On Thursday, September 1, the White Box will host a closing reception for its current exhibition LOCUS: CHANGING PLACE. The reception will feature a program of original dance/movement choreography that responds to and incorporates the concepts of CHANGING PLACE.

The White Box is excited to present two original pieces choreographed and performed by local artists Dawn Stoppiello and Tere Mathern, featuring dancers Vanessa Vogel and Stephanie Schaaf.  We hope the interdisciplinary intersection of visual art, experimental performance, and media will spark a dialogue around the themes of perception, inhabitation of space, and evolving notions of place, providing a unique form of engagement with the White Box exhibit that engenders varied perspectives and interpretations of LOCUS’ work by a group of award-winning Portland performers.

inHabitation – Tere Mathern

Tere Mathern, along with dancers Vanessa Vogel and Stephanie Schaaf, will perform a new work about movement habits and habitation, how and where we find comfort, and unease, counterpoint and contrast. Investigating the movement inherent in the implied architecture of the LOCUS installation, the dance is assembled from the ways the space invites visual and movement habits, tendencies, and inclinations for groupings, gestures, and relationships. What are the movement habits of this space? Where does the human body contour and merge with its implied architecture? How does the body’s movement, placement, presence, and focus change the perception and feel of a space?

Choreography/direction by Tere Mathern in collaboration with Vanessa Vogel and Stephanie Schaaf

Dawn Stoppiello: Changing Place Response

“For me the color and rolling terrain of the floor suggests the midwestern plains and the lines of string suggest falling rain frozen in time, thus my response to LOCUS: CHANGING PLACE is to be a tiny weather system traveling across this landscape. I will improvise a movement journey that intends to entice audience members to closely follow me into the more intimate spaces within the installation. By ‘changing place’ I hope to provide the viewer with the altered perceptions/perspectives of this space as intended by the creators.” - Dawn Stoppiello

About the Artists

Tere Mathern
Tere Mathern has been professionally involved in contemporary dance for over 20 years as a performer, choreographer, educator, and administrator. Her work has been performed in venues throughout the US, including Seattle, San Diego, Anchorage, Portsmouth NH, Madison WI, New York City, and Ohio. She received her MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU and is a certified movement analyst (CMA) in Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies/NYC. Mathern is executive director of Conduit Dance Inc., a nonprofit that supports creation of new contemporary dance work, offers dance training and education, a space for creative practice, and an intimate performance venue. Mathern teaches at Portland State University’s Theater/Dance Department and offers classes for professionals and those seeking professional experience at Conduit, which also serves as a home base for her creative work.

She has received past support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Oregon Arts Commission, and PSU’s former Contemporary Dance Season among others. In 2006, she was selected to participate in the New England Foundation for the Arts, Dance Lab/Portland—a professional development project for regional dance artists. Recent works include Show Me The Body featuring live music by jazz/modern composer Tim DuRoche premiered in June 2007 funded by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and in September 2008 she was commissioned to create a site specific work for the City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin for the Keller Fountain.  Mathern is a 2009 Oregon Artist Fellowship grantee. Her work Pivot was commissioned and presented on the White Bird Dance Uncaged Series in January 2010.        http://conduit-pdx.org/mathern/

Dawn Stoppiello
Dawn Stoppiello is a choreographer/media artist who has dedicated her career to computer mediated live performance, creating choreography for bodies interfaced with computers through sensory systems and dancing in synchrony with projected images. She is recognized as a pioneer in the genre that came to be known as Dance & Technology. With composer/media artist Mark Coniglio she is co-founder of Troika Ranch, with whom she has performed, lectured and taught extensively throughout the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. She began her career in Portland at the Jefferson High School for the Performing Arts and received a BFA in dance from California Institute of the Arts. Stoppiello has received multiple honors from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, including the foundation’s highest honor, the Statue Award, for continued excellence in the field. Her early professional life includes performances with Jazz Tap Ensemble and membership in the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company. She relocated from New York City back to Portland in 2009, where she continues to direct Troika Ranch. www.troikaranch.org

CHANGING PLACE – Explorations of Space

Thursday September 1st, 2011

Closing Reception – 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Program Begins at 7:30pm

Join us during your First Thursday walk.  Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be provided.  

LOCUS is comprised of architects/artists Robert Mantho (Glasgow, UK) and Michael Wenrich (Orlando, FL), who have been working together for over a decade on creative design projects in the US and abroad. Every couple of years, the two collaborate on a site-specific “intervention” into an existing built environment that forces participants to consider and question how we interact with the spaces around us; what we expect to see or feel yet don’t notice until it’s altered; how architectural line, shape, and form inform our bodily experience and interpretation of a place; and how art and architecture intersect and mimic one another visually and psychosomatically.

Every LOCUS project is different from the next, each a unique and dynamic response to and experiment with a specific environment and creative conditions, from the most apparent (physical dimensions, interior/exterior space) to the hidden or organic (a particular community’s quality and presence, the priorities of a partner organization, budget constraints, who shows up). One thing LOCUS always emphasizes is the participatory nature of their installations—projects are meant to serve as experiential environments that require engaged perception, movement, and interaction.

For their Portland project, LOCUS was especially interested in concretely re-imagining the White Box in such a way that one is constantly taken by surprise. For the primary component of the exhibit’s build-out, the artists worked with a contractor to construct an entirely new floor suspended above the existing one—but upon entering the room, one soon notices that something’s not quite right underfoot…hills and valleys, tilts and warps, this floor is at once nothing special and a beautiful landscape of unpredictable, undulating lines.

An altered floor was just the beginning; as work progressed, the group began the tedious process of installing thick, black, floor-to-ceiling-length cable that transformed from seemingly randomly placed, non-descript hardware to carefully calculated abstract drawings cutting through thin air. Once a piece of cable was measured, cut, prepared with ferrels and stoppers, screwed through flooring, wrapped tightly around pipes hanging from the ceiling, and hooked and crimped to the wall…we moved on to the next one!

Over the course of several long, laborious days installing hundreds of such cables, we witnessed a transfiguration from what looked like haphazard cords on a construction site to life-size optical illusions generated from perfectly taught cables mapped out in precise patterns throughout the room, each a different thickness, like weights of charcoal pencils, creating an immersive sensation of seeing and moving cautiously through delicate drawings suspended in air. Each cluster carries a different formative interaction—its own illusory secret—from every angle. An occasional red line slashes through the ubiquitous black like a bloody punch, a streak of chaotic color on an atmospheric canvas, the moment when architectural precision and artistic abstraction collide.

Tiring but tremendously satisfying, LOCUS’ installation wrapped up in time for our opening reception on July 12^th, at which Robert and Michael spoke about the importance of disrupting normative experiences of space and built environments so that we might better understand, question, and imagine artistic and architectural possibilities that inform how we interact within space—and with each other—at every moment. Check out photos of our installation process here.

LOCUS: CHANGING PLACE is on exhibit through Sept. 3^rd in the front rooms of the White Box. A film excerpt about renowned artist Gordon Matta-Clark—whose artistic and conceptual practice similarly distorts and disrupts interior and exterior space—is screening concurrently in the Gray Box, a space for new media adjacent to the White Box.

For more information about LOCUS, visit www.loc-us.org.

By Roya Amirsoleymani, White Box Intern

Exhibition Runs July 12 – September 3, 2011

Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 6:00 p.m.

Opening Reception

Tuesday, July 12th, 6:00 – 8:00p.m.

Artist’s Remarks at 7:00pm

Robert Mantho and Michael Wenrich, of the collaboration LOCUS, transform the White Box into an immersive architectural experience exploring altered perceptions of space. CHANGING PLACE represents the fifth iteration of LOCUS’ international interventions where the architect/artists re-envision the found space and challenge visitor’s physical and visual perceptions. The Gray Box media room will feature an excerpt on Gordon Matta-Clark from the film 14 Americans: New Directions for the 1970s (1980).

                                About LOCUS

LOCUS is a collaborative effort formed to make architecture as an act of art in a specific place. Their work is a creative exploration – as the goals and intentions of each project are discovered they come to understand the place in which they are working. Central to their continued work is their requirement for an active participant, whose body and senses are engaged to reveal and question primary spatial relationships.   www.loc-us.com

Support for this exhibition comes from UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts, UO Arts Administration Program and UO in Portland. Additional support provided by The Stillpoint Foundation, Henry Frantz, Maxi Jahn, and Charles Stone.

The U Oregon Digital Arts BFA Exhibition, Watch Your Mouth, is composed of 12 artists completing their fifth year degree program experience. An entire year has been dedicated to the development of their creative process, their conceptual motivations and the production of a vast range of media in an art context.

These artists seek to define meaning and purpose in a complicated world. They are invested in a critical inquiry into how humankind navigates a complex existence. This thesis exhibition is the result of mining the abstract space between humans and technology, researching cognitive behavior, dissecting language and information delivery systems, examining our poetic relationships to space and place, investigating material translations, process obsessions, and questioning personal philosophies, all with an often dark, twisted and cryptic sense of humor. There is a diversity and consistency to the Digital Arts BFA artists’ work.

The range of media and methodologies employed span hybrid digital output, computer programming, image capture, drawing, animation, sculpture and as always, evidence of the skilled hand. Clearly a mark of the UO Digital Arts experience, the ideas reign importance over the media. It is the ideas that appear consistent and substantial, for this unique BFA experience. Like barometers for culture and society-at-large, these artists ask important questions about how and why we live in a technologically fertile, swiftly moving world. Change, thought, story, space, inquiry, truth, translation, language, communication, digitization, these ideas are consistently mined and dissected from this critical, analytical group of young artists. It is with their work we attempt to find a better understanding to our place in the universe.

The artists are Brian Aebi, Amy Chan, Braeden Cox, Gage Hamilton, Matt Pfliiger, Andrew Pomeroy, Steven Robinson, Brad Saiki, Lauren Seiffert, Tanya Tracy, Chris Wilson and Zach Yarrington. The UOregon Digital Arts faculty is Colin Ives, Craig Hickman, John Park, Michael Salter, Ying Tan, and Kartz Ucci.

http://watchyourmouthpdx.com/
Click to view slideshow. Watch Your Mouth, photo credit: Craig Hickman

Exhibition Photos
Daniel Heyman
HUNG Keung

Exhibition Press
HUNG Keung at White Box
Daniel Heyman: Bearing Witness at Laband Art Gallery, L.A
Hung Keung’s ‘Skinny Language’ closing soon

Photos: Matthew Green, “Friendly Reminder,” 2011, alarm; Benjamin Young, “Self Help,” 2011, mixed media; Benjamin Young, “The Last Thing Ever Born,” 2011, sleeping bag, synthetic hair, and nail; Benjamin Young, “Ejection,” 2011, climbing rope;  Jason Traeger, “Untitled 4,” 2011, oil on canvas; Jason Traeger, “Untitled 1,” 2011, oil on canvas; Jason Traeger, “Untitled 3,” 2011, oil on canvas; Midori Hirose, “BWI,” 2011, acrylic and sand; Midori Hirose, ” SQT,” 2011, acrylic and sand; Midori Hirose, “Gradient,” 2011, acrylic and sand; Credit: White Box Gallery.