Rock Moving Rocks
a small book by Jess Perlitz

printed in an edition of 100
Monday, July 15
6 – 8 pm
Reading at 6:30 pm

Books and rock music boxes will be available for sale
Moon balloons will be free for all who attend

In 2015, Jess turned into a rock and pulled another rock alongside, moving along the shore of the Willamette River and through the city of Portland, engaging with the surrounding land and ending up in the Portland Art Museum. The daylong performance, titled Rock Moving Rocks, was inspired by landscape and landscaping, landmarks and monuments, natural disaster and our never-ending attempts at control. As a way to continue some of the conversations it elicited about how we perceive and experience, control and surrender, produce and struggle with space, there is now this book, also titled Rock Moving Rocks. It is a sixty-eight-page offset-printed book that uses the physical embodiment of the rock as a way to think about sculpture. With images and words, the book explores being a rock not only as an object, but also as a way to think about how we make meaning. 

Jess Perlitz makes work focused on considering landscape and the ways in which we define and seek to recognize ourselves within it.  Grappling with how space gets articulated, her projects take many forms - traversing performance, sculpture, and drawing.  The work has appeared in a variety of venues such as playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Socrates Sculpture Park in NY, Cambridge Galleries in Canada, and De Fabriek in The Netherlands.  Born in Toronto, Canada, Jess is a graduate of Bard College, received her MFA from Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance.  Jess is currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Assiociate Professor of Art and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College.  Jess was recently named the 2018 Joan Shipley Fellow from the Oregon Arts Commission and was an artist in residence in Omaha, NE at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.  Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series.

This book was produced with the help of a project grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council.