Clark College’s Archer Gallery presents Out of Nothing, a virtual & interactive exhibition by Alyson Provax.
Artist Talk & Opening Reception: October 9th at 12 pm
Pacific Time Artist Workshop: October 30, 12pm Pacific Time
All events are open to the public and will be held virtually via Zoom (links TBA at website below).
For more details, and to view and participate in Out of Nothing, please visit: www.archergallery.space
Artist Statement:
“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel.” Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
Periods of sadness and grief encompass more range than we often consider: regret, apprehension, vivid quiet, even momentary electric joy. A period of grief can serve as a bright backlight, illuminating all of the gaps and cracks already in existence but previously unseen.
In the 2009 youtube video David After Dentist the young David, delirious, asks: “Is this going to be forever?” Watching, we know that what he’s experiencing is temporary - that’s the joke - but it can be much harder to see our own feelings as temporary. Being in the experience is the thing. These days do feel like forever.
This show will be a bit different from past shows. There won’t be a place for you to visit, instead, I have worked with a couple of different formats to make a small body of reproductions that you can incorporate into your individual life, in whatever way feels appropriate to you. I hope that this show can be a way to feel like we’re together during this lonely year. -Alyson Provax
Alyson Provax lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in loneliness, uncertainty, memory, and the other small but powerful specifics of living in our times. Her formal training is as a printmaker and works in letterpress. Her work has been described as “printmaking disinterested in the perfection based traditions that exist as a form of exclusion.” Within those experimental uses of traditional tools she often uses the potential for repetition as a drawing tool, creates original works by manipulating the printed image, or uses physical printed pieces as stills for animation, reproductions into books, blankets, posters, stickers, and billboards.
She has shown regionally at Carnation Contemporary, Wolff Gallery, Upfor Gallery, LxWxH/Bridge Productions, The Vestibule and the Whatcom Museum, nationally at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Montalvo Arts Center in California, and internationally at the Blueproject Foundation in Barcelona.
Her work appeared in articles about artists’ responses to the 2016 election in New York Magazine, Newsweek and ArtSlant. Her work has been published in Poetry Northwest, The Buckman Journal, and Eleven Eleven, and her first book was published by Volumes Volumes in 2019. She has shown temporary public art installations in San Jose this summer as part of Montalvo Arts Center’s ‘lone some’, in Portland in 2019 as ‘something nameless’ and Seattle in 2018, as part of Vignettes and Gramma’s project ‘a lone’.
Alyson Provax, Untitled (I kept thinking of the things we should have done), letterpress on kitikata, 2020.