PNCA’s Center for Contemporary Art & Culture Presents The Earth Will Not Abide

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 19, 2018

Contact:

Lisa Radon, lradon@pnca.edu

PNCA’s Center for Contemporary Art & Culture Presents The Earth Will Not Abide

Portland, OR—October 19, 2018—The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) presents The Earth Will Not Abide, a group exhibition opening November 1, 2018 and running through January 12, 2019. The exhibition poses questions about the ecological and social viability of industrial agriculture and extractive land use. Works and projects in the exhibition, including video, creative mapping, paintings, and installation, comprise an investigation of and aesthetic response to these questions, employing a variety of media and methods.

Featuring work by duskin! drum, Ryan Griffis, Brian Holmes, Sarah Lewison, Alejandro Meitin, Claire Pentecost, Sarah Ross, and Sara Siestreem, the exhibition draws connections between lands in the US, Brazil, Argentina, and China that have been—and are currently being—engineered to support an agricultural economy based on monoculture. The Earth Will Not Abide attempts to understand the rapid transformations in land use, biological diversity, and social structures wrought by these monocultures and envision how the analytical tools of political ecology allow us to visualize and critique this subject, while also pointing us in the direction of viable responses.

Some of the works in this international exhibition consider our own region. Chicago-based artist and essayist Brian Holmes is researching the Columbia River Basin for his participatory mapping project, Learning from Cascadia. This interdisciplinary, internet-based project is being created with several regional partners, to share their work and stories as it connects to Cascadia. The work features ecological data,art, and social issues displayed in thematic layers. Claire Pentecost has made new soil chromatography works from the Columbia River Basin for the exhibition. For the Portland iteration of the exhibition, Sara Siestreem will display recently woven works made with materials collected in the Columbia River Basin.

This project is made possible by the generous support of c3:initiative & Oregon Cultural Trust

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Sarah Ross
Sarah Ross is an artist who works in sculpture, video and photo and teaches at The School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her projects use narrative and the body to address spatial concerns as they relate to access, class, anxiety and activism. Sarah also works collaboratively with Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and co-founded the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project; two large scale cultural projects that work with survivors of police torture and currently incarcerated people. She has co-curated exhibitions at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland; Sea and Space Explorations, Los Angeles; and PS122, New York. Sarah is the recipient of grants from the Propeller Fund, Graham Foundation, the Illinois Art Council and she is currently an Open Society Foundation Fellow. Her artwork has been exhibited in venues such as the Armory, Pasadena, CA; Gallery 727, Los Angeles; PS122, New York; Roots and Culture Gallery, Chicago; Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore; META Cultural Foundation, Romania and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal.

Ryan Griffis
Ryan Griffis is an artist currently teaching in the School of Art + Design at UIUC. Under the name Temporary Travel Office, Ryan has created work and publications that attempt to use tourism as an opportunity for critical public encounters. The Temporary Travel Office has created work for venues such as the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, SPACES Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Links Hall, PS122, LA Freewaves, and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. His writing has appeared in international print and online journals and in the edited volumes Cities and Inequalities (Routledge, 2015) and Support Networks (Chicago Social Practice History Series, SAIC/University of Chicago Press, 2014). His recent work employs the form of documentary images and writing to address regional political ecologies and extractive agriculture.

duskin drum
At the School of Advanced Studies, duskin drum is a founding professor and researcher in the Material Relations research group. He is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, performer, and woodsman. In 2017, he completed a doctorate in Performance Studies with designated emphases in Native American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. In 2005, he earned a Bachelors of Arts studying interdisciplinary theatre and performance at Evergreen State College . For 15 years, duskin has been making art and performance in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Brian Holmes
Brian Holmes is a polyglot art and cultural critic who got waylaid by the Anthropocene. After doing his PhD in Romance Languages in the 1980s at UC Berkeley, Holmes moved to Paris and became involved with art and activism, working as English editor for the publications of Documenta X and agitating in the counter-globalization movement. His essays on art, political economy and social change have appeared in journals and magazines such as Springerin, Multitudes, Brumaria, Open, #Errata and E-flux, as well as innumerable exhibition catalogues and three books of collected essays (Hieroglyphs of the Future, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms and Escape the Overcode). He has lectured at museums and universities around the world and taught occasional classes in cultural theory at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fe, Switzerland, and later at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Climate change makes all the foregoing matter less. After returning to live in the US in 2009, I have collaborated with the Compass (http://midwestcompass.org) and more recently with Deep Time Chicago. Over the last few years I’ve made and exhibited multimedia maps on environmental issues, using open-source software and public science data. The idea is to represent and embody a necessary shift from political economy to political ecology. See for example http://tinyurl.com/petropolis-... and http://tinyurl.com/living-rivers-map.

Sarah Lewison
Sarah Lewison an artist, writer and educator based in Southern Illinois. Her interdisciplinary performances trace relations between the social and economic referents we humans maintain to the economic and political presence of non-human species and cultures. Often these performances resemble the ordinary activities that silently define our relationships to environment and each other. Working independently and in collaboration with the media group BLW and the Compass correspondence in the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, she has created projects for galleries and public spaces in the United States, Mexico, Europe and China. She is Associate Professor, Radio, Television, and Digital Media at Southern Illinois University

Alejandro Meitin
Alejandro Meitin is an artist, lawyer, environmental activist, and co-founder of the art collective Ala Plástica (1991), which is based in La Plata, Argentina. Since 1994 he has been a member of Arte Litoral, an independent network of artists, critics, curators, and scholars interested in new ways of thinking about contemporary artistic practice and critical theory. Meitin has been involved in researching and developing collaborative artistic practices and has a number of exhibitions, residencies, and publications to his credit. He has also taught courses and given lectures in Latin America, North America, and Europe.

Claire Pentecost
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer whose poetic and inductive drawings, sculpture and installations test and celebrate the conditions that bound and define life itself. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing for many years on food, agriculture, bio-engineering, and anthropogenic changes in the indivisible living entity that animates our planet. Since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16Beaver and many others organizing Continental Drift, a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. A sample of Pentecost’s exhibition venues include dOCUMENTA(13), Whitechapel Gallery, the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Nottingham Contemporary, the DePaul Art Museum, the Third Mongolian Land Art Biennial. Institutions inviting her to lecture include MIT; CalArts; RISD; Northwestern University; Rice University; The University of Virginia; Creative Time Summit and many others. She is represented by Higher Pictures, New York, and is Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sara Siestreem
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, 1976-) is a master artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators, her training began in the home. Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and traditional Indigenous weaving. Her art practice branches into education and institutional reform. Siestreem created and runs a weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. She teaches Studio Arts and Indigenous Studies Courses at PSU and Community Education courses at PNCA. Her work in institutional reform relates to curatorial and educational practices regarding Indigenous Fine Art. She has been represented by Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon since 2010. Her work has been shown at Museum of Northwest Art, Missoula Art Museum, Hallie Ford Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, The Whatcom Museum of Arts, The University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Museum of Contemporary Native American Art, Grants Pass Museum of Art, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Evergreen Longhouse, Newport Visual Arts Center, Spaceworks Gallery, Littman Gallery, Archer Gallery, Royal Nebeker Gallery, Crossroads Carnegie Arts Center, COCC, OSU,1Spot Gallery, Jacobs Gallery, Columbia City Gallery, Pratt, Mark Wooley Gallery, Modern Zoo, The Life Gallery, Zeitgeist Gallery, Pip Gallery, and City Center Gallery. Her work figures in The Bonneville Power Administration Native Art Collection, Propel Insurance Collection, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Art Collection, The Hallie Ford Museum, The Missoula Art Museum, Native American Student and Community Center at Portland State, The Portland Art Museum, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Portable Works Collections as well as private collections around the world. She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon.

About Pacific Northwest College of Art
Pacific Northwest College of Art empowers artists and designers to reimagine what art and design can do in the world. Founded in 1909 as the Museum Art School in Portland, Oregon, PNCA offers eleven art and design Bachelor of Fine Art programs, seven graduate programs including Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts programs within the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies, a Post-Baccalaureate program, and Community Education courses for artists and designers of all ages. pnca.edu