The shape of memory
27 January 2023 – 19 March 2023
Video by Eric Mellencamp
Reception on 4 February 2023, 5–8pm
Talk with curators manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis at 6pm
home school and Oregon Contemporary proudly present The shape of memory, on view 27 Jan – 19. Mar 2023. The second show in home school’s curatorial residency includes works by Star Feliz, Deborah-Joyce Holman, Dozie Kanu, Nkhensani Mkhari, Portland Backyard Art Group, and MODUS. Exploring the slippage between symbol and sigil, the works in the show comprise still and moving image, sculpture, and installation.
In From the ashes (a chiasmus) and Untitled 1-4 from the series Floor Maps, Star Feliz acts as a decolonial experimental archaeologist. Interested in destabilizing the Romantic’s legacy of conquest that reverberates within Land Art, they create a world where the rebellious cartographies of the 17th Century Caribbean come alive with small gestures using the iconographies of Dominican Vodú and contemporary aesthetics of countercultural resistance. As a medicine person trained in various healing arts, Feliz is continually tracing their ancestral knowledge systems that evade the Archive. With painted stonelore and collective prophecies, this interdimensional portal serves to ignite our understanding of humanity’s shared fate with the earth.
The Portland Backyard Art Group uses found materials and the outdoors to make space for the reclamation of memory, childhood, and more. They present a number of pieces from their NE Portland home, where they worked for 3 years.
In the first physical exhibition of the series of works Untitled (in refusal), 2021, commissioned by the Athens Biennale and included in the catalog for the 7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse, Deborah-Joyce Holman renders asemic or illegible writing in a seemingly subtractive process over a sumptuous background of oil pastel on paper with deep red and orange hues. Certain moments and contexts converge near legibility before returning to the warm embrace of the pictorial. The framed series explores, as such, the intimacy of opacity as a gesture of refusal while still seeking to document the moment.
In The Songs They Sing, 2021, Johanesburg-based artist Nkhensani Mkhari knits together an ongoing audiovisual collage documenting civil unrest in post apartheid South Africa and its intersections with the coloniality of meaning. The video explores themes surrounding inherited oppression and renegotiated spaces. Here the anarchic noise of revolt becomes a silent melody sounded by the viewer. Dozie Kanu, born in Houston and currently living and working in Portugal, demonstrates the flickering kinship of form and feeling–poetic objects and the ways they activate our imagination– in his sculpture Abject Twin (2021). Resting gently against the wall, the repurposed bed headboard invites us to wonder: who is the version of us that walks in our dreams? MODUS presents, in interactive installation rather than workshop form, the third iteration of his proposal exploring the overlap between layered graffiti writing and asemic gesture (writing without semantic content). The audience is invited to contribute to the living palimpsest by means of water-based spray paint, and as layers of meaning pile on closer toward illegibility, the line between visuality and letter-form blurs ever more.
On your swirl around the world you accumulate yourself. You turn your senses inward, catch glimpses of the palimpsest, the erasures, the edits, the propensity for layering, for drawing connections, the endless depths. You find your way, building gradually like candy floss. In your search for meaning, memory is held in moments, bound or braided together, sometimes caught and beaded in shimmering tangles. In these moments the gaze explodes. The motion is full of promises– kept, broken, hidden, forgotten, et cetera. The artists provide the chance to stand among their offerings-up to our shared world, to contemplate where you fit in, how to activate your benevolent enmeshment. In bringing these works together we hope to give you clues to the future.
*
People see who they know
in the faces of others
And in their words
They hear the words they've heard
You've tasted this knitted shadow before
Its pain halo tattooed on your skin
The pain of the shadow shows up in the face of the other
Look harder so you don't just see
The old selves you saw in others' faces before
I met the ghost of Brautigan
At the Seattle Greyhound station
He called me "sucka fish" repeatedly
Like he wanted to hurt me
He rode the Kong train of shadows sewn into old light
He rode the sucker fish train into the night
I says with the voice of a crow in me
You can do more than hurt me.
Programming for Curator in Residence Season 11 is generously supported by Stephanie Snyder and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College. Oregon Contemporary is supported by the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund and the Oregon Community Foundation. Oregon Contemporary also receives support from the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other businesses and individuals provide additional support.
Star Feliz (b. 1992, New York, NY, Lenapehoking) is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person with roots in Ayiti, aka Dominican Republic. Entangled across the mediums of sculptural installation, time based media, and book forms, their work explores earth-based pathways for disarming apparatuses of violence and their cycles of trauma. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles department of Interdisciplinary Studio. After almost 10 years of studying and practicing community based herbalism, Star is currently sharing their ancestral medicine under the self-started project of Botánica Cimarrón. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music.
Deborah-Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist based between London, UK, and Basel, Switzerland. Their work has recently been shown at Istituto Svizzero, Palermo (2022); schwarzescafé, Luma Westbau, Zurich (2022); Sentiment, Zurich (2022); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022); Last Tango, Zurich (2022); Unfinished Live, The Shed, New York City & House of Electronic Arts, Basel (2021); 7th Athens Biennial (2021); TransBona-Halle, Basel (2021); Kiefer Hablitzel Prize nomination exhibition, Basel (2021); Conceptual Fine Arts Live, Milano (2021); Cherish, Geneva (2021); Yaby, Madrid (2021); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2021); La Quadriennale di Roma (2020); Material Art Fair, Mexico City (2020); A Soft Spiral (solo), Mikro, Zurich (2019); Fondation Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2019); Auto Italia, London (2019); Live In Your Head, Geneva (2018); Alienze, Lausanne (2018); OSLO10, Basel (2017); Locale Due, Bologna (2016), among others. From 2020-2022 they worked at East London arts organisation Auto Italia first as Associate Director then as Associate Curator. They are the founding director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland, which ran 2015–2020. Deborah-Joyce has curated the 2018 and 2019 annual group exhibitions for the arts and music festival Les Urbaines, Lausanne, entitled ...and their tooth, finest gold and Cinders, sinuous and supple respectively, presenting newly commissioned works by over 15 international artists.
Nkhensani Mkhari (b.1994) describes their work as a queer meditation on transience, aesthetic sociology and redemptive futurologies; an abstract machine nomadically migrating through contemporary culture. Exploring what Individuality is, what collectivity is and what it means to share space, their broad praxis spans photography, painting, performance art, sound design and new media. Their curatorial projects and artworks function as multi-modal material-semiotic metaphors in the application of Bantu Kongo cosmogonies as contemporary interfaces for new materialities. Nkhensani continues expanding in their praxis, synthesizing mediums to evoke new passages of materiality in expanding public consciousness towards indigenous interfaces. Their research is a study on migration, myth and cultural practices of (re)memory, rooted in counteractive ways of seeing and modes of hearing.
Dozie Kanu (b. 1993, Houston, TX) is an artist based in Santarem, Portugal. He has mounted solo exhibitions with Galerie Francesca Pia (Zurich, CH), Neuer Essener Kunstverein (Essen, DE), Project Native Informant (London, UK), Performance Space New York (NY, NY), Manual Arts (Los Angeles, CA), Galleria Madragoa (Lisbon, PT), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY, NY) and elsewhere.
MODUS (b. Bronx, NY) is a graffiti writer. His mentors are legendary writers Wane, Rime, and Meres. MODUS is a member of the following crews: Letters First (L1ST), the Seventh Letter family, the Writer’s Bench, and OTM.
home school is a free pop-up art school and space of sacred duty co-run by Victoria Anne Reis and manuel arturo abreu. Since 2015, home school has offered genre-nonconforming edutainment, critical care, and contexts for contemplation, all free or sliding scale for local and remote publics.