With a practice akin to an alchemist, Jenny Heishman creates approachable objects that elicit misunderstanding and require a shift in perspective. Using a variety of run-of-the-mill materials including aluminum foil, ceramic tiles, paper, tape, fabric and Styrofoam, Heishman alters the way we experience the use of these humble items. Encountering her works on paper and in sculpture, one recognizes her misuse of material and her interest in broken patterns, faux surfaces and optical illusions. Jenny Heishman grew up in Florida surrounded by theme parks, water flumes and golf courses. Nature was mimicked — much of her world was a reconstruction of some other place’s history and landscape. She writes: “Because we enjoyed year-round warmth, we built the seasonal changes with plastic autumn leaves, artificial snow, and unspoken agreements. This environment taught me how to use objects to create a fabricated reality.” Her work encourages us to find pleasure in the act of looking and her playful gestures reward us with multiple visual surprises. Heishman received the Betty Bowen Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundationan grant in 2011. She received her MFA from Ohio State University in 1998.
Amjad Faur received his BFA in Painting from the University of Arkansas in 2003, and his MFA in Photography from the University of Oregon in 2005. He has been working for over a decade with large format photography and it continues to be the means by which he conceptualizes, associates and produces his work. The visual content of Faur’s images is mostly informed by the transitional and elastic spaces found in the ethnic, political and religious labyrinth of the Middle East; the images are contingent on having been shot “in camera” so as to reinforce the visual abstractions contained within them. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art, in Portland Oregon. Amjad joined the Evergreen faculty in 2012.
Miranda Mellis is the author of The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007). The Revisionist has been translated into Italian by Leonardo Luccone (Nutrimenti, 2008) as well as Croatian by Zoran Rosko (Quorum, 2009). It was a finalist for The Believer 2007 Book Award. Mellis has received The John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, The Michael Harper Praxis Prize, and an NEH Independent Research Grant. Her writing has appeared in various journals & magazines including Conjunctions, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Cabinet, Fence, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, American Book Review, Context, Modern Painters, Post Road, Harp & Altar, No Colony, BeeHive, and Paul Revere’s Horse. Her writing also appears in several anthologies including Conversations at The War Time Cafe and California Video: Artists and Histories. She teaches at Evergreen State College.
Hanneline Røgeberg is a painter who works with the paradoxes of representation and language. She has shown in solo shows at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Henie-Onstad Kunst Center and most recently at Dortmund Bodega, Oslo, Norway this March, 2011, and in groups shows such as the MIT List Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a four person show the Richmond Museum, VA, in 2009. She has received an NEA grant in 1996, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1999, an Anonymous Was A Woman grant in 2003, and an OCA grant for a catalog publication in 2009. She is an associate professor of art at Rutgers University and has previously taught at University of Washington, Cooper Union, and Yale University. She was a visiting artist at Skowhegan in 2009.
Hanneline Røgeberg lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Oslo, Norway.
Jen Graves—The Stranger’s visual arts writer—writes about things you mostly, but not strictly, approach with your eyeballs. Her writing has been in Art in America, The Believer, and ArtNews, and the Warhol Foundation has given her some money to get lost in land art. She also digs teaching, especially at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Jen has lived and written about art in the Pacific Northwest for 11 years.
Seattle Catalog is both an art project and a for-profit company. As a for-profit company, Sea-Cat takes the form of a tri-yearly sales catalog with carefully selected artwork by different artists. As an art project, it is a collaboration by Gretchen Bennett, Wynne Greenwood and Matthew Offenbacher.
Sea-Cat is a teaching / learning art gallery and catalog sales business. In our experience, the selling of work can feel removed from and even opposite the experience of community and meaningful connection. We are interested in opening up the access to and experience of art purchasing and selling. We’re trying to experience community within a sales environment.
Sea-Cat engages individual practices, involving creators from various communities and backgrounds. Our goals include: building an audience for and selling experimental artwork; creating interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and transitive programming; nurturing individual practices into new and fruitful areas; examining and re-evaluating the idea of “value”.
We want everyone to build upon their individual practices, while also realizing new language and creating new connections. By everyone we mean: artists, performers, ourselves, our advisory board, audiences, you. This cooperative framework is intended to put practices into discursive motion. We hope Sea-Cat will reflect some of the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of shifting positions, roles, and open-ended outcomes.
Catharina Manchanda joined the Seattle Art Museum in 2011 as Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art. A native of Germany, she received her Ph.D. at the City University Graduate Center in New York specializing in German conceptual photography of the 1960s and ‘70s. While in New York she helped organize a retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. At the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis she curated Beauty and the Blonde: An Exploration of American Art and Popular Culture with work from the 1960s to the present, and Models and Prototypes, which investigated the prevalence of architectural and conceptual models as templates for artistic production. Prior to her move to Seattle she worked as Senior Curator at the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art where she organized exhibitions on Robin Rhode and Cyprien Gaillard. For SAM, she is currently curating a series of exhibitions and installations for Elles: SAM, including a focused show on Yayoi Kusama, a presentation of paintings by Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, conceptual works by Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper, and accompanying video program. Her published writings address a range of topics from photography and conceptual art, to essays on individual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Thomas Demand, Braco Dimitrijevic, Robin Rhode, Cyprien Gaillard and George Grosz.
Nikki McClure of Olympia, Washington is known for her painstakingly intricate and beautiful paper cuts. Armed with an X-acto knife, she cuts out her images from a single sheet of paper and creates a bold language that translates the complex poetry of motherhood, nature, and activism into a simple and endearing picture.
Her work depicts the virtues of hard labor and patience, which is inherent in her process as well as in the images themselves: weathered hands washing dishes, people sweeping, mothers caring for their babies, and farmers working the land. But there is also a large element of celebration, of taking the time to roll around in the grass and get wet from the early morning dew. The need for all of us to lay down on the ground, grab hold of the earth, look at the stars and dream. She magnifies the importance of simple things, like the change of seasons, slowing down the world for a moment so we can actually taste it.
Nikki’s images exude a positivity that revolves around community, sustenance, parenting, and appreciating both the urban and rural landscape, undoubtedly influenced by her home in the Northwest and specifically Olympia. As one of the more prominent visual artists involved with Olympia-based record labels K and Kill Rock Stars, as well as the Riot Grrrl movement in the early nineties, Nikki’s work still embodies the fiercely independent fire that fueled the passion and creativity of that time period.
She regularly produces her own posters, books, cards, t-shirts and a beloved yearly calendar as well as designs covers for countless records and books, including illustrations for magazines the Progressive and Punk Planet. She is a self-taught artist who has been making paper-cuts since 1996.
Fionn Meade is Curator at SculptureCenter, NY, where recent group exhibitions include Knight’s Move, a survey of new sculpture in New York, and Leopards in the Temple, with Lothar Baumgarten, Das Institut, Patrick Hill, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Lucy Skaer, and Kathrin Sonntag, among others. Recent curatorial projects also include Nachleben, co-organized with Lucy Raven at Goethe Institut, NY, which engaged Aby Warburg’s thinking and included works by Matthew Buckingham, Patricia Esquivias, William E. Jones, Harun Farocki, Rachel Harrison, John Miller, Stan VanDerBeek, James Welling, Christopher Wool, and Akram Zaatari, among others, and Entr’acte at Catherine Bastide with Tom Burr, James Coleman, David Noonan, William Pope.L, Catherine Sullivan, and Rosemarie Trockel. His writing appears in Artforum, Bomb, Bidoun, The Fillip Review, Mousse, and Parkett, among other publications, and he received a 2009 Arts Writer Grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Recently released catalog writing includes essays on Elad Lassry for the Kunsthalle Zurich (JRP/Ringier), and Mark Morrisroe for the Fotomuseum Winterthur (JRP/Ringier). He holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University
Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau present their 2011 film Empty Quarter on Wednesday May 30, 2012, 11:30-1:30, in Lecture Hall 1 at The Evergreen State College.
Empty Quarter (2011, 16mm black & white/sound, 71 minutes) is a film about the region of Southeast Oregon, an area populated by ranching and farming communities, in Lake, Harney, and Malheur counties. The region is roughly one-third of Oregon’s landmass yet holds less than 2% of the state’s population.
Southeast Oregon, though familiar by name, is a foreign place, particularly to those who reside in urban environments. It is a landscape in the making, constantly undergoing change, being re-worked. It is a highly politicized landscape, evoking differing opinions concerning resource management and land use. It is also a landscape that is, despite some beliefs, rich with diversity, as seen by the presence of East Indian and Japanese families, ancestors of Basque sheepherders, home to the Paiute tribes people, and to Latinos who have come to help work the land.
Empty Quarter departs from a documentary form that utilizes “talking head” interviews and “B-roll” or “cut-away” images tied together with occasional narration. The film instead presents stark portraits, waiting to be explored and digested by the viewer. Meaning is extracted in the slow process of accumulation and measured response. Through a series of stationary shots, recording open landscapes and the activities of local residents, Empty Quarter reflects on the character of the region. Natural areas are viewed among images of industry, various labor processes, resource management and recreation. Voices of local residents describe the history of pioneer settlement, social life of rural communities and the struggles of small town economies.
Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau are media artists based in Portland, Oregon. They are the co-founders of 40frames.org, a 16mm film preservation and advocacy organization that maintains the web resource 16mmdirectory.org, houses a collection of 16mm prints, and provides a menu of technical services to media artists and organizations.
Empty Quarter is their first co-production, and has been exhibited at venues and festivals throughout North America, including the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago, Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Centre. Minty and LeTourneau are currently at work on new projects scheduled for release winter 2013.
