Portland Center Stage

First Thursday on March 7

Posted by Sarah | 27 February 2013 | Comments (0)

Join us for a First Thursday reception on March 7 from 5-7 p.m.! Light refreshments will be served for you to enjoy as you mingle among the artwork in our Gallery and Studio level lobbies. Both exhibits are co-presented with Nationale,  a local art gallery and specialty shop.

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In the Fold

Works by Lindsay Kennedy and Joey Veltkamp

February 26-March 29, 2013

"Lindsay Kennedy and Joey Veltkamp are artists who reconfigure memory and emotion into representational textiles, replicating the intricate weavings of both effect and cloth by pushing paint across canvas and pencil across paper. Together they tell stories about objects that are imbued with layers of meaning accumulated during a lifetime. 

What I love about these artists' work is its ability to conjure comfort and tactility in the act of looking. And while Veltkamp and Kennedy have different approaches to their art making, they both make us aware of the memories that we hold dear and the secrets we keep covered. And right there in their works--right in between that space between revelation and disguise is a sense of timelessness that lingers long after after we have stopped looking."

                    - Curator Elizabeth Spavento

"What's more personal than a blanket? We sleep with them and make love in them. They collect our dreams, our subconscious fears, our dirt and our tears. We cling to them when we're sick, when we're tired, and when we're at our most vulnerable. There's a lot of residual energy there. Even the names we attached to them, like "comforter" and "security" blanket, reveal their importance.

I'm a visual artist who lives and works in Seattle. My work deals with creating multiples of everday objects such as blankets, cans of beer and other sources of comfort."

                 - Joey Veltkamp

"In my paintings I attempt to create a space where the viewer can get lost in sensation. I steer away from any intellectualism and instead create work that is emotive and spiritual. My profound interest in color and sentiment drives to produce work that embodies an evocative vibrancy. These paintings, suggestive of knit fabric, are about stretching out a moment or feeling and leaving it suspended in time."

             - Lindsay Kennedy

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Elizabeth Malaska

January 29 - March 11, 2013

 

Elizabeth Malaska’s new works, on display in conjunction with our production of Venus in Fur, combine a deep and sustained interest in the history of the painted female form with the immense iconographic power that the goddess, Venus, projects within this history. Using classical representations of Venus as starting point for this series, the artist shifts the viewer’s relationship with the familiar deity. Inspired by the play that these works have been created to accompany, each Venus Malaska paints retains her original pose, but now drapes, caresses, hides, or reveals herself with the skin of an animal. As a symbol of bestiality, wilderness, and the unknowable, Malaska’s creatures, at once inanimate and familiar, make the gaze that Venus returns to the viewer slightly less civilized.