The mixed-media paintings in Remembering are primarily about color and texture, says Clint Brown, painted to give the viewer an aesthetic experience rather than a narrative. The abstraction-based works incorporate recognizable, seemingly unrelated, images—salmon, a cowboy on horseback, roses, computer circuitry, maps of downtown Portland. To Brown’s way of seeing, these images are, in fact, related and have particular relevance for the Pacific Northwest. While Portland is home to the Silicon Forest, it’s also where cowboys once rode the range, and salmon still run on their homeward migration. In our modern, technological world, says Brown, we romanticize about living in Bonanzaland. This is a form of remembering.

Another kind of remembering is at work in the exhibit. Young salmon on their way to the sea carry a memory of the route back to their birthplace, computer chips hold massive amounts of information we can retrieve at will, and musical scores enable musicians to recall the sounds of symphonies centuries after they were written. With subtlety and formal skill, Brown draws connections both overt and subliminal, pointing us towards connections we share with nature, place and culture.