LOST with a trace

It’s much easier to find something that is lost if you aren’t looking for anything in particular.

Four local artists will explore the significance of the word “lost” in today’s society in an art exhibition appropriately titled LOST at the Portland State Littman and White Galleries. The show will take place Thursday, April 5, through Friday, April 27.

The exhibit will feature pieces by Horia Boboia, Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, Alex Dolan and Rebecca Steele.

“This was an idea I had for a while, so I thought this was a good time to address it in this show,” said Horia Boboia, a professor of art at PSU. “It’s a commentary about the life of images, the way they travel, the way they are encountered and the way they get found and lost—moved from one context to another.”

LOST highlights the contemporary transformations of the photograph through the use of lost and found images collected from the vast anonymous pool on the Internet, in magazines and advertisements and other public sources. These found objects will be presented as “magical” artifacts.

“I invited three other artists to collaborate for this project to expose a personal collection of found photographs,” Boboia said. “The premise was to present four distinct compilations of photographs, which are arrived at through sorting and editing existing material gleaned from the web or other public sources. The unexpected appearance of these four encounters also mimics the way we encounter these images on a regular basis—unexpectedly and randomly.”

Horia Boboia was born in Romania and received his Bachelor’s and Master’s of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. He has been working at PSU since 2000. Since then, he has taught drawing, painting and mixed media classes and has worked with both undergraduate and graduate students in the fine arts programs.

With its focus on photography as an evolving medium, LOST is also presented as a part of Portland Photo Month.

“The show was actually designed to be part of the Portland Photo Month—intending to present another angle on the role of contemporary photography, the way it is distributed and the way it constructs and reconstructs our stories,” Boboia said.

For Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, the collaborative process is just as exciting as the results.

“This is my first time working with Alex [Dolan] and Horia [Boboia], but I am finding it to be a very fun and exciting experience,” Carney said. “Rebecca [Steele] and I have known one another for about five years and have worked on exhibitions together in the past, as well as spent a lot of time discussing contemporary art.

“Portland’s art community is intimate, so I was familiar with everyone’s work before being invited into the exhibition,” he continued. “It’s something that I like about the art community, that while we might not know each other very personally, we can all connect through conversation and the process of making.”

Carney is a local visual artist, writer and educator. He is the founder of Social Malpractice Publishing, an artist book distributor, and co-founder of the Conceptual Oregon Performance School, a free, artist-run school focusing on contemporary performance strategies and theory.

Carney holds an Master’s of Fine Arts in visual studies and teaches theory and practice in the Intermedia Department of Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Art.

“The pieces that I’m making are critiques of conceptual art, specifically contemporary minimalism,” Carney said. “Through a process of feeding famous contemporary artworks through a ‘Google Similar Image Search,’ I am finding compositional similarities between those exalted works of art and photographs of arbitrary, everyday items that are not meant to be considered in that context.”

Mostly known for his performance art, Carney has little experience with photography.

“Working with photography is not something that I normally do,” he said. “But the idea for this show allows someone like myself—who generally works in performance and writing—to adopt that medium and use it in a humorous and critical fashion.”

Also working with Boboia and Carney are artists Dolan and Steele. Steele is a West Coast-based artist, writer, photographer and historiographer whose work has been exhibited and published internationally by such organizations as Independent Curators International, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Publication Studios and Country Club Projects.

Dolan lives in Portland. His work investigates hybrid connections between technology and everyday life.

“I found a strange image series with a strange watermark, and I wanted to share it,” Dolan said. “These sorts of images are interesting and emerge from a process of deep searching. The aesthetics they promote are rare and have currency in image-making communities separate from fine art image-making communities.”