December 2019 / Playground
Laura King. Heaven on Earth.
Acrylic on panel, 2’ x 2’, 2018
Jam Jesse Allison. You Jerk Off to Me.
Acrylic on foam, 2’ x 3', 2017
Playground
Curator / Laura King
Tropical Contemporary /
Andrew Douglas Campbell
Denise Lutz
Maddison Colvin
Jonathan Bagby
M. Earl Williams
Tannon Reckling
Anne Magratten
Sam Wrigglesworth
Mady Mazsk
Jam Jesse Allison
December 05 – 28, 2019
Reception / Thursday, December 05, 6–8pm
Meeting up. Hooking up. Goofing off. Loitering. Where do we go to spend time together? By ourselves? What’s this weird thing we’re sitting on? Let’s pretend the conceptual ground is lava and we’ve gotta stay off it or we get BURNED. Or we could just get online and be anyone, anything, without limitation.
Working in a variety of media, members of art collective Tropical Contemporary have created work that plays along themes of dreamt and repurposed spaces, new identities, and fantasy as coping mechanism and tool for discovery. We arrive at these concepts as a collective of artists, the majority of which fall under one (or more) umbrella term– LGBTQIA+, Femme, POC, Kinky.
Tropical Contemporary is a collective of emerging contemporary artists located in Eugene, Oregon. We created Tropical with the intention to be open, affordable, and collaborative. Our primary goal is to provide the Eugene community with access to viewing, participating, and creating contemporary art with an emphasis on providing a platform for marginalized artists to exhibit their work. As a collective we aim to inspire people to create, engage in, and be a part of conversations larger than themselves. Starting as a nomadic group, our past exhibitions have utilized unoccupied office spaces, residential dwellings, and even rented moving trucks to use as gallery space. We now have a home base located at 1120 Bailey Hill #11 Eugene, OR which serves as a flexible project space for both exhibitions and studio work.