Artists Talk with ??????? and ????: Sunday, ???????
FEB. 2 - 28 • MAIN GALLERY
Light
— A Blackfish Member Show —
Noah Alexander Isaac Stein — Ouroboros/Leviathan, 2024, ghost-nets, recovered plastic, chicken wire, LED lights
Justin Auld — Quantum Painting #77, 2023, oil on masonite, 17" x 24"
Myra Clark — Langeais Doorway, acrylic on wood panel, 34" x 30"
Blackfish Gallery is pleased to announce that it will participate in the 9th annual Portland Winter Light Festival, by hosting the group show Illuminations and the installation Ouroboros/Leviathan.
Occurring every February, the Portland Winter Light Festival (PDXWLF) is Portland’s largest annual art event. It connects local artists with visitors from around the world. With a focus on light-based art and site-specific installations, the PDXWLF is a free event at the intersection of art, technology, and community. In 2023, the festival had an estimated attendance of 208,000 visitors, and featured the work of 308 local artists and performers throughout the city.
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The Blackfish group show Illuminations will explore light as both a literal and metaphorical force in art. In addition to light-based mediums, Blackfish artists will use light as a stepping off point for exploring the multi-faceted nature of light, and the perspectives it can reveal. Through both the language of light itself, and its symbolic presence, Illuminations will reveal what lays hidden in the dark.


Constructed out of a skin of recovered ghost nets and filled with glowing plastic trash, the installation Leviathan/Ouroboros imagines the shadowy behemoth of the Anthropocene as a self-consuming serpent. Designed to capture the paradox of emergent behavior in a collective system spiraling heedlessly towards its own catastrophic unraveling, Leviathan/Ouroboros provides viewers with a tangible connection to abstractions of environmental collapse and spiritual isolation.
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GALLERY 2
For?????????action
— Laura Swingen —
Clint Brown — Dressed in Purple, mixed media, 36" x 24"
Across cultures and throughout history, figurative icons capture our attention, and spark our curiosity and imagination. Clint Brown has embedded the evocative form of the figure within an abstract orchestration of color and gestural mark making in his latest work. The result is a fresh and satisfying blend of the geometric/formal and the organic/expressive.
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Brown’s mixed-media works on paper are created with acrylic paint and prismacolor crayons. The application of color is intuitive, rather than intentional, and the mark making is spontaneous and gestural, a kind of autonomic or asemic writing that cannot be translated.
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JAMES HIBBARD GALLERY
Ri???????ture
— Michael Knudson —
Ritual Texture highlights Benjamin Mefford’s most recent 2D and 3D material explorations, with notable attention to process, pattern, and texture. The exhibit consists of chiseled stone sculptures and a series of acrylic-on-glass tiles, which creates a striking juxtaposition of the permanent and flowing, neutral and brilliantly colored.
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The artist uses tactile materials with process-based experimentation and play as a means of emotional and intellectual cleansing. The creation of these objects is part of ritualistic pattern of behavior that allows Mefford to transform compartmentalized inner worlds and project them outward into a shared physical space. The result is an environment that is simultaneously energizing and soothing.
Benjamin Mefford
Avo, stone (granite), 24" x 12" x 12"
Benjamin Mefford
Pattern Plate 1, acrylic, glass, 4" x 6"
Illuminations — Member Show
Laura Swingen
Michael Knudsen
Blackfishers Doing Cool Stuff
See what Blackfish Artists are involved with outside the gallery this month.