First Thursdays

TBA:24 Opening Day

The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2024 Time-Based Art Festival opens at PNCA for 1TH on Sept 5, with a come one, come all jam session with Videotones, Elbow Room’s neurodiverse digital media collective. No musical ability required—bring yourself, an instrument,* your voice. Come make a sound or just witness our giant, undulating community band.

Meet in front of PNCA at 5pm to usher in PICA’s TBA:24 festival with our joyous and discordant noise, then move inside to PNCA’s 511 Gallery for the opening reception of the Videotones exhibition Outside Inside World. After the festivities at PNCA, continue your evening with the many First Thursday events taking place throughout the North Park Blocks and Pearl District. 

*If you wish to bring an amplified instrument, the Videotones artists can plug you in! Come a little early to set up. Acoustic instruments are also encouraged, no set up required.

Outside Inside World

CO-PRESENTED WITH PICA

Exhibition Dates: August 26 – October 5, 2024
⁠Gallery Hours: Monday – Saturday, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Videotones is a neurodiverse digital media collective that employs homegrown, collaborative editing practices, exploits the hidden potential for accessibility in cheap consumer technologies, and adheres to a vision of filmmaking that privileges improvisational experimentation and nonlinear play over predetermined outcomes to make their idiosyncratic brand of music and video art. Since its inception in 2018, the project has yielded three full-length albums of experimental music as well as countless short video works. In the Videotones universe, authorship is dispersed—each project born out of a process of equal participation and nonhierarchical decision making, resulting in work that is discordant, polyvocal, awkward, hilarious, mysterious, fragmented, joyful, and deeply affecting.  

Equal parts survey exhibition and emergent experiment, Outside Inside World activates PNCA’s 511 Gallery as a showcase for works from the Videotones archive as well as a site for making and sharing new work. True to the Videotones ethos, the space will take on multiple roles—film set, recording studio, improv theater, rec room, and exhibition space—which will change unpredictably from day to day. This living exhibition will be augmented by a series of public events, including an open-access jam session, workshops, and the premiere of Videotones TV, a DIY variety show made for public access television.  

Since 2020, Videotones has been sustained under the auspices of Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of artmaking. Outside Inside World will culminate with a bingo night and dance party fundraiser to benefit Elbow Room.

SPONSORSHIP

The current iteration of Videotones is sustained by Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Born on The 4th of June

By Ran Sheng 
PNCA Mediatheque {on view 1TH 5pm-9pm}

A mixed media, multi-channel projection installation, serves as a memoir of a pivotal moment in my childhood and Chinese history. It combines documentary footage, animation, and sound collage to convey the complex emotions, fantasies, and memories that have shaped my life. Here, I share my reflections on the events of June 4th, 1989, and their lasting impact on me and the world.

Ran Sheng, born and raised in Beijing, China, has a rich background in graphic design, video, animation, and photography. After moving to Portland in 2015, he pursued his passion for stop-motion animation, graduating from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in 2018 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. His thesis film, Karma Has You, won the William H. Givler Thesis Award and was screened at Cannes in 2019. From 2019 to 2021, Sheng worked as a stop-motion animator at a local studio, then freelanced on various projects, including online animation shorts and informative animations in feature films. Since 2021, he has been the Lead Support Specialist at PNCA’s Animated Arts Department, supporting students with his expertise. In 2023, he began the Low-residency MFA in Visual Studies at PNCA’s Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies, focusing on projection/public art while continuing to explore the endless possibilities of animated storytelling.