Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/05/2017
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location
White Gallery
1825 SW Broadway St, Suite 289 --Portland
The Day is Bright with Burning Fossils | Kaia Sand
On view: May 5–26, 2017
Reception: Weds, May 5, 6–8 pm
To better understand our future transformed by a warming climate, I try to read the present, sooty with the omnipresent burning of the anciently dead and newly dead: fossil fuels and biofuels. If we are moving toward an epic transformation of how we power our lives, we are saying goodbye, a grotesque goodbye, to flames. The moth, also disastrously drawn to flames, is a central image of this installation, symbolically charged with its behaviors—creating holes in cloth, flying toward celestial light and flames, and nesting in cabinet corners.
Cloth gestures toward the corporeal; it is a proxy for the body that it swaddles, clothes, and shrouds. Motivated by the relationship between textile and text, I write by embroidering as well as burning cloth to print language. I also stitch with copper unwound from electrical wire. This is poetry written with thread and flame and copper, an investigation of corporeal decay, fire, and power.
Kaia Sand works across genres and media, dislodging her investigative poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts, including walks, installations, and a magic show. This spring she exhibited her artwork in the Expanded Readings show at the University of Reno, curated by Inge Bruggeman. She served as a Despina Artist Resident at Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and as artist-in-residence with Garrick Imatani at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center.
She is the author of A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish Press 2016), Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010), and interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic book of the year; and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). Her text comprises two books in Jim Dine’s Hot Dream (Steidl Editions 2008). She documents her poems, exhibitions, and projects at:
http://kaiasand.net/
http://
The Littman and White Galleries are student-run exhibition spaces at Portland State University. Our mission is to provide the tools for a critical experience of visual culture through direct exposure to a comprehensive program of contemporary art for students and community members. We envision the Littman and White Galleries as centers for cultural enrichment where an indispensable art experience is accessible to all perspectives and levels of education.