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This Thursday evening there are three exciting art receptions during the same time period which makes for a perfect UO welcoming event for art lovers:

Thursday, March 14^th DIY Art Walk, 3 Receptions:

Envelop Reception with Anne Magratten MFA ‘15 in EMU Adell McMIllan Gallery, 6-7pm

5^th Annual Undergraduate Juried Reception in Lawrence Hall’s LaVerne Krause Gallery, 6-7pm

Interior Architecture Student Design Presentations in Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 5-7pm

The watercolor club is an informal gathering for students interested in exploring watercolor – all experience levels welcome and supplies provided! Meets Wednesdays from 6-8 at the Urban Farm across Franklin Blvd east of the Milrace buildings – follow the bike path. If there are any questions contact Sierra (smccomas@uoregon.edu).

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Our first annual EUZINE Comics & Zine Fest is taking place Saturday November 12th, at 44. W Broadway, in Downtown Eugene. 11AM-6PM, we will be hosting tabling artists from Seattle, Olympia, Portland, Eugene and Beyond for this one day only Comics and Zine event! Admission is free to all! Find us on facebook and online at euzinefest.com

AAA, EUZINE Fest was started by UO graduates
and local artists who wanted to create an event that exposes local and regional talent through print media, ephemera, comics, illustrations, storytelling and many other graphic and visual arts. We would like to continue to grow this event in scale and complexity and will continue to reach out to artists in other cities large and small to showcase their talent. We believe a zine fest in Eugene was a long time coming and wish to get the word out to support the artists who have taken a chance on our emerging event.

Tropical Contemporary Presents
Nailbiter
Opening
Friday, November 4th, 2016, 6 PM – 9 PM
Tropical Contemporary, 1120 Bailey Hill #11
Eugene OR
www.tropicalcontemporary.space
Facebook Event

Following in the footsteps of Teenybopper and
Lollygagger, Tropical Contemporary presents Nailbiter, a group show of local artists working with ideas of idiosyncratic psychological tendencies. Fear, the emotional response to threat, danger or abjectness. Cortisol floods the central nervous system and
pupils dilate with a sharp inhale. Should we flee? Fight? Gag? We’re yelling at the car in front of us as if this has become the lion our genetics tell us we should be fleeing thousands of years ago on the savannah plains. These impulses become even further
removed, as we watch actors on screen run from bloodthirsty killers, tapping our veins as we crave the adrenaline rush brought on by this illusion of danger. The fight or flight response, a genetic hijacking, conditions us through Pavlovian mechanisms to acquire
unique and problematic coping mechanisms. Nail biting, a mild form of the obsessive compulsive tendency, Trichotillomania, rewards us for ripping small pieces of cuticle and nail; tiny self-cannibalizations. This can temporarily hold off the cortisol; small
fleshy sacrifices to help channel our focus. This behavior we pass down socially, learning from our loved ones who cope in this same way.

Through a variety of media, including painting,
sculpture, photography, and video, Tropical presents a show that looks at this relationship of behavior and stress, venturing into the creepy, grotesque, and abject.

Tropical Contemporary is an itinerant collective
of emerging artists in Eugene, Oregon who are working to instill a climate of contemporary discourse, critique, and unbridled creation by finding ways to connect through visual, acutely visceral, and symbolic means.

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Eugene Contemporary Art announces the exhibition, Layers that Swallow, featuring work by Mandy Hampton.

Opening Reception Saturday, October 1, 6-8pm

On view at The Barn Light East, M-F 8-6, October 1 through October 28, 2016.

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The 2016 UO Art MFA Thesis Exhibition opens Friday, May 6, at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, 8371 North Interstate Avenue in Portland, with a reception from 6-9 p.m. The exhibition runs through May 29.

The eight artists presenting work “reveal and question truths, both singular and universal, by exploring ways of being that go beyond the conventional,” states Alexandra Mickle, a UO art history graduate student, in the show catalog. “The exhibited installations are grounded in the gallery space but speak more broadly to questions of larger dialogues.”

Mickle’s commentaries about each of the artists “consider each artist both individually and as a cohort, suggesting potential threads to create discourse among distinct practices. Embracing many mediums and forms, the works in this exhibit present iterations, fragmentations, and clarifications of reality, encouraging a reevaluation of things as they are, or as they appear to be.”

Exhibiting artists are Anya Dikareva, Summer Gray, Krista Heinitz, Steven Joshlin, Daniel Lopez, Sarah Mikenis, Rachel Widomski, and Stephen Nachtigall.

“These artists have worked in tandem, occasionally collaborating, engaged in the hard work of the studio and the challenges of critical discourse,” says Christopher Michlig, graduate program director in the UO Department of Art. “Pushed by their peers, faculty members, and remarkable visitors, these artists leave the program well-equipped, with promising bodies of work and the tools for ongoing inquiry.”

Video, digital media, collage, performance, painting, sculpture, printed matter, photography, and installation make up the range of practices presented in the exhibition. “The broad range of inquiry and practice demonstrates the dynamic conceptual and formal potentials of this graduating group of young artists,” Michlig notes.

Sarah Mikenis says she tries to create art “that is unresolved or defies easy categorization. My work oscillates between being a painting and a sculpture, between being an art object and acting like an everyday object, that is simultaneously serious as well as playful and mocking.”

Her work is “more sculptural and object-like than traditional two-dimensional painting,” she says. One piece in the show is a large, green, monochromatic painting with pockets attached. Sometimes the work is easily recognizable, like a pair of pants with pockets, and other times it seems familiar, perhaps a pillowcase, a couch cushion, a tile floor, “but remains unnamable,” she says. She hopes viewers take away “some feeling of ambiguity in the work; not just that the work is indecisive, but that it swings wildly between being uneasy and completely confident.”

Her materials and processes vary widely, as has the direction of her creative inquiry since she began graduate school. Some are made in plywood covered with upholstery foam and canvas; others are made from digital drawings translated into oil or acrylic paint and airbrushed. She characterizes her show installation as a synthesis of the trajectory of her work over the past three years — from photo-realism to abstraction, from making collages to be painted, and finally to “paintings that become sculptural objects themselves.” Though her work has changed dramatically, certain themes — like the human body, fashion, consumerism, pattern, and disruption — have remained, she says.

“I am calling the installation ‘Painting’ with quotations because although I use canvas and paint, and most of the work hangs on the wall, my work is much more sculptural and object-like than traditional two-dimensional painting. My paintings are sometimes stuffed and puffy, or wrinkled, or the gesture of the painted form seems to be slumping, leaning against the wall, or bending away from the wall and toward the viewer.”

Stephen Nachtigall also departs from traditional two-dimensional work, however his installation is based around digital videos made with 3D models of plants and animation software.

The videos are shown on flatscreen televisions incorporated into a structure built with steel studs. His work also integrates printed mesh screens and other materials as the “walls” of the space. “The result is a provisional structure that viewers can look through and also pass through physically,” he says.

“I wanted the work to reflect both the physical, sculptural aspects of my work and also include digital video, which is a large part of my practice,” he says. “What I came up with is a framework that will meld these multiple ways of making together.”

Nachtigall says the work is a new direction for him at the same time “a kind of summation” of his studies at UO.

“The vibe of the work in the show will be a mix of things I see in our cultural environment, screens that are designed to shift our attention away from something or towards something else, the way that images might determine our approach to reality, and a connection to our ecological predicament that is often a tenuous mix between alienation and complacency. What I hope my work can do for viewers is to provide a place that affords the chance to reflect on how they might feel about a future where ‘nature’ might not mean anything more than an image of simulated plants on a screen.”

Disjecta is open Friday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. when exhibitions are staged; in between shows, the gallery is closed.