Bringing geology to the foreGround

Artwork takes a different approach to geology in the foreGround exhibition in Portland State’s Littman Gallery, located on the second floor of Smith Memorial Student Union.

Guest curator Jeff Jahn wanted to challenge the other galleries in the city with an exhibition that was more than the traditional landscapes, trees and rain.

“I wanted to do something that’s relevant,” Jahn said. “This is a landscape show with no proper landscape in it. It’s about material and cognition, the way we process the landscape and how it lives in our memory.”

The central theme of the exhibition is geology. Jahn wanted to be a geologist when he was a child and now considers himself an amateur geologist. From that prompt, the six artists have produced artwork that is unusual and diverse.

“I was looking for artists that could flesh out the experience of landscape in a non-descriptive, non-literal way,” Jahn said.

Artist Jim Neidhardt’s piece, titled “Atomic Fireballs,” is a series of paint stick drawings of red, tumultuous objects meant to represent flaming rocks and meteors.

“I saw that the show seemed to have a physical earth focus,” Neidhardt said. Initially he had planned to make his piece a series of red hot rocks, but he didn’t have enough time to work on it. “That’s when I came up with the idea of doing drawings of the same idea.”

Jahn explained that Neidhardt’s piece symbolizes mortality.

“Jim is commenting on the human tendency to fear what we can’t see immediately, how we always worry something will fall out of the sky,” Jahn said.

The foreGround exhibit features art from radically different media. Neidhardt’s drawings contrast with their neighboring piece, Zachary Davis’s “Rovers,” which utilizes both a pile of sand and a video projection.

“I was really lucky to find Zack’s piece, which takes the computer-generated world and mashes it up with a 3D gallery setting,” Jahn said.

One of the artists, Arcy Douglass, was originally an architect, but found that his true passion was for art.

“It is a good example of the case that one does not choose to be an artist. Either it is in you or it isn’t,” Douglass said. “If it is in you, there is nothing else that you can do.”

Douglass used a computer program to help generate his pieces, which at first glance look like simple black-and-white patterns, but represent both the order and chaos of nature.

“I am very interested in unstructured, non-hierarchical spaces like stars in the night sky,” he said. “We are talking about stars but we could just as easily be talking about the spaces creating in rivers, mountains, oceans, sand dunes or even patterns created in rocks and trees.”

Douglass said that nature has always inspired him.

“Nature is more complex, more subtle, more colorful than what artists normally create. It is the ultimate teacher,” he said. “I am trying to tap into nature in order to bring some of that complexity into my own work.  

“You get a certain calming effect when you see a fractal form field,” Jahn said. “It looks like a pattern, but the more you look, the more you see a logic that is beyond human intelligence. It has an organized and disorganized affect.”

Modern art can often be confusing at first glance because it differs from our basic expectations of art. But Neidhardt believes that modern art is whatever the viewer makes of it.

“It’s on you to see whether it resonates with you. It’s not up to the artist to provide you with the guidance on that,” Neidhardt said.

He thinks that art students especially benefit from this exhibition because it goes beyond formal writing programs that only teach technique and finish.

“Some people think art is about aesthetics, what’s beautiful,” Neidhardt said. “But I don’t think what most artists are working towards what’s beautiful. I think people are working toward what they’re seeing.”

Douglass agreed that students find the exhibition interesting.

“It demonstrates different ways to establish a deep connection to places that we collectively inhabit without necessarily having to represent it,” he said.

Jahn has a specific idea that he hopes people will take from the art.

“The exhibition is a ‘think piece.’ It’s here to make you think about something that’s in plain sight, which is geology. I think people should be more conscious about what’s underneath their feet,” he said. “This art is a prompt. It doesn’t give you answers; it makes you think and reconsider.”

The Littman Gallery is open weekdays from noon to 4 p.m. The foreGround exhibition will run through Wednesday, Nov. 23.