Your path: Public Relations Certificate Requirements > Art Therapy Info Meeting > Career Services > President's Letter > Cooperative Programs > So Close to the Glass and Shivering
Melody Owen: So Close to the Glass and Shivering
For Release: February 03, 2010Gallery 2:
If We Lived Here
by Paula Rebsom
Preview Reception:
Sunday, February 21, 3 to 5 p.m.
Exhibition continues through April 9, 2010
Gallery talk: Thursday, March 11, Noon
Gallery closed Easter weekend: Friday – Sunday, April 2-4
The Art Gym, Marylhurst University
Curator: Terri Hopkins
Two new exhibitions will open at The Art Gym on Sunday, February 21 with a free public reception for the artists from 3 to 5 p.m. The Art Gym’s main space features So Close to the Glass and Shivering by Melody Owen. In Gallery 2, the collaborative Paula Rebsom will present If We Lived Here. Both exhibitions continue through April 9, 2010. Admission is free.
At noon, Thursday, March 11, curator Terri Hopkins will moderate a gallery talk with the artists. Admission is free.
Both exhibitions address human and animal interactions, migration and travel. Melody Owen’s So Close to the Glass and Shivering is a large installation in The Art Gym’s main space. Owen uses drawing, video and sculpture as "quiet ruminations on whales and exploration." Paula Rebsom built a house-like structure and set up an observation station on her family’s abandoned farm in rural North Dakota. Images of the structure, landscape and the birds and animals that frequent the site will be recorded or broadcast live from North Dakota and projected in The Art Gym’s Gallery 2 over the course of the exhibition. A catalogue with an essay by Portland author Jon Raymond accompanies Melody Owen’s So Close to the Glass and Shivering.
Regional Arts and Culture Council provided support for Owen’s exhibition and publication through an Artist Project Grant. Rebsom’s exhibition is supported in part by a Marylhurst University Faculty Development Grant and an Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant. Both projects are supported in part by the Oregon Cultural Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts.
About So Close to the Glass and Shivering
So Close to the Glass and Shivering is a major exhibition for Portland-based Melody Owen. In this new show, the artist presents works in a number of media that are records of travel and exploration. Some of her travels have been in North America, others in Europe. Owen is interested in the records that explorers keep and in making her own. In this exhibition she also builds on the concept of the whale as a record keeper and traveling library. She created an 11-foot, white-wire sculpture of a beluga whale—a drawing in space—and a trace of a whale that lies on the gallery floor. Owen has also carved and sanded a vine from Borneo to resemble a narwhale tusk — something explorers might bring back from the journey — and added a message in Morse code. During a recent residency in Switzerland, Owen was reminded of some old glass slides of European mountain landscapes she found years ago in Beacon, New York. She added collage elements to the slides that will be shown in a light box.
Many of Owen’s significant experiences have been with animals, often through the glass of an aquarium or zoo enclosure. The title So Close to the Glass and Shivering comes from the title of a video Owen made of white wolves in the Berlin Tiergarten. The exhibition includes video recorded through a telescope at the Cornell University ornithology lab and bird sanctuary in upstate New York, and videos of a Beluga whale filmed at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and of a leopard recorded at the Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Owen’s exhibition in The Art Gym is also part of the Portland2010: A Biennial of Contemporary Art. Disjecta Interdisciplinary Art Center is producing Portland2010 and presenting it at multiple locations March 13 through May 30. (The Art Gym exhibition runs February 21 – April 9.) Curated by Linfield College gallery director Cris Moss, the biennial includes the work of 16 artists, many who have had important exhibitions at Marylhurst, including Pat Boas, Bruce Conkle, David Eckard, Sean Healy, Jenene Nagy and Stephen Slappe.
Owen’s work is also featured in Letters from Switzerland, a solo exhibition at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland this March.
About Melody Owen
Melody Owen lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Owen’s work has been included in exhibitions organized by the London Metropolitan University, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland Art Museum and Bellevue Art Museum. Owen has an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.
About If We Lived Here
In If We Lived Here, Paula Rebsom continues her exploration of habitat and complex relationships among animals and people. During a 2007 residency at the Ucross Foundation in northeastern Wyoming, she placed numerous small house facades on a hillside filled with prairie dogs and their burrows. Rebsom then observed and photographed. The results were both intriguing and humorous.
For If We Lived Here, Rebsom devised a project that uses technology to tie one place to another. This time the project is as much about the migration of humans, loss of home and its reclamation, as it is about animal habitat. In 1978, the Rebsom family moved from their farm during a brutal winter to nearby Dickinson. Over time, the original house, barns and outbuildings on the 1,300-acre property decayed, were vandalized and became home to birds, mice and various critters. The family destroyed the structures for liability reasons in February 2009.
Late last summer, the artist returned to North Dakota to begin work on her first permanent outdoor installation. She built a 16-foot high and 40-foot long "billboard-like replica" of her grandparents’ original homestead. In December, she went back to film and outfit the site with recording equipment. Those recordings will be used for presentation and projection in The Art Gym’s Gallery 2.
Once weather permits, two wireless Web cameras will be installed on the property, and provide live feed to the gallery. The video will also be available for viewing 24/7 on the artist’s Web site www.ifwelivedhere.com. Visitors to The Art Gym and to the Web site will have an opportunity to observe both constancy and change in a landscape; variations in weather as the seasons move from winter to spring; the occasional arrival and departure of birds, deer and cougar; and the visits of family to check on equipment, walk the land and look for wildlife.
Rebsom writes:
In its simplest form If We Lived Here was built in an attempt to provide shelter for the birds that were displaced when their home was destroyed. In its most complex form it is a quiet and haunting, ghostlike reminder of what was, what is no longer, and what may never be. It holds memories far beyond my years and comprehension while at the same time providing a new presence of hope and possibilities for this rural landscape — the landscape my mom was born and raised on, the land where she and my father tried to make a living, a place that I dreamed as a child to call home, the land my sister and I will someday inherit.
About Paula Rebsom
Paula Rebsom lives in Portland, Oregon, but was raised in western North Dakota. She received an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon in 2006. Rebsom did her undergraduate work at Dickinson State University and post-baccalaureate in studio at the University of Minnesota. She has exhibited at Portland State University, Tilt Gallery, Portland Community College and the Portland Building installation space. Rebsom is a member of the Marylhurst University Department of Art & Interior Design.
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.