Students set out to sea

Amid the grizzly bramble of two Time-Based Art shows, student registration and an absorbed public drifting through the ground floor galleries at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s collaborative exhibition every which way emits a quiet exuberance from the BFA Gallery.

Amid the grizzly bramble of two Time-Based Art shows, student registration and an absorbed public drifting through the ground floor galleries at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s collaborative exhibition every which way emits a quiet exuberance from the BFA Gallery.

The multimedia installation consists of pencil and charcoal drawings on the walls, a model wooden boat with tiny movies displayed inside and stacks of paper objects. These include books hidden inside plain white covers, a take-home word search miniature of the puzzle printed on the wall, and postcards of the two artists launching their model sailboat. The work provides an interactive context for searchers and explorers among those who drift in to see the art.

A sprawling map of the world stretches over three of the walls, with swirling trade routes illustrated by factual statements on ocean voyages, famous explorers and failed investigations past.  Facing the map is a muddy charcoal drawing of a freeway with a person walking in the shadows alongside the road as if wading through water. Having talked together with Paulsen about the possibilities for the installation for as long as a year, Gray made the drawings and projected enlarged versions on the wall, which the pair traced together in a careful effort to create the impression of a single hand in the images and script.

The freeway image is also featured in Paulsen’s I’m Searching Too, a project commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art for the Time-Based Art festival this year. For the work, the artist sent postcards to private homes with an image of himself walking toward a patch of grass under an elevated freeway—his back to the camera, and the phrase “I’m Searching Too” printed on the back with nothing else but the artist’s name and address and the recipient’s address printed elaborately in calligraphy, as on an invitation or gift.

According to Gray, every which way is related to Paulsen’s postcard mailing in that the simultaneous projects have as their subject the drive to search and explore. She mentions the Dutch performance artist and photographer Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared from his 13-foot sailboat in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic in the third and final installation of an art piece he called In Search of the Miraculous. Gray stated that the installation every which way is “a room created for the explorer,” though much like Ader’s work, a distinct ending may never be known.

Selected from PNCA student proposals by a panel for each month throughout the year, BFA Gallery shows are part of the open classroom design completed by Holst Architecture with former employee Randy Higgins in 1998. A converted warehouse, the building is an active exhibition space ringed by loft-style classrooms along a metal walkway on the second floor. The integration of classroom, gallery and studio help activate the space into a process-oriented platform for creating and questioning.

The BFA Gallery provides an opportunity for students to take part in First Thursdays, the open gallery night for Pearl district and downtown art openings, as well as to display alongside fellow artists and students in the Feldman Gallery and Swigert Commons. 

Gray and Paulsen take control of the unique shape of the BFA Gallery space, which is a kind of angled seven with a hook at the tip, and keep it from feeling awkward through their particular placement of images and objects. The tiered stack of books covered in white paper (but unable to hide their colored edges and yellowed pages) sit in a narrow corner cut off from the neighboring Feldman Gallery with a sheet. Normally a strange dead end for walking and looking, the books appear on the periphery, in a tower just out of the way, with the pile of take-home puzzles piled on top. A furtive glance through some of the topmost items confirmed their reality—the books have words inside and seemingly reference the exhibit in their titles, Autobiography of a Search and Basic Spanish.

Paulsen explained that the two artists did extensive library research on explorations and sea voyages over the summer, later curating their findings into the most appropriate examples to include in the installation. Gray’s interest in searching within a text is emphasized alongside Paulsen’s familial relation to sailing: his father held a commercial captain’s license and was an avid weekend sailor, and the tiny films inside Gray and Paulsen’s model boat were spliced together from 8mm films Paulsen’s grandparents took sailing off the shores of Connecticut and on the Puget Sound.

Gray and Paulsen are seniors at PNCA, and though they intend to collaborate in the future, their individual thesis projects will take up much of their time before graduation this year.

every which way is open in the BFA gallery at PNCA, 224 N.W. 13th Ave., until Sep. 30. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week.