An Assortment of the Relational:
A Shareholder Show
Curated by Alex Andreotti
Marguerite Bailey, Dylan J. Beck, Ben Glas, Leslie Hickey, Michael Lazarus, Eric Long, Raul J. Mendez,
Jane Schiffhauer, Nikki Vené (from the collection
of Mack McFarland), and Paula Wilson
October 18 – 27, 2018
An Assortment of the Relational: A Shareholder Show is a group show curated by Alex Andreotti, featuring works by some Founding Shareholders — Marguerite Bailey, Dylan J. Beck, Ben Glas, Leslie Hickey, Michael Lazarus, Eric Long, Raul J. Mendez, Jane Schiffhauer, Nikki Vené (from the collection of Mack McFarland), and Paula Wilson.
An Assortment of the Relational centers around the body transforming over time. Bridging the past and the present, Leslie Hickey photographs her long braid from a childhood haircut, the braid itself suspends alongside in a plastic bag. Eric Long also combines photo and object, specifically utilizing "the everyday" and fashion photography in investigating the body, queerness, and society. Some artists in An Assortment of the Relational connect the body to the landscape, such as Dylan J. Beck and his ceramic sculpture of a milky fluid secreting out of a rock, as well as Jane Schiffhauer’s re-use of found ceramics and fiber. Or the work reacts to environments, such as the pigment in Marguerite Bailey’s work gradually fading due to "sun" exposure, and the periodic crescendo of Ben Glas’ sound piece in the gallery.
Rather than including his own work, Shareholder Mack McFarland put forth a work from his personal collection: Nikki Vené’s painting of a lived-in room, absent of a body. The figure and the face are reoccurring themes in both Paula Wilson’s and Michael Lazarus’ practices, and both artists also re-contextualize time and histories. Raul J. Mendez’s large painting depicts individual human narratives and one's breadth of possible experiences.
Artists included in An Assortment of the Relational: A Shareholder Show responded to an open call that went out to all Williamson | Knight LLC Shareholders. The gallery runs on an experimental “Shareholder Program” gallery model. Since its launch in February 2017, 300 shares have been available to the public for $100 each. The Shareholder Program—paired with modest sales, subsidized rent, and in-kind support—has allowed for Williamson | Knight DBA HOLDING Contemporary to sustain itself financially, address the art world economic system, and regularly engage with its community. Shareholders receive a variety of small benefits from the gallery, including quarterly dividends based on sales, greater discounts on artworks, and limited gallery voting rights. Shareholders are also invited to participate in the gallery’s annual Shareholder Exhibition. Ten of our 60+ Shareholders chose to participate in our inaugural 2018 exhibition, curated by an MA in Critical Studies Candidate at PNCA and gallery intern Alex Andreotti.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Alex Andreotti received her B.A in Studio Art, Visual Culture, and Secondary Education from Linfield College in May 2017. She is currently a second-year candidate in the MA Critical Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. As an art historian, her research explores the destruction of the gallery space while promoting subcultural art groups such as punk, lowbrow, and post-surrealism. With hopes of pursuing her research on alternative curation post-graduation, Andreotti would love to start a curatorial project to bring her research to life in the Pacific Northwest or somewhere in the woods of Alaska.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Marguerite Bailey is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, OR. With an affinity to material and process, her work proposes to illuminate the compression of time into memory—or lack thereof.
Dylan J. Beck is the Department Head of Ceramics and Digital Strategies at Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, OR. He earned his BFA from Ohio University, Post Baccalaureate Fellowship from Illinois State University, and MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. After teaching at Kansas State University as the Area Coordinator of Ceramics from 2007-2013 Dylan moved to Portland Oregon to accept his current position at OCAC. He has exhibited and lectured extensively and has published articles in Ceramics: Art and Perception, CFile, and the NCECA Journal. Beck has served on the boards of Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Artaxis.org, and NCECA. Born in rural southeastern Ohio, Dylan Beck spent his childhood living between small-town Ohio, inner-city Columbus, and the wooded Hocking Hills. These diverse environments had a major impact on how he interprets landscape. As a teenager, Dylan worked for his father’s home construction business which directly informed his use of materials and understanding of infrastructural development. His artwork explores the interaction of human activities with the natural environment and the idea that we are currently living in the Anthropocene, where human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems.
Ben Glas is an experiential sound artist and composer based in Portland, OR. Glas' compositions question, explore and challenge a wide of topics including cognition, psychoacoustics, and social sound. An archive of his work and practice can be found at https://www.thankyouforyourunderstanding.com/
Leslie Hickey lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She earned BA degrees in Studio Art and English from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Recent solo exhibitions include The Future Has an Ancient Heart (Edel Extra, Nuremberg, Germany, 2018) and Beyond the Sea (Jules Maidoff Gallery at Studio Arts College International, Florence, Italy, 2014). Group exhibitions include Some Other Place (Palazzo dei Cartelloni Gallery, SACI, Florence, Italy, 2018) and We’re Always Touching By Underground Wires (Pushdot, Portland, OR, 2018). In 2017 she was awarded a fellowship through The Civita Institute in Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy, and received RACC funding in the same year with both a Professional Development Grant and a Project Grant (jointly awarded with Small Talk Collective). In 2018 she received an Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant. She is a founding member of both Small Talk and SCALENO, an international photographic collective. Her images can be found in print in Issue 5 of Big Big Wednesday; additionally, she is the proprietor of a letterpress, Hoarfrost Press.
Michael Lazarus received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1992 and earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1994. His work has been shown nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at Feature, Inc., New York (2005, 2003, 2001,1998); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2000), Walter Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute (2003); ANP, Antwerp (1999); M du B, F, G & h, Montreal (2003); Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2001, 1999); Elizabeth Leach Gallery (2009); and Kathryn Brennan Gallery, Los Angeles (2008, 2006). Lazarus has participated in group exhibitions including LA Now, Las Vegas Museum of Art (2009); That Was Then… This Is Now, PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2008); About Painting, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, NY (2004); Guide to Trust No. 2, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2002); Message To Pretty, Thread Waxing Space, New York (1998). His work has been written about in The New York Times, The LA Times, Art News, Art in America, Art Forum, Flash Art, and Art/Text among others. Lazarus lives and works in Portland, OR.
Eric Long relocated to Portland, OR after receiving his BA in Film & Theatre Arts from the University of New Orleans, where he was born and raised. In 2018, he received an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is co-curator at First Brick, an all-queer curatorial collective. He has exhibited in solo and group shows around Portland.
Mack McFarland is a cultural producer and has worked as Curator for Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2006. Currently, McFarland is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA. His exhibitions at PNCA have included commissioned projects of new works from tactical media practitioners Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Disorientalism. He has also curated a review of Luc Tuymans's printed works, a group exhibit marking the centennial of John Cage’s birth, and a comprehensive look at the process of the comic journalist Joe Sacco. McFarland’s current question is how exhibitions and artworks can meaningfully link to our shared experience of existing together and within the ongoing process of history. Nikki Vené is an artist and art educator, currently living and working in Boston, MA. With acrylic and oil paint on canvas, Vené explores the idea of isolation portrayed through both physical and psychological landscapes. She draws much of her inspiration and reference material from the urban streets she walks every day. Vené received an MFA in the interdisciplinary Visual Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2016 and a BFA in Art Education and Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2010. Her work has been exhibited on both East and West coasts, including Gallery 263, Cambridge MA; The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; Disjecta, Portland, OR; Dendroica Gallery, Seattle, WA; and Long Hall Gallery, Worcester, MA- to name a few. Vené is passionate about teaching, and respectfully advocates for the individual learner. She actively works in the Massachusetts Public Schools as an art teacher and also as a private art instructor of various age groups alongside her energized studio practice.
Raul J. Mendez creates work in an attempt at assessing the zeitgeist of the American Condition as the 21st Century commences. Exemplified by painting and drawing on one extreme, and research-based multimedia installation works on the other, both involve a blend of fiction and fact in order to create fragmented narratives that interrogate numerous areas of interest, to include: Memory and history; the ontology of places and objects; the slippery psychology of people and their characters; regarding cities as psychic entities; the nature of crowd dynamics; the ubiquity of and our obsession with media entertainment, in particular its vice grip on culture; late capitalism’s insatiable appetites & our changing systems of value; the psychogeography of the spaces that surround us; how to be in the world when the world has been reduced to language; our place in the slipstreams & bitrates of information. In short, the work is a conversation with other artists and authors, as much as it is a dialogue with current events and intercepted psychic transmissions. Raul’s work has been shown at academic institutions such as Boca Raton Museum of Art, Miami Art Museum and New York’s The Drawing Center, as well as alternative art spaces, Galleries and Art Fairs in North America and Europe. He has received several public art commissions for large-scale projects from Portland’s RACC and the Miami Public Library. Information regarding upcoming and archived projects can be found on his websites at www.rauljmendez.com and www.society4preservation.org. Raul was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1973. He received his BFA in Painting & Drawing from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He lives and maintains his studio in Portland, OR, and supports his art habits by working as a 747 pilot for a global shipping company.
Jane Schiffhauer, originally from New York, is based in Portland, OR. Schiffhauer deconstructs and transforms materials, mostly fibers, as a metaphor for the physical body and experiences of trauma. Her organic forms question ideas of beauty and often convey a vague sense of anxiety and discomfort. Schiffhauer earned her MFA in Visual Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and a Dual BS degree from Syracuse University in Communications and Management with additional BFA degree studies in Graphic Design at Kent State University and Photography Studies at The New School/Parsons in Paris, France. She works in sculpture, installation, and printmaking. Her work has been shown locally and nationally and is held in many private collections. She has been awarded several artist residencies including at the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity in Canada, Vermont Studio Center, and Djerassi in California. Additionally, she was the Founder and Director of the non-profit Rainmaker Artist Residency (2014-2017) in Portland, OR.
Paula Wilson received an MFA from Columbia and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Wilson’s most recent solo exhibitions were Spread Wild, Pleasures of the Yucca, at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2018), PIECESCAPE at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, CA (2018), FLOORED, at Williamson | Knight, Portland, OR (2018), Salty & Fresh at Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami FL (2017), and The Backward Glance at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE (2017). She has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and The New Yorker. Wilson’s artwork is in many prestigious collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York Public Library, Yale University, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saatchi Gallery, and The Fabric Workshop.