Jaleesa Johnston, Program Lead and Sara Krajewski, Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Join us on Zoom and Facebook Live
Art and Conversation is a free monthly program that occurs every third Tuesday, featuring a range of speakers from Museum curators and staff, artists and Portland-based arts organizations. Please check back for more details on what this month’s Art and Conversation topic and time will be.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Register on Zoom or watch on Facebook Live
As the French theoretician of abstract art Michel Seuphor wrote in 1962, “in the 1960s, every abstract painter is fascinated by the East, dreams of visiting Japan, perhaps to find the delights of Japanese calligraphy.” This talk is dedicated to the artists who launched and fueled this fascination.
In the early postwar years, avant-garde calligraphers from Japan radically transformed their art with the aim of bringing calligraphy to the same level of recognition as abstract painting. In order to reach this goal, they launched creative collaborations with European Art Informel artists and American Abstract Expressionists, and soon started sharing exhibition spaces with them at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Documenta in Kassel, São Paulo Biennale, and Carnegie International. This talk will introduce the connection between Japanese avant-garde calligraphers and abstract painters from Europe and the United States as one of the most fascinating examples of the early postwar global art exchanges, drawing attention to calligraphy as a phenomenon of the global postwar avant-garde.
This program is sponsored by the Asian Art Council.
Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer is Lecturer (assistant professor) in Japanese Arts, Culture, and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, affiliated to the University of East Anglia.
She is an art historian specialising in modern Japanese art. Before joining the Sainsbury Institute in 2018, she received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University and held postdoctoral positions at Emory University, Atlanta, GA and Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C. Her research interests include postwar art in Japan; modern calligraphy history in East Asia; transcultural studies; abstract art; and the relationship between image and language in modern Japan. She is the author of Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde (Japanese Visual Culture Series 19, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), and currently working on her second book project on the history of calligraphy modernization in East Asia.
How do you distill a feature-length film into a single compelling image? Join Akiko Stehrenberger, visual artist and prolific film poster designer for a workshop on creating film posters that invite and intrigue audiences. In this workshop, Akiko will walk participants through a case study of one of her projects, give a brief tour of her broader collection of work and also lead the class through the initial steps to develop poster design ideas for a project of their own. There will be time at the end of the class for a Q+A.
Instructor:
Akiko Stehrenberger is a 15-time CLIO award-winning movie poster illustrator and designer, who works with directors, movie studios, advertising, and movie advertising agencies.
She was deemed “Poster Girl” by Interview magazine in 2011, Creative Review dedicated their January 2011 Monograph to her illustrated movie posters, her poster for “Bad Milo” was featured on the Conan show, and Vanity Fair included her “Funny Games” and “Kiss of the Damned” posters in their “Best Movie Posters of All Time” list.
Tuition: $60
Register now
Self-published, limited distribution, one-of-a-kind works of text and images, zines have been a subculture mainstay for decades and continue to evolve. This workshop will recontextualize this definition as it relates to filmmaking today and examine how zines can become tools in exploring, developing, and materializing your ideas. We will look at examples of filmzines and explore how they can help you get started on a project with no equipment or funding, be a gateway to other mediums, and allow you to visualize an idea from your head to the page. Being works of art in and of themselves, we will touch on the history of the zine and the merits of physical objects in the creative process.
Join Mila Matveeva, illustrator, film producer, and zine-maker, for a workshop on how the zine can become part of your creative work and leave with resources and a few prompts to get started on your own.
Instructor:
Mila Matveeva is a film producer and illustrator in New York City. Most recent projects include the forthcoming feature film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, as well as season 2 of The Eyeslicer. She has worked with HBO, IFP, PBS, Kickstarter, Quad Cinema, and The Future of Film is Female, and is a contributor to Screen Slate and Exclaim!. She is a former member of Silent Barn, a collectively-run arts and music show space in Brooklyn, NY.
Tuition: $80
Register nowJoin Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
You sit in a dark room, focus in on the glowing light of the movie screen in front of you, and enter a new state of consciousness: one in which place, time, and identity are suddenly fluid, where you are free to float through a slipstream of light and sound.
Critics and filmmakers have long been aware of the intimate connection between the filmmaking medium and the dream state, but how specifically do artists use the tools of cinema to replicate such an ephemeral experience as getting lost in a dream? Join filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Eyeslicer, collective:unconscious) for a personal tour through the history, theory, and practice of dreams on film, from the early surrealism of Maya Deren to present-day masters like David Lynch, all the way to Schoenbrun’s own work. We’ll look at case studies that illustrate the tools, rules, and cinematic ideals that have been used to immerse viewers within an oneiric state throughout cinema history, and attempt to answer the question: what does it take to effectively transport one’s dreams to the screen?
Instructor:
Jane Schoenbrun (they/she) is a non-binary filmmaker, producer, and curator currently in post-production on their narrative feature debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Jane is the co-creator of The Eyeslicer, director of A Self-Induced Hallucination, a producer on Aaron Schimberg’s Chained for Life, an EP on season one of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness (HBO), the creator of the omnibus ‘dream film’ collective:unconscious (SXSW 2016), and the founder of the Radical Film Fair, which drew 2,000+ attendees in its first year. Jane has served as the Film Lead at Kickstarter and the Associate Director of Programming at IFP.
Tuition: $80
Register now
How to find, hire and work with a film composer, from the demo process to finished picture. The instructor’s musical palette and style will guide the discussion, along with real-life case studies from a variety of feature, documentary, and fine art films. Emphasis is placed on developing strategies for successful communication between director and composer, the key to making beautiful music together.
Topics:
- Connecting with composers Film score sources (original, licensed, public domain, live captured, sound design)
- Typical contracts, budgets and timelines Work that occurs before a composer is hired (the temp score, music demos)
- After a composer is hired ((the spotting session, the cue sheet, score workbooks) Giving notes and feedback (glossary of film music terms for directors) Final stages (the music mix, filing cue sheets) How to license music for film (obtaining master and sync rights)
- Getting to know the film music team (music supervisors, music editors, copyists)
- Filmmakers at all experience levels are welcome, as are musicians interested in film composing. Interaction with the instructor is highly encouraged.
Instructor: Mark Orton
Mark Orton, founding member of the genre-bending acoustic chamber ensemble TIN HAT, has written original scores or contributed music to numerous dramatic and documentary films including NEBRASKA, MY OLD LADY, SWEET LAND, EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, BUCK, FROM THE ASHES, THE GOOD GIRL, THE BOX TROLLS, PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS, Fernando Meirelles’ 360, Ken Burns’ ROOSEVELTS series, and Pixar’s LOOP. Recent and upcoming projects include the features CHARMING THE HEARTS OF MEN, THE LAST SHIFT, and Sony Pictures Classic’s 12 MIGHTY ORPHANS. An alumnus of the Peabody Conservatory and the Hartt School of Music, and the recipient of a Sundance Institute Composer Fellowship, he was nominated Best New Composer by the International Film Music Critics. Mark is a multi-instrumentalist and collector of antique and unusual musical instruments, which he often employs in his scores. He is a frequent contributor to both radio and podcast programming including THIS AMERICAN LIFE, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, the HEADLONG series, and WIND OF CHANGE. As an arranger, Mark has worked with artists including Tom Waits, Willie Nelson, Mike Patton, and Madeline Peyroux. In addition, he continues to compose music for modern dance, radio drama, the circus and the concert hall. He lives in The Great Pacific Northwest with his wife and son.
Tuition: $175
Register now
Monday, Wednesday, Friday | June 14, 16, 18 | 1-3 p.m.
Experience the unique process of developing a game in a collaborative class meant for High Schoolers. Participants will work as a part of a team to create characters, assets, and plans for a first-person, interactive game, using your medium of choice. Will you design the walls and furniture, animate an enemy, or plan out the level? Participants will leave with a build of the game and a perspective on indie game development.
Preproduction
Assign roles, create the ‘game book’, game goal and design including level design, and setting the scope back. The first day will be spent preparing for production. We’ll divide the work among the artists, organize our thoughts and start downloading and setting up tools and programs for the work pipeline.
Production
Asset creation starts here. Animations, User interface graphics, textures, objects, and animations. This will be the most laborious day and may spill into the next day depending on time. Audio sourcing or recording if time permits.
Postproduction
Testing, wrap-up, bug fixing, refinement, and packaging. The last day is spent culling the ideas that won’t make it, and implementing what works.
Instructor
Ian Levesque is a stop-motion animator dabbling in indie-game development. He’s been excited about sharing the rewarding process of animation with artists for as long as he was able to. He spends his time working on his personal videogame projects and playing with his rats.
Tuition: $180
Ages: 14 – 18 years
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art