December 2018 / Remains of our Refuse
Garima Thakur. Lies.
2016
drawing,collage, watercolor
Garima Thakur. Din Pratidin (Everyday).
2017
fiberglass, wood, vermillion
Tabitha Nikolai. Sick Trans sex Gloria.
2017
interactive digital environment
Tabitha Nikolai. Sex Temples Memory Palace.
2018
interactive digital environment
Remains of our Refuse
Artists /
Sex Temples: Tabitha Nikolai, Garima Thakur
December 06 – 29, 2018
Reception / Thursday, December 06, 6–8pm
Remains of our Refuse is a simulated physical and digital ceremonial space designed to activate all five senses. It explores our early memories of sexuality & gender through the lens of cultural, historical, and personal hybridity. Like relics in a reliquary the physical space hosts video game stations in a larger installation, drawing influence from both the Khujuraho monuments in Madhaya Pradesh (commonly known as Sex Temples) and banal sites of suburban youth culture. Each digital vignette within the game illustrates a dreamy recollection from our youths, both mundane and traumatic, and the formatively repressive dimensions that lie therein. The narratives told in the architecture of the Sex Temples convey multitudinous forms of gender identity, which, although ancient, are more progressive than many contemporary attitudes about gender and sex. Amidst the mounting pervasiveness of digital spaces, a recursion can be glimpsed and ways of living described in the Vedas take on heightened significance.
Sex Temples is a Portland, Oregon, based collaborative duo (Garima Thakur & Tabitha Nikolai.) Remains of our Refuse is funded in part by a Western Oregon University Faculty Excellence Research Grant.
Garima thakur is an interdisciplinary artist born in New Delhi, India where she spent most of her formative years. Operating within the in-between nature of our beings her work seeks to find visual passages back to elusive idea of home and the world. Thakur works with interactive media, video, drawing, sculpture and text. She is currently residing in Portland,OR and works as an assistant professor of interaction media and graphic design at Western Oregon University. She has held residencies at Portland Institute of contemporary art, and Playa Artists. Her work has been exhibited at S1 gallery(Oregon), Indivisible (Oregon), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Oregon), Front Gallery (Louisiana), NW Film center (Oregon), and Chitrakoot Gallery(Kolkata)
Tabitha Nikolai is a trashgender gutter elf and low-level cybermage raised in Salt Lake City and currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her artwork manifests as text, videogames, cosplay, and earnest rites of suburban occult. She is sometimes a stray cat and an attractive nuisance who is interested in reinvention, resistance, resilience, and making pocket worlds with people she loves. Currently she teaches and manages galleries for the Portland State University School of Art + Design. Her work has been shown in i-D Magazine, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and Ganka Gallery in Tokyo. Forthcoming projects include a new VR environment as part of her New Media Fellowship with Open Signal in 2019. She hopes you’re doing okay.
This exhibition is funded in part by a Western Oregon University Faculty Excellence Research Grant.