ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Assembly brings together a diverse company of Portland-based and international artists across three venues located in Portland’s legendary Pearl District. These venues are the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Parallax Art Center and Stelo Arts. Long known as the city’s most prominent gallery district and home to a number of its more important arts institutions, the Pearl District has an extensive record of fomenting experimentation for Pacific Northwest artists, as well as playing host to select national and global artists.

A fundamental part of Converge 45’s project of putting artists and works of art-as-a-social-form into active conversation, this group exhibition explores, among other values, ideas of identity, representation, inclusion, citizenship, labor, landscape, cityscape, ecology, trade, regionalism and globalism, at a time when the very meanings of these terms are shifting. Because Converge 45 views its participating artists—to borrow a phrase from the Romantic poet Percy Bysse Shelley—as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, Assembly has designed this group show as a series of colloquies. Each features creators and their artworks dialoguing across geography and difference. When viewed from the vantage point of our age of intolerance, this presents as a model good in itself.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Russian-born, Miami-based photographer Anastasia Samoylova’s slideshow Image Cities (2023) presents a tour through a number of world capitals. Shot in 17 cities, that include New York, Paris, London, Zurich, Tokyo and Milan, Samoylova trained her lens on the public-facing images that saturate many of the surfaces of these metropolises. In doing so, she reveals not what is unique to these cities but what is the same: a creeping homogeneity that is manifest as global commodity culture, an ideology undergirding the hopes and dreams of an increasingly corporatized planet. Samoylova’s book, Image Cities, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2022.

The work of New York-based multimedia artist Nicola López examines and reconfigures our contemporary landscape, pointing to deep connections and rifts between our built world and systems and cycles of nature. Through drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video, she engages architecture and urban structure as evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting these with geological and organic formations. Her graphite drawings, Transformers (2022), and her collaged paper work, Land Form 4 (2023), dramatize what the artist calls “the sheer scale of transformation, the complex web of forces that must have forged these forms, and the questions that they pose.”

Portland-based artist Judith Wyss has worked for decades as a painter, a glass artist and on three-dimensional portraits and small-scale installations. Much of her early work is sculpture, for which she used mixed media rather than paper. The range of materials, abilities and concerns demonstrated by the tabletop constructions exhibited here prefigure a number of 21st century artistic and urban issues, among them gentrification and homelessness, while demonstrating the critical importance of creative breakthroughs arrived at late in life.

Chicago-born, Portland-based Jessica Jackson Hutchins embraces an expansive array of materials and approaches, from wall-mounted assemblage to fused glass to ceramics installed atop couches, recliners and chairs. Inspired by found objects and images from her personal life, Hutchins' allows her materials and the ways they connect to her hands and body to drive their form and experience. In this exhibition, the artist presents two sculptures, Girls Win (2020) and The Fountain (2014), which bring the presence of the body and its expansive personal and political concerns even more directly into view through the use of a revealing anthropomorphism.