PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present sandwiches for every meal, an exhibition of new work by Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen.
Working as a single artistic entity, Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen most often focus on the activities of reading and writing. They translate and graft together the information they find, drawing extensively from books, art history, literature, philosophy, and philology. They do so with an awareness of other forms of knowledge, whether that be watching YouTube or talking to the cashier at the corner store. sandwiches for every meal is a gathering of works inspired by these types of research and knowledge. Their pursuits are largely influenced by language and intellect, at the same time holding an often unexpected sense of humor and warmth.
The exhibition carries recurring themes of rereading, unknowing, and dismantling of myths. Multiple works in this exhibition are constructed from fragments of Janson’s History of Art, a part of a larger project by the artist where they are dismantling the textbook to make new things. A knitted garment, a quilted flag, or a pairing with an unexpected image creates a new association or ‘rereading’ of the book. This reconstruction is a way to acknowledge the many myths and blindspots carried in the knowledge we have inherited.
The work in this exhibition calls for slowing down— asking us to search for moments of quiet attention where we might notice the architecture of rural road signs, fall asleep while reading, accept the feeling of speechlessness, dismantle old textbooks, and watch a rocky shore or the changing qualities of the moon.
Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen are based in Portland and earned their BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and their MFA at Portland State University. Among the awards and residencies Gray & Paulsen have received are artist in residence at the Schneider Museum of Art and the Caldera Arts Center, a fellowship at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, a commission at the San Diego Museum of Art, and a Precipice Fund Grant. They have mounted several projects in Portland and California, and have created numerous publications since 2007. Among their solo and group exhibitions are included shows at PDX Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Marylhurst Art Gym (Portland, OR), Disjecta (Portland, OR), SPACES (Cleveland, OH), Museum of Northwest Art (La Conner, WA), Renaissance Society (Chicago, IL), Boise State University (Boise, ID), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), galleryHOMELAND (Portland, OR), Napoleon (Philadelphia, PA), Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, WA), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), James Harris Gallery (Seattle, WA), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), The White Box (Portland, OR), Botkyrka Konsthall (Tumba, Sweden), and Milepost 5 (Portland, OR). They are currently represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART in Portland.
Gray + Paulsen are included in the public collections of Washington University Library (St. Louis, MO), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), and the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), among others.
Besides their own exhaustive writing and publication projects, the artists’ works have been included in features, mentions, and reviews in Scene, Dazed, Oregon Arts Watch, Bad at Sports, The Pedagogical Impulse, Art and Social Practice Journal, BOMBlog, Daily Serving, Huffington Post, Willamette Week, Hyperallergic, frieze, Portland Mercury, Portland Monthly, Shift, Ultra, PORT, The Oregonian, and Statesman Journal.
Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen, by the cover 2022 books on cedar wood bookshelf, painted paper doily with found images of Herakles, and ceramic bowl with philodendron