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BITTER CHERRY, BLEEDING HEART

Bitter cherry, Bleeding heart was an offsite exhibition, in collaboration with NO ARCHITECTURE, which featured the work of ten Oregon artists and was sited at the Courtyard House in Aurora, Oregon. Taking inspiration from the diverse native Oregon vegetation surrounding the modern glass and concrete structure, the exhibition highlights the myriad working practices of artists choosing to live and work in the state.

As the hard-edged forms of the glass and concrete architecture meet the natural vegetation beyond, so Bitter cherry, Bleeding heart counterposes those artists working from a logic of abstraction to those mining the variously and deeply alive. The precise abstraction in works by Lynne Woods Turner and Iván Carmona parallels the “rigorous interrogation of site, context, and constraints” at the core of NO ARCHITECTURE’s process of designing and building the Courtyard House. Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Chris Johanson have pushed boundaries of materiality for over three decades, each with a deep humanity pulsing through the works. Maya Vivas and Joanna Bloom draw materials from the earth—clay and porcelain—for their thoughtful monochrome reveries. And Melanie Flood, Rainen Knecht and Elizabeth Malaska use the body, human and otherwise, as a means to express the anxieties and complexities of our common humanity. And John Houck’s work, oscillating between painting and photography, is grounded in his background in architecture and often incorporates, not unlike work by Hutchins, the domestic and highly personal object.