Your path: Sitelines
Sitelines:
Jenene Nagy and Stephanie Robison
For Release: March 25, 2008Sitelines: Jenene Nagy and Stephanie Robison
Gallery 2: Jesse Hayward – WHY AND THE WHY NOT
Opening reception 3 to 5 pm, Sunday, April 13, 2008
Gallery talk noon, Wednesday, April 30
Exhibition continues: April 14 – May 14, 2008
Two new exhibitions will open at The Art Gym, Marylhurst University, with a preview reception on Sunday, April 13. Sitelines in The Art Gym's main space is a two-person exhibition with new work by Jenene Nagy and Stephanie Robison. In The Art Gym's Gallery 2 Jesse Hayward is presenting the changing installation WHY AND THE WHY NOT. The exhibitions continue through May 14. Admission is free.
At noon, Wednesday, April 30, curator Terri Hopkins will moderate a gallery talk with artists Jesse Hayward, Jenene Nagy and Stephanie Robison.
The Art Gym is presenting two exhibitions that involve interactions between and among artists, and with the gallery space and architecture. Sitelines is an exhibition of painting and sculpture by Jenene Nagy and Stephanie Robison. Although this is a two-person show, the artists did not want the main space of The Art Gym divided in ways that would separate their contributions. Instead, they mocked up an installation design to allow them to experiment with the works in relationship to each other and to the gallery walls, floor, trusses, windows and ceiling.
Jesse Hayward's WHY AND THE WHY NOT in Gallery 2, will start its run with a single painting, a single sculpture, and a stockpile of potential additions to both the sculpture and painting. Marylhurst sculpture students will meet with Hayward weekly to discuss and make additions to the two artworks.
About the Artists
Jenene Nagy is a visual artist who engages painting's ongoing conversation with materials and the wall. At the time of this writing, the works Nagy will install in The Art Gym are in progress and will be completed in the gallery. In contrast to the rigid painted sheetrock constructions in her current installation s/plit in the Portland Art Museum's Apex Gallery, the 2007 installations False Flat at Linfield College and Structuring Surface at Dinnerware ArtSpace in Tucson, these new works explore the fluid sculptural qualities of paper. The artist is experimenting with the ways paper hangs and drapes from the wall, from wall to floor and between supports. The new works continue Nagy's interest in shape, but rather than cutting shapes from the material that provides the ground for her paint, she finds those irregular shapes in the bending and drooping of large rectangular sheets of paper.
Nagy lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is the director and co-curator of Tilt Gallery and Project Space in Portland. She is also a member of the faculty at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Nagy completed her MFA at the University of Oregon, in 2004.
Stephanie Robison makes sculptures that depict and suggest. Her three-dimensional composite imagery of signs, towers, bricks, mattresses and clouds, for example, invites the viewer to invent function, purpose and stories. In 2006, the Stranger critic Jen Graves described Matressland, Robison's contribution to the CoCA annual as, "A long, thin fraying mattress spilling its guts is a roller coaster riding off the rails." In Roadside Attractions, the artist's 2008 Portland State University show with Paula Rebsom, Robison's tall sandwich board-like scaffold may be breaking the fall, propping up and/or advertising the rumpled cloud it supports. For The Art Gym, Robison has built several large-scale sculptures that play off the architecture of the gallery – including a tower that pushes through the lighting tracks to the roof trusses and a cascade of forms that spill from a freestanding wall. Where Nagy experiments with the intersection of painting and sculpture, Robison addresses sculpture's ability to reference architecture and landscape. The narrative quality of her work also pushes the art into the realm of theater. The sculptures act not only as sets for implied dramas, but also as characters within those dramas.
Stephanie Robison lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches at Marylhurst University, Clark College and Portland State University. Robison received her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2004.
Jesse Hayward's installation WHY AND THE WHY NOT for The Art Gym's Gallery 2 examines the relationship of process to possibility. WHY AND THE WHY NOT will begin with two artworks – a large painting and a large sculpture – and a stockpile of prospective additions. In some ways, it will resemble the artist's Portland studio, in which sculptures accumulate and stretched canvasses lean against the walls and one another. Once a week Hayward will meet with Marylhurst students to consider and make additions to the installation. Visitors will be able to track changes to the installation through a series of photographs. Describing Hayward's Large Pod Project at the 2006 Oregon Biennial Isaac Peterson suggested that "the possibility of mutation, of capacity for growth and self-change is a latent property of the object itself, rather than a function of the artist." (PORT, September 04, 2006) Artists often talk about knowing when an artwork is finished. WHY AND THE WHY NOT opens up the possibility that for some artworks the question is moot.
Jesse Hayward moved to Portland after completing his MFA at the California College of Art in San Francisco in 2002. In addition to the Oregon Biennial, Hayward has exhibited at Tilt and Chambers. His work was included in the exhibitions Core Sample, Fresh Trouble and Transient Décor in Portland; and The Dollar Show at the Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco.
Art Gym programs are supported in part by the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Art Gym, Marylhurst University is located at 17600 Pacific Hwy (Hwy 43), Marylhurst, Oregon, 97036. The gallery is open Tuesday - Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. The Art Gym is located on the third floor of the B.P. John Building on the Marylhurst University campus, one mile south of Lake Oswego. Admission is free. (503-699-6243)
Founded in the fall of 1980, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University has a 26-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.