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Caryn Aasness
Caryn Aasness is an MFA candidate in Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice program and has a BFA in Fiber From California State University Long Beach.
They want to invite you into their brain. In it we explore mental illness, and the folk art of coping mechanisms. We investigate queerness and how it forms and severs multiple selves. We look to language and learn how to cheat at it. You are welcome to leave the brain at any time.
Early on, Caryn learned to love junk and continues to collect discarded objects to inspire and inform their work. They have watched as cultural attitudes toward compulsive collecting have shifted as the word packrat made way for the word hoarder. As light begins to be shed on these phenomena and collectors are splintered off from hoarders and new denominations form, Caryn attempts to carve out a space to make mentally healthy compulsive work about junk.
Colin Kippen
Colin Kippen was born in San Francisco and grew up in rural Vermont. Along with a nine-year apprenticeship to a jeweler, he holds an MFA in Craft (2015) and a Post-Bacc Certificate in Metals (2006) from Oregon College of Art and Craft along with a BA in Studio Art (2004) from Carleton College. His sculptural practice loosely references domesticity, waste streams, gender roles and masculinity. Along with a recent solo show at Nine Gallery in Portland, OR, Colin has exhibited along the West Coast including Eastside International, Los Angeles, CA, SOIL Gallery, Seattle, WA; and Dakota Art Gallery, Bellingham, WA. Colin is an adjunct professor of sculpture, design and drawing at Portland Community College and Clark College in Vancouver, WA. He lives and works in Portland, OR.
Jessica (Tyner) Mehta
Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, born and raised in Oregon and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary artist, author, and storyteller. She has received several writer-in-residency posts around the world, including the Hosking Houses Trust with an appointment at The Shakespeare Birthplace (Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK), Paris Lit Up (Paris, France), the Women’s International Study Center (WISC) Acequia Madre House post (Santa Fe, NM), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE), and a Writer in the Schools (WITS) residency at Literary Arts (Portland, OR). Jessica has three books releasing in 2021 from New Rivers Press, Meadowlark Books, and Not a Pipe Publishing. She is currently the post-graduate research representative at the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Exeter, England. She is the first Native American to serve in this role at the largest institutional Victorian research centre in Great Britain. Learn more about Jessica at her website, www.thischerokeerose.com, where you will find links to her books, upcoming projects, and the Emmy award-winning documentary on her life and work from Osiyo Television.
Malia Jensen
Malia Jensen (b.1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) is a Portland based artist known primarily for her work in sculpture and video. Jensen draws inspiration from the natural world and the complex relationships we negotiate within it. Her technically accomplished work marries the tactile authority of the hand-made with complex psychological narratives and a genuine quest for harmony and understanding. Her work can be found in many public and private collections nationally and throughout the Northwest. She has been Artist in Residence at the Headland Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Yucca Valley Materials Lab and the Portland Garment Factory. Jensen has been a visiting artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Whitman College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has mentored students at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her recent project, Nearer Nature, received support form the Creative Heights Initiative of the Oregon Community Foundation. The resulting six-hour video, Worth Your Salt, screened online in 2020 during a virtual residency with the Portland Art Museum and was recently added to their permanent collection. Jensen has a BFA, ’89, from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Willie Little
Willie Little is a multimedia artist and author who currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon. His visual narratives document a fading part of rural southern life while also tackling topics of racism, Social Justice, Black Lives Matter and the childhood memories of growing up on a tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina. His memoir and art book, In the Sticks, documents his years growing up as a poor, Black and gay child in the rural south.
Little is an artist whose genius incorporates sculpture, painting, sound installations, re-constructed architecture, re-cycled memorabilia, and real-life stories, Willie pours out his soul for all to see as he relives growing up during a time of radical change.
Willie received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His solo exhibits include the Smithsonian Institution, The Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon and The Noel Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, the Charles H. Wright African American Museum in Detroit and the American Jazz Museum. Notable group exhibitions include the Corcoran and the California Folk Art Museum. He also participated in The Hourglass Project: Baggage, an internationally renowned residency and exhibition program, which toured venues throughout South Africa, Belgium, and Mozambique; the work is archived in a catalog published by Caversham Press. (South Africa)