Fourteen30 Contemporary is pleased to collaborate with NO ARCHITECTURE in presenting Bitter cherry, Bleeding heart, an exhibition of work by ten Oregon artists 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. Private visits are now available by emailing info@fourteen30.com

In the eight years they have lived on the Aurora property that was once owned by Heid’s father, Ted and Andrea Heid have slowly cultivated the vegetation around the Courtyard House and in the central courtyard that gives the house its name. Becoming acquainted over time with the native plants, they have learned their growing habits, their preferences, their Latin names: Ribes sanguineum, Fragraria chiloensis, Mahonia aquifolium. The family’s sensitive cultivation of each plant, letting the plant lead, feels analogous to parenthood, allowing each plant to forge its own way, all the while gently weeding, pruning, tilling, and watering. Western Oregon’s wild perennial landscape grounds the extended family, enriching their daily lives while offering a future of great promise.

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.

Designed by NO ARCHITECTURE principal Andrew Heid for his parents, the Courtyard House is built into a hillside, cantilevered toward views of the Pudding River and surrounded by the astounding wild Oregon landscape. Entered through a sunken entrance court, the living spaces unfold in a continuous loop around a faceted glass courtyard, the floor to ceiling glass walls erasing the barrier between interior and land.

NO ARCHITECTURE is an internationally renowned practice based in New York City. The office is known for a diverse range of projects including Tongzhou Grand Canal in Beijing, Cloud Forest: Qianhai New City Center in Shenzhen, and the Courtyard House, which was awarded the highest Honor Award for the Housing Design Awards from the Boston Society of Architects and AIA New York. Recent design work and writing have been presented at Shenzhen University, Tongji University, the Museum of Modern Art, The Positive Economy Forum, The Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture, and the Beijing Design Week; and have been featured in Cultured Magazine, Taschen, AD Germany, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Dwell, the Oregonian, Wallpaper*, and the Wall Street Journal. PIN-UP Architecture Magazine featured NO ARCHITECTURE as one of the ten innovative architecture practices in New York City.

The Heid family would like to acknowledge that they are situated on the traditional land of the first people of Aurora, the central Kalapuya tribe Ahantchuyuk, whom historically lived along the Pudding River. The Heid family respectfully acknowledges and honors all indigenous communities––past, present, and future––for their ongoing relationships to the region.