Gestures of Resistance

Something in the current cultural moment has triggered an acceleration in critical dialogue about contemporary craft. Gestures of Resistance brings together a cohort of eight artists whose trajectories through the terrain of craft show us what craft can offer us now. As diverse as their practices are, they share a profound understanding of craft as a context they can draw from, push against, and play with. Each, in their own way, builds on the craftsperson’s sense of agency, that capacity for autonomous action, even as they make mischief with conventional expectations about how craft should behave. The emphasis in this exhibition is on contemporary craft actions: work that deploys craft to agitate for change through direct political statements, public interventions, or dialogical, community-specific projects. As each Gestures of Resistance artist takes up residency within these walls, reconfiguring the space to match the needs of their individual projects, the Museum becomes a work space, performance venue and town square.

Rebuilding Mayfield
Sara Black and John Preus
January 26 – February 6, 2010

The Guinness Book of World Records lists the first whisper in the current record-holding “telephone game” as “They inherited the world and then the army came and scorched it.” The final words passed on were “Mayfield College.”

In Rebuilding Mayfield, Sara Black and John Preus perform a live build-out of the Museum’s lower exhibition gallery floor. Using inherited materials, Black and Preus treat the Museum as a workshop space, transforming the Museum into platform, town square and performance installation. This structure becomes the staging area for all subsequent resident artists, who will transform and manipulate the space further through their performances and objects.

Limiting themselves to verbal communication through a small portal cut into a central wall, Black and Preus attempt to produce two identical worlds on each side of that wall, exploring the zone between transmission and reception. Their performance examines the condition of subjectivity, the interdependence of what is inherited and what is produced, and the uncertainty of perception. At the end of the two-week build-out, the central wall is removed.

CALLING ALL NEXXXT GENERATION MIND INFLUENCERS: ARE YOU READY TO SERIOUSLY EFF WITH PUBLIC DECENCY?!?
Anthea Black
February 19 – March 10, 2010

Anthea Black, a Canadian printmaker known for her subversive postering campaigns, produces an edition of two-sided posters deployed across Portland in collaboration with local printmaking students and queer youth. Black designed the poster with collaborator Wednesday Lupypciw to be produced as an edition with the printmaking students of Christy Wyckoff at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). On one side of the poster is the text “CALLING ALL NEXXXT GENERATION MIND INFLUENCERS:” On the other side of the poster is the text “ARE YOU READY TO SERIOUSLY EFF WITH PUBLIC DECENCY?!?” Postering kits are available to Museum visitors who want to assist in the deployment, with a large public performance of the text erupting in the heart of the city during and following the residency.

KO Enterprises: High Performance Apparel Production, an experiment of uneconomical production
Carole Lung, a.k.a. Frau Fiber
March 18–27, 2010

Frau Fiber, itinerant textile worker, addresses Portland’s garment culture by “hacking” a Columbia Sportswear Company design for rain gear and sewing multiple sets of the garment using a bicycle-powered sewing machine constructed specifically for this project. High Performance Apparel Production (HPAP) is a two-person apparel micro-manufacturing unit consisting of Frau Fiber (operating the sewing machine) and volunteer citizens (providing power by pedaling the bike). The synchronized efforts of this Production Team are necessary to accomplish daily manufacturing goals of two pieces of high performance apparel each day, for seven days. Manufacturing takes place throughout Portland’s shopping districts and items are for sale at prices based on local wages at Columbia Sportswear Company manufacturing locations. A Manufacturing Code of Conduct for KO Enterprises are developed and posted on the machine.

Ironings
Mung Lar Lam
April 1–3, 2010

Mung Lar Lam performs Ironings, a meditation on labor, gender and class, in which the task of ironing becomes the means of mark making. Lam works principally with reclaimed factory-produced textiles that she carefully steams and presses into origami-like folds. While some works remain discreet pieces, maintaining their autonomy, others are opened to expansively tile the walls, creating an environment for her performative labors. Lam recycles her Ironings for subsequent performances by un-ironing and re-ironing, and inscribes dates on each piece to disclose the number of iterations it has been through and the number of memories each one holds. Working with rudimentary textile operations, and pulling from practices of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture, Lam has been developing a new and overtly gendered discipline for herself.

Fiber Alliance
Cat Mazza
May 18–22, 2010

Cat Mazza, whose Nike Blanket Petition earned her acclaim in both the craft and anti-sweatshop movements, embarks on a new project intended to initiate a conversation around global manufacturing practices. Setting up a process by which knitted cast-offs of American brands are unmade – unraveled and spun into new balls of yarn, Mazza uses a knitting machine and her freeware knitPro to recreate knitted textiles, sampling motifs and patterns that have origin in the country where the garments were actually made. A world map connects the brand headquarters to the country where the product was manufactured.

Occupation
Ehren Tool
June 1–12, 2010

Ehren Tool, a veteran of the First Gulf War and a potter, uses bags of porcelain clay to construct a bunker with a potter’s wheel inside. Assisted by students, Portland-area potters and veterans or survivors of war, Tool’s production is a communal effort; inhabiting this bunker in an extended, durational performance, Tool will attempt to throw all of the clay into cups. Once fired, he uses the cups as building blocks, erecting dividing walls within the Museum’s exhibition gallery. While these walls temporarily obscure views or interrupt space, they are ultimately fragile barriers in danger of falling, shattering or, in turn, deteriorating – as Tool demonstrates – when the cups are given away in an act of generosity and concord. Through this act, Tool builds a new structure, a dispersed community of people who have taken the cups home with them.

A Good Whitewashing
Theaster Gates
June 18–19, 2010

Over the course of twenty weeks, the Museum will have been transfigured by the labor of seven artists, their collaborators and their audiences. The result is a culmination of actions and objects, a work site continually reinterpreted through new performance and the mnemonic objects left in their wake. The final gesture of transformation is a coat of fine porcelain slip, applied by Theaster Gates, to the performance space and its contents. As a ‘resetting’ of the site, the whitewash cleanses and maintains, yet conceals the actions and exchanges that have left their mark. The whitewash, made precious by virtue of its porcelain identity, both coats the Museum in a fine glaze as well as humbles it – and the worksite built therein – with associations of sanitation and poverty. As a closing performance, Gates projects images from his glass slide collection across a purified space, attributing the work to unknown black artists. The wash itself, traditionally unstable, leaves behind a trace on the bodies who brush past, marking them with this final gesture – the ghosted presence of the unknown or obliterated craftsman.