We were happy to see the new DIY photobook manual from Self Publish, Be Happy featured in the Guardian this weekend. Represented artist Delaney Allen's first publication, Between Here and There, has a few pages included. Congrats, Delaney!
Stop by and pick up copies of both Self Publish, Be Happy and Between Here and There during your next visit to Nationale.
Emily Counts photographed in her studio by George Barberis
A great interview with Emily Counts from The Frye Museum Store's website, where she is a featured designer. Read more HERE. Counts' large sculpture, Sisu Sequence, from The Ins and Outs, her 2015 solo exhibition at Nationale, is currently on view at Frye in Seattle, WA.
Happy Monday from the backroom!
A big thank you to Katie Behel for gifting us a large pedestal/storage box. It was a great excuse to move pieces around on the walls and reveal yet another version of the backroom gallery. More information about older pieces can be found on our "COLLECTING" page.
Artist/Curator Michelle Grabner is giving a lecture tonight at PNCA from 6:30-8 p.m. Grabner is the curator of the upcoming Portland2016 Biennial of Contemporary Art. If you can't make it down to PNCA tonight, check out the livestream!
Amy Bernstein and Patrick Kelly reflect on their work and current exhibition, The Liminalists, now on view at Nationale through December 4.
Amy Bernstein & Patrick Kelly at the Disjecta Art Auction in front of Jeffrey Kriksciun's textile // photo by Katie Bernstein
Gabi Lewton-Leopold: I wanted to first get a little background on how you two know each other if you had ever thought of combining your work in this way?
Patrick Kelly: We met working at Stumptown, but we never really worked together here in Portland. I remember hearing that Amy was an artist, and I don’t even know if I had seen any of your work. I feel like I had, but I just remember various times we’d meet up at other events and have small conversations. I remember that when I started making these kind of works, Amy was one of the people I tracked down to see them, she and a couple of other people. I saw these particular individuals almost as points of validation: like, if these people approve, then I’ll keep pushing this. I don’t know if I really ever thought before about putting our work together.
Amy Bernstein: I don’t think we ever thought about working together, but the coolest result of this exhibit has been all of our conversations about how and why our work does work together. Just getting to work with Patrick has been such an honor for me; we’ve been colleagues and friends for such a long time. Most of our conversations before were sort of casual shoptalk, just shooting the shit, you know “what’ve you got going on? What are you thinking about?” Pretty classic stuff but not exactly “let’s collaborate” or “let’s see what from having our works exist in the same space.”
GLL: You did studio visits?
PK: Yeah, leading up to the show. It was funny; she and I had been sort of working respectively, for quite a while, developing these bodies of work. In a way these conversations we were having, it felt like they should have already happened, or had been waiting to happen for a long time, and this show finally realized them. Sometimes it feels like you need something to bring those conversations to light.
Amy Bernstein & Patrick Kelly: The Liminalists at Nationale
GLL: That leads to another question: you both have these distinct bodies of work, how did they develop?
PK: Many years ago when I started working on these drawings, the initial starting point was a point of frustration, of trying to build and design these horrible sculptures that just didn’t work. I was trying to force and mash these disparate materials together.
GLL: What were they made out of?
PK: A lot of it was black plastic, rope, and earth. It was that of creating a movement or traction of earth, of earth being pushed around. It was a horrible process. When I tried to redesign them, I started drawing them with pencil to plan out what was going to happen. Then I realized I was getting a lot more of a response, actually physically drawing these ideas—capturing movement with a pencil.
GLL: And when did you start using the template, or what do you call it?
PK: It’s been called a template, a jig, a guide, so many different things, which is really funny. I’ve never really given it a name. It’s not necessarily a very precious thing, so I never really thought of it as having a name. They are shapes that have been designed from quick gestural sketches and then cut out from foam core. The contour of the shapes are then traced repeatedly with pencil as I shift and rotate it minutely across a page.
GLL: But each piece uses a different one?
PK: Oh yea, definitely, and there are multiple ones in each piece.
AB: I think that the similarities of the way in which our work developed, which is maybe always the way it is when you are making work for a long time, is coming to a point when you realize that the process itself is problematic. I used to work on pieces for such long periods of time that they would become buried under other pieces. The work couldn’t be what it wanted to be. I think about language a lot, and writing, and the language of painting. I think about the visual language and trying to make your own. Making a language can take a very long time. It isn’t this way for everyone. But for me, I was putting it all in the same place rather than letting the words, or the symbols stand by themselves, so all this white space started to creep in so that these kind of quantifiers could have a space to exist. They needed it, and they responded to it, and then they could talk to each other in this space, so that’s how these kind of works developed. I think that oil paint can do anything, it’s such an amazing recorder of time, or of a moment. And for the surface to be incredibly smooth, it becomes an even better recorder.
Amy Bernstein, Vowel Sounds, 2015, oil on canvas, 28 x 26”
GLL: You both talk about time, and there is something very time based about both bodies of work. There’s a feeling of accumulation and process but in different ways.
PK: Yes, even when I was initially beginning these pieces, the idea of how much time you’d dedicate to something cropped up; at that point, I felt it was really a problem for me because I felt like I didn’t have an understanding of what that would mean. When I started making these works, that was a part of the challenge because they are so time consuming: how much time could I devote to this? This was not just physical time but also a certain mental space. How much could I devote of myself to make this work? I really wanted to push myself to keep testing that idea.
GLL: This brings me to a question about the title of the show and the idea of the Liminalists as a reference to the creative process. It makes me think of the ongoing debate about when and where creative impulses happen. One camp argues that it’s about time dedication and hard work, while the other side says it’s more mysterious than that and that it often comes from outside of the self. Thinking about the Liminalists and your studio practices, how do you feel about those two philosophies?
PK: I think we both might be from the camp of work and dedication (laughs).
AB: I think it’s both. You need the time to spend sitting and thinking, to get to the place in your brain where these things live, where the need is to make them. And you need this in tandem with the actual hands-on making.
PK: I also think it is a little of both, and it’s ambiguous to say which one weighs more. Sometimes the physical work isn’t happening yet, because you are still looking for inspiration, but once you find it, the mind quiets down and you can really devote a lot of time to that work, to the physical craft. But yea, I think it does sort of exist in this ambiguous state and when you are an artist, you can’t really define when one stops and when one begins.
AB: I can’t get there only in my mind, as much as I would like to, as much as I’ve tried. I’d love to get there in my mind and see a piece and just make it, but it never works that way for me. I have to make something and there’s going to be all these other things that happen in the making of the thing that I can’t control. It’s taken my whole life to let go of wanting that control.
In terms of the title itself of the show, I think that part of it is a play on words, in referencing art history and the Minimalists. But the idea of liminality itself has to do with the place between language and thought. That impetus is also where making comes from, and so I think that’s what we were thinking about a lot.
PK: A lot of conversations were that of, if you strip away language, what is it that you are still communicating? You are kind of lost in that. Each time we venture into a new piece, we are at that beginning state.
Patrick Kelly, Carbon trace 24, 2015, graphite on paper, 42 x 30”, Private Collection
GLL: Have you always both worked in abstraction, or is that something you came to later?
PK: No, further back in my life I was a very representational painter, highly realistic, lots of detail. I would say this sort of abstraction is a recent thing in the span of my life. But it’s interesting; this is one of those bodies work that developed outside of the way you have been trained. Like, ok you’ve gone through all this school and finished graduate school and struggled for several years, not knowing what to make because you are finally removed from the community from where I started. It became a body of work that really came from myself, from myself searching. It was void of influence, or at least of a direct influence of an immediate community.
AB: I was a figurative painter when I started school. but at the same time, I always think that all painting is the same.
PK: Well, it really is. I would agree with that, it really is all the same.
GLL: How do you see that?
PK: Well, the materials are the same—it’s still paint. I think that the painterly strokes that Amy works with and communicates with are the same things you would use to communicate the idea of a rendered space or a three dimensional form. Which is funny because in those arenas it’s almost like a visual trick. You can look at a painting of a landscape, for example, and think to yourself: oh that tree looks like a three dimensional form, but it doesn’t really have the feeling of a three dimensional form, and the color next to it sets it back in a space that looks three dimensional, but doesn’t necessarily feel like it. It is essentially, an abstracted three dimensional space. It’s all still the same language.
GLL: Yes, but do you think that maybe these abstract works are more open in a sense? In terms of that visual language, you are allowing for more interpretations and those kind things that come along with abstraction versus giving someone a rendered space or form.
AB: I think people rest on the things that they can recognize like a figure or a room, and maybe in this sense, they can become maybe a little less open because they aren’t always looking at the paint as much. And of course, these created spaces are loaded, psychologically and emotionally in all kinds of ways, as in the ways we relate with any depiction of our world: I know what it feels like to hold my body like that, or stand in a room, or lie next to my lover, or see a bowl of fruit lit like that, etc. Or maybe I never saw it before and now you are showing it to me (but this is part of what art does, right?) But honestly, if you think about Vermeer or even Ralph Pugay, a fantastic artist that works here in town, those are psychological spaces that those artists create with figures. The paint is part of it too, but my work is different in that way. But when I think about Frank Auerbach, or Manet, or Alice Neel, all those painters that use this juicy, psychologically charged medium to convey emotion, I think it’s about the way that they use paint more so than...
PK: ...than what they’re rendering.
AB: Yea, and that’s what they are conveying more than anything, and I feel that I’m doing , or trying to do, something more like that.
PK: If you look at the history of painting, it has always been about the application of paint. That’s the thing that set successors apart from the people that came before them. Certainly, certain subject matter has been jarring for what they are, but movements in painting are always based on the application of paint.
Amy Bernstein, An Intellect’s Love, 2015, Oil on canvas, 20 x 18”, Private Collection // Patrick Kelly, Untitled, 2015, graphite on paper, 13 x 10”
GLL: Amy, we spoke before about how you often work on the ground to get rid of the hierarchy of shapes and spaces. So, speaking of abstraction, my question is, how is orientation important to you in the final work?
AB: I do work a lot on the ground because I don’t want the work to be affected by gravity. But, I think somehow these works still got a little affected.
PK: What exactly do you mean by being affected by gravity?
AB: Every time I work in a way that I exist in my body, with my feet on the floor and the work on the wall, I eventually start making the world around me. Things start to move to the bottom of the picture plane and all of a sudden, it’s like the real world, and that’s not what I want at all in this work. So, I have to work on the floor because gravity always seeps in. I don’t want to make the physical world in my painting, so I have to work on the floor.
GLL: So, you don’t want that horizon line...
AB: Exactly, well, not really a horizon line, but the way things are weighted, a top and a bottom, a right and wrong, an up and down. Even when I look at the work and make a decision while the work is on the wall, gravity happens again and confounds me. I don’t want my characters to be affected by those rules. Gravity is so inescapable, it turns out!
PK: It probably is like one of the most inescapable things!
AB: But you’d think in my painting it doesn’t have to exist, but it does, it gets in there. I have had people turn my paintings different ways. I think of them as being oriented a certain way, because for me they do something for me that way. I want to not care if it’s oriented in a different way, but I probably do.
PK: Yea, you probably do.
AB: Yea, I do. I read this wonderful idea that I want to take on as my own but I can’t because I’m just not being honest. You know there was that awesome aboriginal show over the summer (No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, presented by PICA) and those artists were like, “put this piece on the floor,” because the way that they orient space is just so fantastic, and they don’t cater or work in any of our western pictorial constructs of making a landscape to explain your experience at all, which I thought was the most fantastic thing in the world and which I wanted to do so badly. But honestly, I know someone who owns one of my paintings and has turned it a different way and every time I walk in the room I’m like “ehhh...that’s not right.” But, you put it in the world and it’s not yours anymore.
GLL: And Patrick, with your work you are definitely working on the wall.
PK: I am, yea.
GLL: Physically, it would probably be difficult to work on the floor.
PK: It kind of would be, but honestly when I’m making these too, I am kind of twisting and bending so many different directions. It’s really kind of strange. Sometimes if I find my body in a stressful situation all of a sudden, I’ll switch to the other side and find another position. Once a work is completed, I’ve always enjoyed the fact that there is not one fixed spot in which to view it, for the fact that under certain amounts of natural light affecting it’s constantly changing.
GLL: Which brings us back to the idea of time.
PK: Right.
GLL: But in terms of orientation, you know from the beginning how a piece will be placed on the wall?
PK: Yea, I don’t ever really turn the page when I’m working. I haven’t really gotten to that point because I don’t know the reason why to do that, other than just to do that. Usually, I orient a page and say this is how I’m going to work, in this format. It’s interesting when Amy was talking about trying to rid yourself of gravity, because I’ve really tried to do that as far as keeping these images floating in space to almost feel weightless, outside of the fact that they also feel very heavy, very dense.
GLL: And these newer pieces on black paper, almost feel like a piece of a larger one or a zooming in.
PK: Yes, somewhat, getting a little bit closer in. Maybe a little more terrestrial. The black paper was really started as more of a curious thing of seeing what could happen.
Amy Bernstein, We’re Creatures of the Wind, 2015, oil on canvas, 20 x 20”, Private Collection // Patrick Kelly, Traverse, 2015, graphite on paper, 15 x 11”
GLL: This brings me to a question about Amy’s latest painting, with the black background, what are your thoughts on that newest work?
AB: I think after awhile you work in a certain way for a long time, I think of people like Morandi who painted still lifes his whole life and they are just so sublime, so fantastic, they hold something that is so otherworldly. This time that we are in right now is so fast, which I think is hard sometimes for making art because developing language is a slow, slow thing. I think I had the impulse, I need to not work on this white space because it is limiting me, but then I think about people like Morandi, and the fact that I haven’t even begun to even touch the surface of what could possibly be in this white space, in this sensitive void record, but I wanted to make something that filled the hole—and so I filled white with black.
GLL: Do you think it’s somewhere you’ll keep going?
AB: I don’t know, I’m not really good at knowing. I kept thinking about this the whole time making this work, that I just can’t get there in my mind. I can’t do it in my mind, I have to make the thing. It’s the only way to work toward where it will go, and I’m absolutely positive it’s influenced by all my ideas and thoughts about the world, but I have to make the thing to find out. Other people don’t work that way; they have a complete concept. But I don’t entirely believe that either. I don’t entirely believe in a watertight concept. I don’t think that works.
PK: I don’t know either, it’s hard to judge if that really is happening that way or not for some people.
AB: I have a sneaking suspicion though that with anyone who is making anything, that the transformation something goes through while it’s being made is probably pretty drastic. And then the end product holds so much more than anyone ever intended, especially if it’s a powerful piece of work.
Amy Bernstein, Untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 24 x 22", Private Collection
GLL: The idea of darkness as a meaningful space, or a political space, has come up in a few of these artist interviews. I started thinking about your work, Patrick, and wondering if you think about darkness, and if so, what does that mean for you?
PK: Now, I don’t really think so much about the idea of darkness. Originally when I was conceptualizing these I was thinking about darkness and the void that exists there. Part of it is that staring into the abyss or staring into shadows of something that is void of light, like light of this physical world. What happens as you start staring into a void is that it becomes a reflection of yourself. You start looking at a picture plane that is not existing here, but feels real and you start creating imagery, creating shapes, you almost start creating light that is going to exist there. I feel that that part, where you get to staring, is actually pretty critical for us as humans, especially for our entire development from where we’ve started from to where we are going. There’s a part of me that feels it’s very necessary to have that, to have that bit of darkness. I think it has to be there.
Patrick Kelly, Untitled II, 2015, graphite on paper, 24 x 18”
AB: Which I think also goes back to the title of the show, you know. The liminal space is a dark one.
PK: It is definitely. In a way, those dark spaces are the places where you have to create what exists there because maybe there is nothing there at all, but you can’t tell.
GLL: There are many conversations going on between the two bodies of work, but the one thing that really stands out is the fact that both bodies give us that time and space, and it feels really generous. It’s work that the more time you spend with it, it keeps changing, keeps giving more.
PK: I definitely want people to consider it that way, because it is such a long journey for myself, moving physically from one piece to the next. People can’t be there with me while I’m making the work; they can’t be in that mental space, but hopefully the images encourage an experience that opens them up to these ideas.
AB: That is definitely the goal. As someone who feels that way about the work that I look at, you know, that it’s work I feel like I will look at for my entire life, that would be amazing. That’s like, my life’s goal for my work, what I would want, something someone would want to come back to. That would be amazing.
Post-interview follow-up question with May Barruel (Nationale owner/director)
GLL: How did you arrive at the idea of pairing Amy and Patrick's work?
May Barruel: It was one of those moments when I was laying in bed, either had just woken up or couldn't sleep, and I had a vision of their work being paired together. I've always been drawn to how sparse both of their work is, how minimal and yet intense, and I wanted to put that vision into reality in a gallery setting. As different as Amy's bright colors and Patrick's blacks and greys can be, I had a sense that their work also had a lot in common. I was attracted to both the stark contrast, and the similarities of their work, and wanted to see where that conversation could take us visually.
Once we started planning for the exhibition, I knew it would all come together because of their shared enthusiasm and dedicated studio practice. From the start, I always envisioned that Amy's and Patrick's pieces would be paired together in the gallery, for the public to see that conversation, as opposed to grouping each of their work in two different areas. I couldn't be happier with how the show turned out. It has infused the space with a sense of both calm and euphoria.
That's all for now—thank you Amy, Patrick, & May!
Join Midori Hirose and these other amazing women artists this Sunday, November 15, in the Columbia Gorge for GG at the Helm! More info below.
With a Bronco Gallery tailgate invitation in hand, Midori Hirose returns to her familial Oregon roots and would like to take you on an Oregon expedition via curatorial investigations this Sunday, November 15th to the Portland Women's Forum (the viewpoint which overlooks the gorge and Crown Point, 30 minutes from Portland.)
Presenting GG at the Helm. An exhibition of visual, music, performative and written works at the Portland Women’s Forum from 3pm till sunset with: Julia Calabrese, Mia Ferm, Jennifer Keyser, Lola Milholland, Patricia No, Antonia Pinter, Lisa Radon, Morgan Ritter, Stephanie Simek, and Mary Sutton.
So proud of our 8 represented artists (+ Jeffrey Kriksciun) for their generous donations to the upcoming Disjecta Auction happening next Saturday, November 14. Start bidding now via Paddle8 for the pieces featured on the live auction and see you in a couple weeks for the big night...
Thrilled to see our current exhibition featured on Sight Unseen this weekend. Congrats, Amy and Patrick!
Congrats to represented artist Amy Bernstein for being featured on the always impeccable Women Artists blog this week...
On view October 21–December 4, 2015
Opening reception Sunday, October 25 (2–5 p.m.)
The work of Portland-based artists Amy Bernstein and Patrick Kelly may at first glance seem like formal contradictions. While Kelly's thick layers of graphite depend on countless passes of his hand to achieve their silky depths, Bernstein's colorful compositions herald the immediacy of her gooey medium. And yet, their processes abound in a shared ritualism. Exhibited together at Nationale for The Liminalists, the two may be seen to similarly tease the standard behavior and limits of their given mediums (painting and drawing, respectively) in the attempt to create a new language. For both, the act of creation—rife with introspection and indeterminacy—thrives on the unfamiliar. Their images are disoriented and rebuilt over time, forever questioning the limits and givens of perception.
Specifically, within Bernstein’s practice, painting’s hierarchy of color and composition is routinely upended. Placed in what appear as haphazard configurations upon a slick, white background, her colorful blobs and geometric shapes float unconstrained by the two-dimensional surface. This illusion of randomness and detachment enables Bernstein to orchestrate a pause within her audience. Her sparse works beg the viewer to confront their ideas of a visual status quo. Her palette and layouts, while seemingly accidental, are, instead, deliberate examinations of cultural perception, design, and visual construct.
Kelly’s Carbon Traces series similarly challenges space in order to manipulate perception. Using hand-cut forms to trace an initial design, he then continues to move the stencil ever so slightly in order to widen the image. The result of this laborious repetition is amorphous and seductive. The graphite that Kelly uses subtly absorbs and reflects light, thereby invigorating the drawing with an atypical sense of sculptural depth. Meanwhile, the line of the individual contour merges through endless reiterations into a new object, a distant, haunted trace of its original state.
BIOS
Hailing from Atlanta, GA, Portland–based artist and writer Amy Bernstein received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been exhibited in Portland at Nationale, the Littman Gallery, Portland State University, Car Hole Gallery, Worksound, and Carl & Sloan Contemporary. She has received grants from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation in 2010 and from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2012. She joined Nationale as a represented artist in the summer of 2015.
Patrick Kelly is a practicing artist living in Portland, OR. He received an MFA from The George Washington University in Washington DC in 2005 and a BFA from East Carolina University in 2001. He has shown in Seattle, WA, New York, NY, and in Portland, OR, at Worksound, Basil Howard Gallery, Half/Dozen, and Autzen Gallery. Kelly’s work is included in collections at the MoMA Library, New York, NY, the Bieneke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, New Haven, CT, and the Oregon Arts Commission.
Sporting Goods just stocked us with two sweet Damian Lillard cups, I guess it's RIP CITY time all over again.
We continue our artist interview series with represented artist William Matheson, who offers us here insights into his process and thinking behind his current series, Night Was Already in My Hands (on view through October 19).
William in his studio at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA
Gabi Lewton-Leopold: The title for this show is taken from a poem by the Japanese Modernist poet, Sagawa Chika. Can you speak about how the line in the poem came to be the title of the series? How do you feel it informs the work? It's interesting too, recently I was talking with Elizabeth Malaska about her titles, many of which come from poems, and she spoke about how she felt a kinship between poetry and painting; that both mediums can talk about our world and create their own in the same moment.
William Matheson: Poetry is one of those things that I only read occasionally, but every time I do it seems to directly enter into the paintings. I’d say more regularly I read novels, and of course, because I’m in grad school, there is always lots of art theory/contemporary art literature. But I always really relish the brief intervals of time that I spend with poetry, as it can provide a pretty rarefied form of inspiration. This has to be stated as a bit of a generalization, but I think poetry and painting share a certain type of resistance and opacity. Both can deal with a type of intimacy that can be hard to find in other mediums, something that exists halfway between reality and something else, something stranger. They’re both also rather precarious and slippery. I guess this definitely relates to the mixture that Elizabeth mentioned, of existing halfway between our world and another. There’s a great quote by Wallace Stevens where he says, “To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.” The two mediums have a long history together, they seem to have necessary overlaps in how they construct a space to interact with.
I just recently discovered Sagawa’s poems and I was just immediately taken. Her work seems to straddle this really interesting line between sensuality, in terms of how she describes details from nature, and this almost overwhelming sense of doom and angst derived from being human, from having to exist. There is also something very simple and refined to her work, which I deeply admire. I chose the last line of the poem because it tonally related to the paintings and what I wanted from them, and also because it’s the most ambiguous line in the work. “Night was already in my hand” exists on this interesting spectrum between unsettling—if we take the “in my hand” in the poem as a negative, almost like something subterranean or internally corrosive—and powerful, because it’s the first line in the poem of possession, of having control over what occurs. I wanted something of this kind of ambiguity to be present in the show, a struggle of sorts.
GLL: The poem paints a very bleak scene, and like the poem, there also seems to be a theme of darkness, or evening, cast over the paintings. Does this ring true to you?
WM: Darkness is such an interesting thing currently. I was just reading Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 last year, which is a book I have mixed feelings about, but one of the main topics is how night, as both a diurnal occurrence and a potential political/creative position, is being totally eradicated contemporaneously because it exists in opposition to capitalism. It’s something that cannot easily be utilized or monetized because it is essentially a space for inactivity and dreaming. I won’t make this a discussion or critique of capitalism, because I don’t think that’s what this body of paintings is about or is trying to achieve. But this idea that Crary outlines, the possibility of the end of night by light pollution, the end of sleep from advancements in drugs, even the end of the dreamer, I think it’s really charged.
I’ve always been quite night oriented in my rhythms and lately, I’ve found night to actually be a fairly crucial position for me in my work, rather than just the time and space when I’d create and think most fruitfully. Night and darkness entail a sort of resistance, an embodiment of the mercurial. I like that night is readily associated with returns: the return of the past, the return of the dead, the return of deep subconscious emotions, of things unseen and unexplainable. It has an uncanniness or unpredictability to it. So, I think that’s where a lot of these paintings come from, or what I was thinking of while making them. Many of the works are populated with specters and other embodiments of this sort, like the hazy figures in Autumn at the Feet, or the wobbly dreamer from Afternoon or the feet and lemon in Self Portrait with Lemon.
Afternoon, 2015, oil acrylic, and dye on canvas, 26 x 18"
I had a great studio visit with the artist Keith Mayerson recently where he brought up Foucault’s idea of the panopticon in relation to everything I was just talking about. The panopticon is a type of centralized prison arrangement that is designed for constant surveillance, where no one can tell when he or she is in fact being surveyed. Basically it’s a system that runs on uninterrupted visibility, of constant watchfulness and light. If we think of night, creatively, politically, socially and metaphorically as a way of subverting being seen and surveyed contemporaneously, of retaining the position of being dreamers in some way, well I think that’s great, and that’s a position that I want to be present in the work, even if it may be very quiet or indirect.
GLL: While I've definitely thought of sleep as an unpredictable and maybe even sacred space, separate from the waking world, I've never thought of it as a political space. I'm wondering how you see protest entering into the discussion. I think this idea of quiet moments and spaces is especially relevant and important in today's world where we are constantly confronted with modes of communication and distraction during our waking lives. It is only in sleep and moments of great self-discipline (say in the studio or meditation) that we can get away from it all.
WM: I think that there is, or can be, a protest aspect to painting—of indulging in what could be seen as a sort of dream manifested formally, something far removed from what is demanded currently of people. Painting has an odd temporality to it still, with all of its ancestral connotations. So, I think that time spent on painting in the studio (this could easily extend to other mediums in different ways) is a bit like sleeping, going inwards and trying to resist in some way or another.
It makes sense that we're so embattled with sleep and inactivity, because on an evolutionary level it's so ridiculously vulnerable. For example, if you went back 50,000 years, sleeping may well have been one of the most dangerous and easily preyed upon parts of our existence. So, on a biological level, we may feel hostility to this time and space that entails complete lack of control. But I think highlighting this vulnerability, retaining it, and being honest about the fear that lack of control brings is very important too, especially for the arts. And this can definitely entail resistance.
I also don't want to sound like a lamenting culture critic here, because contemporary life is far too complex to simply wring your hands at, and many of the things I'm alluding to come with enormous benefits. But it's getting harder and harder to approach this state of being in 'night', with computers and cellphones demanding time in both the studio and all throughout the night, and to find some sort of actual 'darkness' in all of its varied connotations, with growing light pollution.
GLL: Your previous show at Nationale, Sunless, also featured ghostly, hollow-eyed figures but there seemed to be more of an interest in landscape with that series; perhaps a more horizontal use of space, where as this show is more vertical. What has changed in your thinking and practice between these two series?
Skull In the River, 2014, oil on canvas, 18 x 24", Private Collection (Portland, OR)
WM: Sunless was definitely a more representational/colorful/poppy show than Night Was Already in My Hands. I think of the paintings in the current show are more internal and abstract, both formally and in other less describable ways, than Sunless was as a whole. If I remember correctly, I was trying to imbue many of the paintings from the previous show with a digital quality. Many of them were appropriated from online sources—video games, screensavers, things of that ilk, so the paintings held onto some of that odd, hyper colorful, verging on absurd energy that was in the references. I think this kind of determined the landscape quality as well: the images that the paintings were derived from maintained that format.
The works in Night Was Already in My Hands are for the most part not taken from direct sources, so that may explain a bit of the shift from horizontal to vertical. Also verticality is typically associated with the portrait, which has more intimate, internal connotations. I definitely think that this body of paintings, compared to the last, has a more introspective, quiet goal.
GLL: The paintings in this show are either on pre-dyed colored canvases, or on canvases that you dyed yourself. What attracts you to working in this way? When you start with a colored canvas, does it act as a welcome restrain/frame, giving you some parameters in which to work?
WM: Like many painters, working with different surfaces/restrictions/presentations can be really rewarding for me. The usage of pre-dyed to self-dyed canvas definitely becomes an avenue for containing and potentially constraining the content. I think the pre-dyed colored canvas comes from wanting to engage with flatness in a very direct way, to create a very literal tension between the painted sectioned and the pre-dyed section. These works become a bit like an image on a screen or an illustration in a book. They don’t have complete autonomy in the same way that a more fully rendered/completed painting would.
With paintings like WK (the Architect’s House) or Afternoon, where I dye and paint the initial layer, I’m looking for different type of conflict. These surfaces read less like a book or screen and more like something organically growing or decaying over time. These paintings are darker too, and I think relate to the mercurial aspect of night that I previously mentioned. Part of that comes from materials used; in WK, the lighter stained areas arise from bleach and water poured onto the dyed surface, and in Afternoon, some of the hazier areas are created by spraying a very watery mixture of paint and dye through an airbrush.
Throughout many of the paintings there’s an attention to space, and especially compartmentalizing the space in which the painting realities exist. So both the self-dyed and pre-dyed canvases become a way to navigate different versions of this.
WK (the Architects House), 2015, oil, acrylic, dye, and bleach on canvas, 41 x 33"
GLL: There is, for a lack of a better phrase, a signature mark that is repeated throughout your work. It's an arch of solid color, for this series it is done in white. At times, it seems to be used as a highlight, say on the collarbone and cheek bone of the figure in Smiling Etruscan Bust, other times as in Autumn at the Feet, it serves as a pause, a comma, that interrupts the color field. What's your thinking behind this mark?
Smiling Etruscan Bust, 2015, oil on canvas, 26 x 20"
WM: I see the arch as a sort of personal signature to be sure. It originated a couple of years ago, while I was at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I had made a semi-grey, blurry painting of two polar bears fighting, which was starting to have nods to some of Richter’s blurred paintings, and I started thinking what I could do to upset the mood that was becoming prevalent in the image, because it wasn’t working, or it felt derivative. So, I placed this bright blue poppy arch right between the two bears, and it seemed really funny, and changed the tone of the painting quite substantially. In retrospect it oddly allowed it to contain more conflict.
Two Bears Fighting on Thinning Ice, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 32”
Since then it’s become a way to upset what could become heavy handed paintings, like Autumn at the Feet, or a way to add movement and rhythm in other works, like Smiling Etruscan Bust. The arch has something of a spatial quality, a bit like a miniature entrance, but it is never large enough, or rendered enough to be complete. I always hope there’s a certain sort of tension to it, halfway between something cartoonish and something more mysterious.
It’s usually made by squeezing the paint tube right out onto the canvas. I suppose in this manner there are also ties to certain forms of digital painting in the mark, I’ve always felt that it has a sort of digital register in its application, as it can appear a bit like something made in Photoshop or Illustrator. Sometimes I over do it and put too many arch-like paint lines in the works, and those ones can start to feel gimmicky. But if used moderately, it can become an interesting tool to break the space and mood up in strange ways, to add another dimension.
GLL: Can you tell us about your consistent interest in mythology and references to figures from antiquity?
WM: I find myself constantly turning to ancient references because of the interesting mixture of art historical canonization and uncanniness that exists within their parameters. Almost any art history course covers the myths, artworks and artifacts of the Etruscan, Grecian, and Roman periods; the images they produced come as close to being foundational human images as any, at times seeming like universal embodiments of creativity/humanity. They’re so loaded.
But, like a mask, or a doll, these ancient busts and sculptures are inanimate and have a certain vacancy to them, a long, somewhat inaccessible material history. I was just reading a short interview with the artist Carrie Moyer and the way she describes her attraction to ancient busts, masks, and armor is really well put. She says it exists as a search for “forms that were nearly recognizable…that generated a preliterate force.”
So, I think it’s that odd balance between familiarity and something inherently removed that continually attracts me to them.
GLL: There are two paintings in your current show, one titled Country Witch and the other, City Witch. The latter is very abstract with solid blocks of blue, black, gray and yellow, while Country Witch is much more figurative—it depicts a face made of differing tones of blue. What is the significance of the witch? What does that figure mean to you within this series and do you see the major differences between these two witches as meaningful?
City Witch, 2015, oil on canvas, 25 x 20” and Country Witch, 2015, oil on canvas, 22 x 18”, Private Collection (Portland, OR)
WM: The Witch, like the bust or the doll, is such a fascinating character because there’s something inherently archaic, or old fashioned to her. Like I previously mentioned, there’s a certain uncanniness to these figures, a vacancy, so to speak. They’re figures/beings that are not animated or real, but they still have a deep psychological resonance and an eeriness/romance for lack of better words.
There’s a great drawing that I often think of by the early 20th century outsider artist August Natterer called Hexenkopf. In the work, the boundaries and perimeters of a quaint Grandma Moses-esque town comes to form the head of a giant, grinning witch's head. As a drawing it’s both funny/playful and simultaneously deeply disturbing. If I remember correctly, the drawing was created right before the beginning of World War I, and the act of casting the witch, a pagan figure, as the embodiment paranoia of what was a fairly industrial/mechanistic age is really interesting. Like, how can the witch possibly be used to address contemporary uncertainty or fear then and especially now? There’s almost something futile about the character. Also, there are of course the kitschy Halloween associations (I’ve actually made some small witch paintings based directly on cheap costume masks), and the disturbing narrative of the persecution of otherness. They’re creatures of the night too, like any character with horror associations, which ties into everything else. I guess I’m attracted to the witch because she represents an odd combination of elements, something halfway between a kitschy joke and something more tragic.
August Natterer, Hexenkopf (The Witch's Head), 1915
The titles, funnily enough, actually come from that old children’s story, The City Mouse and the Country Mouse. I think the story goes that each mouse visits the other in their respective homes, and the country mouse can’t understand or adjust to the city, and in the city mouse’s case, the country. I think I really just liked using that narrative reference for the titles because it’s a bit of joke, but actually it does make sense that the city witch would be more alive and simultaneously fractured.
GLL: Who are some of the artists you think about often? What have they taught you?
WM: Always a fun question. I guess these would be the artists/filmmakers/writers I think about/am inspired by now, in no particular order: Peter Doig, Michael Armitage, Marcel Desgrandchamps, Ted Gahl, Victor Man, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Clarice Lispector, Jose Donoso, W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Carl Dreyer, Chris Marker, Laure Prouvost, Jon Rafman, Rachel Rose. God and I feel like I’m definitely leaving people out.
I don’t know if I can neatly summarize what these particular artists have taught me though. I’d probably need to type page after page for that, which would inevitably become a bit of a ramble.
GLL: What's next for you in the studio?
WM: Actually, most of what I've been working on currently has taken place in video. I've been wanting to make film/video work for years now, and going in to my second year in grad school, with access to great resources and the input of my peers and professors, well, it just felt like the exact right time to push myself to find new ways of conveying my interests.
This obviously doesn't mean that I'm going to stop painting, but for the next several months I'd love to find new ways of dealing with all of the themes that are percolating here in this show: night, returns, dissolutions, specters. It's been both daunting and extremely exciting and rewarding.
If you find yourself in Houston, TX, check out FotoFest's upcoming exhibition featuring new photographic work by Texas artists, including Delaney Allen. This Side of Paradise opens October 8, 2015
Had to share this gorgeous photograph of represented artist Amy Bernstein, shot by Simon Metcalf in her studio. Looking forward to her upcoming two person exhibition with Patrick Kelly.
WILLIAM MATHESON, Afternoon, 2015, oil, acrylic, and dye on canvas, 26 x 18”
I've grown so fond of this new painting by William Matheson. I was initially surprised by the palette but the unexpected camo-like background and that pointy nose/mask have completely won me over. Or was it the boob?!
Sea of Vapors cuff by St Eloy, hand carved in wax then cast in bronze
St Eloy's fall line has arrived and I especially love all the bronze pieces, this little bracelet in particular. Plus it's named after one of the basaltic plains on the Moon, how cool is that?
Akhmatova Poems, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets
He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.
He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.
… And he had married me.
1911
Need I say more?
We were excited to see William Matheson’s exhibition front and center on PNCA’s alumni page. Congrats, Will!
The last time we saw Sarah Mikenis was at the opening reception for Everything We Ever Wanted, our summer group painting show. Soon after the opening Sarah headed off to Maine for her residency at Skowegean School of Painting & Sculpture. Now back on the West Coast, she shares some of her insights and work from her productive and eye-opening summer. Thanks for letting us in on this special place, Sarah!
Sarah's studio at Skowgegan
Gabi Lewton-Leopold: Have you ever attended a residency program of this type before?
Sarah Mikenis: I attended a four-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2011. While very different than Skowhegan, working in a new environment away from the comfort of your home and studio, meeting and working alongside talented artists from around the world, and having space and time to concentrate on your work were present in both residencies.
GLL: How were your days and evenings structured at Skowhegan?
SM: On a typical day I woke up and had breakfast sitting outside by the lake around 8:30. I made an effort to walk up the hill to upper campus and start working in my studio by 9:30. I worked in the studio in the morning until breaking for lunch on upper campus at 12:30 or 1. After lunch I might stop by the library porch and browse a book or just drink coffee and chat. Then back to the studio to work for the rest of the afternoon. Everyone on campus had some job during the summer, so two afternoons a week I worked in the fresco workshop cleaning tools, mixing plaster or pigments, or helping prepare the walls in the fresco barn for new large paintings. Also, once a week for five of the nine weeks we had individual studio visits with one of the resident faculty members.
Dinner was down the hill by the lake at 6. After dinner was dependent on the day: I might spend the evening in the library relaxing and reading books, watch a DVD in my room, or head back up to the studio to work late. There were a lot of evenings spent hanging out and drinking beer in the Common House. Some nights there might be video screenings in the Fresco Barn, and Friday nights were lectures by visiting or resident faculty artists. Saturday nights there was usually a dance party, and other evenings there might be a special event like a Red Farm dinner with a visiting artist or an opening with wine and cheese in the Fresco Barn.
GLL: What was your most challenging moment/time during the program?
SM: I think the most challenging part of the residency might have been the lack of solitude for me. There are challenges to being out of your comfort zone, away from your family, your partner, your apartment, your studio, and your usual way of doing things. But as an introverted person, being thrown in the middle of 65 participants plus faculty and staff for every meal and every event, and having a roommate for the first time since college, was certainly challenging. Of course that feeling of being slightly uncomfortable and being constantly surrounded by artists is what creates this amazing, buzzing, vibrant environment and makes the entire experience of being at Skowhegan what it is, and I find myself really missing all those interactions and exchanges now that I’m home.
Last Month's It Girl, 2015 oil, spray-paint, acrylic, and Flashe on canvas, 66 x 40"
GLL: Now your most rewarding/exhilarating….
SM: By far the most rewarding part of the experience was the friendships that I formed and the truly incredible generosity of everyone that I met. Generosity is a word that I continue to come back to again and again when I reflect on my time there. I found it in many forms, from people being so generous with their time, energy and ideas in studio visits, to the commitment of the resident faculty to the participants, to my roommate and friends going out of their way for me with acts of kindness when I was dealing with some personal things while there.
GLL: What was a surprising/unexpected aspect of the experience?
SM: I wasn’t expecting to find such a heartfelt emphasis on community while I was there. The individual artist and focus on making work were of course extremely important, but building relationships and seeing the class as being part of a continued support group for each other became an essential part of the experience.
GLL: Did the time and environment lend itself well towards experimentation within your practice? If so, how did your work change?
SM: I think working in a new studio, in a new environment with new people inherently changes your ability to approach your work in a different way. Plus, having all day to work without worrying about school or work or cooking or cleaning just simply allows the time and space to think and physically work through more ideas than is possible while in school.
When I got to Skowhegan I knew I wanted to get working right away, whether or not I had the perfect idea of what to get started on. I had a vague idea that I wanted to make abstract paintings that looked like purses. The result was three pieces that ranged in their representation of purses from quite literal to much more abstract, but all of the pieces took my work in a direction that became more sculptural and object-like than any work I had made before. Suddenly I was finding ways to bend, fold, braid and cut canvas into different shapes, and play with the materiality of paint to create surfaces that felt like leather, metal or paper.
Leaving the constraint of the “purse” and thinking more broadly about fashion, the construction of garments, and the conventions of painting, I made three more works that continued to explore a tension between painting and sculpture. I felt really free and excited about ways that I could cut, fold, and reattach the canvas to itself, make a painting that looked wrinkled, or a painting that was bulging and stuffed. The paintings that I showed at Nationale in June in Everything We Ever Wanted were still lifes painted from objects I constructed out of foam, papier-mâché, fabric, and paint. I feel like I’ve come full circle in the past year in some way as the paintings themselves have become more like constructed objects that also still play with illusionistic space.
Untitled, 2015, oil spray paint, Flashe on canvas, 44 x 30”
Pink, Red, Wrinkled, and Stuffed, 2015, oil on canvas, 60 x 50”
GLL: Can you tell us more about your interactions with the other artists? Did you find some kindred spirits and what was their work like?
SM: Interaction between artists was happening all the time, whether it was conversations at dinner, talking on the library porch, or impromptu studio visits with one another. We also had other more structured time to talk to each other about our work. I mentioned that we had weekly individual studio visits with resident faculty, and we also met with one of the visiting artists for an individual studio visit. Twice during the residency, at week four and at the end of the summer, there were open studio days to walk around campus and see everyone’s work. Halfway through the summer the painters began a Painting Happy Hour as a good excuse to have a cocktail before dinner and exchange group studio visits. We also began another small informal group that exchanged studio visits centered on our shared interest in fashion and the various ways fashion informed our work. Resident faculty Sarah Oppenheimer’s partner Noga Shalev is a clothing designer, so we had the opportunity to see her studio as well as take part in a fashion shoot with some of her newest designs.
There was an incredible diversity of practices among the residents. During the first week we had a marathon slide show where all 65 participants presented their work. I remember sitting in the Fresco Barn, being so blown away during those slide talks at the talent and intelligence gathered together in one place for nine weeks. That being said, there were several artists that I shared particular affinities with for various reasons, three being Sophie Grant, Linnea Rygaard, and Anna Queen.
Sophie Grant recently finished her MFA at Hunter and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Sophie is an abstract painter, and although her work is different from mine I found we shared a lot in common dealing with creating tension between illusion and collage. Sophie is really masterful at playing with and confusing what parts of the painting are painted, what parts are collage, what is cut out or what is behind versus in front. We shared an interest in color and pushing our palettes to be a little bit “wrong” in some way. We really enjoyed sharing thoughts on how we thought about materiality of paint and application of paint. Sophie is currently working with pours and staining and creating shimmery surfaces. She was also experimenting with creating shaped canvases while at Skowhegan, and taking the canvas off of stretcher bars completely to explore hanging and draping the canvas in different ways.
Linnea Rygaard is from Sweden, and makes larger than life abstract paintings heavily influenced by architectural spaces. Her paintings work with perspective and pushing perspective in ways that created at times a believable, but also impossible space. Her work also plays with design and pattern, although in different ways than I work with pattern, and the paintings oscillate between tight, rigid, almost trompe l’oeil areas to really loose, luscious, painterly applications of paint.
Anna Queen graduated from MICA and currently lives in Maine. Anna’s work incorporates found materials; mostly building materials found in hardware stores, as well as ceramics and fabricated pieces. I was particularly drawn to the way Anna utilized light, reflections, and transparency, and combinations of colors in her work. She played with arrangements of materials as well as expectations of materials and gravity, like making cast concrete appear as if it were crinkled paper.
GLL: Did the experience change the way you think about community and studio practice?
SM: The support and encouragement at Skowhegan really reinvigorated my belief in the importance of community among artists. There is a built in community in grad school that is really comfortable, but Skowhegan felt like a call to action for getting outside of that school group and finding ways to build community at home in Eugene and Portland. It definitely poses a question for myself about how I can reach out and develop relationships around me, what are other ways to interact besides gallery openings and artist talks, and how can I be more generous with my time and energy?
Also, since we’re talking about community, please take a moment to check out www.skow2015forlife.com. Upon returning home after the residency, Jeff Prokash, a fellow participant, learned that during his absence his brother, Tim, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Participants, faculty, and staff have donated work on this site that is available for purchase to help the Prokash family and Tim’s treatment.
Untitled, 2015, oil, acrylic, and Flashe on canvas, 43 x 56”
GLL: What was your favorite thing to do on your “down time”?
SM: On a beautiful, hot day there was nothing better then walking a couple steps from my cottage to the lake, swimming out to the dock and lying there for an hour or two. Also, sitting on the library porch, drinking wine by the lake after dinner, doing yoga on the sun porch in my cabin, and Saturday night dance parties.
GLL: Maine: Give us three words that describe that place for you.
SM: Fireflies. Loon calls. Space.
Lake Wesserunsett at sunrise
GLL: As you move forward with your last year of grad school, what parts of your experience at Skowhegan do you take with you? What lessons/mantras/ideas are in the forefront of your mind?
SM: There is a weird pressure lurking in the back of my mind right now that this is my thesis year in grad school so it is time to really buckle down and make work I “understand” or “good” paintings for my show. I think one of the most important lessons I will be holding onto this year is embracing that feeling of not knowing, of being slightly uncomfortable, of not fully understanding something while I’m making it. I remember a conversation with my roommate, talking about how some of the paintings I was making felt really dumb and ugly, and she very wisely reminded me that those dumb, ugly things, the things we fear, or are really unsure of, are probably the best things happening in the studio.
So happy to be working with William Matheson again. Please join us this Sunday, September 20, for his opening reception. The new paintings are fabulous...
Bisected, flattened, bleached, pre-dyed. In an examination of the artist's absolute vision, the pretreated canvases on view for William Matheson’s second solo exhibition at Nationale, Night Was Already in My Hands, are active screens with which his brushstrokes must learn to either coexist or compete. Upon this amorphous foundation, he accordingly layers lazy geometric forms and monochromatic figures with a measured obtuseness. Certain images tantalize as perhaps Freudian dreamscapes- what does the lemon mean? Is it a house? Who are those witchy apparitions? The historical significance of Grecian and Etruscan busts are likewise questioned and reinterpreted through their appropriation as softened portraits, accented with curves of opaque color.
Inspired by the poetry of the Japanese modernist Sagawa Chika, from whom the exhibition borrows its title, Matheson explores his uncertainty towards the pressures of image production and studio practice with a lyrical sensitivity. Painting becomes an exploit of both austerity and accommodation that, in its limitations, uncovers new emotional currents.
BIO
Originally from Los Angeles, William Matheson is currently pursuing his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. He received his BFA from Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2013. He has exhibited nationally, including a 2014 solo show, Sunless, at Nationale. Matheson is the recipient of the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship Award from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT and a Canserrat Residency Artist Fellowship. His second solo exhibition at Nationale coincides with the announcement of his representation by the gallery.
On view September 16–October 19, 2015
Opening reception Sunday, September 20 (2–5 p.m.)
Nationale is pleased to announce the addition of three artists to the gallery: Amy Bernstein, Emily Counts, and William Matheson. We’ve had the pleasure of working with all three on solo shows in the past, and we are thrilled to have them join our roster of represented artists. Through their diverse styles and voices, Amy, Emily, and William bring their unique perspectives to the gallery. We look forward to many upcoming projects and exhibitions with the three of them.
BIOS
Amy Bernstein is a Portland-based artist and writer originally from Atlanta, GA. She received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been exhibited at such local spaces as the Littman Gallery at Portland State University, Car Hole Gallery, Carl & Sloan, and Worksound. Her last solo exhibition at Nationale, Notes, took place in 2014. She has received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2012 and from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation in 2010. Amy will be showing at Nationale with Patrick Kelly this fall.
Emily Counts was born in Seattle, WA, and currently lives and works in Portland, OR. She studied at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin and the California College of the Arts, where she received her BFA. Counts was an artist in residence creating work for associated solo exhibitions at Raid Projects in Los Angeles in 2004 and Plane Space in New York in 2008. She has exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), Garboushian Gallery (Beverly Hills, CA), Disjecta (Portland, OR), Nisus Gallery (Portland, OR), Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), and in Tokyo at Eitoeiko Gallery and Gallery Lara. In 2012 she received grants from both the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation. She is currently a member of the Los Angeles based artist collective Durden and Ray. She had her first solo exhibition with Nationale, The Ins and Outs, in April 2015.
Originally from Los Angeles, William Matheson currently lives in Richmond, VA where he is pursuing his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. He received his BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2013. He has exhibited nationally, including a 2014 solo show, Sunless, at Nationale. Matheson is the recipient of the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship Award from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT and the Canserrat Residency Artist Fellowship. His second solo show at Nationale opens September 16, 2015.
