The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition 'The Familiar Edge of the Unknown,' featuring individual and collaborative works by artists Elizabeth Arzani and Tanner Lind and curated Pacific Northwest College of Arts (PNCA) Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies (HFSGS) Curatorial Fellow, Ilsa Payne. The exhibition will run from June 14 to July 12.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

‘The Familiar Edge of the Unknown’ presents the works of Arzani and Lind, these two interdisciplinary artists’ work speak to spatial considerations of awareness by peeling back the layers of experience through the exploration of relationships and systems. Both artists center concepts of transformative states of responsiveness in their individual and collaborative works. Arzani troubles fragmentation while Lind attends to ideas of tracendension.

Arzani has been described as an interdisciplinary assembler, constructing narratives from moments of curiosity, absurdity and potential humor in happenstance. Her work is caught between painting, sculpture and printmaking to reveal the allegorical relationships embedded in materiality. These collections of fragmented ephemera become what she conceives of as, “Site-specific maps of a place, offering a form of communication that extends language.”

Lind seeks to decipher the many layers of the existential forces that create and transform the natural world. His detailed process is characterized by parameters and rules that serve as a framework of creation. From there, his paintings enfold through a system of chance, echoing the spontaneity of life as well as calling into question our relationship to our physical reality.

ABOUT 'THE FAMILIAR EDGE OF THE UNKNOWN'

"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story...just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore."

pg.31 Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby | Source of inspiration for the title of the show

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE

The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture is a platform for cultural production including exhibition, lecture, performance, and publication. Housed within Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), the Center throws open its doors to the greater public to foster conversation and community.

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