PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present solo exhibitions by northwest artists Marjorie Dial and Victoria Haven.
Marjorie Dial’s exhibition, The Repository, brings together a collection of text inscribed ceramic vessels. Placed on pedestals around the room, the larger five vessels compose the poem Hello my Love—a meditation on the loss of intimacy. Read gradually and carefully as you circle the space; there is an intimacy to reading the words these containers hold. The remaining works in the show carry the text of fragmented poems—they are non-linear and on-going, holding and preserving knowledge. The Repository is a storehouse of desire, reason, and hope and the works act as both a preservation and a transmission.
Marjorie Dial was born in Columbia, SC. She holds an MFA in Craft from Oregon College of Art and Craft (2019) and a BA from Yale University (1994). Dial is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice includes sculpture, print-making, and writing. In 2018 Dial founded an artist residency in North Carolina called Township10. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and venues including Eutectic Gallery, Portland, OR; Front of House, Portland, OR; Ash Street Project Gallery, Portland, OR; T Project Gallery, Portland, OR, and Hoffman Gallery, Portland, OR. Dial received the MFA Award of Distinction at OCAC and was invited to attend the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSULB as a Resident Artist in 2019.
Victoria Haven’s exhibition, The Queens of Rain, is composed of 6 works on paper, brought together from two separate bodies of work. Thinking of them as “painted drawings”, the works from m-series, 2019 are drawn with metallic paint and operate as containers and frames, provoking the negative space of the central ‘void’. These carefully rendered abstractions shift from two to three dimensions simultaneously. The Captiva drawings were completed during Haven’s time at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida. They are individual orbits of thought, memory, and attention. Brought together, these two different series became a new visual arrangement. Sharing an association of clouds and crowns, in both form and atmosphere, Haven began to think of Joni Mitchell’s song Both Sides, Now. After some rabbit-hole research revealed that Joni came up with her song while reading a passage from Saul Bellow’s Henderson The Rain King, she landed on the title: The Queens of Rain.
Seattle-based artist Victoria Haven explores abstraction and shifting perspectives to illuminate the phenomena of fleeting sensations, energy fields, and severed space. Victoria Haven received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1999. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Award, the Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award, the Behnke Foundation Neddy Award, an Artist Trust Fellowship Award, ‘The Stranger’ Genius Award for a Visual Artist, and the Art Matters New York Grant. Haven has exhibited widely, and has mounted solo exhibitions at PDX Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Greg Kucera Gallery (Seattle, WA), Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Howard House (Seattle, WA), Planthouse (New York, NY), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), and the Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle, WA). Haven’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, WA), 4Culture and King County Public Art (Seattle, WA), City of Seattle (Seattle, WA), Great Northern Annuities (Seattle, WA), Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Seattle City Light (Seattle, WA), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Safeco Corporation (Seattle, WA), Amgen (Thousand Oaks, CA), and Washington State University (Pullman, WA). Haven’s work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, Art Observed, The Guardian, art ltd., ARCADE, New American Paintings, The Stranger, CityArts, Artweek, Daily Serving, Art in America, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Artnet, The Seattle Times, The Oregonian, and New Art Examiner, among others.
Visitor information: Open Tuesday - Saturday 10:00am - 5:00pm
Type: Exhibition
Cost: Free
Diversity: Women/Femme
Accessibility: Sensory Friendly, Wheelchair Accessible, Emotional Support Animals Allowed
ALT Text: The image on the left is a ceramic vessel fused onto a ceramic pedestal. Blue, white, tan, and black glaze is poured over the vessel and runs onto the pedestal. The pedestal is matte black and has the words "FUTURE SEX" written on the sides. The image on the right is a painting of an abstracted, geometric form painted in various shades of metallic gray paint on white paper. The center of the shape is not painted, creating a void in the middle.