IMAGE DETAILS: Julia Oldham, Dendrostalkers (Video Still), Digital video, 8min 29sec loop, 2022.
Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday, 10am - 4pm
Artist Talk: March 2nd – 12:30-1:30pm, PNCA Mediateque (will be livestreamed on YouTube)
Public Reception (Artist in Attendance): March 2nd – 5-8pm (Portland, OR)
The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA is pleased to announce Dendrostalkers, a solo exhibition of new and recent video works by Julia Oldham on view from March 02 - April 15, 2023.
Join us on Thursday, March 02 for an artist talk at 12:30pm in the PNCA Mediateque, followed by the opening reception from 5-8pm. Open to the public with refreshments provided.
Exhibition Statement
Dendrostalkers is a 3-channel video installation by Julia Oldham about trees that are evolving to transcend the three-dimensional world in order to escape human destruction. Combining footage of clear cuts in the Coburg Hills with hand drawn and digital animation, Oldham takes the viewer on a drive through a forest peppered with trees behaving strangely: they grow and regress, break down into geometric abstractions, and disappear into black holes. A crackling radio transmission warns of the potential danger of approaching “Dendrotopes,” a term Oldham invented to describe trees that have evolved to exist in higher dimensions and pass through our world on occasion.
As the video progresses, a story emerges about two sisters who are obsessively seeking out and recording videos of Dendrotopes and posting them in online forums to gain internet recognition. They find themselves in competition with a stranger whose username is @dendrostalker1992 and taking risks to acquire the most daring footage. The sisters, who meet a mysterious end, are performed by the artist and her sister, Erin Oldham, who also composed music for the project.
Artist Bio
Working in a range of digital media, Julia Oldham visualizes the uneasy collision of nature and technology in a world on the edge of environmental collapse. She documents extant environments such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine and swaths of derelict wilderness in New York City, and she also builds fictional worlds through digital manipulation and collage. With tenderness and humor, Oldham explores her own conflicting feelings about human progress through her narrative works, envisioning post-apocalyptic futures in which stray dogs have turned trash and abandoned technology into junkyard homes, and humans live in tiny, stacked houses in a swamp world dominated by beavers. Her practice is research intensive, often involving climate scientists, physicists and biologists as collaborators. Julia Oldham’s work has been screened/exhibited at Art in General in New York, NY; the Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, NY; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA; PPOW in New York, NY; The Drawing Center in New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of Art in the Bronx, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Disjecta, Portland, OR; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; the Dia Foundation at the Hispanic Society in New York, NY; the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; and Nunnery Gallery in London, UK; and she was included in the 2016 Portland Biennial curated by Michelle Grabner.
Her work has been supported by Artadia, the Fund for Art and Dialogue, New York, NY; NYC Urban Field Station, Queens, NY; Artist in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York, NY; Outpost Artist Resources in Ridgewood, NY; Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Miami, FL; Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY; the Oregon Arts Commission in Portland, OR; and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago, IL. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice, and has been featured on the NPR shows “State of Wonder” on OPB and “Inquiry” on WICN.
About CCAC and PNCA
The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture is a platform for cultural production including exhibition, lecture, performance, and publication. Housed within Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), the Center throws open its doors to the greater public to foster conversation and community. Pacific Northwest College of Art is the leading professional arts and design school in the Northwest; we are the heartbeat of learning and experimentation in Portland’s vibrant cultural ecosystem. We spark curiosity and sharpen skills so students can build creative careers anchored in innovation, justice and civic imagination.
Monday-Saturday, 10am-4pm