2022 Artists
Val Britton, born in Livingston, New Jersey, lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She received her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts. Britton creates immersive, collaged works on paper and site-specific installations that explore physical and psychological spaces. Her fragmented, exploded landscapes draw on the language of maps to investigate memory, history, and the possibilities of abstraction.
A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, she has participated in residencies and fellowships including Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology, Millay Colony for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, the Facebook Artist in Residence Program, the Golden Foundation, and Ucross. She has exhibited in museums, galleries, art fairs, alternative spaces, and non- profit institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Gallery Wendi Norris, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Group shows include the San Jose Museum of Art, the Katonah Museum of Art, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the de Saisset Museum.
Britton was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission to create a permanent public artwork for the San Francisco International Airport that opened to the public in 2015. This 15-panel work, measuring 9 feet high by 55 feet wide, was executed in laminated glass using a variety of techniques including hand painting, graphite drawing, and sandblasting areas to create an etched effect.
Britton’s work is part of numerous collections, including Arkansas Arts Center, The Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; Facebook Headquarters, Menlo Park, CA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York, NY; New-York Historical Society, New York, NY; New York Public Library, New York, NY; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Jens Hoffmann and Trevor Paglen provide critical text in her catalog Reverberations and articles about her work are featured in Square Cylinder, the San Francisco Chronicle, Refinery 29, KQED Arts, Artillery Magazine, Venison Magazine, Art Practical, and 7×7 Magazine.
Credit Dante Korinto
Maddy Dubin grew up in rural northern California, scavenging found materials from an early age. Maddy was never able to shake this impulse, and employs the same methods in their art practice today. This practice has provided the catalyst for connection to place, matter, the past, and people. While pursuing a BFA degree at CSU Chico, Maddy explored found sculpture, abstract ceramics, and meditative print-making. After graduating in 2018, they moved to Portland, OR to participate in a year-long emerging artist mentorship at Ash Street Project. Their work then began to embrace alternative methods of installation, collaboration, and performance. While in Portland, Maddy has spent time teaching, managing studios, assisting a wide variety of local artists, and advocating for underrepresented artists. Maddy is currently an integral part of Gather: Make: Shelter, a non-profit organization facilitating collaborative, creative projects with people experiencing houselessness and extreme poverty. Maddy leads art workshops, mentors artists, and organizes exhibitions, receptions and other events through Gather: Make: Shelter. Maddy’s own work has been exhibited extensively on the West Coast, most notably at, Russo Lee Gallery, PDX Contemporary, Ash Street Project, and Pottery Northwest.
Artist, author, and performer Anis Mojgani is the current Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, and multiple TEDx Speaker, Anis has shared work across the globe as a professional poet for the past 16 years.
A multidisciplinary artist born to a Black American woman and an Iranian man and raised in New Orleans, Anis attended school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which he holds a BFA in Sequential Art from. After moving to Portland Oregon, he and a band of fellow SCAD graduates opened and ran downtown art gallery and collective, Couch, for two years. Anis has been awarded artist residencies from Caldera Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, The Sou’wester, AIR Serenbe, and The Bloedel Nature Reserve, as well as serving as both an artist- and writer-in residence in the KSMoCA and Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools programs. His work has been commissioned by the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Portland Timbers, and others.
Known for creating work that centers on translating the specific to the universal, Anis uses his own experiences pushed through magical realism to hopefully open his audiences to the power of their own imaginations and self-worth. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, and in the NY Times, Buzzfeed, Rattle, Forklift Ohio, Paper Darts,Thrush, Bat City Review, and Illustoria.
Anis is the author of five books of poetry, all published by Write Bloody Publishing: Songs From Under the River, The Feather Room, Over the Anvil We Stretch, The Pocketknife Bible, and his latest, In the Pockets of Small Gods; his first book for children is forthcoming from Chronicle Books. 2021 saw the premier of Sanctuaries, the opera about gentrification in Portland for which he wrote the libretto for; and Spring of 2022 saw the creation of a telephone line in which people could call and listen to a daily poem from Oregon Poet Laureates. Anis currently lives in Portland Oregon where he serves on the board of Literary Arts.
Joshua Sin is a Canadian-born artist/designer living in Portland, Oregon. Trained as an Industrial Designer, he’s spent 10+ years working in corporate America, leading advanced innovation projects in retail, sports, and technology.
In his practice, he explores the tension between physical craft and digital space. He sculpts textiles from found materials and deconstructed used clothing, sewing new patterns and experimenting with traditional quilting and mending techniques to create new fashions. He then inserts his fashion into digital 3D universes, constructing mysterious characters and worlds around his clothing design.
Ultimately, Josh’s work asks the viewer to question perception: What is old and new, trash and elegance, digital and reality, art and commercial.
Joshua is currently experimenting with tufting guns, 3D scanning, and parametric design while researching his family’s immigrant stories, model minority identities, and corporate American culture.
ahuva s. zaslavsky lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She was born and raised in Tel Aviv and graduated from The University of the Negev, Israel with a B.A in behavioral sciences. ahuva will receive her MFA in Visual Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in summer 2022. In her work, ahuva looks into the relationship of space and place to memory and trauma. Through writing, painting, printing, sculpting and other mediums, her investigations permeate the social and domestic, the cultural and psychological. ahuva is the author of Between These Borders Wonders A Golem (First Matter Press, 2022). Her work has been shown locally and nationally. ahuva has completed the Art/Lab fellowship in 2022 and will take part in GLEAN Portland’s 2022 artist residency.
