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It isn’t often that students and recent graduates get a chance to show their art at a high-end commercial gallery. Last weekend, the downtown-based Mark Woolley Gallery changed that with a disarming exhibition dominated by two of Portland State’s own.
Nestled into a corner among several other polished galleries, the Woolley Gallery looks down from the third floor of Pioneer Place’s atrium. There, the gallery’s monthly Third Saturday opening featured work by recent graduate Kayla Newell and Hayden Taatjes, a current undergraduate at PSU.
Their joint exhibition will show through the month of Febuary, displaying a mix of media including drawings, photographic prints and sculpture.
“Because Mark Woolley’s gallery has been around for awhile, most of the work he shows is from artists he’s had an established relationship with,” Newell said. “We’re the first emerging artists he’s shown in some time.”
The show opening was lively and energetic, with deejays spinning a mix of rock and electronic music and a constant flow of viewers from a range of ages and backgrounds. People mingled and looked at art, partook of refreshments offered by the gallery and danced.
But the charged social atmosphere didn’t seem to compete with an art exhibition that was both youthful and sophisticated.
Taatjes’s work bloomed across the left walls in an ultra-tight, mixed installment of photographs and drawings. The works depicted an array of subjects, from artfully drawn partial nudes to studies of tools such as ladders and knives.
Photographs displayed living scenes and landscapes. Carefully framed in black, white and brown, they spread in a configuration so closely wound together that each work had dialogue with every piece around it. The works were displayed as a singular whole, titled No Need for Fun.
“Everything comes from my head. I don’t use direct references or life models,” Taatjes said. “Because of that, I focus on man-made and natural objects with shapes or lines I can manipulate into recognizable images.”
Taatjes also commented on the tight and hectic configuration of his installation, which he balanced with deliberately clean decisions about framing and finishing.
“I want people to see my artwork as I see it in my head—which is a big mess altogether, but very clean in the final presentation,” he said. “I make sure everything is framed and put together, in the end.”
Taatjes’s flanked his body of images on either side with a pair of sculptures on pedestals. On one end rested a wood sculpture; on the other, what looked like a found antler. Taatjes chose to let the viewer fill in the context rather than offer commentary.
“Basically, because everything in my drawing came from my head, I wanted to pull from nature for my sculptural works,” he said. “That’s all I have to say about them.”
Newell’s extensive body of work featured mixed media drawings that spread across the back and right walls. Her arrangement included works in a variety of sizes, often framed with a consideration similar to Taatjes’s work.
Her work depicts pen-drawn geometrical and geological forms: from basic shapes to pyramids to depictions of rocks and crystals. The precise penmanship is balanced with amorphous swells of pastel colors in watercolor and gouache.
“I feel like this body of work has been in progress for three years. I focused on lines, geometry and space for a long time before really going into color,” Newell said. “This balance of geometry and shapes is a way for me to make sense of the color in the work. When I learned I could add lines made of color, I started adding that into the work.”
This show is not the first joint exhibition by Taatjes and Newell. Newell, a recent art history graduate, and Taatjes, an arts major, met while serving internships at an Everett Station studio and gallery, MoHDI, before showing at Portland State’s Food For Thought Cafe.
That on-campus show led to their current internship with the Mark Woolley Gallery.
“We both initially met because we shared a professor, Sara Siestreem, who introduced us to Drew Anderson and suggested that we work at his MoHDI gallery,” Newell said.
The crowd bustled with people throughout the course of the evening, with a constant flow of traffic moving through to engage with the artwork. Onlookers reacted with excitement to the young artists’ work.
Paul Soriano, director of the downtown-based Cock Gallery, offered glowing commentary on Newell’s work.
“It’s brilliant, fucking brilliant,” he said. “You see this kind of work often, in terms of process, but not many people really pull it off so well. She absolutely does. She really speaks through her work.”
Drew Anderson, of MoHDI, remarked on the quality of the show as he viewed Taatjes’s work.
“It’s an impressive show,” Anderson said. “It’s great to see the progression they’ve made. I’m fortunate to see what they were working on initially, and where it’s come. I can’t wait to see what they do next.”
Both Newell and Taatjes were happy with the success of the opening and excited for more to come. Asked whether they would continue to show jointly, both Newell and Taatjes seemed uncertain but optimistic.
“It’s bound to happen, because we’re both contemporary artists working in the same place,” Taatjes said. “On one hand, I’m curious to see how my work looks alone, but on the other, I really fucking like how Kayla and I work together.”