Melody Owen
Carved Postcard #1
archival inkjet print on Arches rag
22.25" x 30"
edition of 2
2010
Melody Owen
Letters from Switzerland
March 4 – 27, 2010

First Thursday Reception: Thursday, March 4, 6 – 9 pm

In March, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Letters from Switzerland, an exhibition of Melody Owen’s collages, made while in residency at the Gaestatelier Krone in Aarau, Switzerland.

Through her photographs, videos, and works on paper, Melody Owen reaches out and touches, processes, and examines the objects and stories that define a specific place. A frequent participant in artist-in-residency programs, Owen demonstrates a remarkable openness, not only in the sense that she absorbs the materials, attitudes, and mythologies of each new circumstance and culture, but also in the sense that she wears her experience on her chest. For Letters from Switzerland, using the tools and media of the Swiss-originated Dadaists, Owen created a precise and strange group of collages, examining feelings of dislocation and disconnection. Featuring bisected animals spilling flowers from their guts, and hotels sprouting roots that can’t find purchase, these works allude to the deracinated experience of the contemporary traveler.

A graduate of the MFA program at Alfred University, Melody Owen has exhibited at such locations as the Royal College of Art in London, England, Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn, New York, the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue, Washington and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon. Owen has completed residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, the Gil-society in Akureyri, Iceland, and the Est-Nord-Est Residency in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Canada. In 2009 she was artist-in-residence at Gaestatelier Krone in Aarau, Switzerland, funded in part by the Oregon Arts Commission.

Letters from Switzerland will be on view in conjunction with So Close to the Glass and Shivering, a major new installation by Owen at the The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, February 22 - April 9, 2010, with an opening reception Sunday, February 21, from 3 to 5 pm These two exhibitions will comprise Melody Owen’s participation in the Portland2010 Biennial.


Joseph Park
Flowers in Case
oil on panel
30" x 36"
2008
Re-Present
February 4 – March 27, 2010

First Thursday Reception February 4, 6–9 PM

Pat Boas
Adam Chapman
Isaac Layman
Joe Park
Xiaoze Xie

Through drawing, photography, painting, and video, the artists in Re-Present consider the differences between representation and perception. By re-investigating reality and decontextualizing every day objects and experiences, they elevate and examine our daily lives, uncovering the nuances of our shared experience.

Pat Boas, a Portland, OR-based writer and artist, has spent much of the last decade deconstructing the New York Times, isolating specific elements and highlighting juxtapositions of news and advertising. In her series NYT Little People Boas highlights the bit players – the everyman standing behind the president, who ends up on the front page. By decontextualizing these figures, floating them on a white ground, Boas attempts to find the meaning embedded in the form of the New York Times – one of the most recognizable and widely read newspapers in the United States.

Diagram of Isolated Moments Forming a Memory by Adam Chapman (San Francisco, CA) is a single channel programmed animation, framed and mounted as if it were a traditional drawing, in which colored lines and forms swim around, periodically forming representational portraits of the artist’s close friends and family. Every second of the installation is original. The piece is rule-generated and not a fixed composition, with a complete two-hour cycle forming fifty portraits. Chapman seeks to capture those fleeting, euphoric moments in which one catches a glimpse of clarity; a second of understanding one’s self, as well as one’s relationships.

Seattle, WA-based Isaac Layman, 2008 winner of the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award, creates large-scale photographs of mundane household objects. Shooting with a high-resolution digital 4 x 5 camera, Layman knits together several images, perspectives, and depths of focus, ultimately presenting an impossibly clear image, in which the viewer can almost see all sides of these banal objects. However, this overdefinition of workaday objects can often confuse, as, in the end, one is incapable of comprehending all angles at once.

An accomplished painter, Joe Park (Seattle, WA) creates flat, smooth oil on panel works, which can range in style from quaint, paint-by-number style tableaux, to old-master style still lifes. Often appropriating or manipulating historical painting styles (futurism, cubism, etc.) or found imagery, Park uses his extraordinary skill to examine the relationship between process and content. Born in Ottawa, Canada, Park recently participated in the Apex series at the Portland Art Museum. His work is included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, WA and the Tacoma Art Museum, WA.

Xiaoze Xie’s oil paintings bring together elements of traditional still-life painting and photography. This Bay Area-based, Chinese-born, artist presents paintings of piles of books or archives on library shelves. Based on Xie’s own photographs these works examine the symbolic nature of books – the implied access to knowledge and understanding, and the representation of belief systems and ideologies. Inaccessible and undefined in these works, these specific volumes simultaneously shut the viewer out, and entice the viewer in, offering their secrets. In 2009, Xie’s work was featured in China Urban at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College (Portland, OR).