The world around us, twisted, shifted and transformed through the minds of four artists. Join us for an exhibition of surrealist works by these talented local painters!
Featuring works by:
Sam Arneson
Jennifer Griffo
Ali Schlicting
Tyler Schlicting
On view February 23rd – March 27th
Please join us for a night of poetry, art, food and drink as Ellen Petruzzella and Lindsay Martin show their work in the exhibition: The Habitual and The Novel: Magic, at the Ford Gallery on Saturday, January 26 from 6 pm to 9 pm. Poetry Reading begins at 7 p.m. Please find more details below.
Gather. Retain. Modulate. Materialize. Share. The Habitual and The Novel: Magic showcases Ellen Petruzzella and Lindsay Martin’s thesis bodies of work created at Oregon College of Art and Craft. Both revel in sensory experience, image, and poetic memoir. Their practices focus on transforming the everyday into the extraordinary with material and perception. This work exists in partnership with the fated and coincidental alignment of material and time, of body and spirit.
Ellen Petruzzella focuses on building relationships and understanding through material and sensory encounters. Lindsay Martin uses painting to create a poem via imagery, searching for a new visual language from place and experience. She grapples with place, pulling it apart and putting back together to form new potentials, the casual and the wonderful, in the present. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, this show seeks to share stories via poetry, object and image to create something new and thus, creating something magical.
Ellen Petruzzella
My interdisciplinary work explores intimacy and knowledge, provoking curiosity regarding the unity of mind, body, and environment. I explore exchanges of understanding and trust through perception, corporal comprehension, and intuition. Investigations of the senses and habitual patterns allow for a vivid experience of the present and a connection of people and place through discovery and attention. I design sensory experiences, which promote slowness, require physical presence, explore preferences and aversions, and question what is biological instinct and what is cultural construct. Through conscious experience of physical self, we access the unconscious space between the known and the felt.
Lindsay Martin
I want to map out the world through painting by turning. The turn is not transformation, yet. By turning, one is slowly changing a situation, viewing a slightly altered perspective. A transformation happens after many turns; when I arrive at a location, my place transforms from home to beach. My work focuses on the wonderful subtle movement, the leap before home to car, car to gas station, gas station to highway, exit 5, rest stop, diner, beach. Place is both general and detailed, it is permanent and temporary; place is a fluid illusion. Painting emerges as material algomation of the body’s translations of memory. I am curious about comparing the psychological perspective of interior, exterior imagery and the symbolism of architecture. These challenges are met with the language of painting and ideas of expansion in painting through material. Paintings are poetic anecdotes, an escape window, a doorway to the past, a barrier between interior and exterior.
Join us Saturday, Dec 8th for an opening celebration and mixer,
featuring the artists and makers who call Ford Building their home!
Alexandria Levin
Amy Ponteri
Annamieka Davidson
Arletha Ryan
Christopher Scott
Claire Browne
Dan Kvitka
Jan Rothermel
Kenneth Sellen
Midge Williams
Nicki Beiderman
Ryan Imogene
Sara McCormick
Sue Friesz
Thérèse Murdza
This one-of-a-kind installation reveals paintings designed both as a coherent body of artwork and as scientific stimuli. When you enter, you become part of an experiment.
INTO A STUDY is both an art installation and a carefully planned neuroscience study. It began in early 2017 when painter Paul Rutz called neuroscientist Amanda Hampton Wray with a question about how to study the ways people view new paintings. After more than a year spent debating, compromising, fundraising and building a stellar team, that question has blossomed into an immersive exhibit using state-of-the-art research technology to transform the gallery experience.
At the opening—one night only—visitors to Ford Gallery will become subjects in a special data collection event. Many will be fitted with biometric equipment, and all will be shown a series of precisely crafted paintings designed both as a coherent body of art and as stimuli for a neuroscience study.
This is not art inspired by science or vice versa. The exhibit practices both art and science together, which is no small feat! Merging the two cultures has been a difficult yet rewarding process, a dialogue full of give and take—and learning—on both sides. This is a growing niche for art, not only as a site for the artist’s self expression, but, importantly, as a guide for how to engage with the world differently.
Immediately after participating in the study, viewers can enjoy a Q and A with the collaborators and see behind-the-scenes video of how it all came together. Next year the exhibit will be tweaked before it travels to Purdue University and beyond.
Our symbols for “female” and “male” come from the ancient Romans, but they don’t reference the level-headed Minerva and Apollo, the gods of wisdom, art and self control. Instead they refer to Venus and Mars, the gods of sex and war. The “female” symbol depicts the handheld mirror of Venus, while the “male” circle with arrow represents the shield and spear of the war god.
Looking at those symbols on bathroom doors got me curious about our culture’s parallels to Rome beyond the political and military similarities. A quick online search shows that ancient Rome celebrated some surprisingly complicated and flexible images of femininity and masculinity, much like we do today. It turns out that Venus, the goddess of erotic desire, and Mars, the rampaging, pillaging war god, were just two of many forms of these gods. Romans kept making up new versions of them over the centuries, establishing new names, rituals and temples. Soldiers of the Roman Empire sacrificed to Mars Gradivus—the marching god, god of good combat—but when Rome was not yet so big and powerful many people worshipped the agricultural god Mars Silvanus. He gave farmers good harvests and made them into good fathers. As guarantor of treaties, Mars Quirinus precariously held on to peace. Venus Obsequens—Indulgent Venus—was the ancient Romans’ image of the perfect wife, while Venus Genetrix, the pure feminine parent, brought out the best qualities of motherhood in her people. (Julius Caesar’s clan, the Julii, claimed this version of the goddess as their ancestor.) Some ancient writers say the city also worshipped Venus Calva—Bald Venus—for motivating Roman women to sacrifice their hair for the common good, such as during a siege of the city when women cut off their hair and wove the strands into bowstrings to fight off the invaders.
The ancient Romans believed the gods drove people’s behavior. Personified in statues, paintings, prayer and ritual, Venus Obsequens was healthy erotic desire. When you felt it, you knew she had found her way inside you. The paintings in this exhibit show these versions of Venus and Mars as I found them living in us today.
On the web: paulrutz.com
Instagram: @paulxrutz @fordgallerypdx #intoastudy
Paul X. Rutz paints pictures in oil on canvas and carved panel. A former Naval Officer and ballet dancer, he holds a Ph.D. in visual culture. His exhibitions include solo shows at the Oregon Military Museum and several academic galleries, as well as group shows at Mark Woolley Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution. A former reporter for the Pentagon’s press service, he has contributed to HuffPost, Modern Fiction Studies, The Smart Set, and Cincinnati Review, among others, and he writes features for Military History and Vietnam magazines.
Amanda Hampton Wray, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is an Assistant Professor of Communicative Sciences & Disorders and director of the Brain Systems for Language Lab at Michigan State University. Her research program examines relationships between cognitive and linguistic proficiencies and life experiences. Her work employs measures of brain functions mediating language and attention processes in order to understand the development of these skills in populations with typical and disordered developmental trajectories, including children who stutter and those with SLI.
Courtesy of The Go! Team
Ford Gallery, Portland, OR
Jason Babcock of Positive Science, LLC
Laura Annalora and Queens’ Suite
Brian J. Clark Productions
Dar Meshi, Ph.D., and Courtney Venker, Ph.D., of Michigan State University
Megan Heiy, Esq.
Journal entry…on painting 2015
Songs to myself…another chapter of work. All paintings in progress. All writing in progress. The end is nowhere in sight. The fundamental organ. Can’t separate the organ from the bone. There is no story. Color, line movement are all without thought..I find you in everything. I write to myself and I am writing to you. Now I feel hunger. I am your second half, third , and fourth. There is no whole.” six rivers the ocean…”my only hope is that if I keep creating looser, bigger, more, that the understanding will reveal itself without interpretation. My painting will become more real, more full for its lack of interpretation.
Songs for my child. Songs for myself is a body of work created during the last 15 years as a study of self. When I started these paintings and stretched the first large canvases I wasn’t cognizant of what there was to uncover. It’s been an unexpected journey. I knew I was lost and I understood wanting to use my painting practice to build a deeper relationship with self. But what I didn’t realize was how seperated I was from my actual body. Repeated rape, torture, and abuse experiences as a small child had really left me divorced from myself physically and emotionally.
My painting practice required hours of daily meditation in order to find the willingness to show up. Nausea and migraines became daily studio routines. I’ve laid on the floor and tried to surrender to the feelings of grief, pain and betrayal at least hundreds maybe a thousand times.
And I’m still not finished. I’ve done much of this on my own, and I’ve had help along the way. Talented therapists, acupuncturists, and body workers have patiently tried to help me untie these knots. Loving friends and family have reached out and supported me when possible.
I share this work and my process, because it’s important.
Everyday I struggle. Each of us does in their own way. I’m grateful for the time, space, and courage to find myself. And if sharing my process helps even just one other person in the way that it has helped me, then the pain of sharing this experience was worth it. Being alive is beautiful. Part of being a painter is knowing when to stop. There is always more to say, and there’s other paintings to be made.There is blank canvas there to hold my space. I think of these paintings as my pretty monsters. They aren’t about being raped. They’re essentially about who I’m becoming and what I experienced after, and some days in the best of moments, I hope my painting describes the peace of one single lovely instance of being alive.
Journal entry…on being a girl child 2018
Here the air is warm and thick. I walk around and feel like a fissure. A not there. I know at any moment someone could grab and press in to me. And the groups of people are always pressing.
-side note. To feel like a little girl is to be a walking vagina. To be pressed into. Grabbed at any moment and taken. But maybe that would be ok if I could be warm and loved. Not locked in this cold cellar feeling less than. Crumby, not clean, in dirty clothes and worn out shoes, and at least today I have my clothes. Even my bones are cracked because of this stupidness. The shame of knowing that I’m less than. Especially in my vagina…which is no longer the same…and despite my constitutional quiet. Everyone will know and see that something was very wrong. Not with what happened to me. But with who I truly am.
Bio
Jolyn Fry was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She graduated with honors from Pennsylvania School of Art and Design in 1996. Since moving to Portland, Oregon, the following year, she has exhibited her continually evolving body of work in many group and solo shows. Whether depicting literal, physical landscapes or abstractions of a more personal, emotional nature, Jolyn says, ‘Surrendering to my artistic process grants me the kindest perspective of myself and the life that moves around me.’ Jolyn is a mother, maker, teacher who works as an Art Educator at Radius Community Art Studio in SE Portland.
Journal entry-2004
On the day I was raped I was not alone. I became one with my sisters, my ancestors. I became nothing and whole at the same time. I became hate. In losing myself I became something I never was before. In losing myself in surrendering I became hate, I became animal, I became sex and rage in my very vulnerability I became humane. I was a child human. Human. Small and insignificant. And it wasn’t until today that I knew as I paint these paintings these pieces of myself, of women, these stories they become me and they become above and below and around me. It was yesterday that I was so sm…small so insignificant. as I am today, but I am all of these things at once small and big. Pain and joy. And I live. I will live. Everything up until this moment has been past. An unfathomable past and I live as life is meant to be for today for a moment with utter knowingness, and a trust that I have never understood before and today becomes a day just like any other day in any other lifetime and that is what makes me rise and fall. That is why I breathe and laugh and cry because of the insignificance of it all.
Exquisite corpse is a collaborative drawing approach first used by surrealist artists to create bizarre and intuitive drawings. Each collaborator adds to a composition only being allowed to see the end points of what the previous artist contributed.
All 3 artists, Nanette, Karen and Benz, are inspired by vintage figurative photography. While their imagery choices can be very similar, their approach is quite varied. It’s as if they could be playing a game of exquisite corpse where one can see the connecting narrative in different stories.
Artists Nanette Wallace, Karen Wippich and Benz & Chang will be there to share their unique insights and answer questions about their processes and how they came to collaborate on this month’s intriguing show!
Nanette’s work is gestural and energetic with a tendency toward emotive motion. A large component for the inspiration in her work is derived from vintage photographs from the early 1900s through the 1960s. While her work has a loose and lyrical quality to it, she is most interested in the viewer identifying their own story in her work.
Karen’s work is a compilation of vintage photos, acrylic paint and unknown origins. She works without thinking, channeling the art through her. The paintings tell their own story, often interpreted by the viewer. She believes that by the time someone is viewing the work it is no longer hers.
At first glance, the haunting paintings of Benz and Chang appear to be vintage sepia photographs. Upon closer examination, they reveal themselves to be walnut ink drawings rendered by hand on watercolor paper. The figurative paintings portray mysterious narratives that are largely left to the imagination of the viewer.
While the show primarily features each individual artists work, in the spirit of the title Exquisite Corpse, the artists have chosen to participate in their own version of the game. Each artist created work on a panel without knowing what the other artists had done; only the connection points between the panels were revealed to one another. Nanette, Karen and Benz have created a couple of Corpses for this show. The outcome is surprising and exquisite, and not to be missed.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/280244379228452/
Join us for a new show featuring the striking works of two Portland artists, each exploring the limits of their chosen medium: Karl Kaiser & Justin Auld.
Though Karl & Justin may work in different mediums, there is an unmistakable kinship in their striking use of color and dimensionality. Both draw inspiration from the patterns and textures of nature, and push their medium to the limits in their unique explorations of perception and form.
pareidolia
noun – par·ei·do·lia \ˌper-ˌī-ˈdō-lē-ə, -ˈdōl-yə\
The tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. The scientific explanation for some people is pareidolia, or the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness. Think of the Rorschach inkblot test.
My work explores the phenomenon of pareidolia. The link between what the eyes deliver and what the brain constructs is a loose connection; we perceive images, intent, and patterns where none exist. The brain’s ability to see what is not there yields a fundamental connection to the unknown, and touches the edge of what is possible in our perception. Pareidolia therefore raises doubts on all that we encounter visually. By emphasizing selected forms within random images, my work asks viewers to contend with the thin veil overlaying their understanding of what is real, and invites them to balance on the edge of where visual reality is formed by the mind.
“When you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones … you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes … or, again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, or an endless variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn forms. And these appear on such walls promiscuously, like the sounds of bells in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.” – Leonardo da Vinci
I consider encaustic to be my primary medium because of the unique depth and texture it brings to my subjects. I manipulate the wax through scraping, using impressions and smoothing techniques to evoke the complicated but perfect natural world around me that I find through my camera lens. My signature technique is carving into deep multi-colored layers bringing a richness and complexity to the work. It has been described as sculptural and I continue to push the boundaries in that direction. I am drawn to linear abstract themes and carving back through layers of color feeds that inspiration. During my early career, I created series of abstract leaves, petals, and trees using this technique. As my work shows, I am drawn to color (blues, oranges, yellows, reds). I use pigments to make my own paints encompassing the entire color spectrum.
A new path I am taking with my encaustic is creating spherical abstracts. This came as a complete accident. A client came to my studio and saw my working table top with colored wax spilled over it. It looked like one big spherical abstract painting and she wanted it for her home. This caused me to explore this idea more and has brought about a new direction for me that compliments my landscapes in color and organic form.
I am also creating a new collection of acrylic paintings that use the same premise of my encaustic technique of layering.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/432958453780849/
Please join Ford Gallery for a group show presenting a stylistic variety of papercut work by several gifted Pacific Northwest artists.
Long regarded a traditional, illustrative craft, papercutting is increasingly recognized by the fine art world as a technically impressive medium capable of conveying a wide range of concepts. The works in Papercut! range from expressions of ephemeral fragility, to subversive and nostalgic references to folklore, to emotionally intuitive abstract pieces.
Arrowyn Craban Lauer – littlegoldfox.com
David Friedman – friedart.com
Emily Brown – birdmafia.com
Hannah Kohl – athousandtinysnips.com
Hazel Glass – artbyhazelglass.com
Mrrranda L. Tarrow – mrrranda.etsy.com
Sine Morse – simplysine.com
Wild garden II (snake)
Emily Brown
Hand Cut Paper
2018
$1,600
Our Fragrances Bottled
by Hazel Glass
Hand Cut Paper
2017
$265
for the children
by Miranda L. Tarrow
Hand Cut Paper
2016
$150
Fire Light
by David Friedman
Hand Cut Paper
2017
$750
Raven
by Arrowyn Craban Lauer
Hand Cut Paper
2016
$1,800
Red Riding Hood
by Sine Morse
Hand Cut Painted Paper
2018
$750
The Summer Pavilion
by Hannah Kohl
Hand Cut Paper
2013
$895
On view July 7th – 25th
Ford Gallery is proud to host the Recycled Rain Project’s 2018 Exhibition.
The Recycled Rain Project is a Pacific NW based invitational art show creating original works using rainwater to raise awareness of water issues. Since its founding in 2011, The Recycled Rain Project has been dedicated to its mission to increase awareness of local artists and to engage and educate the community on water issues.
A portion of the sale of all works from RR2018 will be donated to Columbia Riverkeeper. For 30 years, Columbia Riverkeeper’s mission is to protect and restore the water quality of the Columbia River and all life connected to it, from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean.Our strategy for protecting the Columbia includes working in river communities and protecting the people, fish and wildlife that depend on the Columbia River.
Amy Ponteri, Candace Primack, Di Pinsonault, Jane Levy Campbell, Jennifer Feeny, Jesse Nearns, Jody Katopothis, Jon Wippich, Karen Wippich, Karl Kaiser, Kia Metzger, Kindra Crick, Kristen Hamilton, Laura Weigle, Nanette Wallis, Nate Ethington, Quin Sweetman, Rio Wrenn, Roberta Aylward, Sara Sjol, Shawn Demarest, Theresa Andreas-O’Leary, Zeratha Young
www.therecycledrainproject.org
facebook.com/therecycledrainproject
instagram.com/
Contemporary Landscape Paintings
The land is a steady element in nature that can change both
instantly and can take thousands of years to evolve. I strive for my work to capture the land and sky as they are – moving and changing ceaselessly.
I feel that movement in the land is often lost in works of art, which by nature are fairly static and representative of a snapshot in time. The challenge of capturing this movement is what attracts me to impressionist painting.
Although many impressionist painters set out to capture a single moment, they were also able to infuse their work with a movement that makes the painting feel alive – you can feel their hand working on the painting and see each distinct decision they made through every brush stroke or mark. My goal is to capture that kind of a timeless element and movement – not only in the subject matter but to the application of the paint as well.
By nature, the act of landscape painting itself forces movement. Whether it is hiking to a location, driving across continents, visiting places in the world, or experiencing the new ways the land is formed and pieced together, it all demands physical movement by the artist.
Formally, my paintings are contemporary-impressionistic works. All of my work is done with oil paint on canvas. First I apply my orange tint to the surface. I then proceed with my under-painting and my final layers. My paintings are ala-prima (one session), so I am always working with wet-on-wet paint giving me freedom to move and manipulate the medium. Painting this way allows me to work in one layer, which helps to keep a fresh quality to my work. I also refer to my style of painting as gestural painting because l apply quick, broad brush strokes that gives my work a lot of movement.
My inspirations stretch from impressionist artists like Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Manet, Monet and Pissarro to painters like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. I’m also very interested in printmaking techniques like woodcut prints and screen printing – the use of minimal colors, layering colors and keeping colors separated are all elements I utilize in my work.
Local artist inspirations: Walter Rane, Leiv Fagereng, Fran Kievet, James Shay, Dawn Emerson
Since graduating from Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids MI, in 2005 with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Art Painting and studying at SACI in Florence Italy, Renee has been busy pursuing her career as an independent fine artist. She is represented at several galleries in Michigan and in Oregon. She now lives in SE Portland and has been painting full time for almost twelve years.
People ask, “Why a print, why not a painting?” On one hand, I enjoy the act of using tools to shape something, but much of the joy rests within the surprise factor—the mystery that unfolds while printing each piece. The many unpredictable factors involved with this art, and its spontaneous process that demands energy, improvisation, gesture, expressiveness, and directness, all contribute to my enduring love for this medium. My current body of work focuses on the expansive, diverse environment of the Pacific Northwest landscape. With the simple use of contrast and minimal color, as well as line manipulation, I strive to create exhilarating compositions inspired by the natural world.
Captivated by the wilderness since early childhood, artist Kelli MacConnell embraces a unique relationship with nature that continuously sparks her imaginative work. Exploring landscapes with careful observation, she translates her natural surroundings into richly detailed prints. For MacConnell, printmaking serves as a key vehicle in fostering a relationship between humans and the natural world. Through her creations, she strives to show how one person can both exist in civilization and remain connected to nature.
Exploring the outdoors is in MacConnell’s blood. Her childhood road trips to the Smoky Mountains and Lake Michigan beaches were the inspiration for her extensive backpacking excursions as a young adult. While hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, she tuned into wilderness exploration as both an integral part in understanding the world and an endless fuel source for creativity.
In 2006, after hiking the AT, sections of the Pacific Crest Trail, and traveling the country, she left her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. Once in Portland, she immersed herself in the vibrant Northwest artist community and Oregon wilderness. Soon after, at Portland State University, she found a love for printmaking, discovering the passion to share nature-driven experiences through artistic pieces. Currently, MacConnell is dedicated to exploring the endless possibilities of printmaking and creating original, introspective art in the hopes that it will speak beyond the frame, fostering a healthier relationship between humans and nature.
RSVP to our Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/336812363479090/
![A Perfect Wife [Venus Obsequens]](http://fordgallerypdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1808VenusObsequens-1-554x1024.jpg)
![On the March [Mars Gradivus]](http://fordgallerypdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1808MarsGradivus1-1-576x1024.jpg)
![Married Mothers to Be [Venus Genetrix]](http://fordgallerypdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1808MarriedMothersToBe_-1-1024x1024.jpg)
![Holding on to Peace [Mars Quirinus]](http://fordgallerypdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1407HoldingOntoPeaceMarsQuirinus-1-1021x1024.jpg)
