Oregon Contemporary — Attraction in Portland

Putting Our Minds Together Review

[Part 3] "Ja'" (water in Yucatec Mayan) by Patricia Vázquez Gómez is an immersive listening space filled with the voices of a group of Mayan youth residing in Portland, Oregon. This piece illustrates the idea of "language power," showing how language can create unique knowledge and connections, it is a work that makes the presence of the Yucatec Mayan language and their sounds in this land noticeable and recognizable, often overlooked by many. Themes of opacity and decolonization resonate within this site-specific sound piece, emphasizing the ability to create knowledge not just through another language, but also through alternative forms of expression such as a choir. The darkness and the organic overlay of sounds and words from various directions stir our imagination, allowing us to hear a glimpse of Yucatec Mayan. This idea aligns with our term's discussions on knowledge outside Western paradigms, highlighting the importance of diverse linguistic and cultural perspectives in shaping our understanding of the world. As we observed in this exhibition, not all the pieces can fit into the ideas that we discussed in class, just as not all the pieces fit even into the idea of ​​the Biennial: “ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.” Throughout this term we have discussed and learned how these ideas are a process rather than an end, a process that we must (and have put into practice in this exercise) in practice day by day. At the end of the day as Slushy Points —a concept developed by Bayo Akomolafe in Black Lives Matter, But To Whom?— explains, we are the result of the conditions within us and it is what we do with it that counts/matters. This class is just a starting point and this visit is just one more voice in the sea of ​​possibilities that critical...

Putting Our Minds Together Review

[Part 1]

As part of the conclusion of our Critical Theories class this spring at Portland State University, we decided to visit the Oregon Artists Biennial to connect with the ideas we explored this term with the artwork included in the exhibition. Under the theme of Care, we discussed what care means and how it is represented by the artists featured in this exhibition.

How do you imagine “care” connecting with ideas like Center vs. Periphery, Decolonization as a Metaphor, Opacity, Slushy Points, Critique of Excellence, lumbung, and Restorative Justice? Here are some thoughts on this.

One of us was drawn by Horatio Hung-Yan Law’s Portal piece, a virtual tunnel created to transport the audience from Oregon Contemporary to New Chinatown, using augmented reality technology. Luis Camnitzer talks about the dynamics and tensions between center and periphery in his book Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. In this text, he speaks about Latin America as the periphery and Europe/North America as the center. In Horacio's piece, we see the periphery manifested in Portland's Chinatown, in contrast to the rest of the city. Chinatown in Portland now has many houseless people after the pandemic, which has driven away many of the people who used to visit, and the number of visitors to the neighboring Chinatown Museum has drastically decreased. Hung-Yan Law brings the Chinatown Museum (the periphery) to Oregon Contemporary (the center) through his piece, confirming that center and periphery can exist in the same location, with boundaries not...

Putting Our Minds Together Review [Part 2]

A few pieces address the land and the environment, like Sarah Rushford’s, who connects the idea of land with the practices of video and poetry. In her piece, "Elk Woke Here Once (Aware of the World Already)," two women actors engage in a poetic dialogue they've written, conversing in a mossy, wet, highly textured Oregon riverside landscape on a small farm. As we discussed in this class, the importance of land is fundamental to decolonization ideas. What does land signify in contemporary artistic practice? Zoe Todd, in her text Indigenizing the Anthropocene speaks about the need to indigenize our thinking by “a reconfiguration of understandings of human-environmental relations towards praxis that acknowledges the central importance of land, bodies, movement, race, colonialism and sexuality.”

Anne Greenwood's work "Shapes of Land'' seems to share a similar preoccupation. Greenwood uses machine-sewn text with embroidery, appliqué, natural dye, and cotton fibers to portray the concept of land. She retraces her footsteps from North Dakota, through travels with her husband to his native Argentina, and their time in Central America and Mexico, to their home in Oregon. Bridgette Hickey, Carla Bengstron and Meech Boakye bring the land to the gallery through their engagement with plants,...