Vee Hua 華婷婷Tonight, at Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, the galleries on the top floor will be having a very exciting official opening. Below, Recess Gallery’s event, to take place at The Settlement. It is the last in a ongoing series entitled The Synthesis Series, where rotating pairs of partners create and evolve works and themes over the course of time.
Hannah Piper Burns and Abraham Ingle – Fake Collaboration
A 4-channel video work that results in a “mash-up” of their previous video pieces. By re-cutting the interviews and conversations together, they’ve created a “fake collaboration”: a conversation between Allison, Gabe, Abe, and Hannah that never happened in real life but that discusses relationships, collaborations, difficulties, etc. Layers of artifice will be multiple.
Jason King and Delphine Bedient – Oral Culture
Oral Culture consists of a series of spoken word performances, occurring periodically throughout the evening. Five microphones, scattered throughout the gallery on stands, serve as stations for their performers’ recitations. Following the previous performance and sound installation, they address man’s relationship to his devices, the activity of listening, and memory.
Chloe Womack and Tori Abernathy – Where Are You?
Responding to the issues of translation central to the previous works, they’ve turned the attention to the space itself, or more particularly, to the space that is not there*, the people that aren’t there, the sound that aren’t there, the flickering lights that aren’t there. All the absence that renders spectator’s environment ‘liminal’ and the outside, abhorrent. There is an analog answering machine in the space. There is clean, vinyl prompts around the city asking viewers where they are. The prompts ask them to respond by calling a number. In Our space, their responses will be heard (along with all that urban chitter-chatter and hustle-bustle) in real time as they calls are received; thus, the content of the work will be activated by those who are not there.
Shawn Patrick Higgins and Jamalieh Haley – Conversation Data Project
An interactive sculpture presents conversational directives to the viewers. The viewers will follow sequential instructions that ultimately return them to the sculpture and allow them to document their own experience, which will then become part of the sculpture. The sculpture is a carryover from the antithesis show, stringing ribbon from floor to ceiling, essentially creating a forest to walk through on which text from conversations will be projected. The viewer will have to navigate the sculpture to access the cue cards, and, ultimately, become part of the sculpture, both in their presence and in their
documentation.
Cathy Cleaver – CakeHole
By removing the domestic act of baking from its traditional place in the home and using the cake as a brick-like building material, I shift my role into something ambiguous. I am questioning constructs of gender roles, issues of obsessive behaviors, futility and failure. While Delaney Allen’s role in this project is officially that of cinematographer, I feel like it was a collaborative process. I told Delaney my basic idea for the piece but then gave him complete control over filming. During the editing process, I realized how much of his creative eye could be seen in the footage. In this way we are collaborators.
Dasha Shleyeva and Gabe Flores – Manyoufactory
Dasha Shleyeva and Gabe Flores are responding to the industrial workspace of the initial project between Shawn Patrick Higgins and Jason King and the intimacy of Higgins’ and Shleyeva’s Heart Hive. Together, Shleyeva and Flores created a semi-industrial architectural space based on interviews they conducted on each other. Each tempered glass panel, reminiscent of a microscopic slide, reveals a different level of the human process in regards to their art process. The surrounding painted shadows are reflective of the temporal time-based nature of understanding and nods to the impossibility of
ever isolating the variable enough to speak in a truly knowing voice, even if it’s one’s own.
Navi Esparza