Habits Of Denial: A Series of Programs on Access
Global economies and governments not only perpetuate inequality, but are reliant on maintaining power through systems of oppression that transform language, thinking, and behavior into the commonplace. Deeply embedded capitalist ideologies make exclusion habitual. “Habits Of Denial” seeks to examine some of the ways in which these systems affect our behavior and everyday lives.
“Habits Of Denial” features research, exhibitions, and public programs around the broad theme of “access.” Collaborating artists investigate specific issues within larger systems of power and their embedded exclusionary impacts. Four anchoring programs will examine access through lenses of language and communication, technology and economies, communities and archives, and Indigeneity and institutions.
This series is curated by Tiffany Harker and Iris Williamson, CFAR’s 2021-22 Curators-in-Residence. Programs are made possible by the Ford Family Foundation.
Fall 2021 /// October 2, 2021, 1:00 p.m. Pacific (Zoom- register here)
A Conversation on Power and Access
With Jovencio De La Paz, Tannaz Farsi, Christine Miller, and Xia Zhang, Moderated by Carmen Brewton Denison
Recognizing underlying systems of power is crucial when addressing more specific issues around access. “Habits Of Denial” begins with a conversation confronting exclusionary systems that are embedded in the ways we communicate with one another.
Portland-based writer, educator, artist, and activist Carmen Brewton Denison will moderate a think-tank conversation with artists Jovencio de la Paz, Tannaz Farsi, Christine Miller, and Xia Zhang. Discussions will examine how the systemic and embodied elements of colonialism and white supremacy are experienced in these visual artists’ studio practices and, more broadly, how it impacts the words we speak and how we think.
This conversation is a culmination of Describing Language: Thinking Through Access and Communication, an exhibition-as-laboratory at New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Southern Indiana, which exists as on-access.org online as well.
Fall 2021 /// December 16, 2021
Frictionless: Holding on for Dear Life
DB Amorin, Tabitha Nikolai, and Ralph Pugay
An Online Research Project Considering the Access and Transparency of Emergent Technologies
The digital systems that increasingly permeate our lives necessitate vast public trust. They advance ideals of transparency, while simultaneously becoming more arcane to an increasingly dependent and precarious user-base. Artists, community organizers and their extended networks find themselves in a unique position: while able to benefit from the adoption of such technologies, and bring accountability to them, they are also populations highly susceptible to the unseen ramifications of tech at scale (blockchain, web 3.0, social media, deep-fakes, AI, gamification). In this way, Amorin, Nikolai, and Pugay see their role as resident non-experts as key to an investigation of emergent technology’s social impacts. Toward that end, they have sourced questions and input from communities they see as particularly interested in, and vulnerable to, this rapidly-shifting technological landscape. Using this insight, their own curiosity and research as artists working with new technologies, they are convening thematic discussions that will be recorded, transcribed, and released, along with their research, in a media-rich web document.
Winter 2022 /// February 17- March 27, 2022
Don’t Shoot Portland
An Exhibition at Holding Contemporary
This installation creates a timeline of artistry and politics using social trends, music, art and culture to promote each of their intersections to social justice through. Art communicates revolutionary actions and inspiration for social change.
Gallery hours will be Thursday–Sunday, noon–5 p.m.
Spring 2022 /// March 5 – October 2, 2022
Sara Siestreem
An Exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
This project considers access in terms of land, ancestry, resources, and human relationships. Through a multivalent installation in an academic art museum, the artist will make visible some of the complex systems between ancestral objects and contemporary practices. Siestreem’s work bridges education and institutional reform and this project specifically focuses on the care for Indigenous works in museum collections as well as the structural systems that provide or omit access and appropriate context to the presentations of Indigenous fine art.
Carmen Brewton Denison is a writer, educator, artist, and activist who resides in Portland, Oregon. She currently serves as the Executive Director at racial justice and educational equity-focused non-profit organization, Campus Compact of Oregon. In this role, she supports the development and implementation of racial justice programming in partnership with 2- and 4-year colleges and universities, K-12 schools, government, and nonprofit entities across the state of Oregon. She also coordinates, designs, and facilitates Campus Compact community accountability and collaboration and institutional equity initiatives with campus and community partners across the country. Beginning her career as a visual artist, Denison’s early work drew heavily upon histories of social intervention, anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogy, and Black Feminist critique. Denison’s practice led to non-profit work with the co-founding of the Creative Activism Lab in 2013 with an Innovation Award from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. From there, Denison went on to work with the Portland Community College Community-Based Learning department to support community engagement methodologies that center critical race theory and community wisdom. Since then, Denison has worked on collaborative projects with Portland’s houseless community, BIPoC youth, and students. As a teacher and facilitator, Denison supported the development of interdisciplinary and socially engaged-programming in Marylhurst University’s art department, where she taught critical theory and interdisciplinary thesis research and writing. She currently works with students in Portland State University’s University Studies Program and Pacific Northwest College of Arts Critical Studies Program where she designs and facilitates applied theory curriculum. Denison’s partner Alex, and her dog, Pinto, are the center of her world. Her top ten favorite things are: travel, movies/tv, books, politics, art, music, food, plants, the forest, and conversation about the aforementioned topics with good company.
Jovencio de la Paz (they/them) works in a space between digital technology and hand weaving. Focused on creating specialized designed software and drawing tools, de la Paz collaborates with algorithms, self-generating patterns, and computational creativity to explore the related histories of technology and the loom. The resulting textiles, hand-woven on a computerized Thread Controller loom, display a tension between the physical world and the digital, the organic and technological, and the haptic quality of cloth versus the perceived rigidity of the numerical. De la Paz is an artist, weaver, and educator and their work explores the intersection of textile processes such as weaving, dye, and stitch-work as they relate to broader concerns of language, histories of colonization, migrancy, ancient technology, and speculative futures. Interested in the ways transience and ephemerality are embodied in material, de la Paz looks at how knowledge and experiences are transmitted through society in space and time, whether semiotically by language or haptically by made things. They received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has exhibited internationally. De la Paz is currently Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon.
Tannaz Farsi’s practice is a configuration of objects and images that address the complicated networks around the conception of memory, history, identity, and geography. Drawing from historic cultural objects, feminist histories, and theories of displacement evidenced by long-standing colonialist and authoritarian interventions into daily life, her project-based works propose a different means of representation regarding non-western subjects and objects that obstruct singular and conventional means of identification. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and supported through residencies including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MacDowell Colony, Santa Fe Art Institute and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her work has been acknowledged by grants and awards includings a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014 and a Bonnie Bronson Fellowship in 2019. Born in Iran, Farsi lives and works in Eugene, OR where she is on the faculty at the University of Oregon.
Christine Miller (she/her) is a conceptual artist and curator currently based in Portland, OR. Her work centers around racial imagery, products, and histories while simultaneously reframing her own cultural identity. In addition to her own work, Christine’s curatorial practice centers on bringing underrepresented contemporary artists to the front of the Portland art community and beyond. Miller holds B.A from Hunter College (2013), and AA in Textile Surface Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2016). She has been the recipient of various artist grants along with participating in select artist talks and grant panels. Miller is currently working on her curated magazine Black Playground and preparing for her solo show in November.
Xia Zhang is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator who was born in southern China, grew up in suburban Maryland, and came into adulthood in Appalachia. Much of her work has evolved based on her observations and experiences from living in white-dominated communities from coal country to wine country. Since 2012, she has exhibited in China, Thailand, and nationally. Xia was the 2016-2017 Alice C. Cole Visiting Artist at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA), a 2017-2018 resident artist at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN), and was an artist in residence summers 2018 & 2019 at The Growlery (San Francisco, CA). She is presently an Assistant Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cincinnati.
DB Amorin (Honolulu, Hawai’i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials. His work has been supported with awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art and curatorial programming have been exhibited at Luggage Store Gallery, Soundwave ((7)) Biennial (San Francisco,CA USA), PICA, Disjecta, FalseFront (Portland, OR USA), the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu Biennial 2019, Doris Duke Theatre and CRC Cube Space (Honolulu, HI USA), among others.
Tabitha Nikolai is a trashgender gutter elf and low-level cybermage raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, and based in Portland, Oregon. She creates the things that would have better sustained her younger self–simulations of a more livable future, and the obstacles that intervene. These look like: fictive text, video games, cosplay, and earnest rites of suburban occult. Currently she teaches for the Portland State University School of Art + Design. Her work has been shown at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and has been covered by i-D Magazine, the New York Times, and Art in America. She hopes you’re doing okay.
Through traditional media and participatory projects, Ralph Pugay (b. Cavite, Philippines) creates absurd fantasy worlds that destabilize how the familiar conjures value and meaning. Questions about value systems, power, dysfunction, and the layered nature of consciousness are what fuels his practice. Pugay studied art at Portland State University where he was recently appointed as Assistant Professor of Art Practice. Notable solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Seattle Art Museum, Upfor Gallery, Rocksbox, Vox Populi, FAB Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, and King School Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Art Gym, PNCA Center for Art and Culture, Salt Lake Art Center, Marinaro, AA|LA, and Ortega Y Gasset Projects among others. Pugay has been artist-in-residence at Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts, PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, Joan Mitchell Center, Rauschenberg Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has received support from the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Program, the Ford Family Foundation, New York Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Betty Bowen Award, the International Sculpture Center, Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the Oregon Arts Commission.
Don’t Shoot Portland is a social justice organization that uses art, education and community engagement to create social change. Since 2014, their free programming and advocacy work has been done to promote civic participation in the spaces of racial justice and human rights. Since George Floyd’s murder and the following uprising, Don’t Shoot Portland has been on the forefront, filing a class action lawsuit against the city of Portland and suing the Trump administration for the federal response of those defending the general populaces’ right to protest. Don’t Shoot Portland also published an in-depth report on Riot Control Agents in 2020, illustrating the irreparable harm caused by RCAs during the Covid-19 respiratory pandemic.
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians is a multi-disciplinary artist from the South Coast and lives and works in Portland, OR. Siestreem’s studio work includes painting, photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and weaving. She considers painting her primary visual language.