FPO "For Placement Only"
Brittney Connelly + Russell Borne
August 2, 2018 - August 24, 2018
Opening reception: Thursday, August 9, 2018, from 6–8 PM
In reference to the attitude of engagement with social media, the artists look to use the gallery as a container for impermanent actions and mediums. What they call placeholders will begin inside of the installation, be moved, altered and changed throughout the duration of the show. These placeholders will occasionally be extracted and fixed to the exterior gallery wall referencing their own attempts to extract action and experience and place into containers such as Instagram or social media.
Some examples of placeholders are:
- Written text describing objects that are no longer in the space
- Objects that appear to be multiples but are slightly skewed will appear in several locations digital and physical within the space
- Frames with images that reference the location they are placed.
- The human performer as placeholder will inhabit the install for brief stints altering the install
- A sound loop that is cut to only play second snips and never progress
FPO is a collaborative effort by artists Russell Borne & Brittney Connelly. This collaboration was born out of many obsessive discussions surrounding our twenty-first-century poetics of space. The work circles around a central question, had Gaston Bachelard written his famous text “The Poetics of Space” at this moment how would he choose to work through the digital landscapes that exist in tandem to our everyday lives? How do we study the room if the room is flexible if the information is exchanged within it in seconds? FPO is an attempt to restructure or gain some understanding of this new architectural terrain. The digital brushes serve as a codec or overlap that envelope shapes born out of the language of programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketchup and of course Instagram. The installation houses “situations” made up of physical objects, these situations are temporary in nature and serve to fill in space, ready to be photographed and re-digested into our digital world.
Brittney Connelly is a sculptor and photographer living in Portland, OR. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of Houston. Her work is influenced by critical theory revolving around the photographic medium and often mines imagery that is widely accessible on the internet. Her large-scale photographs are constructed from low-res jpegs and studio artifacts built in real space, her work is then photographed, flattened and digitally manipulated relishing in the low-quality editing tools of photoshop. Her work has been screened at museums, galleries and film festivals, such as COCA Seattle, The Blaffer Museum, Site: Brooklyn, FOTOFEST, and The Cranbrook Art Museum.
Russell Borne is a sculptor and designer from Portland, OR. After completing his BFA from Oregon State University, Russell went on to Cranbrook Academy of Art for his MFA in sculpture. Russell’s work takes on common objects and elevates them through mimicry and material transformation. His work deals with aesthetic obsessions and fast fads propagated by the internet.
The Littman Gallery and White Gallery are student-run exhibition spaces at Portland State University. Our mission is to provide the tools for a critical experience of visual culture through direct exposure to a comprehensive program of contemporary art for students and community members. We envision the Littman and White Galleries as centers for cultural enrichment where an indispensable art experience is accessible to all perspectives and levels of education.