Past Exhibitions
What happens before you die?
What happens before you die?
What happens before you die? a site-specific installation and performance by Carin Rodenborn and Sommer Browning opens Saturday, August 9th.
Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She’s the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I’m Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You’re On My Period (Counterpath), and others. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Brooklyn Rail Lit Hub, Bomb, Artforum, Chicago Review, The American Poetry Review, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Richmond.
Carin Rodenborn is a visual artist and writer who makes painting-objects, installations, ephemeral drawings, and text-based works. Her work has been exhibited at ISE Cultural Foundation in NYC, the Texas Biennial, Area 405 in Baltimore, several university and grassroots galleries, and featured in New American Paintings. She has taught in art and design departments at colleges and universities across the United States, and is now supporting the well-being of artists, poets, writers, musicians, designers, and creative folks as a mental health counselor. She lives in Rhode Island.
Museum as Muse IV
with The Zymoglyphic Museum
Museum as Muse IV
with The Zymoglyphic Museum
Opening Friday, September 13th 6-9 PM
1122 + The Zymoglyphic Museum present Museum as Muse IV, a showcase of the museum's residency program. The museum's residency program provides an opportunity for creative people to work on projects inspired by the museum, including access to the its carefully curated archive of gnarled sticks, fungus, bones, rusty remains, and other delightful detritus. The residency show returns to the 1122 this year, with 3 returning and 3 new residents with a variety of projects.
Art from the Zymoglyphic Museum's Residency Program by:
Heléna Dupre Thompson
Lyndsay Hogland
Patty Burns
Zac Banik
Alice Langlois
Sam David
The Zymoglyphic Museum's primary mission is the preservation of the unique natural and cultural heritage of the Zymoglyphic region. In addition, the museum hosts a variety of special collections and online exhibits related to Zymoglyphic themes of natural art, celebration of decay, and museums as curiosity cabinets.
On the Move
by Curtis Settino
Opening Saturday, June 8th 6-9 PM
Reading at 7 PM
Saturday, June 15th 6-9 PM
Reading at 7 PM
Humans made a lot of marks and images in caves and on rocks throughout the Ice Age in Europe (15,000-35,000 years ago-ish). My show On the Move draws inspiration from these earliest examples of human art.
My artwork lives to engage, and the most effective engagement device is story. I’ve often described my work as “abstract narrative.” Whether I’m working with a straightforward story or simply sharing the poetics of a moment or shape, I look for the perfect perspective to share from. For me, the best moments to render are those that inspire curiosity, are thought-provoking, and contain a sense of whimsy. My intention with the work in this show is that each piece can function as a purely visual entity — playing off centuries of iconography and symbols shared by humans —but, upon closer inspection, can also deliver a deeper intention, even it’s only a glimpse of a story or idea. Whatever medium I work in, I’m seeking a conceptual and aesthetic balance between narratives and poetics, communication and obfuscation, comedy and tragedy.
An ongoing theme in my artwork is motion and transportation, which ultimately leads to exploration. The freedom that mobility brings is immediately put to use by all animals as they gain it. I remember the freedom of range my first bike gave me. Zooming back in time, the earliest groups of humans were nomadic, like many animals. So that sense of always being in motion, of watching the sun come around each day and seeing the seasons rotate, is in us humans (despite our current relatively sedentary existence), and we respond when we see it in the arts. It’s a form of neural-nostalgia (instead of an actual memory).
Growing up in the Detroit area has also contributed to my transportation focus. Every dad on our block worked for the auto industry. The Center (now College) for Creative Studies, where I studied art in downtown Detroit, had a huge industrial design department funded by the auto industry. I didn’t get to take any of those classes (sadly), but I watched my schoolmates banging out hundreds and hundreds of car designs. And you can bet I was taught how to draw and paint cars. So transportation is in my blood, even though I am not a gearhead at all. But the effects of these liberating yet polluting travel machines (of all kinds) are a part of my conscious and subconscious thought process when making art.
On the Move also explores forced vs. natural migration. With climate change affecting all species’ habitats, a lot of us are already “on the move” for a better climate to live in. And with war and politics threatening people all over the planet, many are literally running for their lives with their world on their back. Again, looking back in time to good ole Pangea: the original super-continent migrated into several distinct land masses. Another example is the blood in our bodies — if it stops migrating through our veins, well, you know, we stop dead. In this regard, you could say that constant motion is just the natural state of life regardless of the cause.
The 3D works I’m currently creating depict motion — and are directly influenced by cave paintings. I’ve always been intrigued by animals and their representations. When I first saw Werner Herzog’s film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” I was struck by a comment from one of the archaeologists suggesting that early humans painted repetitions of animals in an effort to represent motion, that they were proto-animations under flickering torchlights. At first, I doubted this interpretation. I figured the images repeated because the person was practicing drawing the animal — filling the page, as it were. I started to do some research and discovered more examples of potential “animation” in early human art. Another film, “Stone Age Cinema,” followed this animation concept even further with other examples. Even though this is all speculation, I love the idea of it and see it as a rewarding path to explore.
It's also been theorized that early humans brought these paintings to life through storytelling. The possibility that the caves were used to entertain and educate starts to seem more and more like a theater experience — sound (the human voice) combined with larger-than-life moving images on the cave walls. Inspired by that, I have been creating standing sculptures with repeated heads and legs. (Imagine the negatives from Eadweard Muybridge’s running horse photos being stacked on top of each other so you see several “frames” at once of the same animal.) Starting from the suggestion that, under torchlight, the animals in the cave paintings would seem to leap off the walls, I’m aiming to literally liberate the paintings and give them mobility, in a sense.
In addition to the repetitions of the animals’ features, I take the whole concept one step further. Each animal sculpture has multiple positions, or “frames,” it can be displayed in. The arrangement of the legs (fanned out and offset) allows each consecutive set of three legs to be a unique tripod base for the sculpture. Thus, the animal can appear to be running, rearing, landing — generally, in motion. You can change the position at any time. This flexibility of mood, the option of active engagement, and their connection with nature as well as human history put these works at the crossroads of numerous interesting ideas.
Since these pieces are self-supporting and self-balancing, one of the foremost issues with producing them has been the underlying geometry involved with the design of the armatures — and therefore, the final piece itself. Add to that the need for the sculpture to work in multiple positions, and the problems multiply. Fortunately, I’ve drawn upon various techniques to modify the weight and balance of structures without sacrificing their design. It’s also fun to work within certain limits and see what design presents itself within a given premise. What if I create four heads and 12 legs? How can that work?
I’m producing this new work in multiple sizes, from 4 inches up to 5 feet tall so far. This range necessitates using a variety of materials and techniques. The first round of work for this show are what I call the “dipcoat creatures.” Their size is smallish, no more than 18 inches square or so. I make an armature with wire and then dip it in acrylic paint repeatedly, letting it dry in between coats to add texture. After multiple rounds of dipping, the wire becomes a skeleton within a rubbery acrylic body. After enough layers are on the support, I add surface detail using more acrylic paint and other materials. During the second round of development for the show, the creatures grew in size. Using wood and metal pipes for an armature, I made a 5-foot-tall creature. A few other larger ones have followed. I have been finishing these larger pieces using a combination of fabric and other materials. Other approaches are represented in the show, but these have been the primary ones.
As I have created these 3D creatures over the past few years, they have begun to inhabit my studio and “migrate” around my property. I’ve started to interact with them and get to know them as beings. Their stories have emerged, and I’ve embellished the works to, I hope, give a hint as to why they might be on the move.
Rewind
by Jen LaMastra & Martha Daghlian
Opening Saturday, September 9th 5-8 PM
Performance at 5:30 PM
History is slippery like satin. We wear stories of the past like a uniform, a costume, a suit of armor, or a disguise. Timelines unravel and are stitched together as memory or custom dictates. In Rewind, artists Jen LaMastra and Martha Daghlian combine aspects of traditional fiber craft with histories both personal and collective in wearable artworks that reflect on what it means to play an individual role in a shared drama.
LaMastra’s meticulously constructed garments are as playful as they are assertive, evoking the lineage of feminist art and pop cultural artifacts, in alignment with her ongoing practice of political “craftivism.”
In Daghlian’s haphazardly sewn pieces, European archetypes like the fool and the scholar are reanimated before a backdrop of patchworked historical imagery, encouraging a poetic disassembly of the past. Both artists take unique approaches to transform soft and discarded materials into adornments for acts of resilience, resistance, and reimagination.
Rewind opens at 1122 Outside on Saturday, September 9, from 5-8pm. A very short performance will take place during the reception at 5:30.
Jen LaMastra is a multimedia artist, finding and exploring the connections between personal psychology and found objects. She articulates these connections as the idea dictates toward sculpture, film, or performance. Jen is a drammy award winner for best costume design at Northwest Children’s Theater, and was a guest costume designer at University of Santa Barbara. She has presented work at Portland International Airport, Disjecta, and Museum of Art and Craft for her wearable found object sculptures. Jen also curators and produces shows in her own home 1510 gallery in Portland Oregon.
Martha Daghlian is an artist and writer based in Portland who is inspired by the dead ends of history, doubtful knowledge, and fuzzy emotional timelines. Her body of work is a troupe of personal Frankensteins (sic) revivified to dance like fools in what poet Will Alexander might call “a wary reenactment of the past.” Her past/future projects include Grapefruits Art Space, athousandcirclets.garden, and the High-Tech Luddites Anti-Smartphone Club.