Artist Lecture: Saturday April 8 at noon.

Howard House is pleased to present Matthew Picton: Volumetric Drawings, an exhibition of new drawings and mixed media sculptures. This is Picton‚s third solo show with the gallery.
Trained in economics, Matthew Picton came to art making through photography. The act of selection˜the first concern of the photographer˜is primary to Picton‚s practice. Roads, under Picton‚s scrutiny, become microenvironments upon which seismic shifting is recorded. Every crack and abrasion in a 100-foot stretch of road is detailed in a wispy, ethereal cutout drawing which hovers and inch from the wall. Picton‚s art revels in the disappearing, the veiled, and the hidden in plain sight. Cracks in dried lake beds are inverted, their voids made form and bejeweled by Picton into dashing, garishly colored resin casts.

Whereas the great geological surveys of the mid 19th century are recorded in panoramic oil paintings and photographs, Matthew Picton‚s closely studied road cracks and lakebeds say something of the artist‚s place in early 21st century exploration. A series of wall mounted sculptures based on the Arctic Ocean floor-mapping project undertaken by the Russian Navy hints at the limits of scientific depictions; without art, there is little room for inspiration. The arctic floor sculptures are made by layering sheets of colored lighting panels, whose perforated grid of square cells recall the digital, pixilated nature of the Navy models. Seen head-on, the mass of the sculptures dissolves into a field of overlapping color. The ocean floor sculptures do not yield their forms easily, but instead require a piecing together of observations in order to reach a full understanding.

Much of Picton‚s work is categorized as „removed sculpture‰ in the sense that he approaches the physical world and takes a section to present. Subtlety is achieved in the transformation of the physical section into engaging, formally inventive structures.

Matthew Picton is among Oregon‚s most respected artists and is collected internationally. In 2005 the De Young acquired a piece by Matthew Picton to be exhibited in the newly expanded San Francisco Museum.

Center Gallery
Donnabelle Casis
hunch
April 6 ˆ May 13, 2006
Opening Reception Thursday April 6, 6 - 8 pm

Artist Lecture: Saturday April 8 at noon.

Howard House is pleased to present Donnabelle Casis: hunch. This is Casis‚s fifth solo show with the gallery.

Donnabelle Casis‚s new work turns what was pink and fleshy in her previous work into a graphic language of whipping, taut lines. The white ground on which she paints alternately recedes and encroaches on the paint, complicating the stability of foreground and background space. In this pared-down series of paintings on canvas and paper, Casis is asking how much information is needed for the viewer to create an association between the colorful marks and a referent. Casis casts a broad net for inspiration; while Disney‚s cartoon imagery is most immediately recognizable, there are also references to William Morris, Qin Dynasty costumes, product design, celebrity fashion, and icky orifices that squirt, drip, and ooze.

Cartoons depend on the element of danger to punctuate moments of giddy hysteria. Disney‚s characters are forever being „zonked,‰ „powed,‰ and „bonked,‰ and there is always a rake or a nail to be stepped on by the hapless villain. Cartoon imagery punctuates Donnabelle Casis‚s paintings˜here a „poof‰ image, there a „pow‰ explosion, and over there a double set of parenthesis that are used to indicate wobbling after a jolt. The compositions are arrived at through a sort of chance operation in which Casis layers Disney cartoon coloring book pages and studies the intersections of different highly recognizable images.

Casis‚s paintings traverse moments of danger, comedy, recognition, and dissolution elliptically; the cycle of visual reading rotates through abstract and figurative readings, allowing the viewer to project into the active white space between marks. The viewer, for once, need not feel ignorant for seeing a pig or a bunny (or something more human) in an abstract painting.

Donnabelle Casis has work in the collection of the University of Connecticut, Yale University, and was the 2002 Neddy Award recipient. Casis holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Washington and now resides in Boston.

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