Check out the press release, hereLIVE/WORK - Cameron Hawkey, Heather McLaughlin, Mary Weisenburger, Annie McLaughlin - March/April 2017  Grapefruits is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition titled LIVE/WORK, with paintings and drawings from Heather McLaughlin, Mary Weisenburger, Cameron Hawkey, and Annie McLaughlin, running March 10 through May 5, 2017.
Please join us for an opening reception at Grapefruits, a new experimental art space in St Johns, on Friday, March 10, 2017 from 6-9PM. Grapefruits is located at 7515 N Alma, Portland, 97203 (behind Anarres Infoshop). For information about upcoming shows, please visit grapefruitsartspace.org LIVE/WORK is a collaborative installation that places the viewer within an immersive interior; a room that does not exist, inside of a room that does, filled with rooms that might be. Annie McLaughlin sets the scene with a wall-painted virtual space that will host intimate drawings of other familiar domestic scenes and objects created by Heather McLaughlin, Mary Weisenburger, and Cameron Hawkey. These layers of beautiful spaces beckon the viewer to enter, but of course that is impossible. We can only look. LIVE/WORK brings together new work from four emerging Portland artists who have worked and studied together in local studio spaces and at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where all four received their BFAs. The works in this show share a concern with the depiction/illusion of space - expressed via converging perspective lines, relationships of scale, and contrasts between light and shadow. Cameron Hawkey’s austere drawings of vessels, textiles, and domestic bric-a-brac in pencil and pen evoke a contemplative documentation of the minutiae contained within a quotidian space. Mary Weisenburger’s pictures of otherworldly rooms take up the perspectival device of the grid and twist it in unusual ways, like an architect’s blueprint at the edge of a black hole. Heather McLaughlin’s bold ink wash drawings of darkened interiors create densely layered spaces that hold an emotional intensity in their strong contrasts and delicate transitions. Annie McLaughlin’s vibrant and surreal interior-scape, which will be painted directly onto the gallery’s salmon-pink walls, is the virtual habitat in which we find the aforementioned works. Taken as a whole, this show becomes a collaborative installation that transforms the gallery. LIVE/WORK is a curatorial response to the housing crisis in Portland and other cities across the country, which affects not only the availability of affordable residential space, but also encompasses the dwindling number of studio rentals available to the artists who help form our city’s unique character. Working artists and other low-income Portlanders are struggling to pay their rising rents and competing with short-term vacation renters who offer landlords a much larger profit margin. While we do not offer a solution, this show presents a creative expression of the displacement that many Portlanders are experiencing. Grapefruits is a new art space that presents experimental, low-tech, and radical work from emerging Portland artists and visiting artists from across the country. Our gallery is a program of Grapefruit Juice, a nonprofit whose aim is to empower emerging artists in Portland to engage with our contemporary arts communities and to create their own art-world models outside of commercial galleries and institutions. Please find more information about Grapefruit Juice at grapefruitjuiceartists.org/faqs and our full nonprofit documentation at grapefruitjuiceartists.org/organization Comments are closed.
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