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Motherlode
For Release: March 30, 2010Julianna Bright, Nan Curtis, Fernanda D'Agostino, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Linda Hutchins, Shelley Jordon and Dianne Kornberg with poet Elisabeth Frost
Preview Reception: Sunday, April , 3 to 5 p.m.
Exhibition continues through May 15, 2010
Gallery talk: Thursday, May 6, Noon
The Art Gym, Marylhurst University
Curator: Terri Hopkins
Motherlode opens at The Art Gym on Sunday, April 18 with a free public reception for the artists from 3 to 5 p.m.
The exhibition continues through May 15, 2010. Admission is free.
At noon, Thursday, May 6, curator Terri Hopkins will moderate a conversation with artists exhibiting work in the Motherlode exhibition. Admission is free.
Fatherlode
At noon, Thursday, April 29, author David Shields and Marylhurst faculty member Jay Ponteri will discuss Fatherlode. David Shields’s most recent books are Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010) and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), which was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of several other books of fiction and nonfiction, and he lives in Seattle where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Admission is free.
Motherlode
Motherlode explores the impact of motherhood on artists’ lives and work. It includes art by seven artists and one poet who have made artworks that address motherhood: Julianna Bright, Nan Curtis, Fernanda D’Agostino, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Linda Hutchins, Dianne Kornberg with poet Elisabeth Frost and Shelley Jordon.
Most mothers face the challenges of raising children while carving out the time and sustaining the focus necessary to get their work done, while living lives filled with the energetic chaos and constant distractions that children bring to a household. For artists, motherhood also presents an opportunity to comment on an experience that is near universal—parenting.
The exhibition began with a search for art that explored several issues including the impact of responsibility for another life, the re-encounter with childhood and responses to making art with new restraints on ones time and energy. As curator Terri Hopkins met with artists in their studios, she discovered that many were also commenting simultaneously or concurrently on the relationship of women to their mothers.
About the artists
Julianna Bright makes small paintings on paper that look to folk art and fairy tales for their style and imagery. In While You Lay Asleep, a woman sleeps on the forest floor while children stand over her, or gather around a small fire. The landscape they inhabit is spare and enigmatic and we sense that we are witnessing the mother’s dream. In other works, Bright places her women and children alongside a bare-rooted tree of life, or entangles them in garlands or vines. Her works have the quiet formality of a play performed without words. Bright has shown her work at Fontanelle Gallery in Portland, Charmingwall in New York, Needles & Pens in San Francisco, Motel Gallery in Portland and Tinlark Gallery in Hollywood, California. The artist also performs with her band The Golden Bears.
Nan Curtis has tackled pregnancy, nursing, child’s play, a youth she would rather her children did not find out about and her late mother’s love of costume jewelry, cheap purses and tobacco. She has done this by tattooing a ruler on her then expanding belly, taking a gorgeous photograph of her milk spewing breast, building sculptures that resemble forts and tents, securing scrapbooks inside a too-tight bookshelf and making art from ordinary things her mother left behind. She has done this employing the unlikely discipline of a minimalist. Curtis has exhibited at Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, DiverseWorks in Houston, Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and at the Melbourne Art Center in Australia. She teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
After her daughter was born just over twenty years ago, Fernanda D’Agostino constructed a room in The Art Gym and titled it Offering. Reflecting her Italian heritage, the room was like an interior courtyard with small votives like those found in Italian roadside chapels on its walls. A few years later, D’Agostino included a picture of her child in Abundance and Scarcity, an outdoor garden and installation about food and culture. Motherlode includes a new work in projected video about the connection of generations in a family and Baby TV in which live television flickers behind the image of a child. In all of these works, the artist draws attention to the gratitude we feel for our children and the problems and complexity of the world that frames their lives and our own. D’Agostino is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland. She has exhibited nationally and internationally; her works using digital media were recently included in exhibitions in Spain and China.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins pushes things together, pulls them apart, shapes, gouges, covers and pokes them. She often places unwieldy ceramic sculpture/pots on top of used tables, chairs and sofas. She also creates prints from the tabletop surfaces, creating a record of their use. The objects and prints are formally provocative and metaphorically rich. They trigger various trains of thought, including thoughts about motherhood, parenting and family. Hutchins work is currently in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. She has shown at The Saatchi gallery in London, Seattle Art Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She is represented by Small A Projects and Derek Eller Gallery, both in New York City.
In 2004, Linda Hutchins exhibited a series of typewritten works in the exhibition Reiterations in The Art Gym. Included were several scrolls the artist made by typing a phrase hundreds, even thousands of times, that parents hear themselves saying over and over to their children—be quiet be quiet, sit still sit still sit still. These works were time-intensive, but were also work that could be broken into chunks—piecework. Motherlode includes several scrolls from the series; it also includes a new series of abstract drawings that also make use of the principal of taking on a large endeavor systematically, line by line, section by section. Hutchins shows at Pulliam Gallery in Portland and has exhibited at the Tacoma Art Museum, Braunstein/Quay Gallery of San Francisco and at the Southwest School of Art & Craft, San Antonio, Texas.
Dianne Kornberg and poet Elisabeth Frost collaborated on The Lore That Nature Brings, seeking to create work that would as the artists write, ”de-sentimentalize cultural clichés about nests, from the iconography of maternal instinct and 'empty nest syndrome' to the trope of an anthropomorphic 'joyful' birdsong.† Kornberg’s primary responsibility was the composite visual imagery; Frost’s the composite language. Kornberg’s eight digital photographs present a series of nests in various states from the intact to the disintegrating. Frost responded to Kornberg’s images and built text mined from scientific studies and birding guides and what Frost describes as the ”radical pruning† of poetry by Blake, Wordsworth Keats, Dickinson, Yeats and others. Kornberg has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and it is in the collections of the Houston Museum of Art, The International Center for Photography, and the Princeton Art Museum.
Shelley Jordon is a painter who began her career as an illustrator. She recently expanded her use of painting to create short animations on daily life, family history and the relationship of mothers and daughters. She has revisited her illustration skills for a series of more than twenty drawings of women and girls—one mother or one daughter in each large drawing. As she drew the mothers, she talked to them about memories of their own mothers, and created a sound collage of two of those recollections to accompany the drawings. Jordon is a professor of art at Oregon State University. Her first animated painting, Family History, won the Judge's Award at the 36th Annual Northwest Film Festival from LA Times film critic, Ken Turan. It has been screened at film festivals around the world, including Hamburg, Germany and Sydney, Australia. Her paintings have been shown at the Frye Museum in Seattle and the Portland Art Museum.
About The Art Gym
The Art Gym is a program of the Marylhurst University Department of Art & Interior Design. The Art Gym programs are supported in part by the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Art Gym is on the third floor of the B.P. John Administration Building at Marylhurst University, which is located one mile south of Lake Oswego on Highway 43. The Art Gym’s regular hours are Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free. For additional details, call 503.699.6243.
Founded in the fall of 1980, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University has a 28-year history of presenting work by hundreds of artists based in the Northwest. The Art Gym has published more than 50 exhibition catalogues and sponsored more than 100 conversations about art in the region. In 2004-2005, The Art Gym was a recipient of the Governor’s Arts Award.