Upcoming Exhibitions
David Soman l Shelter
October 20 – November 25, 2023
Opening Reception Friday, October 20, 2023, 6-8pm
New charcoal drawings by David Soman
Through this series of drawings, David Soman explores the circular nature of material and subject. Soman finds a connection between charcoal, fire, and wood, and more largely between ourselves and the forest, creation with destruction, life with death, and wilderness and home. They are meditations in light and shadow, what's hidden and what's exposed, and the relationship between parts and the whole.
David Soman is an artist who resides with his family in Rosendale, NY. He is a New York Times Best-Selling children's book writer and illustrator, and has taught at the School of Visual Arts for over thirty years. Despite being born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, David has always been a woodsman at heart.
Heather Watkins l still—moving
October 20 – November 25, 2023
Opening Reception Friday, October 20, 2023, 6-8pm
still-moving brings together a series of stitched textiles that chart a period of suspended time and stalled movement.
Each embroidered orb floats or drifts within its field, propelled by a rotational energy, as if still forming, still finding its place. Viewed close up, variations between stitches become visible, distinct, imperfect, tender. The act of making small stitches repeatedly is at once meditative and obsessive—it requires and reveals different kinds of attention. Turning the embroidery hoop around and around, trusting in a rhythm that begins without a prescribed plan, an unexpected coherence slowly emerges. The incremental nature of Watkins’ process elicits something only accessible by making—knowledge that is sensory, intuitive, and elemental.
Like unwitting filters, these works absorbed a changing relationship to distance, space, and living with uncertainty. They both represent, and are made, of time.
Heather Watkins (b. 1969, Sacramento, CA) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Her work takes many forms, oscillating between drawing and sculpture, text and textile, to explore the nature and nuance of line—as form, gesture, and sensation. She has presented exhibitions at venues including Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; Planthouse Gallery, New York, NY; Canada, New York, NY; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; and PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Portland Art Museum, Miller Meigs Collection, Portland State University, Reed College, the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, the Rhode Island School of Design Artists’ Books Collection, and the Artists’ Book Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She has been the recipient of grants from the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Caldera, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, Oregon College of Art and Craft, Stelo Arts, Sun Valley Museum of Art, and Township10. Watkins holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon.
