November 2022 - January 2023
The Nexus of Here
Saturday, November 12, 2022 – Sunday, January 15, 2023
WAVE Contemporary
730 Southwest 10th Avenue, Suite 111 & 112Portland, OR, 97205
WAVE Contemporary is excited to announce The Nexus of Here, an upcoming group exhibition featuring Jessi DiTillio, Claire Elliot, Tia Factor, Marcelo Fontana, Asa Mease, Midgray, Nicholas Moler-Gallardo, Susan Murrell, Hannah Newman, Morgan Rosskopf, Katherine Spinella, Michael Stephen, and John Whitten. Join us in celebrating the opening of the show on Saturday, November 12th from 5-8 pm.
The horizon line is a construction to explain the limitations of our bodies in relation to the world. Though we witness the horizon with our eyes, the phenomenon is ultimately imaginary–a concept to define our placement in built, natural, mental and social spaces. Delineating real, mental and imaginary space, the horizon persists as a faithful companion to travelers, explorers, dreamers, and field workers.
Central to the experience of the horizon is the availability of open mental and physical space. With the insatiable development of urban centers and information economies, we increasingly lose our connection with the horizon and our environment. Stable horizons give way to a mixture of depth, distance, pixels, and data. Information bubbles fragment our perception, while attention and outrage economies leave little space to change our minds, create new ideas, or explore the unfamiliar.
In the midst of personal and global scale upheaval, the exhibition The Nexus of Here offers space and perspective to recalibrate shifting horizons.
Opening Reception: November 12, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays & Sundays, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
For appointments outside our regular hours don't hesitate to get in touch with hello@wavecontemporary.com
This show is proudly supported by a Regional Arts & Culture Council Make | Learn | Build Grant. Additional support is provided by: WAVE Contemporary, SATOR Projects, Prosper Portland, and IPM.
November 2022
Through Line, Oregon State University Art Department Faculty exhibition
To mark the reopening of historic Fairbanks Hall and its renovated studio and gallery spaces, faculty and alumni of OSU’s art program present "Through Line," a show featuring painting, photography, sculpture, and video art, representing 14 artists.
Inspired by the natural landscape surrounding Corvallis, "Willamette Streamflow" is a sculptural interpretation of 90 years of river flow measurements collected by the U.S. Geological Survey in Salem from 1930-2020. Willamette Streamflow was commissioned through Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places Program, managed by the Oregon Arts Commission, and joins a robust list of other such pieces on OSU’s campus.
The galleries in Fairbanks, prominently situated on the western edge of the MU Quad, will host a wide array of shows by faculty, students, and guest artists throughout the academic year.
Join us for a reception, celebrating the art and artists as well as this wonderful renovation. The galleries will stay open until 7:30 p.m. in conjunction with the downtown Corvallis Art Walk.
Waves in full color No. 1 & No. 2, colored pencil on paper, on view in Through Line at Oregon State University’s Fairbanks Gallery
October 2022
Along these lines, with Julia Bradshaw, Ron Linn, & John Whitten
Well Well Projects in Portland, Oregon
Opening Reception Saturday, October 1, 2022 5:00–8:00pm
Gallery Talk with Dr. Kirsi Peltomäki, Julia Bradshaw, Ron Linn, & John Whitten Saturday, October 1 at 4:15pm
Visitor Information: drop in Saturdays - Sundays, 12-5pm, and by appointment
Along these lines is an exhibition of recent works by Julia Bradshaw, Ron Linn, and John Whitten. With landscape as their primary subject matter, these artists use time-intensive techniques in photography, painting, and drawing to explore the ambiguous authority of the grid when used to map spaces. These artists challenge the sociopolitical/historical gridded division of the landscape, employ the grid in scientific myth-making, and play with the breakdown of the pixelated pictorial space.
Along these lines, installation view at Well Well Projects in Portland, Oregon, image credit: Mario Gallucci
April 2022
To dog a portal
Well Well Projects in Portland, Oregon
Through pattern, pixelation, and repetition in action or motif, artists in To dog a portal observe the natural world through scientific data, human interaction, and magical thinking. Emboldened by the possibility of science and magic coexisting, this exhibition engages in a willful suspension of disbelief. Balancing these works on the horizon of time through careful precision in the making process, these artists cultivate a field for observing the super-natural qualities in seemingly everyday occurrences.
featuring works by
Andrea Alonge, Ben Buswell, Erik Geschke, Jeremy Le Grand, Morgan Rosskopf, Katherine Spinella, Jessie Rose Vala, Jessie Weitzel Le Grand, & John Whitten
April 2 – May 1, 2022
To dog a portal, installation view at Well Well Projects in Portland, Oregon, image credit: Mario Gallucci
February 2022
A Provocation
after/time in Portland, Oregon
after/time is excited to announce our first exhibition in 2022 with the Portland-based collective, WAVE Contemporary! A Provocation opens Friday, February 4th and will run through March 3rd, 2022.
Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, February 4th 5-8pm PST.
WAVE Contemporary :
Claire Elliott
Marcelo Fontana
Asa Mease
Midgray
Nicholas Moler-Gallardo
Hannah Newman
Katherine Spinella + John Whitten
Kelda Van Patten
Rachael Zur
A wave occurs when a body of water is disrupted. Small disruptions can grow exponentially outward, affecting powerful change on a large area. WAVE Contemporary borrows its name from this phenomenon, seeking to enact small, but effective, change on the art community in Portland.
In Wave – A Provocation, WAVE Contemporary members present gestures of incitement, large and small. These provocations are situated, not within each individual’s practice, but within the practice or ethos of WAVE as a whole. As a dedicated collective, new gestures grow from our collaborative discussions. The process of critique becomes a focal point, and the work from each member highlights this process across various mediums. Just as art is a provocation, critique is also a provocative act, challenging the artist to reach beyond their normal habits, concepts, and thought-patterns. Through critique, WAVE artists seek to both provoke and be provoked, a reciprocity of expansion.
Transgression is always an integral part of artmaking. Wave – A Provocation proposes community as a catalyst for provocation, asking how communities challenge, support and transgress together. Each artist will present a piece that highlights the collaborative efforts of WAVE, an individual work shaped or influenced by critique and conversation within the larger collective. Within Wave – A Provocation, we invite viewers into the critique process and a community of provocation.
Little Pigeon, collaboration with Katherine Spinella, on view in A Provocation at After/Time Collective in Portland, Oregon
December 2021
Atlas
Curated by Marcelo Fontana, Rachael Zur, and Jason Triefenbach
Carnation Contemporary, Portland, Oregon
December 5 - December 19, 2021
The Oregon art community poses unique challenges for artists in the region. Suffering from a lack of space, unstructured market, recent loss of university programs, implicit biases, and lack of institutional support, in addition to the larger challenges of continuing gentrification, real estate speculation and more create a vacuum of leadership to envision new futures for our society. Amidst this ecosystem, artist-run spaces play a fundamental role in cultural production and promotion. Even with the challenges of funding, opportunity, and reach for member-run initiatives, artist-run spaces play an outsized role in Portland’s visual art scene by creating challenging and generative programming. In Atlas, Carnation Contemporary collaborates with other artist-run spaces and initiatives to address the issues listed above.
We believe galleries and artist communities with presence as a physical space have a responsibility to take risks and present exhibitions that capture the city's collective imagination. Carnation's gallery will become a place for reflection on how culture is produced. With this in mind and inspired by Didi-Huberman’s show Atlas: How to Carry the World on One's Back?, at Reina Sofia Museum, Spain 2011, Atlas is a collective curatorial construction presenting a mix of sculptures, projections, paintings and photographs. Our focus is to create a presentation of differences, while focusing on the link that binds us together – spaces enduring to collectively create culture. More than a logic of organization, archive, or a mechanism of research, the exhibition will be a process of discovery on how culture is produced here in Oregon, and how to build and harness a city or community’s collective imagination and create connections between seemingly disparate works.
As Ana Luisa Almeida stated in the book Wishes and Cities "[from] the perspective of identity as a collective construction...it remains to reflect on the responsibility that lies with each one of us. We all are builders of this imagination and the role of our decisions, our behaviors and values determine our social space, who is our city."
Atlas is a collective effort by 1122 Outside, After Time, Ditch Projects, Fuller Rosen, Gallery 114, Gallery Blue, IPRC, Tropical, Small Talk, Wave, Well Well, and Zymoglyphic.
Thunderstruck 2.0: black hole sun exhibited in Portland, OR in September 2021.
August 2020
Cultivating Artist Communities and Networks
As an alum of University of Oregon’s MFA program and co-founder of Carnation Contemporary, I was interviewed for the University of Oregon’s School of Art + Design web page to discuss some reasons why Carnation was created.
February 2020
Carnation Contemporary presents If / Then at Tropical Contemporary.
IF/THEN
As we kick off a new decade the future looms large. Daily we engage in the labor of managing anxiety as we instinctually consider possible consequences from every angle. Familiar horizons fail to stabilize; figure and ground shift above and below, and our minds cloud over as data streams forth. IF/THEN questions our connected and unsure futures by examining hypothetical, individual, and non-linear nows.
The symbols and imagery included in this exhibition are tethered equally to literal, prophetic, and poetic modes of thinking, as we explore once stable notions of nature, offspring, and representation. In IF/THEN Carnation Contemporary members offer new visions of future presents past, bringing into singular focus the multitude of molten tomorrows.
Artists: Hannah Newman, Katherine Spinella, Jessie Weitzel Le Grand, Renee Couture, Maria Lux, Carolyn Hopkins, John Whitten, Susan Murrell, M. Acuff, Jeremy Le Grand
December 2019
Art in America features Carnation Contemporary in a review by Bean Gilsdorf!
October 2019
Hyperallergic features Carnation Contemporary as one of Portland’s “10 Exciting Venues in the Rose City”
September 2019
| | | THUNDERSTRUCK | | | will be exhibited at Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR for the month of September 2019!
My colored pencil series Signals, 2018 on view at Outback Arthouse in Los Angeles, CA as part of a group exhibition exchange with Carnation Contemporary.
July 2019:
| | | THUNDERSTRUCK | | | catalog gets picked up for distribution by Printed Matter Inc!
| | | THUNDERSTRUCK | | | premieres in New York City at NARS!
June-August 2019:
Mass in full color No. 3, 2019 to be featured in Summer Selections 2019 at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art.
Portland, OR—Charles A. Hartman Fine Art is excited to present Summer Selections 2019, an exhibition of several excellent paintings and photographs. This show spotlights several recent pieces by gallery artists as well as a few vintage gems and features work by Holly Andres, Corey Arnold, Jeffrey Conley, Jessica Curtaz, Rachel Davis, Anna Fidler, Raymond Meeks, Annie Marie Musselman, Daniel Robinson, Eva Speer, Mark Steinmetz and John Whitten. This exquisite selection is not to be missed!
The entire exhibition can be viewed on their website by clicking HERE.
APRIL 2019:
Waves in black No. 1, 2019 purchased by Oregon State University's Bend Campus through Oregon Arts Commission's Percent for the Arts.
MARCH 2019:
Surface / Interrupted: Happy Hour Panel Discussion Hosted by OCAC Hoffman & Centrum Galleries and OCAC - Oregon College of Art and Craft
Please join us March 15 at 6pm in the Hoffman Gallery for a Happy Hour panel discussion on our current exhibition Surface/ Interrupted. Participating artists Morgan Buck, John Whitten and Rachel Wolf will be discussing their work and practice with Curator Sam Hopple and Painting and Drawing Dept. Head Michelle Ross.
FEBRUARY 2019:
Drawings from my Stochastic Resonance series will be exhibited at Oregon College of Art and Craft's Hoffman gallery through the month of February.
Waves in Full Color No. 1 published in INDA International Drawing Annual 12 Exhibition in Print.
INDA international drawing annual 12 exhibition-in-print available now.
JANUARY 2019:
Signals to be exhibited at Oregon State University's Portland Campus in celebration of the building's grand opening.
DECEMBER 2018:
Portland based visual artist and Carnation Contemporary co-founder, Katherine Spinella, and I will be participating in a collaborative residency at Caldera.
NOVEMBER 2018:
ArtScene's online platform, Visual Art Source (VAS), wrote about Stochastic Resonance at Charles Hartman Fine Art and used my drawing Mass in Green (2017) as the image for the column.
My recent series of abstract drawings titled Stochastic Resonance will have its Portland debut at Charles Hartman Fine Art this November!
SEPTEMBER 2018:
Carnation Contemporary members Katherine Spinella, Russell Borne and Leslie Vigeant interviewed on Portland's KBOO to talk about the collective!
https://kboo.fm/media/68044-carnation-contemporary
My drawings Signals are used as one of the promotional images!
First Date gets write up on PORT!
http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2018/08/labor_day_weeke.html
Carnation Contemporary opens its doors with a members’ group show titled First Date.
Install shot of First Date with my new drawings Signals (star, cluster, chain, very), 2018 Colored pencil on paper depicted on the right.
First Date
Opening September 1, 2018 in Portland, Oregon at Carnation Contemporary!
AUGUST 2018:
Carnation Contemporary gallery is open and under construction.
Carnation Contemporary was founded in 2018 by a collective of Portland-based artists who champion critical and contemporary artwork. We are a cooperative gallery supporting emerging and mid-career artists from Portland and the surrounding region.
As one of the co-founders I am super excited about this project we have been working on since December 2017.
Follow Carnation on Instagram @carnationcontemporary
JULY 2018:
| | | Thunderstruck | | | receives three grants.
| | | Thunderstruck | | | receives financial support from a Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant, an Oregon Arts Commission Professional Development Grant, and an Oregon State University Faculty Research Award Grant!
Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, 1977. © Estate of Walter De Maria.
Curator:
Jessi DiTillio (b. Los Angeles, CA)
Visual Artists:
Robert Beam (b. Casa Grande, AZ)
Rosana Aviña Beam (b. Los Angeles, CA)
Katherine Spinella (b. Armada, MI)
Michael Stephen (b. Denton, TX)
John Whitten (b. Princeton, IN)
This summer, five visual artist and one curator will spend the night with Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. | | | Thunderstruck | | | will be our response to this experience, culminating in a traveling group art exhibition and exhibition catalog. Using Lucy Lippard’s book Undermining as a guide for navigating the contemporary artwork in a more critical way, this iconic work of Land Art will serve as both site and inspiration for the production of new works that interrogate land usage, the cultural impact of colonialism on native ancestral land rights, the economic commodification of the art object and the market, and the intersection of the environmental and political within our highly charged climate. Scholars don’t typically investigate the Land Art movement as connected to social interaction, but prioritize individual phenomenological experience. Walter de Maria was infamously controlling about the interpretation of his artwork, carefully restricting the means of access and emphasizing that “isolation is the essence of land art.” As a group of artists and writers, we are interested in exploring how the experience of the piece might be altered and expanded as a group encounter. How might a collective approach to land use steer engagement from Romanticism to critical engagement? Along with Lucy Lippard, we are interested in re-contextualizing Land Art to investigate the critical ripple effects of the work of the 1970s for contemporary social awareness and artistic practice.
| | | Thunderstruck | | | currently has exhibitions confirmed for Portland, OR in May 2019 and Brooklyn, NY in July 2019.
Be sure to check back regularly as this project develops.
NOVEMBER 2017:
Mass in blue and orange will be included in the Abstract Mind 2018 exhibition at the Czong Institue for Contemporary Art (CICA) Museum in Korea during February and March.
OCTOBER 2017:
I will be offering a workshop on making "glitch" art at the Society for Photographic Education's Illuminate & Provoke: SPE-NW 2017 held at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR.
Waves in Full Color #2) curated into Manifest Gallery's International Drawing Annual (INDA) publication to be printed and distributed in summer 2018.
SEPTEMBER 2017:
Solo show at Eastern Oregon University's Nightingale Gallery.
Portland artist’s exhibition marks opening of Nightingale Gallery’s 2017 season
Sept. 19, 2017 La Grande, Ore. − Bursts and waves of bright color will fill Eastern Oregon University’s Nightingale Gallery this fall, as it hosts John Whitten’s “Stochastic Resonance” exhibition.
The exhibition opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on Sept. 29 in the gallery, and runs through Nov. 3. Whitten will return to campus Nov. 1 to present a public talk about his work at 6 p.m. in Badgely Hall’s Huber Auditorium.
Read full article at the link below.
https://www.eou.edu/news-press/nightingale-gallery-opens-2017-18-season/
AUGUST 2017:
New drawings exhibited in “Totality,” a cosmos-themed art exhibit.
“Totality,” a cosmos-themed art exhibit saluting the rare total solar eclipse occurring in August, will run Aug. 14 through Sept. 28 in Oregon State University’s Fairbanks Gallery, 220 S.W. 26th St., Corvallis.
“Totality” brings together a group of artists who make work about people’s relationship with the Cosmos in some manner. The emphasis is on lyrical, conceptual, scientific, fantasy and historic responses to the universe or to humankind’s space exploration.
Selected artists and their artworks include photographer Eric William Carroll’s project “Standard Stars,” which documents the deterioration of emulsion peeling off astronomical glass plate negatives. Artist Penelope Umbrico samples images of the most-photographed subject matter - sunsets - in her single-channel video “Sun/Screen.” Corvallis-based astrophotographer Tom Carrico exhibits his photographs of nebulae, which are clouds of dust, hydrogen, helium and plasma in space and can be challenging to photograph.
The exhibition was curated by Julia Bradshaw, assistant professor of photography and new media at OSU. Bradshaw also has assembled a host of arts-related special events for visitors coming to Corvallis and the OSU campus during the weekend prior to the eclipse, which will occur Aug. 21.
“I relish the range of imaginative and fact-based artistic responses to the Cosmos,” Bradshaw said of the exhibit. “Making and viewing artwork that explores philosophies of space puts us in touch with our humanity in ways that are particularly thought-provoking.”
Link to "Totality" announcement on Oregon State University's site here.
Oregon State University is using my drawing for their marketing materials, exhibition posters and gallery signage.
