Deep Down


Through playful exploration of the emotional, mythical, morbid, and psychedelic, “Deep Down” invites viewers to delve into the waters of the subconscious.

We often attach a negative morality with the concept of being “down”.  “Deep Down” aims to embrace the dark and mysterious beneath the palpable.  It is often beyond the visible where brilliant changes take place and from which new life and insights are born. As there is light, so there is darkness.  This exhibit honors all that dwells in the dark, under the surface, and under the flesh. We celebrate these shadowy spaces for the seeds that they germinate, the dreams that they sew, the strength that they build and the secrets that they hold.  We are born from these deep dark places and we will return to them. With this body of work, we’ve chosen to surpass the shallow depictions of our daily lives, and dive deep down into a kaleidoscope of simultaneity, where the doors of perception become unhinged.

Opening Reception
Saturday, January 25th
6 – 9 PM

Steele Tea Studios

Jonathan Steele will be providing tea services the night of the opening.  Steele hosts a delicate and magical tea experience by serving with his own beautifully hand-crafted tea-ware, at a mystically ornamented tea table set to enchant and inspire those who come to sit and sip together.

@steeleteastudios

About the Artists

Ila Rose

Ila Rose’s work is colorful, dark, complex, layered, luscious and surreal.   She plays with symbols which emerge from a combination of research and subconscious exploration. Ila is constantly concerned with improving her technique -as well as researching topics ranging from psychology, mythology, spirituality and science- so that she may be a better vessel for articulating potent and relevant information as it flows through her. Rose has been painting all of her life and considers herself an art activist. She strives to use her privilege, to be a voice for social injustices as well as an advocate for the value of art in our lives and uplifting the value of the working artist.  Rose believes art practice is vital to invoking collective creative thought and a necessary and positive transformation in our world. The process of art-making is symbolic to the process of forging our own personal paths; there is much to be learned, in any creative practice, about enduring and transmuting struggle.

@ilaroseart

Lindsay Swing

Lindsay Swing is a self taught artist, her background in science heavily influences her work and style. Captivated by the art of biological illustration, Swing strives to capture the beauty of all things around her by exploring non-traditional mediums. Her love of abandoned treasures led to an obsession with vintage windows, which she uses as her primary canvas in her illustrated work. She employing freehand etching and inking techniques to create each one of a kind piece.  Her sculptural work focuses on recognizing the magic around us. Swing mixes found biological oddities such as bones, insects, and botanicals, with clay and grown crystals to create surreal worlds designed to highlight the natural beauty of the object with attention to detail and respect for conservation. Swing believes in the importance of art and expression. She is interested in helping to raise awareness of the value of art in the community by encouraging individual artists to recognize their own worth, by finding ways to point out the significance of art culturally and collectively.

@honeyandsass

On view through January 25th – February 26th

The Habitual and The Novel: Magic


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.

Opening Reception
Saturday January 26th, 6 – 9 PM
Poetry Reading at 7 PM

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.

Artist Statements

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.

On view through February 21st

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