+ More Info

“I have spent the day well just looking and looking. It is the same in art as in life. The deeper one penetrates, the broader grows the view.” —Goethe, Italian Journey

In What We See and What We Know artists Leslie Hickey and Erin Murray contemplate real and imagined interior spaces. The two artists ruminate on the quiet loveliness of the ordinary. Portland artist Leslie Hickey’s photographs from around the world combine her keen eye and sense of wonder. Whether her gaze is focused on the stillness of an unoccupied bedroom, or the cheerfulness of a squiggly-shaped telephone cord, her images capture the unexpected lyricism of familiar objects.

Hickey’s work is paired with Philadelphia artist Erin Murray’s graphite and india ink drawings. Murray’s abstract, illusory imagery investigates psychological and pictorial space. Her enigmatic works appear like paper cut-out portals that entangle observation and imagination. Curvilinear fixtures, window reflections, or curtain draperies transmit a feeling of occupation, of a dreamlike journey through a room. What We See and What We Know invites viewers to experience quiet engagement through the activity of looking.

HOLDING Contemporary presents exhibitions and programs by visual artists across disciplines. Through our curatorial vision and alternative community-driven business model we seek to challenge the economic and social privilege of the art world.

Photos by Mario Gallucci

+ More Info

We lived in our house for ten years, and not once did we see the blinds go up over at the place next door. We had an excellent view from our living room windows. Year after year we watched the blackberries grow and slowly overtake everything. As the roof valleys filled with debris and sprouted ferns, we wondered if it still kept the water out. During the warmer months, I’d ask our neighbor, Kurt, if I could come over to his yard and trim the brambles in order to preserve the fence between our properties. He said yes each time, and eventually, after a few seasons, he told me that I didn’t need to ask anymore. He called me a good neighbor.

We lived in our house for five years before I talked to Kurt. Once, with unremitting eye contact, he told me that he was descended from Cossacks, that his grandfather built his two neighboring houses, and his great uncle, our house. During a renovation I found an old book,Tolstoy, in our attic, printed more than a hundred years ago in Russian. I brought it over to show him, and he enjoyed looking at it, turning it over; he held his family’s history close, and here was evidence of that history. I asked if he had any old photographs of our house and he said he thought he did, and he would make sure to look for them in April; it was October, and in the same breath he told me about how he was going to China soon to open up a factory, but first he had to get around the mafia, and the other malignant forces conspiring against him. By this point, he rarely left his house, and, when he did, I rarely saw him in shoes. If he answered the door, we would usually talk through the closed screen. During those porch visits, he always seemed to be holding a small cup of coffee and a hand-rolled cigarette. In the summer months, jazz would drift over our yards, and I felt grateful that I had a neighbor with such good taste in music.

After ten years, I doubt that Kurt still thinks of me as a good neighbor. In a few months, it will be a year since we bought the house next door at a foreclosure auction. Instead of two houses to compose his kingdom, to ramble through his history, he is down to one. Now, the blackberries and ivy are almost reaching his back porch. Someday soon I’ll have to knock on his door and talk to him about cutting through the brush so we can build a new fence to keep the blackberries at bay. LMH

+ More Info

February 27- April 28, 2019

Opening Reception: Friday, March 1, 6 - 8pm

Wolff Gallery, Portland, OR

Featuring new work from Small Talk Collective members: Audra Osborne, Briana Cerezo, Jennifer Timmer Trail, Kelli Pennington, Kristina Hruska, Leslie Hickey, and Marico Fayre.

As a collective, we have the honor of witnessing and discussing the progression of our individual works. We find ourselves traveling along parallel paths, drawn to new directions and processes. We discover common ground in similar themes, investigating dark corners and intimate places.

Here, our realities, our unverified stories, come together for a time before continuing onward. We present selections of new work from each member, curated to tell a temporary fiction of rumor and truth.

+ More Info

January 9 - February 3, 2019

Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 9, 2019, 6-8pm

Curated by Sarah Demeuse and Prem Krishnamurthy

Participating artists: Angeli, Angie Keefer, Anna Riley, Catalina Viejo López de Roda, Dulce Gómez, Fotini Vurgaropulou, Hagen Verleger, Irene Mohedano, Jane Long, Johanna Unzueta, Julie Nagle, Karen Donnellan, Katie Hector, Katja Mater, Katy Mixon, Keren Benbenisty, Kyoung eun Kang, Library Stack, Lukas Eigler-Harding, Malin Abrahamsson, Maren Henson, Matthew Schrader, Olivia Baldwin, Romily Alice Walden, Sari Carel, Scaleno Collective, Shuyi Cao, Suzanne Mooney, Tselote Holley, and Zhenya Plechkina

Public Programs:

January 9, 2018: Performance by Angeli, dancing in our sleep, 2019, performing with Jayoung Yoon

February 2, 2018: 3 PM Launch of A Primer on Working With Disabled Group Members for Feminist / Activist Groups., 2018 by Romily Alice Walden. 5 PM Performance by Irene Mohedano Tengo Miedo; No Tenemos Miedo / I'm afraid; We are not afraid, 2018

Dear Visitor,

This biennial exhibition starts where its open call ended: with the sentence “Let’s try listening again.” Echoing a contemporary sentiment, this title voices an urge to stop the treadmill of self-same thought and perceive what is near, around, yet not always seen. It highlights a pause for respect and discovery that is necessary to imagine new, relevant relations—whether social, intellectual, emotional, or cosmic. The point being: we can’t know everything, but still we need to envision novel forms of communing.

Listening to the five hundred and forty-four voices that responded to their open call, we gradually selected a constellation of twenty-nine works that resonate with this theme. The exhibition brings together two performances, two distributed projects, and twenty-five works for the gallery by participating artists far and wide. The catalogue takes the form of a website that can produce encoded PDF communiqués around the thematics of this year’s biennial.

Gratitude to all applicants. This was hard.

S. & P.

Installation images ©Sebastian Bach

https://letstrylisteningagain.org/

+ More Info

“The future has an ancient heart”

-Carlo Levi

Here, in Italy, there’s always a stepping backward, and an inching forward. The past is heavy, pesante, evident in the shape of buildings and the construction of walls; discovered in old books collected in a dusty library. I began to photograph what I found, places, objects, and scenes, creating still lifes out of everything I encountered with the camera.

In looking, I discovered my language, finding visual verbs, nouns, and articles in the world — always searching for the thing, the object, the frame that will explain the whole. An optical lexicon, this assortment of things is driven by a desire to describe and collect. A desire, also, to keep. Because I cannot keep a mountainside or a frescoed wall, I photographthem instead.

These photographs represent the culmination of ten months of living and working in Italy, from 2014 - 2017.

+ More Info

SACI Gallery

Via Sant'Antonino 11

Florence, Italy

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange… we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

-Carson McCullers

Some Other Place is an attempt at undoing distance, using photographs and audio as a point of connection and investigation, across oceans and continents. We have asked each other, as friends and photographers, “What is it like there, for you?” and answered with photographs of ten everyday objects. Over time, these subjects lead us to discover each other’s cities and also deepen the exploration of our own. We want to know: what can be found in a park in Lima that wouldn’t be seen in Portland or Berlin? How does fog change the city? What makes a place? Is it the buildings and materials or people and experiences? By bridging our individual everyday moments we have created an alternate universe, an entirely new place that exists, like a novel, solely on the page.

The installation in the SACI Gallery will feature more than 35 photographs chronicling the artists’ exchanges over the last year and a half, printed on lightweight paper, and hung salon style. An audio piece will be housed in an old landline telephone located in the middle of the gallery; the artists will invite visitors to pick up the receiver and listen to a blend of sounds from the United States, Peru, and Germany. SCALENO will also publish a newspaper to commemorate the exhibition.

SCALENO collective is comprised of three artists: Leslie Hickey, Ana Lía Orézzoli, and Hana Sackler. Members of the collective currently reside in Portland, Oregon (USA), Lima, Peru, and Berlin, Germany. The name, SCALENO, is Italian for scalene; when connected, the cities of the member’s origins create a scalene triangle on the map. SCALENO is specifically interested in the ideas of place, memory, time, and feeling. Some Other Place is SCALENO’s first collaborative project.

+ More Info

Change is incremental, barely noticed, until it’s sudden and irrevocable. A house slowly ages and wears, until abruptly, it’s demolished and gone. Inside our own homes, we find imperfections and repairs, evidence of former occupants and our former selves. We feel these transitions and make new connections: between a bird discovered in a field and one dismembered by a cat, between the furrows on a face and those on the landscape, impressions left on skin and in memory. We look for change and find its mark. We look at what is, attempting to find the shape of what was.

Opening: April 6, 6-8pm Discussion at Disjecta: May 10, 6-8pm

Works by: Audra Osborne, Briana Cerezo, Jennifer Timmer Trail, Kelli Pennington, Kristina Hruska, Leslie Hickey, Marico Fayre.

To purchase the accompanying book, go here.

+ More Info

Initially the product of a darkroom accident, Cape Disappointment is an exploration of the shortcomings of mechanical precision and antiquated equipment rendered visually. The resulting piece is a large installation of thirty-six prints, each measuring six by six inches. 2012.

+ More Info

“And if you ask how I regret that parting? It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end, confused, whirled in a tangle. What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking-- There is no end of things in the heart. I call in the boy, Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this, And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.

Li Po

I send mail every day, I drink tea, I drink coffee, I read about photography, I look at photographs. I think of you, at home; I look at things and want to keep them. I am living in an eternal present, an outsider, cut off from home, from a garden that needs weeding, parents that want to talk, friends that want to get a drink on a Tuesday night. I stay up late every night working, working. Soon I will feel the bittersweet fact of departure, ending a chapter in my life. With all of these things in mind, I look, I find delight, I hold moments in my mind. Today is a letter sent to my future self, to not forget, to focus on what needs to be done, photographs that need to be made.