My Blog has migrated over to my brand new website!

Check it out and let me know what you think:
shelleychamberlinart.com


Events and News can be found at:
shelleychamberlinart.com/events-and-news/

And Blogposts can be found at:
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Art Rock

I'm excited to be participating in Portland Community College's Visual Arts Fair: Art Rock.

This Monday, May 16, 10 am-2 pm, Mike McGovern and I will be leading a collaborative printmaking demo and workshop. Come get your hands dirty and make some prints with us!

​Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus
17705 NW Springville Rd, Portland, OR 97229

Free and open to the public!

Print Print Print!

Southern Graphics Council International is having their annual conference in Portland this year: Flux Portland, and the city is full of amazing prints and shows and happenings!

I've got a couple of pieces on view around town.

I have this brand new piece up at the Trayle Studio Print Show

There will be a little opening this Friday if you'd like to pop by.

In this Metaphor, I am the Tree of Singing Birds

Polyester Plate Lithograph with Watercolor

I'm thrilled to be a part of the fantastic Print Portfolio:
My Rules, curated by Mike McGovern

The piece below is on view at PCC Sylvania

The Ghost Ship

Polyester Plate Lithograph with Watercolor

. . . . .

Check out all of SGC International's Flux PDX events here: http://sgciportland.com/

On Instagram and Twitter: @sgci_2016

#sgci #sgci2016 #fluxpdx

This is what happened in the studio today. I wasn't expecting it. I went to the studio to put some finishing touches on a piece I'm making for an upcoming print show, but I was feeling unsettled: rattled, sad... I just couldn't finish the piece I had in my head. My heart had other plans.

The news gets inside us, permeates everything. Feeling the shock and horror with Brussels today.

Three Days of Mourning

On Artmaking, Feminism, and Intimacy

Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about feminism, art, and intimacy, how their roles and influences tangle and intertwine—partially through conversations with a dear friend with whom I share a deep kinship in these realms. She is a fellow philosopher-poet of the arts (and she happens to be a brilliant art historian**)

There is, we concluded, a crisis of intimacy. Not just an intimacy breech, she said, but a crisis of intimacy. This is as relevant in the personal as it is in the political.

This is how it is.

I had a conversation with an intimate recently wherein they were baffled how our personal conflict became became a conflict of politics... but how could it be otherwise? The intimate is political. The political is intimate. There is no deep feminism that does not embody both. Culturally, we seem to have not yet learned this; we have not yet figured out how to inhabit it, how to breathe within it.

Those of us trying to span the gap are suffering its loneliness.

This statement is equal parts personal and political.

When did we extricate the two from each other? When did the abstraction, the academizing make us lose sight of the fact that these are the stories of one or a million female bodies, their rights to themselves, their lives... ourselves, our lives? My face, my fat, my muscle and bone, my wrinkles, my biceps, my knees, my thighs and [the countless articles and online discussions about] the gap that does or does not belong between them, the cubic feet of space that my body inhabits, this belongs to me. Embracing ownership of it is a political act, and the politicizing of that body, my body, can be nothing but deeply personal.

Tina Fey said, in Bossypants, that the definition of crazy as it applies to show business, is "a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore."

We make ourselves smaller. We contain and hedge in our depths; we do not fully inhabit all of our space. We are the bridges slung low and heavy across the canyon. We hold tight to both sides, stretch ourselves taut. We remind ourselves and each other to be narrower and narrower; we should recede into the distance when viewed from either side. We string ourselves between worlds, between realities, for the aesthetics, for the poetics. Our ribs are the planks and we make ourselves ever smaller.

This is our crisis of intimacy.

Reproductive rights, women's suffrage, domestic violence, fair pay, rights to own land... these battlefields are only expansions of the struggles of individuals, the singular and particular life of any one woman, her body, her work, her marriage, her home, her grief, her joy.

The stories we tell in word and image, of power dynamics, of relationship, of microaggressions and transgressions, of grief and loss and joy, the stories and mythologies, the symbologies and metaphors that we build and weave together, these stories are political.

How and if we choose to share our stories is a political act. That fact is inescapable. Silence bellows as loud as what is spoken... or cried... or shouted.

The edges of this is something I have always intuited, as my own work weaves threads of intimacy and personal narrative within broader pictures of cultural place and meaning-making, but this new view, this deepening of my understanding of the mythology, this putting words to it—building narrative in community, it ignites a new spark of understanding, of curiosity, a new desire to parse it out, a new pull to allow myself to reach wider, grow deeper, set loose some of my containment.

It makes the wind of the canyon sound a little more like song.

It makes me feel just ever-so-slightly more brave.











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** I am not the kind of person who uses the term brilliant lightly. Seriously, you should check out her work. I'm pretty excited about this upcoming exhibition she curated for Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University:

For Myself: Nudes by Imogen Cunningham, 1906-1939


Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), Self-portrait, 1906, silver gelatin print, 18 x 14”, collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Ore. A gift of the Department of Art History at Willamette University in Honor of the Class of 2015, 2015.032.

Big News!

I am thrilled to announce that my dear friend and fellow artist Michelle Daly and I will be having an exhibition together this fall in Massachusetts!

September 29-October 23, 2016

Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Gallery 51

Details to follow.

For now, follow our postcard project on instagram @toobeautifultokeep

On Compensation and Love

Today I opened my email to find this letter from Portland Art Museum inviting artists to paint pianos for an upcoming exhibition.

I'm familiar with the partnering organization and am a fan of what they do, so I inquired further— namely, I asked about compensation.

Here is the response I got, verbatim, and in its entirety:

$0.00

This is purely a labor of love.

I am an artist, and I am accustomed to such requests. I am also intimately familiar with Portland Art Museum's at times less than stellar history when it comes to ethical engagement with local artists and the local arts world. Still, this response landed beyond the bounds of what I have been conditioned to expect. There was no half-hearted apology citing budgetary concerns, or promises of 'exposure' and 'opportunity' (whatever that amounts to). There was simply an assertion that my love should be enough.

"This is purely a labor of love." It was almost refreshing in its honesty, in its accidental revelation of what many arts institutions have come to expect of us, the artists they claim to represent. The Portland Art Museum has an annual operating budget in the $15-20 million range. In 2013 (the most recent annual report I could get my hands on), 3% of that budget went to art acquisition, and it's a pretty fair bet that a significantly smaller percentage than that landed directly in the hands of the artists themselves.

I am not trying to single out the Portland Art Museum per se, but I wonder where our priorities lie that this is the accepted norm, the reasonable expectation of artist involvement. I wonder what exactly this proposed labor of love would be in service of. The truth is, I'd love to be involved in this project: it tugs all the right heartstrings: community engagement, arts for underserved populations, art in public spaces. I've seen these pianos around, and I love them. It is also true that I make work for free all of the time. My work is, indeed, a labor of love... but when that labor of love becomes simply free labor in service of a system that exploits artists for profit, when it fuels a capitalistic art market—one that, as an aside, last night brought the highest ticket sale of a work of art to date at a Christie's auction ($160 million for Picasso's Women of Algiers)—it becomes expressly exploitative.

But I'm not sure that even that is what's getting to me the most.

I think it is this, the thing that has kept it nagging and tugging at my mind all day: Why are compensation and love somehow mutually exclusive? Why should we not put our blood sweat and tears into the things we love and also be compensated for those efforts? Have we, when I wasn't looking, all mutually agreed upon this operating procedure? Should there be no support, no exchange, no return for those who are working in service of something that they love? What does this say of the tortured artist trope? The martyr? I try to—and am honored to—give of myself wholly and freely to whom and what I love, but I don't want to give more than I can, get nothing in return. It is not in anyone's best interest when energy flows only in one direction. We need exchange in order to thrive. In short, I think we—all of us—need compensation for our work.

So, no. Thank you for the invitation, but I will not be painting a piano for you this time. Maybe it's time we all stop offering up our services for free and start valuing that labor of love.

PAPER

These new pieces will be in the PAPER show at Waterstone Gallery this month. There's some really interesting work in the exhibition; I'm excited to be a part of it!

The opening's this Wednesday from 5-8 pm 
424 NW 12th ave, PDX 
I hope you can stop by if you're in the area.

Apart

Altered book

225-

Alone

Altered book

225-    sold

This piece is now in the collection of
Regional Arts and Culture Council's Visual Chronicle of Portland! (click to view)

Long Distance Communication
Acrylic and Hand-Stitching on Paper

Finally got a page up about the recent show, Object and Meaning: An Exploration of Brokenness and Repair. Pics, artist talk, info, it's now all in one place! 

http://shelleychamberlin.blogspot.com/p/object-and-meaning-exploration-of.html

Artist Talk at Place Gallery
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Object and Meaning: An Exploration of Brokenness and Repair
 

Object and Meaning: An Exploration of Brokenness and Repair—Installing the Show

Install Begins

Object and Meaning: An Exploration of Brokenness and Repair

Place Gallery (in the atrium of Pioneer Place Mall)
placepdx.com
placepdx.tumblr.com

Exhibition runs September 21-November 2, 2013
Opening Reception- September 21, 2013, 6-9pm
Second Reception- October 19, 2013, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Thursday-Sunday, noon-6pm

In this exhibition, you are invited to break things, things that are merely objects, or things that are personal and meaningful to you. You are also invited to bring things to be mended.

how long will you have to make clay pitchers
that have to be broken to enter you?
--Rumi

It's easy to categorize things in our lives or in the world as either falling apart or coming together, but these things are always happening in tandem. By paring them down to simplest form and bringing them into the same room, the juxtaposition illuminates their relation to one another, how they are two sides of the same coin. Construction and destruction are both part of the same unfolding story.

In destroying and mending objects there is an opportunity for reflection about the meanings and stories we attach to these objects. By transmuting the objects, there's the possibility of transmuting their stories as well.

It is an opportunity to glimpse into the possibility of a new organization of meaning. It is the way things are always breaking down and building up at the same time. It is the making and remaking of meaning. It is systems and stories that no longer work in their wholeness, things that have to be pieced together from what remains, from what has been worn and torn and shattered, loved into loose strands.

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***I would like to invite you to bring glass, ceramic or fragile items that you wish to break during the opening, or at any point throughout the exhibition, or anything you would like to have mended. I will be 'repairing' objects in the gallery to return to their owners in new incarnations. I am also seeking donations of glass or ceramic objects in bulk that you are willing to part with for the general public to break throughout the course of the exhibition. Please comment here or send me an email at shelleychamberlin@gmail.com if you have anything you wish to donate. It'd be much appreciated!

Meditations On Getting It Right

I spent the morning on the phone with my father, talking about the old standbys: life and and love and what are we going to DO with our lives? We laughed about the idiosyncrasies we have in common: the need to understand, the need to plumb the depths, and the need to get it right. He joked about how channeling it into knowing that the cabin of the boat needs to be 3 inches longer is appropriate, other instances, not so much. (My father has a great mind and is, indeed, a boat designer—he really does know if the cabin of the boat needs to be three inches longer.) With my line of work, there are no absolutes, no rights or wrongs, nothing to measure and catalog, no way of knowing I am following the plan, no mathematical equations I can muster or master to make sure that this boat will float. It is all faith and persistance. My life seems wholly this way, all ephemeral, only able to be experienced via sidelong glances, in full color in the periphery, but to clasp it would only make it dissolve into dust in my hand, slip seamlessly through my fingers.

I have been obsessed with maps and patterns, the yellowed tissue of dress patterns, and of course architectural drawings/ nautical plans are deeply ingrained in my aesthetic. One of my first paying 'jobs' was folding plans, blueprints, for my father. He paid me a nickel a piece. I folded them up and he would put them in a big manilla envelope to send to someone who needed a plan, something on paper that would tell them how to make something. What a nice thing—directions, a promise, that if you just do it right, you will have this lovely concrete and functional object when you are finished. It will float and it will hold you up.

It has only been recently that I have come to see the thread between these aesthetic loves of mine. They are all just that, a promise of direction, of success. Maps, patterns, plans—they tell us how to do it, how to get there. We can locate ourselves, and have directions to get to where we are going, a series of steps to follow to get to a place we've never seen, make something that doesn't yet exist. A friend chuckled at me the other day, reminding me that I speak exclusively in metaphor. It's also how I see, it is what the world is to me.

In my phone conversation today, I described this new piece I have just finished. A chine colle of layers of pattern paper over thicker paper, the lines intersecting and pointing different directions, hints at what is supposed to be done, but no answers, not really, and then sewn text over the whole thing, let it be. let it be. let it be...

Meditations On Getting It Right

Chine Colle and Hand-Stitching On Paper

It has never been something I'm good at, just letting it be. I am accustomed to work, to doing and making and planning. He responded with a story, about his adventures as a young man. He had spent a long time fixing up a sailboat, charting the waters, planning for the tides, packing and organizing and then finally, sailing in to Canada.

"Another long day, but we made it into Canada! Quite an accomplishment; more than two years of dreaming and work, pushing forward… pushing forward… always pushing forward." (A snippet from his travel log, included in a story he wrote about the sailboat, Ode to the Missy.)

And then, he realized that he had arrived, that all of his work had led him to the place that he had planned for, and suddenly, he could just be. He told me he made a decision to just allow things to happen, not make any choices, how hard it was, but that when he allowed for it, things began to happen. He told me that one afternoon he was sitting in his boat, mending a shirt, and realized he had no memory of how he had come to choose to pull out the thread or the needle, or begin the work. It had just happened, easily and without force of will. We laughed that if one believed in such things, one could possibly call it something like a spiritual experience.

I think a lot about the ins and outs and struggles of piecing together an artist's life—a life at all—how much work it takes to get there, how much letting go it takes to make it work, the choices we make, the risks we take. It is terrifying and precarious, but wonderful and exhilarating all the same. Sometimes I wish I had chosen something safe, something easier, something with less leaps of faith, more foundation, something with a rulebook. There is always that cliff just within view. But I didn't. I don't. I chose this; I choose this. I chose to spin my life from the matter at the center of my heart, and to try to make peace with instability. So, though the life I've chosen often feels scary, though upheaval is always a little too close for comfort, I will try to balance the planning and the leaps of faith, the pushing forward, and the letting it be.





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***New piece on view at SCHOOL/WORK: PCC Cascade Campus Art Faculty and Staff Exhibition. If you're in the area, come visit it (and me) at the opening this Thursday, 4-6pm

Pentimento

I have work in the Pentimento Exhibition at Waterstone Gallery this month.
The opening's this Wednesday from 5-8 pm
424 NW 12th ave, PDX
I hope you can stop by if you're in the area.

Ease-in

collagraph and chine colle

holding patterns

intaglio and collage

Things to be Thankful for

altered book

Printmaking with Portland Cocktail Week

Last month I had the privilege and pleasure of leading a t-shirt printing event for Portland Cocktail Week. Bartenders + ink + stencils + t-shirts = fun!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

There have been some major life changes in the last couple of months. Some good, some hard. No, scratch that... All good. All hard. My feet aren't exactly on the ground again yet, but I've been feeling alive in a way I haven't in a while. It feels strange and brave to talk about this here, but it's what/who I am, right? Isn't that what it is to be an artist? Raw-edged. At least the kind of artist I am, the kind I want to be. I've spent the last few years pursuing the particular vein of making public space for the private and intimate.

It makes me think of my first or second term of grad school, of a man who didn't stay with us in the program for long, but he made an impression. He was a little more than most of us could handle, but he would raise his hand in discussions, and count off on his fingers: raw, naked, vulnerable and lost. This is how he felt, where he was, what his world meant to him at the time. He was an aging surfer, a lawyer, a man whose life had veered from the path he had anticipated, and he was trying to make sense of new terrain.

These things aren't exactly true for me. I don't feel lost. If anything, I feel suddenly, joltingly found. But, new terrain, that's the case, to be sure, and to be an artist, there is always a fair amount of that grappling. There has to be.

I've been waking up in the middle of the night with ideas... feelings and ideas, and today, finally, I gave myself to the studio, to the press, to color and shape, to the particular kind of motion of hours passing while I work. I spent the afternoon with ink on my hands and I feel it all in me again. I feel that river coursing again. I feel like myself. I feel myself, and one notch deeper. I'm excited about this new terrain.

I made monotypes and played with layering color, neither of which I've explored much in a long time.

And here's little a peek at a few of the pieces I was working on.

on the wing of a bird

I've been in the studio again the last few days, practicing making things from the remnants of what's been broken. I am gearing up for a new body of work that is eliciting that tingling feeling in my fingertips, the one that makes everything feel brighter and better... and, you know, possible. I have an installation/performance in the works for next year that's rapidly tumbling and growing into an event I'm pretty damn excited about. There will be more details to come, but in the meantime, here is a detail of the wing of a bird in flight painstakingly constructed from shards of things that were once whole, things I have loved, believed, things that had to be broken in order to take flight:

Nourishment

The haze of the holidays is finally lifting, and today there was a small peak of sun. My mind has been filled, mostly, with the personal and mundane: shifting objects and patterns to make space in this home for another person, making meals, hibernating, gestating art ideas, feeling the rumblings of spring's imminence. I've spent some time out shooting with my new camera, and making things from what I find. Always. There is always that. The what do I make of it in my life. That's been focused on film for a time, and, suddenly, food.

I have become obsessed with food. Where art blogs once sat, food blogs. Afternoons in the studio have become afternoons in the kitchen. Maybe it's the comfy feeling of sharing my home with the man I love; maybe it's the hibernation of winter, but maybe there is something else here too. Nourishment. It's a word that has flashed across the screen more than once over recent years. What do we do to nourish ourselves, each other? What feeds us?

For the first few weeks of this month we did a bit of a cleanse, and every time I drank a jewel-colored glass of carrot ginger beet parsley juice (or whatever the combo of the day), I felt it. I felt a tingling rush into my body of nourishment. I feel it too in conversations with good friends with whom deep and true understanding is shared. I feel it when I witness someone in power speaking the truth, or when I see someone without power respected, honored. It's not as present as it ought to be in our world. And I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. It is, in fact, a palpable presence in my world. Wholesome food, love, connection, kinship... what nourishes you?

(Inter)Action and Artmaking

As my artwork has expanded beyond gallery walls, as the frames have fallen away, unsurprisingly lots of questions have arisen. Many from within me, and many from curious friends and onlookers.

The most common, and still the hardest to answer is the ever ubiquitous 'so, what is it, exactly, that you do?' More often than not, this question is my own. The jacket of a bell hooks book I've been reading describes her as a 'cultural critic'. Yes! I think to myself; that's a good term. I'm certainly a cultural critic. But that's not the whole of my practice, not even close.

Some colleagues of mine have decided not to call themselves artists anymore. They've adopted terms like culture worker, philosopher poet, environmental interventionist, and activist.

And, yes! All those fit too. My film, time and its passing is surely the work of a philosopher poet. And what could you call my private protest: sprouting alfalfa project if not the work of an activist/ environmental interventionist? And the gifting project? Culture worker, clearly.

But then there are the small private pieces, like this broken ceramic bird, each shard threaded together, a metaphor of brokenness and repair, of the glaringness of the fissures in ourselves, the possibilities of re-piecing into a new whole.

So, you mash all these things together, and you slap on the label artist. But the image that title conjures doesn't quite fit, either. The art itself has never lived exclusively in the lines for me, the composition, the color. (Though you'll never convince me that craft doesn't matter.)

Art is in the action, the interaction.

Which is why I'm so excited about the Occupy movement. This is not a protest; it's a movement. And that movement is pure art. People are out on the streets embodying the metaphor of change, of action, of engagement, of democracy. They are not demanding democracy—which, I think, is what has so many people flummoxed—no, they are modeling it; they are creating and performing it. Our cultural frames are being challenged, falling away.

So, when I marched down the street with fellow citizens chanting: show me what democracy looks like: this is what democracy looks like, and singing quietly to myself we are a gentle angry people (and we are singing, singing for our lives), it felt more like making art than a lot of afternoons I've spent alone in the studio. Art is about creating something, and there I was amidst thousands of engaged, saddened, angry and hopeful people who were co-creating something together.

Yes, this is art too. This is everything art is meant to be.