July 2024 / Composition / Decomposition

Composition / Decomposition

Carnation Contemporary

Raphael Arar
Elizabeth Arzani
Heather Lee Birdsong
Brittney Connelly
Epiphany Couch
Renee Couture
Carolyn Hazel Drake
Michael Espinoza
Quinha Faria
Marcelo Fontana
Pamela Hadley
Chris Lael Larson
Matthew Bennett Laurents
Maria Lux
Kyle Adam Kalev Peets
Allan Pichardo
Kim Smith Claudel
Matt Williams
Rachael Zur

July 05 - 28, 2024
Opening Reception / Thursday, July 11, 5–8pm

Summer Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

Through decomposition, soil is made fertile for seeds to take root. What should we construct from what needs to be deconstructed—systems, ideologies, images, a line, a composition, a theory? What should or could grow in its place? In the decay of dated systems and ideas for art, culture, politics, artists can plant new seeds and imagine new ecosystems

This group exhibition features 19 members from the artist collective, Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), uprooting and inserting disparate forms of entangled histories, questions, fears, grief, and longing embedded in seen and unseen structures. Themes of archetypal life cycles, ephemerality, consumption, ritual, generational knowledge, motherhood, and intimacy are shown side by side as simultaneously expansive and oddly specific. From projected landscapes on a desert-sun-bleached can to dusty poems encased in a block of soap to a CRT television with robotic news mining social media, reclaimed and constructed materials present themselves in various states of composure and disarray. Collectively, the work in this show serves as an invitation for SOIL members, asking them to respond, in turn, at Carnation's gallery in November 2024. 

These exchanges between artist collectives are made possible by a RACC Art3C grant.

Carnation Contemporary was founded in 2018 by a collective of Portland-based artists who champion critical and contemporary artwork. Carnation supports emerging and mid-career artists from the Pacific Northwest. 

ARTIST STATEMENTS // BIOS

Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. His work highlights the social, political and economic implications of technological acceleration and human-to-machine interaction. His artwork has been exhibited at venues internationally including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Moscow Museum of Applied Art, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Gamble House Museum, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival. Notable commissions include Noema Magazine, Goethe Institut, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Intel Labs and IBM Research. Commercially, his design work has been featured in publications including Forbes, TED, Inc. Magazine, FastCompany, Wired and others.

 rarar.com / @rarar

Elizabeth Arzani (b. Charlotte, NC) is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator living and working in Portland, OR. As a collector of sorts, Arzani constructs narratives from moments of curiosity, absurdity, and potential humor in happenstance. Her impulse to collect and desire to recycle is a search for connection and an attempt to collaborate with the unknown. Working between painting, sculpture, and printmaking practices reveals allegorical relationships embedded in materiality. Stories are located in the cracks, and creases, stains, and rust of physical objects, layered with her own mark making. They become site-specific maps of a place, offering a form of communication that extends language. 

Arzani is a member of the artist collective, Carnation Contemporary; Portland, OR, and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC; The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture in Portland, OR; Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, NC; Peek-a-Boo Gallery, Western Australia, Perth and the Salon du Cal during Luxembourg Art Week. She has collaborated on public art installations with Shunpike’s Storefronts Project, Seattle, WA and has participated in artist residencies with Kulturschapp in Walferdange, Luxembourg and with New Harmony Clay Project in Indiana. She was recently a recipient of a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission with support from the Ford Family Foundation and has received two project grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Arzani holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

www.elizabetharzani.com /@elarzani

Heather Lee Birdsong (b. 1984, Spring Valley, NV) works in printmaking, painting, and handmade books. Based in Portland, OR since 2005, she holds a BFA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (2011). In addition to her fine art practice, she works as a graphic designer and arts administrator (specializing in studio and collections management for artists and collectors). Recent exhibitions include the office at Russo Lee Gallery, Portland; Hopeful Things in Dark Places at Truckenbrod Gallery, Corvallis; Imaginary Shelter at Carnation Contemporary; and forthcoming in winter 2025: Other World/s at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon.

Collections housing her artwork include the Visual Chronicle of Portland, OR; Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College; and Albert Solheim Library, PNCA. Her membership at Carnation is supported by an ArtsC3 Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (2023).

In my short series of paintings titled The Need for Kindness, the scenes coalesce from multiple environments that I called home. A figure—a human, abstracted into a state of pure emotion—stands in a room as Pacific Northwest forest invades the house. The architecture is a reconstruction from memory of the home I lived in as an adolescent, situated in the desert city of Las Vegas. Archways, a motif that belongs equally to sacred and mundane architecture, often function as portals in my work; they were not part of the home that I remember. The decorative ivy crawling toward the figure is common to both locations—here in the Northwest, an aggressive invasive that chokes our native forests; in the Mojave Desert, a drain on scarce water resources. The title for this series derives from a line in The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch.

www.heatherleebirdsong.com

Instagram and Bluesky: @smidgeonpress

Brittney Connelly (b. 1985) fervently believes that one should challenge the structures that encircle our understanding of what art is, was, or can be. In keeping true to this mantra her physical output often varies in format ranging from sculpture, ceramics, photography, curation, writing and space building. What is consistent throughout the work is the modality of time, both in terms of expansion and compression, essence of a performer or the body, and a critical look at contemporary image production.

In 2018, Connelly co-founded Carnation Contemporary, an art gallery in Portland Oregon. In 2019, Connelly embarked on a curatorial project called </script>, this project funded a group of national artists to discuss & address the impact that digital landscapes have on contemporary art practices. Her most recent curatorial collaboration called Foreign Bodies was screened at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw Poland.

Connelly has received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and Portland State University for her ongoing projects. Connelly’s work has screened at museums, galleries, such as Site Brooklyn (NY), Outback Arthouse (LA), COCA Seattle (WA), The Blaffer Museum (TX), FOTOFEST Biennial (TX), and The Cranbrook Art Museum (MI).

At the heart of Dusty Shelving lies an exploration of self-loss and the sorrow of losing another. Conceived from poems the artist penned during the height of the pandemic in 2022, this work is part deeply personal, and an attempt to evoke the ephemeral nature of thoughts, which seem powerful in the moment but are altered by time’s passage. Within the series the poetic verses are immortalized in materials that are weathered by time like soap and dust, some text works are glimpsed through fleeting reflections in water. These creations seek to explore the transitory nature of thoughts that fill our minds in our darkest moments.

www.brittneyconnelly.com / @linda_cenoura

Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing classic mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she presents new ways to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to create images and sculptural works that hold space for reflection, transforming from mere things into precious objects—intimate and heirloom-like.

Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington) in the shadow of təqwuʔməʔ (Mount Rainier). She attended the Tacoma School of the Arts and earned her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Puget Sound. Her work has been shown at Carnation Contemporary (Portland OR), Gallery Ost (New York, NY), Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), The Bellevue Art Museum Education Gallery (Bellevue WA), among others. She is a 2024 Studios at MASS MoCA resident, recipient of the Ford Family Foundation’s Oregon Visual Artist Fellowship, and a selected artist for the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon where she is a member of Carnation Contemporary Gallery

epiphanycouch.com / @epiphany_couch_art

Since becoming a mother five years ago, Renee Couture has made work addressing her desire to understand her relationship with motherhood making her experiences and her emotions the subject of her work.  

She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Art and a BA in Studio Art and Spanish from Buena Vista University. Couture’s work has been exhibited nationally in group exhibitions and as a solo artist. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and four Career Opportunity Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission and four project grants from the Douglas County Cultural Coalition. Couture has been granted residencies at Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Residency Artist Program, Jentel, PLAYA, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and ARIM.

Currently, Couture lives on seven acres in rural southern Oregon with her husband, daughter, and dog. She works out of a retrofitted 20-foot camper turned studio space located in her garden.

Since becoming a mother nearly 5 years ago, I realized I needed to completely overhaul my art practice if I wanted to maintain an art practice. My current practice straddles photography, sculpture, and drawing. I needed a way of working that would allow me to dip in and out. Armed with my iPhone, ink and a thin brush or some other material laying around my studio, and often as little as 20 minutes, I do something. Anything. My work has become my lifeline to explore my experiences and emotions as I raise a tiny human: the rhythms of the day, the tension between resistance and acceptance, the endurance needed to make it through the day. 

www.rcoutureart.com

Carolyn Hazel Drake is a sculptor, arts educator, and third-generation Oregonian. She studied Literature & Architecture at Portland State University’s Honors College and spent a term as a curatorial research & writing intern for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has an M.Ed. in Arts Education and was a longtime K-12 public educator and arts administrator in Oregon school districts. She has been awarded the GLEAN residency, the Leland Ironworks Residency, the Suttle Lodge Artist Residency, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology residency, and is an active participant in the annual Portland Textile Month. Her work has been shown at Guardino Gallery, Oregon Contemporary, Blackfish Gallery, Hanson Howard, and the Sitka Art Invitational. Most recently, Drake joined the faculty of the School of Art at Arizona State University as an assistant teaching professor for art education. She divides her time between Phoenix, AZ and Portland, OR.

My work integrates textiles, ceramics, and domestic objects assembled and layered through traditional craft techniques and collage. I reference devotional objects and archetypal imagery to create objects and installations that are familiar yet cryptic. My handmade objects and readymades create a gentle dissonance between the sacred and the mundane and lean hard towards the analog world as a tangible means of processing ephemeral but very real experiences of death and loss. The work engages viewers in dialogue with death, the sacred, and the resonance of ordinary objects as symbols and bearers of memory.

@carolynhazeldrake / www.carolynhazeldrake.com

Michael Espinoza is a non-binary, multi-racial, multi-disciplinary, self-taught artist whose work embodies & embraces the undone artistic practices of Queer Ancestors lost to persecution, disease, fatal sadness, & closets. Currently, their practice borrows strategies from embroidery, quilting, digital media, sculpture & photography to explore sex & sexuality, intersectional identities, intimacy, the body, & contact with the dead. They have previously exhibited live performance, site-specific installation, & video; their work can be found in public art collections, digital spaces, domestic & international group shows, & the many places intended for queer joy. 

Michael created this work, “Super Fund Cruising Site” for the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artist’s Biennial open through August 4. The image depicts an anonymous cruising site which is also designated as a superfund site due to over a century of industrial deposits. The coincidence of environmental degradation and a covert location for gay sex is not unexpected: queer people must often find safety and pleasure in the places others do not go. The original image was printed 50 feet wide and exhibited as a billboard on the exterior of the Oregon Contemporary in North Portland’s Kenton neighborhood.

www.michaelespinozaart.com / @michaelespinozaart

Quinha Faria is a Brazilian and Japanese-American artist based in Portland. Her work has been included at various national shows such as Vox Populi and Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia and Frieze New York. She is pursuing an MFA at Bard College.  

I carve, scrape, rub, dig, and ground down wood surfaces while continually rotating the work in order to examine new perspectives and to question linear narratives in paintings that resemble landscapes. This work may be gently touched and rotated. 

www.quinhafaria.com / @quinha_faria

Marcelo Fontana is an artist, curator, and organizer from São Paulo, Brazil, based in Portland. Fontana’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between people and photography and how the massive production of images affects and influences our world.  As an organizer, his goal is to create meaningful connections between communities developing culture forward projects. BFA in Photography (Senac-Brazil), Fontana is one of the founders of Wave Contemporary, a member of Carnation Contemporary, and was part of the artist incubator group Prequell and Atelier Fidalga. Marcelo has worked as an assistant for the artist Shirley Paes Leme, made art shows in Brazil, Japan, Korea, and the USA, and was part of The Ford Family Foundation & PNCA Leland Iron Works, LABMIS(Brazil), and WeWork residencies.

“No statement, just that.” 

www.marcelofontana.com / @bulb_fiction

Pamela Hadley is a time-based light artist based in Portland, OR. Using projected minimalist abstract animations while considering or constructing architectural forms, they create immersive environments. Hadley is interested in how embodied viewing changes the scale of time and place and makes us witnesses to the divorce of contemporary culture from these basic realities. Believing that phenomenological experience can be an agent of social change, they seek to make these experiences freely accessible.

An active member of the Portland, OR art community, Hadley is a member of Carnation Contemporary, WAVE Collective, and Borderline Salon. Hadley has participated in exhibitions and artist residencies across the US. They currently are artist-in-residence at the Bush House Museum, Salem, OR and have upcoming two-person and solo shows at The Vestibule, Seattle, WA and Carnation Contemporary, PDX. Hadley earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, DC.

pamelahadley.com / @nosleeptillinstall

Chris Lael Larson is a Portland-based artist working in the overlap of painting, photography, and assemblage to create new perceptual experiences. His subject matter is the everyday absurd—the strange, curious, and confounding ways we connect to each other, the things we consume, and the environments we inhabit. In his work, Chris constructs temporary altar-like installations utilizing found objects, reclaimed materials, natural elements, cheaply printed photographs, and paint to accentuate their latent qualities and reframe their meaning. Sometimes, the installation is the final piece, and sometimes, the final piece is a blend of paintings and large-format photographs of his constructions using a hyperreal lighting technique to create images that confound expectations.

www.chrislaellarson.com / @chris_lael_larson

Matthew Bennett Laurents is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in ceramics. Drawing on histories of craft and ritual, his work explores the potential of objects as vessels for spiritual and emotional energy. Working in a process that emphasizes play, experimentation and intuitive mark-making, his practice is an ongoing series of channeled forms and images. He graduated with an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Studio Art from Lewis & Clark College; he lives and works in Portland, OR.

welcometofaceland.com / @mattbennettlaurents

Maria Lux (b. 1984, Ames, Iowa, United States) is a research-driven artist who makes installation-based works centering on the way animals are used to generate human knowledge and understanding. She earned her BFA from Iowa State University in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. She has shown work throughout the United States, including solo shows at Antenna Projects in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Upfor Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She is a recipient of a McMillen Foundation fellowship, and recent residencies include Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Cow House Studios in Ireland, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As a cross-disciplinary artist, Lux also regularly presents her work at academic conferences around the world—from Finland and the UK to Kentucky and Texas. Originally from the Midwest, she is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

My art practice centers on animals and the way we use them to know our world and ourselves. My work looks at animals as important subjects in their own right, as well as what animals can tell us about human concepts of gender and family, race and class, or power and interdependence. Stemming from fields like evolutionary biology, extinction studies, ecology, history, literature, film, or epidemiology, I often explore subjects like the optimism and fantasy of empirical science, technologies of domestication, the rhetoric of invasive species, or religion, monsters and de-extinction. Though animals have only recently been taken seriously in contemporary art, my work paradoxically uses “unserious” approaches like absurdity, humor, cuteness, horror, or wonder.

My projects are typically installations, involving a variety of different forms and processes, like carving a life-sized record-breaking hog, casting fruit bats that look like chandelier crystals, and making videos of a dollhouse being flooded in an aquarium, to filming a stop-motion animation of a miniature parade, or turning a gallery into a 1960’s department store, as well as making artist books, drawings, collages, essays, and comics. I see my work as a contribution to larger discussions about animals as a subject, and art-making as an approach, for alternative ways to think and know.

marialux.net / @maria__lux

Kyle Adam Kalev Peets is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the margins of meaning as spaces filled with the opportunity to use humor, mischief, and poetry to critique dominant conventions. He has had solo exhibitions at Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO) as well as various group exhibitions like, Art Is Our Last Hope at The Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). His work was published in the periodical SPRTS by Endless Editions, archived in the Watson Library Special Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, Manhattan, Artists’ Books. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2015 and currently teaches Printmaking and Book Arts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

My work considers landscape as a process not a thing. I think of landscape as an expanded concept that considers its always changing entanglements with late capitalism, ecological devastation, popular culture, science, myth, images, and imagination, and how that mediates our understanding of it. The print techniques of layering, repetition and misregistration are used to abstract conventional landscape photographs to obstruct legibility but also surface new forms of reading. The disruption of what we expect to see or experience in a landscape destabilizes its role in perpetuating colonial settler and late capitalist ideologies whose hierarchies create a division between the subject and the landscape.

www.kylepeets.com /  @kyle.peets

Allan Pichardo is a digital media artist from the Dominican Republic currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He has a Bachelor of Fine Art in Computation Arts and Computer Science from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Allan draws from his background as a scientist as well as an artist to explore the materiality of digital media, evoking themes of identity and post-truth in the context of a digitally mediated world. His interactive media work has been exhibited at venues such as InterAccess in Toronto, Studio XX in Montreal, Babycastles in New York City, and the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL.

As a digital artist, I delve into the obscured aspects of our digital selves, leveraging coding and speculative software to reveal the unintended insights buried by modern technology. My art—spanning interactive installations, net art, video games, and speculative software—challenges the dynamics between technology users and the governing structures that exploit their data.

My process begins with examining the personal and societal narratives we broadcast online. This pushes me to dissect and repurpose social media mechanics into mediums for reflection. By manipulating code, electronics, and big data, I envision speculative futures where autonomy over personal data is reclaimed, aiming to evoke reflection and dialogue about our digital existence.

My work frequently navigates satire and the notion of post truth. For instance, “Talkinghead” (2021) features virtual pundits who craft fake news from online political debates, highlighting how quickly misinformation spreads through social media. In “Follow the Drinking Gourd” (2021), I invert Google’s sound search algorithm to explore the interconnectedness of African diasporic musical traditions, offering a virtual reality journey through cultural lineage. These works, and others like them, aim to provoke thought about the fluidity of truth in our digital era and the significant role algorithms play in crafting divergent narratives.

Ultimately, my goal is to foster a dialogue on our engagement with technology, urging a more mindful interaction with the digital world and its narratives. How do we see ourselves within the digital reflections we create and consume? This question guides my pursuit of creating art that not only questions but offers pathways to understanding and possibly redefining our digital identities.

https://allanpichardo.com / @mylovemhz

Kim Smith Claudel searches for moments along the creative process in which gestures of physical forces (gravity / entropy / time) intersect with the ephemeral magic of being (consciousness / intuition / wordless poetry). Her work intersects painting, sculpture, and performance while using a variety of natural, discarded, and technological media—often created within limitations or rule sets. Her work has recently been shown in Japan, Sweden, and across the US. She has upcoming solo exhibitions at Building 5 (Portland, OR), Mt Hood Community College (Portland, OR), The Vestibule (Seattle, OR), and The Painting Center (New York, NY). She received an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab; and she has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.

www.kimsmithclaudel.com / @kimsmithstudio

Matt Williams is an artist, educator, and enrolled tribal member of The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. M. Earl received a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography and a Masters of Arts in Studio Art from the University of Iowa. His work is shown internationally with recent cities including Rome, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, New York, Denver, Portland, and Phoenix. Currently he resides in his ancestral homelands, the Oregon Willamette Valley, where he is the Multimedia Specialist for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

His work explores how we make meaning out of the world around us and how we create significance to our existence as humans. The photographs, videos, durational performances, and installations ask questions like; what is our purpose in the environments that surround us? What is our imminent future if we continue down our technological path towards a more digitized world? What happened to the ideas of the myth and the miracle? The work never expects the viewer to find true answers but instead is more invested in “the why” and “the what”.

www.mearlwilliams.com / @m_earl_williams

Rachael Zur’s expanded paintings blend sculptural physicality with traditional painting techniques to depict objects found in living rooms.  Her work is twice published in New American Paintings, as well as Friend of the Artist, Studio Visit Magazine, and Create! Magazine.  After 12 years as a stay at home mom, Zur resumed her education and completed her MFA in 2019 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Since then she has exhibited her work locally and nationally at places such as Museum of Museums, Seattle, WA; CHART Gallery, New York, NY; SOIL Galley, Seattle, WA; Stone House Art Gallery, Charlotte, NC; and Young Space.  Zur currently resides in the greater Portland Metropolitan area where she strives to set boundaries on when her kids can hang out in her studio.

www.rachaelzur.com / @rachaelzur