HOLDING Contemporary presents the group exhibition Winter Formal featuring works by Emily Bixler, Jovencio de la Paz, Kassandra Howk, Kellie Romany, Stacy Jo Scott, Sarah Wertzberger. Winter Formal opens on January 14 and runs through February 12, 2022. Gallery hours are noon – 5 PM, Friday – Saturday. Visit our website to schedule an appointment. Safety and social distancing requirements will still be in place.

Winter Formal celebrates the formal elements of an artist’s practice. Shifting between printmaking, sculpture, painting, and textiles, the artists all embrace shape, color, line, mark-making, and materiality. Through varied abstract visual languages these artists' processes and material investigations serve as conduits for deeper meaning.

Emily Bixler currently lives and works in Portland, OR, where she graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2004 with a BFA in Sculpture. Her practice includes sculpture and large scale installation as well as her accessory line BOET, a working investigation of fiber and metal, in operation since 2010 and sold internationally. Particularly interested in the conversation that is made when soft forms are limited/enhanced by rigid structures, Bixler’s work investigates relationships and relational aesthetics. Exhibiting predominantly along the west coast, Bixler was an artist in residence at Wildlands in Healdsburg, CA and has a permanent installation at the W Hotel in San Francisco. Bixler has been awarded a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and Stumptown Artist Fellowship.

Jovencio de la Paz works in a space between digital technology and hand weaving. Focused on creating specialized designed software and drawing tools, de la Paz collaborates with algorithms, self-generating patterns, and computational creativity to explore the related histories of technology and the loom. The resulting textiles, hand-woven on a computerized Thread Controller loom, display a tension between the physical world and the digital, the organic and technological, and the haptic quality of cloth versus the perceived rigidity of the numerical. De la Paz is an artist, weaver, and educator and their work explores the intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and stitch-work as they relate to broader concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures. Interested in the ways transience and ephemerality are embodied in material, de la Paz looks at how knowledge and experiences are transmitted through society in space and time, whether semiotically by language or haptically by made things. De la Paz is currently Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon.

Kassandra Howk grew up on the Hood Canal in Washington State. In 2003 she started her modeling career. After living in Sydney, New York, and Paris between stints back home in Seattle, Kassandra made Berlin her base in 2011 to further her career and whilst there, began painting. Wanting an outlet that was faceless of the person behind the creation, abstract painting became that release in conjunction with what it meant to work in fashion and creating art with her body for designers and clients. Being inspired by living in a city of musicians and artist of all mediums, Kassandra collaborated with others to create visuals for shows, album covers and more; the likes of Sonic Pieces (Berlin DE) 1631 Recordings (Stockholm, SE) Hauschka, Acid Tongue, Sophie Hutchings, Library Tapes, Dustin O’Halloran, Dmitry Evgrafov, among others. Kassandra now lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband.

Kellie Romany is an abstract painter interested in bodily representation, materiality, and the history of the painting process. Using a color palette of skin tones, Romany creates objects that act as a catalyst for discussion about human connections, femininity, and race and the systems surrounding these themes. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Romany has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including museum shows at the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and DePaul Art Museum. Her work is in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Westtown School in Pennsylvania. Her work has been included in many notable collections including the collections of Roxane Gay, Theaster Gates, and Rashid Johnson.

Stacy Jo Scott uses ceramic objects and digital processes as anchors from which to navigate shifting landscapes of queerness, embodiment, and spectrality. These objects emerge from research, digital processes, trance practices, and chance operations. Her work revolves around imaging the ephemeral body and speculating on queer lineages and futurities. The speculative nature of her inquiries is grounded in confounding the relationship between clay’s materiality and the supposed purity of machinic code. Stacy Jo explores how digital media renders embodiment, and how computational tools can be used to convey illegible histories or mythic futures. She employs the more ancient skills of hand-working clay alongside generative software tools, unorthodox 3D printing, and CNC hacks. The idiosyncrasies of clay interrupt the numeric logic of the machine, looping it back into a queered transient world of direct embodied experience. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon.

Sarah Wertzberger’s art practice began with painting and incorporates elements of craft, technology, and fine art as a mediated process of creating woven objects reminiscent of paintings. She explores ideas of play, color interaction, and the tensions that exist at the intersections of art, design, craft, and technology. Wertzberger received her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited at Field Projects (New York, NY), The Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland, OR), The Design Center (New York, NY), and has been a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Weaving Mill (Chicago, IL), and AZ WEST — Encampment Residency (Joshua Tree, CA). Wertzberger lives and works in Portland, OR.

HOLDING Contemporary presents exhibitions and programs by visual artists across disciplines. Through our curatorial vision and alternative community-driven business model we seek to challenge the economic and social privilege of the art world.