Blair Saxon-Hill: A Frieze of Pedestrian Ways of Being and A Few Individual Portraits

In October 2016, I had the opportunity to exhibit new work alongside two other Portland artists, Peter Simensky and Zack Yarrington, in a sister city exhibition in Sapporo, Japan curated by Kiyoshi Takahashi. The four images currently on display at Disjecta are part of a series of 27 images produced for the 500m Gallery. 500m is a massive series of glass cabinets that creates a formal public exhibition space in a populated subway breezeway that is in an enormous underground mall. For the that exhibition, I was to be personally responsible for 157 linear feet of glass cabinet space.

This site serves to archive images from the exhibit, site maps, meetings with the Mayor of Sapporo, works in progress, images from the public lecture and more. With this collection of images and short video clips, I also hope to acknowledge the magnificent 500m team and the critical assistance of Leif Anderson, Pushdot, and Rae Davis Fine Art Services for photographing, printing, mounting and framing this series. I am grateful for their collective assistance and energies that have enabled the Sapporo print project.

In sum, it is my hope that these images reinvigorate connections between our two cities and one day result in a sister city exhibition here in Portland based on the foundation of exchange made by the 500m Gallery in Sapporo.

Inspired by the site and environment of the sister city exhibition, the Sapporo subway, these works move between representations and abstractions of pedestrian bodies and behaviors, collectively forming the title of the series of 27 images, “A Frieze of Pedestrian Ways of Being and A Few Individual Portraits.” The figurative collages, made in service of the final photographs, draw upon published photographic documentation of sculpture and portraits of artists’ bodies to create what I term, “impossible documents”. The resultant works privilege physical viewership and examine the thingness of presence while also addressing our shifting interpretation of information and knowing.

- Blair Saxon-Hill

Slideshow of full series below. 27 images, edition of 5 with 2 APs. 4 of which are displayed at Disjecta.

Slideshow of works in progress and framing.

Slideshow of prior body of influential work from 2011. Offset printed book page collages on book pages, enlarged and printed with torn book page edge.

Installation in progress, curatorial staff, and 500m Gallery specs.

Slideshow of final installation views.

"As an artist, I act as a researcher, a wanderer, a hunter, an irreverent butcher, a matchmaker, a gambler, and a psychic. I respond to this remarkable world by collecting from its deep pools of value and disregard, with the aim of sincerely reformulating the bizarre, subtle, elegant, broken, and in love to focus on the humanity of our time.” - Blair Saxon-Hill

Blair Saxon-Hill has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon for over 15 years. Her figurative assemblages and collages are pedestrian and raw, turning the viewer to a visceral material world of paint and matter to register current cultural and political realities. Blair Saxon-Hill is a fellow of the Oregon Arts Commission, the Hallie Ford Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work has recently been exhibited at the 500 Meter Museum in Sapporo, Japan; JOAN in Los Angeles; VENUS Over Los Angeles, Maccarone LA; the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon; Artist Curated Projects; Fourteen 30 Contemporary and Adams & Ollman in Portland, and the Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in numerous prestigious arts publications and her two recent solo exhibitions received Artforum Critics’ Picks and an LA Weekly Critic’s Pick. Blair Saxon-Hill is represented by the Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles.

Links:

500m gallery
Gallery archive of the exhibition
Press on the show
Residency in Sapporo