2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial

Curated by Jackie Im and Anuradha Vikram
April 26- August 4 of 2024.

Gallery Guide

We will have programs and receptions on First Saturdays of May, June, July, and August.

The Artists’ Biennial is a survey of works by visual and performing artists who are defining and advancing Oregon’s contemporary art landscape. Jackie Im and Anuradha Vikram are the curators of the 2024 Biennial, which is focused on themes of networks, community, care, and support. Rather than a hierarchical approach to artists' works, the curators' goal is to present work that is timely and relevant to the communities of Oregon.

The Artists’ Biennial is a selection of artists who are working within the curatorial themes. The artists included range in age from 25 to over 65 years old. Over 50% are BIPOC, including artists that identify as Asian American, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and multiracial. Over 50% are LGBTQ+, and the group includes artists identifying as transgender, non binary, or gender diverse. Our choice of curators also supports these demographics.

This will be the seventh biennial in Oregon Contemporary’s series, which began in 2010. Previously focused on Portland artists—as a continuation of the program initiated by the Portland Art Museum in 1949—the biennial expanded to an Oregon-wide selection of artists in 2016. Curator-led each time in its scope and themes, the biennial has been housed in art venues throughout the city, art and community spaces throughout Oregon, and back to the 12,000 square-foot home of Oregon Contemporary in North Portland’s Kenton neighborhood. With more space designated for public arts programming at Oregon Contemporary than ever before, this biennial will utilize the spaces for the exhibitions and our First Saturdays for performances and programs, with occasional partner venues presenting works as fitting for the artists. The programs will run May–August of 2024.

Participating artists:

Additional Programming:

Saturday, May 4

3–5 pm
Horatio Law residency closing reception
Portland Chinatown Museum, 127 NW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97209

11-3pm
Oregon Rising Above Hate
Join together to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the AANHPI (Asian, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander) community, its resilience, and commit to combat the continued rise anti-Asian hate.

Lan Su Chinese Garden, 239 Northwest Everett Street, Portland, Oregon 97209

6 pm: Gallery 1, Oregon Contemporary
Epiphany Couch
Burdened With More Beautiful Things: An Artist Talk and Reading with Epiphany Couch and Cliff Taylor

Presented as part of the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, exhibiting artist Epiphany Couch and poet Cliff Taylor come together for a joint artist talk and poetry reading. As seekers, storytellers, and sensitive souls, Couch and Taylor will discuss their inspirations and the connections between their respective works and practices. Within Couch’s latest artworks, fragments of Taylor’s poetry are seamlessly integrated, highlighting the healing powers of community, collaboration, remembrance, and radical native joy. A brief Q&A and book signing will follow the conversation.

June 1, 2024

1-6pm: Disjecta Studio, Oregon Contemporary
Vo Vo
Over six months into an escalation of an ongoing occupation and genocide, some of us are in deep grief. Vo Vo provides direct care sessions for those whose lives are impacted by settler colonialism and/or imperialism on any continent. Options will include:
grounding strategies
hand massage
shoulder massage
life coaching
divination
open-ended time together

Please follow this link to sign up for individual half-hour sessions

6 pm: Courtyard, Oregon Contemporary
Maxx Katz
Yelling Choir is a femme, women, and nonbinary performance ensemble, created by Maxx Katz, that reimagines voice, presence, gender, and power. The choir is a vehicle of experimental relational technology, using play, somatic awareness, and vocal practice to reimagine community organization. This performance is a collaborative composition which calls for a socially aware aesthetic of listening and seeing, that includes social relationship as a moving element of the internal composition of the piece.

Yelling Choir shares the immediate, visceral experience of having a voice (both sonically and creatively), especially for those who have historically had less of a voice in our culture. We love to yell—and we also explore other sounds, extended vocal techniques, movement, and improvisation. We explore getting big, taking up space, allowing a full spectrum of emotions—from joy to rage to boredom to delight, and everything in between—in an emotionally-regulated and supported way.

7 pm: Courtyard, Oregon Contemporary
Methods Body
Covert/Overt is a new sound art composition by Portland duo Methods Body—Luke Wyland and John Niekrasz. This piece celebrates speech diversity through the lens of people who stutter, Wyland being a person who stutters himself. Methods Body interviewed people from Portland and abroad, drawing musical inspiration from the rhythmic fingerprints and cadences of different individuals’ disfluencies. Covert/Overt employs technological refraction and acoustic syllabic mirroring to share and expand upon some aspects of what it’s like communicating with different forms of verbal disfluency. Special thanks to the National Stuttering Association's Portland, OR, chapter and SPACE (Stuttering, People, Arts, Community, Education).

Saturday, June 8th

12:30-3:30 pm: Disjecta Studio, Oregon Contemporary
Marcus Fischer
Contact Microphones Basics + Extended Techniques

Each participant will construct their own contact microphone which is theirs to keep. No electronics experience required - all skill levels are welcome.

A contact microphone is a very simple device consisting of a piezo disc (similar to the paper-thin speaker you’d find in a musical greeting card) and a pair of wires, and costs less than $1. It is also one of the easiest ways to access a world of sound. Rather than a standard microphone that picks up sound through the air, a contact microphone picks up the vibration of a surface and converts that into an electric charge. This means that with the help of an amplifier, you can take something that only exists as vibration and turn it into an audible sound. Like if you affix a contact microphone to a table it essentially turns the entire table into a microphone.

This workshop will be an introduction to building and using contact microphones - what they are, what can they be used for and how we make them as well as a deeper look at creative uses for them. It is a hands-on introduction to making contact microphones which includes background history, demonstrations, time to solder and reinforce the connections, and time to experiment with amplifying different materials. Dedicated time to share with others what each person discovered.

Taking a deeper look at what can be done with what we’ve made.
With a few simple materials, we can transform the basic contact microphone into a hydrophone (underwater microphone), a trigger for electronic drums, or a voltage source to control synthesizers. We will take time to go over possible extended uses for our simple device and then give attendees time to experiment and share with others.

For this workshop, we are partnering with Synth Library Portland to help provide support in the form of ideas and equipment. Synth Library Portland is a collectively-run non-profit organization that supports a diverse community of artists through its in-person workshops and lending program. Since its founding in 2016, the synth library has become a model for other organizations that have started up in Prague, New York, and Los Angeles.

Link for signing up for the workshops to follow

Saturday, June 15

5 pm: Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
Bean Gilsdorf
For the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, Bean Gilsdorf presents an experimental lecture-performance that enmeshes facts, figures, memes, and clichés about the arts with key theories from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. “Epistemics for Artists” will unpack the concept of being “epistemically adrift”—a term originally coined for mood disorders, but which could also be used to illuminate how artists have become patently alienated from the fruits of their own labor. Engaging with current research on the effects of artistic production, Gilsdorf invites the audience to consider the relationship between artist, community, and city. This staging of Gilsdorf’s first performance in Portland is inspired by her own experiences as an artist and builds on her groundbreaking 2021 city-wide study “Seeing Visual Artists” as well as her five years of work as an arts-advice columnist.

Saturday, July 6
12:30 - 5:30 pm: Galleries and Courtyard, Oregon Contemporary

UwU Collective
12:30-2 pm Public Conversation
2-5:30 pm Outdoor Event

In your dream you were basking in the sun, sipping tea. There was music, there were friends, that made you feel euphoric. No phone on site, just vibes.

There was a talk, a public one, where you got to exchange your shared struggles and some cute ideas for the communal future you’ve been longing for. When you wished your lucid dream could last a bit longer, the universe blesses you and suddenly, you’re transported to a temporal kitchen, making food with your besties old and new. In your dream the world is built of flowers and building blocks called empathy.

On Saturday, July 6th, at the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, UwU invites you to be a part of this dream. Come, bring your friends, and let’s spend a sunny afternoon together over food, tea, and music. Let’s share our feelings, thoughts, and dreams together. Let’s imagine how we can build our future together.

This is our open-ended manifesto we co-write with you, of the society we wish to build. This is our form of resistance against the acceleratingly alienating culture redesigned by social media platforms. This is our form of resistance against the homogeneous culture, the status quo, upholding white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. This is our song for the future we weave together with you. This is simply, our love letter to our friends.

UwU is not a word, it’s a feeling.

Collaborators include Adam A. Lucero, Andrés López, Ava, Bianca AE Mack, cay horiuchi, Haevyn, Jack Malstrom, Jen Tam, Jesse Rawlins, Laura Bread Kitten, Lillyanne Pham, Ryan Bunao, Zi Zabalerio

Thank you to our friends, our community, our ancestors.

July 6, 2024

5:30 pm: Disjecta Studio, Oregon Contemporary
Sarah Rushford
Elk woke here once (aware of the world already)
Reading, discussion, and generative writing exercise with guests: Juleen Johnson, Briseida Pagador, and Sarah Rushford. To investigate Sarah Rushford's textual video work Elk woke here once (aware of the world already) there will be a reading, discussion, and writing exercise with Rushford, Juleen Johnson, and Briseida Pagador; the projects' writers and actors.

Elk woke here once (aware of the world already) is a video work that depicts an experiment in creative writing and cognition. The process of making the work was a specially designed, generative process meant to nurture a feeling of recognition in writers, actors, and crew. The final work and its process will be discussed. A short participatory writing exercise will also take place.

6:30 pm: Gallery 1, Oregon Contemporary
Carla Bengtson in collaboration with composer Juliet Palmer, choreographer Darion Smith, and perfumer Dannielle Sergent.

Other Nations: scent-sharing ritual and performance

Other Nations enacts the voicing, sensing, signifying life worlds of other creatures while shining a light on our own animal-related modes of being. Biennial artist Carla Bengtson’s floor graphic serves as a score for a scent-sharing ritual followed by a dance performance created by choreographer Darion Smith and composer Juliet Palmer.

7 pm: Starting at Oregon Contemporary
Tyler Stoll
ATTENTION: Calling all milquetoast mollies, detumescent daddies, softbois, tenderqueers, and any other flimsy folk and lovers of limpness! (and allies)
You are cordially invited to join biennial artist Tyler Stoll in a participatory protest where we will collectively explore flaccidity as an emancipatory, fluid identity and political antidote to phallic masculinity. Participants will march around the Oregon Contemporary grounds and nearby Kenton neighborhood, creating chants, feeling into flaccid embodiment, and encouraging others to join the movement!
All are welcome. Signs and props provided. Costumes are encouraged but absolutely not required.
Suggested costume themes: your favorite anti-phallic icon, a traditionally masculine character you’d like to reclaim, or anything else you imagine representing a flaccid future.

Sunday, July 7

3-6 pm: Albina Green Park, 3552sf, North Albina and Sumner Streets
Anne Greenwood
Anne Greenwood, Michael Callahan, and Patrice Kelly co-founders of the Albina Green Community Greenspace located at the corner of Alberta and Sumner in North Portland will host a Soundscape Gathering on July 7th, 2024 from 3-5pm. The Albina Green began as a grassroots movement in the Spring of 1996 with a handful of neighborhood residents intent on transforming a neglected piece of tax foreclosed property into an open and usable green space. As part of the 2024 Oregon Biennial Anne Greenwood will provide Raymains Blanket Co. blankets for lounging on the grass while listening to musicians Katherine Paul and Marisa Anderson and paging through a paper book reproduction of Shapes of Land, activating the original one-of-a-kind fabric book of the same name exhibited at the Oregon Contemporary.

The original book materials include: cotton buckram, silk thread, natural dyes, machine-stitching, hand-embroidery, and collage. The paper version was printed in an edition of fifty by Gary Robbins at Container Corp. for distribution at a public soundscape event. Partial proceeds from the sale of this book and blankets will help fund the Jefferson High School Art program.

Saturday, July 13th

1-5 pm: Disjecta Studio, Oregon Contemporary
Marcus Fischer + David Chandler
Working with Audio Tape - Looping + Splicing

No electronics experience required - all skill levels are welcome.

The analog recoding medium of magnetic tape is something that has been having a bit of a resurgence at the moment. It has become so popular that software companies are creating programs to imitate the imperfections and signal degradation characteristics found in tape. For most, it is just a shortcut to creating a nostalgic backdrop to their music — but that misses so much about what makes tape so fascinating.

In this workshop, we will begin by exploring the anatomy of a tape recorder and the technique of splicing tape of pre-recorded sound We will experiment with splicing strips of 1/4” tape at different lengths into loops in order to create rhythmic patterns and learn how playback speed and direction has an effect on the sound.

Moving on we would focus on making smaller tape loops housed inside cassette tapes. Although they may seem limited by their short recording time, cassette loops can be used in many different situations and with many different results. David will share his methods for creating cassette loops and some of the techniques for expanding on those ideas.

Using these ideas as a basis we will explore moving beyond pre-recorded material and into using tape in delay and feedback networks. Attendees will have time to try out different machines and methods and share what they have created with others in the workshop.

Link for sign-up for the workshop to follow

Curator Biographies:
Jackie Im is a curator, writer, and editor based in Oakland, CA. She currently serves at the Associate Curator of the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries. She is also the co-founder and Director of Et al. and Et al., etc. in San Francisco. Im has organized exhibitions at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (SF), Queens Nails (SF), The Lab (SF), Important Projects (Oakland), Holiday Forever (Jackson Hole, WY), and SFAC Galleries. Her writing has appeared in Fillip Magazine, Art Practical, Curiously Direct, and various exhibition catalogues. She holds a BA in Art History from Mills College and an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts.

Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, educator, and curator of the upcoming Getty Pacific Standard Time Art and Science exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (September 2024-March 2025) at UCLA. They recently curated the mid-career survey exhibition Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary (January 30–May 8, 2022) and the series Illuminate LA for the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (September 2022-January 2023). Their book Decolonizing Culture is a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017).

The Artists’ Biennial is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Oregon Cultural Trust, Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, and Autzen Foundation.

Thank you to our partners ILY2, the Portland Chinatown Museum, PICA, Albina Green, Stelo, and Friends of Noise.

Oregon Contemporary is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Community Foundation, Prosper Portland, the Henry Lea Hillman, Jr. Foundation, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, and Portland Events and Film. 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.