Stumptown Coffee Roasters is excited to present Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea by Michelle Ramin, our newest Portland Fellow. Starting July 23rd, visitors at our downtown cafe, located at 128 SW 3rd St. will be able to view this series. Her work will be on display until October 23rd, 2021.
Reception Date: Thursday, August 5th 5-7pm
Artist Statement:
My mind replays the visuals of a fractured 18 months: social upheaval materializing into violence, wildfires draping the skies in a rotten pink & orange, ice storms shattering hundred year-old trees across Oregon. Even now, I am (very fortunately) sitting next to an air conditioner during a record-setting heat wave. My mind has been hyperventilating for a year and a half - and I know I’m one of the lucky ones.
This series of paintings began in pre-pandemic 2019, exploring the notion of an unnamed ‘happening’ - be it a massive weather event, a cosmic disturbance - and what it would take to actually halt modern society in its tracks. It spoke to a climate crisis paired with a political crisis, to measurable divisions breaking our country, quite literally, in half.
In 2020, the tone of the work moved from the speculative to the prophetic. Yes, this is real. It was always real. As the skies became physically and metaphorically putrid, so did my color palette. The globs of thick oil paint felt like cathartic piles of discarded matter, or ominous comets blazing the sky. Humanity, on-canvas and on-line, stood paralyzed in terrible awe. What was left but to stare at the beautiful collapse (and scream hard with BLM protests en-masse)?
My first-ever solo exhibition in 2005 was entitled “Empires Don’t Last Forever”, a phrase that still rings true across my decades of work; cautionary tales, invented or direct, and quasi-realistic portrayals of the now. I’ve always been hyper-aware of our limited time on Earth, and appreciative for every speck of beauty that finds its way to me. Growing up in the mountains of conservative, rural Pennsylvania, I know a thing or two about pushing through deep hardships - and about counting my blessings.
As difficult as these pandemic times have been, I remain thankful - especially now, for this incredible opportunity to show this body of work as part of the Stumptown Artist Fellowship Program. I’m so excited to give these paintings a chance to finally breathe and live in a space outside of the isolation of my basement, not unlike so many of us looking longingly, yet dubiously, to re-emerge into a world awakening.
