In the Gallery May 7th – 29th, 2021

Livestream – First Friday & Winner Announcement

This show displays work by invited and juried artists, invited artists are typically more well-known or established artists that are invited by the juror/curator. Juried artists are artists who are selected out of applicants for the show!

Exhibition: “Beyond the Construct”
May 7 – 29, 2021

Columbia Center for the Arts and The Dalles Art Center collaborate to bring the ceramic exhibition Beyond the Construct to The Gorge!

Columbia Center for the Arts and The Dalles Art Center are excited to present: Beyond The Construct. Thanks to the lowered Covid restrictions CCA and The Dalles Art Center will be having a First Friday reception: CCAs from 5-7pm and TDAC`s from 6-8pm on Friday May 7^th. Prize winner of the show announced at TDAC and was live-streamed at CCA.

CCA is excited to team up with The Dalles Art Center on our first of an ongoing collaborative Biennial exhibits, each focused on a different medium. The first of these biennials, Beyond the Construct, highlights ceramic work from around the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the Construct is an opportunity to showcase the expressive and functional capacities of clay. The exhibit showcases works by Aisha Harrison, Baba Wague, Dirk Staschke, Ivan Carmona, Joe Davis, Lisa Conway, Maya Vivas, PK Hoffman, and Stacy Jo Scott, Willie Little. In addition, 21 juried artists have been selected to exhibit two pieces of work each: one piece representing the functional aspect of their practice, and one piece representing the expressive side. All artists will be divided between each Center showing a total of 16 artists at both galleries.

The juror, Brett Binford, is an artist and entrepreneur residing in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-owner/co-founder of Mudshark Studios, Eutectic Gallery, Kept Goods, and Clay Street. For more information please visit: https://www.thedallesartcenter.org/beyond-the-construct

Artists

This show displays work by invited and juried artists. Invited artists are those typically more well-known or they are established artists invited by the juror/curator.

Juried artists are artists who are selected out of applicants for the show.

Maya Vivas

Maya Vivas is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums such as ceramic, performance, painting, social practice and installation. Maya has exhibited work, spoken on panels and hosted workshops throughout the United States including venues and institutions such as Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Louisiana State University and Yale. Vivas is also co-founder of Ori Gallery. Whose mission is to redefine “the white cube” through amplifying the voices of Queer and Trans Artists of color, community organizing and mobilization through the arts.

Aisha Harrison

Aisha discovered clay in a community studio, while working toward a degree in Spanish at Grinnell College in Iowa. After graduating, she spent the next two years teaching third and fourth grades in Atlanta, Georgia, and exploring clay at Callenwolde Fine Arts Center in Georgia, and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Aisha decided to go back to school and received a BFA from Washington State University, and an MFA from University of Nebraska- Lincoln. Her work is shown nationally with recent work at Bainbridge Museum of Art and in the Store Front Windows Project in downtown Olympia (as a collaborator in the Black Well Red Thread Collective). She has done residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Baltimore Clayworks. She has taught workshops/courses/programs at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, The Evergreen State College, Bykota Senior Center, Baltimore Clayworks, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, and the Lux Center for the Arts.

Joe Davis

Since the early 1990’s, my studio practice has been concerned with the creation of functional pottery. One encounters my work visually and physically, and in this way it fosters a multifaceted, sensual experience that communicates my interest in the richness, beauty, and diversity of human existence. Pottery form, in its inherent relationship to the human body (i.e., lip, neck, belly), speaks to the viewer/user through anthropomorphic familiarity and an implication of direct physical contact. Thus, pottery evokes a participatory, physical and conceptual experience that makes it uniquely powerful and real.

Willie Little

Little is a Black multimedia artist and author. His visual narratives document a fading part of rural southern life while also tackling topics of racism and Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, and the childhood memories of growing up on a tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina. His memoir, In the Sticks, documents his years growing up as a poor, Black and gay child in the rural south. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area and Portland, Oregon. Little is an artist whose genius incorporates sculpture, painting, sound installations, re-constructed architecture, re-cycled memorabilia, and real-life stories. Willie pours out his soul for all to see as he relives growing up during a time of radical change. The common thread in all the work he creates is his examination of the manifestations of physical and societal decay in American culture.

Babe Wague

Writer, illustrator, sculptor and ceramic artist Baba Wagué Diakité was born in 1961 in Mali, West Africa. He spent his early childhood in Kassaro, a small agricultural village, tending sheep, working in the rice and peanut fields and stalking animals in the bush with his friends. He later moved to the town of Bamako where he enrolled in French school to complete his formal education. The artist came to the US in 1985 and settled in Portland, where he began producing his highly acclaimed books and painted ceramic work, which remain infused with West African Folklore and the rich experiences of his rural childhood.

PK Hoffman; no website…

P.K. Hoffman is a University of Oregon graduate and received a teaching assistantship for his post-graduate at University of Iowa. He also spent time teaching and lecturing at the University of Oregon, Portland State, and several other western colleges and universities. After his British lecture tour, he accepted a teaching position at the Glasgow School of Art. While in Great Britain, he met Bernard Leach and fired with Michael Cardew in his famous wood-fired kiln. During his travels, P.K. has worked with all the great potters of the “American Revolution in Clay.” Upon returning to America he taught, conducted hundreds of pottery workshops, has held numerous exhibits at museums, colleges, and galleries throughout the U.S. Currently, P.K. resides near The Dalles with his wife Evelyn and daughter Pearl. After building his studio and kilns on Mill Creek, he began concentrating on raku and wood-fired salt. Over the past 27 years, he and his students have been and continue to fire their creations there at his studio.

Dirk Staschke

I make sculptures based on paintings in what is traditionally considered a craft medium. In this translation, the sculptural representation of still life painting creates abstract forms. The results are beautifully made objects that simultaneously expose the crude structures of their creation.The pieces are both a simple exploration of residual forms derived from representation and a question regarding the merits of an Art object.

Lisa Conway

I want to make beautiful objects that engage the viewer on a physical level. I want my pieces to remind us of our own bodies, whether they be blushing or sagging, ticklish, tender, erect or deflated. I hope that by strongly referencing the plant world in my work, I can avoid direct references to any specific human anatomy. My goal is to create pieces that evoke these physical sensations, and ultimately the subtle emotions and human relationships that go along with them. Like plants growing towards the sun, I believe sexuality is a major force around which we gravitate.

Ivan Carmona

As a boy, I learned about Modernism through magazines and TV documentaries. It was there that I was introduced to the work of Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder, and began to recognize their forms in the natural world around me. The mountains and forests of Puerto Rico became sculptural constructions and swaying mobiles in my mind, and through my own visual language, I hope to communicate these intimate moments in a manner accessible to a larger audience. A shape, word, texture, or color can activate potent memories, and this sense of nostalgia is key to a reading of my work. The sculptures are abstracted, they aren’t one-to-one representations. Instead, each emotional memory is passed through the sieve of Modernism, creating connections between my remembrances and recollections of the past and the timeline of art history.

Looking back at a particular moment, I might remember a specific shape, color, or feeling. Through the years, these memories take on a life of their own. They expand and contract, shapes soften and blur, and colors push through to become more vibrant. By working with clay, a product of nature, I am able to make the immaterial physical. The unifying effect of flat, rich color helps to amplify the presence of even the smallest object, and serves to highlight its curves, angles, and planes. Each of my works pulls the past forward into a new body for the present to see. By creating these physical manifestations, I can remember, reflect upon, and share my histories with the world.

Stacy Jo

Stacy Jo Scott is an artist and educator based in Eugene, Oregon. In both artwork and writing she uses ceramic objects and digital processes as anchors from which to navigate shifting landscapes of queerness, embodiment, and spectrality. These objects emerge from research and speculation, digital processes, trance practices, and chance operations. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Rockelman & Partner, Berlin, Germany; Thomas Hunter Projects in New York, NY; Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Asheville, NC; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX; Pewabic Pottery, Detroit, MI; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; Paul Kotula Projects, Ferndale, MI; Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago, IL; and The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH. She co-curated New Morphologies: Studio Ceramics and Digital Practices at the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University in Alfred, NY and was a Franzen Teaching Fellow for Digital Craft at Colorado State University. Her writing has been published in numerous publications online and in books and periodicals. Publications include Bad at Sports, The Studio Potter, and Crafts: Today’s Anthology for Tomorrow’s Crafts. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and is a founding member of the Craft Mystery Cult. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Oregon.