<chimaera.site/afk iteration 1: May 4th-19th, 2023 in Portland’s Lloyd Center Mall>
EXHIBITION
the chimaera.site/AFK exhibition featured portland-based artists who are exploring the chimeric qualities of hybridity, (im)possibility, + mutation in their work :
Endale Abraham, Lost Akuma, Iram Asghar, ROCKY CLATTERBUCK, buq corvidae, Martha Daghlian, Francis Dot, Korey J. Ellis, Marlow Jay, Izzy Knowles, Christina Lafontaine, daelyn lambi, Lee Maskarinec, Mei, AB Moore, Elmeater Morton, Vinh Pham, Re Pinter, Alim Ringgold, Davis Esther Rose, Silas Ruesler, & Lauren Voight.
curated by daelyn lambi
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artist statements:
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Endale Abraham, untitled
$60
Endale Abraham's off-kilter, often surreal drawings are distinguished by their soft touch, attention to detail, sinuous line work, and hybrid subjects. This particular piece features an odd and evocative mix of characters from Gumby and Asterix, illustrations inspired by old library books, and organic designs. Endale is a participant of Elbow Room, a Portland progressive studio that supports artists experiencing intellectual and developmental disabilities.
@elbow.room.pdx & @endale.abraham.5
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Lost Akuma, A Race Towards Death
$666
"A Race Towards Death" shows a skeleton standing at a finish line which confronts it with death. This race towards death expresses the anxieties of one’s mortality and instead of dealing with the process of death, the skeleton rushes to get it over. The harsh contrast and aggressive art making style fuels the anxiety within the piece. The process involves cutting, ripping, pasting, destroying the canvas, and then stapling, stitching, taping & binding the parts back together. This treatment of the canvases inhabits qualities of chimera.
@lost_akuma
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Iram Asghar, Chained to the Bed; Ancestors; Affirmations; Pressure Cooker; Bird; Heart; & Organs
NFS except Organs: $600 ($450-600 sliding scale for BIPOC)
My sculptures are things, creatures formed by incongruent parts and pieces of discarded materials. When I think of the word Chimera with my art I think of monsters and creatures patched together through alchemy to create a sacred new being. I also think of the second definition of Chimera - my work seeks to illuminate the beauty in pain, discarded textiles but also discarded and forgotten populations. Unfortunately, we do not live in a world that finds beauty in suffering, I often see us neglecting parts of us that are too hard to see, to touch and my hope for my work is to illuminate that beauty in what is hard to look at and invite people to not just look at but touch those parts - engage with those parts actively.
@squigglesthehuman
*Iram’s pieces were initially only slated to be a window residency, but became an important part of the chimaera exhibition, and therefore were installed in the gallery after their residency ended. You can read more about their installation and practice (and see more photos of their work) on the programming page.
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ROCKY CLATTERBUCK, Diga-Snake & bonked puppy
NFS
Diga-Snake: ok so I usually use yellow for my toenails and fingernails, and I do love to add a good pattern and cool eyes, and I think it fits in perfectly because it is a mix of three animals- snake, goat, and lion. The lion has the whole body to itself, the snake is the tail, and the goat is the lookout. Plus, the lions claws are shovel and I think I think it would live in the rainforest. His name is DigLook TailSlap.
bonked puppy: the dog loves bones so he went to a bone tree yum yum bow wow eat 'em up. Bones don't grow on trees, oranges grow on trees. The dog said 'why are there bones on this magical tree?' and ate them all and the tree threw a pinecone on the dogs head. -Rocky, age 6
mom: @missameliahart dad: @samuelrules
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buq corvidae, patches of illegible canid creatures
NFS
they are imaginary creatures constructed of blunt animal hybrids!
@saltbat vimeo.com/emmalena
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Martha Daghlian, a thousand circlets
NFS
a thousand circlets is a series of interlacing works made from appropriated imagery and text, analog and glitched video, digitally printed fabric, custom coding, and hand sewing. it splices together romantic representations of nostalgia, nature, apocalypse, and the sublime from the start of the industrial revolution/anthropocene in the early 1800s and our current moment at its imminent end, combining high and low tech methods to ask questions about how we think about progress and the ways that art and literature reflect and warp our ideas about problematic histories.
@seahorsesunited marthadaghlian.com
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Francis Dot, Two Fewer Teeth, Mirabilia Monstrum (The Anchorite), & WarLord
Two Fewer Teeth: $350. Mirabilia Monstrum (The Anchorite): $350. WarLord: NFS.
The sculptures I’m submitting for consideration are fantastical mashups of science-fictional and historical artifacts. With an enthusiastically blasphemous spirit, I combine materials from catholic mythologies with elements from my other areas of interest to create relics from future or parallel worlds. These works feature mutants that were perhaps once singularly animal but are now also part mineral, machine, vegetable, and extraterrestrial life forms. The chimeras in this work are containers for dreams and explorations of gender accelerationism, transhumanism, and liberation.
My sculptures Two Fewer Teeth and Mirabilia Monstrum (The Anchorite) were in part inspired by medieval catholic reliquaries, depictions of monsters in illuminated manuscripts from post-black plague Europe, and the biotech and extraterrestrial beings in sci-fi author Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.
The WarLord sculptures are chimeras of a slightly different sort; the pieces in this work began as statues of embodiments of the myth of purity as derived from catholicism: the virgin mother, a lamb, and a cherubic angel in the form of a child. In their mutation process, the characters in this work broke loose from their roles as pawns of patriarchal domination and became dangerous: turning the weapon back upon the hand that wields it. The forms in WarLord are an amalgam of catholic iconography and architecture, imagery from the development and detonation of nuclear weapons, and the otherworldly geologic phenomena of stalactites in deep underground caves.
@francis.dot.studio francisdot.com
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Korey J. Ellis, Creature & Kreature
Creature: $330, Kreature: $40
Creature: This creature isn't the typical chimera from myth, but it is formed from multiple different parts of animals and other critters. For example it's skin looks to be that of a seal, it has a long snout, and much of the rest of it is left to the imagination as the majority of its body is out of frame.
Kreature: Not much is known about this creature as those who gaze in its direction don't survive the encounter. The only things known for sure is that it is red, it has teeth and that it might have horns.
@Artwithkorey
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Marlow Jay, the horrors of nature and humankind
$250
The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and all who inhabit this earth. Manmade horror beyond comprehension is all around us.
Nature, in particular, with its ebbs and flows, continual rebirth and violent cycles, pales in comparison to the horrors of so-called advanced societies who have colonized, murdered, and desecrated.
What is a chimaera if not a grotesque, pained beast of many kinds, tangled into one? I believe that we exist in a hybrid of violences at all times, and we lock those visions away because we are afraid to admit that we benefit from these horrors - war, death, destruction - and that we are not immune to the ones that have been given to us by nature, no matter how hard we try to deny them through technology or collective disconnect - birth, death, and decay. One thing is certain. Nature will always persist, and death is certain, and a gift.
@wolfgore
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Izzy Knowles, untitled & untitled
$200 each
These pieces are very stream of consciousness, and involve a lot of narrative and spontaneous story telling. Everything is layered and with some digging you can find poetry, symbolism, journaling and process. That’s the most important thing about these paintings, is that they evolved and grew into themselves.
@shortforisland Shortforisland.com
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Christina Lafontaine, Invisible Cities
$400 each
"Invisible Cities” is a pair of sculptures inspired by the novel of the same name by Italo Calvino, a fictional work in which the traveler Marco Polo recounts amazing tales of his travels through 55 seemingly unique cities to an aging emperor Kublai Khan. As the book progresses, it becomes unclear whether Marco’s tales are real or imagined, many cities or just one - blurring the concepts of memory, time, life, death, and the richness of place. These sculptures are my own interpretation of these cities/one city distilled into twin pieces, the same and yet different. They are past, present, future all at once - inhabited and abandoned, separate or together, never to be seen or remembered the same way. Christina Lafontaine is a mixed media artist with a passion for the natural world and the liminal space where fantasy and reality meet.
@christinalafontaine christinalafontaine.com
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daelyn lambi, læceċræft
Install NFS, game playable free online
there’s a repeating audio signature in the field data. a parasitic echo. the signal is tuned to match the tonal spectrum of the blood. you assume that it that was always there. bound to you. but it has the ability to just transfer itself to others. your image is spread across many layers. the echo is inaudible. it is an attempt to lure you to the surface. a continuous oscillation of the source system. a spectral signature. a screen is your skin. your leech is hungry. let your code go.
(a digital game exploring legibility, chimæric hybridity + (im)possibility.)
@saltcircle daelynlambi.com
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Lee Maskarinec, T/the red little ones roll around and death bundles it all up & D.O.E
Originals NFS, prints available
These pieces are about seeking to understand death, and our relation to material processes that inherently reshape our observations of nature. As our world and landscapes change, we are asked to walk inside the domain of death, sit on its cloak and listen to its stories, to find our own path forward. The red little ones is a meditation on that experience, looking back at allegory and tradition, while D.O.E (Depends On Experience) muses on nature, mutation, and media. The future is a monster at the gate, but we approach it nonetheless.
@mazkastudio
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Mei, Trans-relation
$300 ($250-$300 sliding scale for BIPOC)
"Trans-relation" seeks to offer a reality where communal love and communal pain are both at the forefront of our collective reality. Through honoring ancestral relations and healing ancestral wounds, acts of service to the Self as well as the community, it devotes to creating space for our interwoven human experience.
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AB Moore, Fishwalker
NFS
Inspired by Junji Ito's science-fiction horror manga "GYO," this sculpture is a biomechanical chimaera- a fish with mechanized legs, ready to terrorize the streets.
@v_a_l_l_e_y
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Elmeater Morton, That's a Girl and a Boy and They Got a Foot
$100
Place, family and relationships are common themes informing Elmeator Morton’s body of abstract work. Her dense paintings are composed of layers of scratchy, repetitive marks, India ink and acrylic paint that seem to reflect the weight of emotional mileposts her family has experienced together as she captures the historic landscapes of her past. Her recent experiments in fiber and collage playfully expand on her paintings and drawings in their jarring juxtapositions, surprising humor, and bold use of uncommon materials. Elmeater is a participant of Elbow Room, a progressive studio in Portland supporting artists experiencing intellectual and developmental disabilities.
@elbow.room.pdx
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Vinh Pham, Tusk
$888
This piece combines the form of a pig skull with doll hands and arms. The arms act as tusks, surrounded by small hands that are sewn in where teeth should be. This piece is a chimera, in that it is the fusion of human parts with the parts of a boar; a homunculus, or a doll without a soul. Through making I am exploring the intersectional dissonance that manifests in my own identity. My work dances the edge between body horror, and cotton candy; this marriage is called soft-gore and is used as an analytical tool that delineates connections between heritage, assimilation, and autonomy.
@donutmutt
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Re Pinter, Spiraling
$50-100 sliding scale
The spiral of life! The return and depart! It is all one and the same and bending and morphing into something small, something big! The push and pull dizzy of being human! How we are pulled in and spun around with love and with pain. Confusing, silly, lonely, lovely. How strange! How beautiful!
@repinter
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Alim Ringgold, worn star
$1,125 for sculpture and pedestal or $450 for sculpture alone
A piece from a larger Installation called "Something Glimpsed Through a Parting in The Clouds." The project as a whole aims to consider diasporic connections to culture and spirituality on both a personal and a general scale. Centering ideas of physical displacement and destabilization through the creation of an in-between realm, I use ceramic sculpture, sound, light, and video projection as world building tools to bring to life a sentient and ambiguous landscape. I think of the sculptures as being constructed from a curious, black teleplasm, a shapeshifting material which searches for meaning through the constant creation, destruction, and recycling of strange and contorted landforms. The sculptures pull inspiration from geological formations and bodies both celestial and terrestrial.
@ne0lithh neolith.studio
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Davis Esther Rose, Gay Clock
NFS
My work is a digital clock with a teensy microcontroller, sensors, buttons/keys, & a display; in laser cut acrylic housing. When one button is pressed, the clock display shows "GAY" instead of the time, another displays "boob". I think it fits chimæra because it's combining a typically boring functional object with silliness, creativity, & queerness. And while the main function of the clock is preserved, the silly things I've added don't really have any 'function' outside of maybe making someone giggle or smile!
@dartvis
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Silas Ruesler, do not touch tank
NFS
Do not touch tank features the vagenome, companion of my former pet, the vagina fish, in its enclosure. This piece is a continuation of my work exploring my experience as a trans person, body dysphoria, the labor of self-care, and society’s perception of queer bodies. Imagining genitalia as something outside of ourselves, specifically as a pet, critiques the importance and borderline obsession society places on genitalia and identity, while translating the burden of living with a body you have a complicated relationship with. The birth of the vagenome is an example of bodily abstraction and world-building as a method of healing and reclaiming autonomy. Ultimately, this piece takes an absurdist and surreal approach to the dialogue surrounding trans bodies and society’s constant desire to police them.
@ko0l_dad silasruesler.com/
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Lauren Voight, gimme gimme
$350
composed of found toys and the glittery cellophane of childhood gimmicks, gimme gimme touches on the gross consumerism of childhood desires. although not the lovies i personally held, these found friends stand in for the treasures i begged my parents for and their fated demise into the ‘donate pile’ when something new came along. the insatiable nature of childhood sold to me as a kid is reimagined in this piece, exposing the exploitation of my youth.
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