Summary: A Group of Urban Ducks Tour Portland’s Oldtown | Chinatown Galleries and Explore Public Art as Part of the Arts and Administration Program’s Arts and Visual Literacy. Urban Ducks are newly accepted and admitted University of Oregon students who have the opportunity to take courses at the White Stag Block.
Students in David Bretz’s Arts and Administration Program course, Art and Visual Literacy came to the University of Oregon in Portland’s White Stag location on July 12 for a special tour of art galleries and public art in the region. The course is geared to encourage
Students [to] explore the interactions of the physical, perceptual, affective, and cognitive modes of learning elements of experience, and how [these elements] come together in creating interpretations and forming judgments about the visual world.
The Friday, July 12 convergence began with a lecture by Bretz to introduce the students to the importance of noticing and observing their environment, to “start seeing and looking more and more at [their] personal environment and to recognize the culture of another.” [Instructor David Bretz]. Bretz continued, emphasizing that “artists are always coming up with new ideas and ways of expressing ideas” —letting us, as the audience, know “we are not alone in our (or their) feelings.” We, as the observers of culture and art, noted Bretz, are being “[pushed] as an audience to see more than what we would normally see” by art, architectural decoration | embellishment and design.
After the tour, I asked the instructor to comment on the course thus far and to summarize his reflections not only regarding the objectives of the course but also in relation to his students. What follows is instructor Bretz’s response:
Art and Visual Literacy is a course that is designed to assist individuals in becoming more conscious of and more adept at using visualization as part of their intuitive intelligences. This course draws upon the cultural matrix of ideas and practices associated with the arts to develop a broader understanding of the visual world and our interactions with the innumerable things we see. In addition, students are introduced to a set of conceptual skills for actively shaping and creating meanings in their visual culture.
The objective of the tour was to have students experience looking at a variety of visual phenomena within a specific cultural environment of China Town and the Pearl District in downtown Portland. I thought the students were attentive and interactive with the various visual images we observed. I thought it particularly interesting to observe the students looking at and using the terms of the elements and principles of design in their descriptions and discussions of various architectural details on buildings in this area of Portland. In addition to looking at signage, wall murals, sculpture and landscaping in this urban center, the students visited three art galleries, Butters Gallery LTD, Augen Gallery, and Froelick Gallery.
I have a culturally diverse class with European Americans, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean students. An objective was to have students look at a variety of objects and art within a specific area noting the culturally influenced architecture, sculpture and landscape decorations and to analyze and make meaning from what they perceive. I remember discussing an image under a street-side sculpture, where there was a carved granite stone with an image of a fish and an abacus. I asked the students to identify what these images were. There was no problem with the image of the fish, but only the Asian students knew about the image of the abacus. They called it a “calculator”…
I noticed that the students were beginning to use their descriptive and interpretational skills when they viewed the art in the three galleries we visited. It is very gratifying to observe students using newly discovered skills when viewing art. I believe the students were engaged in viewing the variety of visual art and objects, asking questions and contributing to discussions during the tour. I believe their willingness to explore art and culture and to express opinions and personal perspectives in this regard is commendable.
Images from July 12, 2013.
Instructor David Bretz addresses students in his course, Art and Visual Literacy at the UO in Portland.Students learn to notice decoration and embellishment in the built environment, here on the White Stag Block.Instructor Bretz pauses to have students consider the graphic design elements of the Old Town mural and how it works to convey a feeling, mood and overall, aesthetic.The tour included encouraging students to look at all aspects of their environment.The use of fonts in branding was considered as students were asked to regard how a font used in a logo conveys identity, history, and mood.In Chinatown, instructor Bretz urged students to look at the elements that conveyed a feeling of what makes this place "Chinatown."Looking at the public art, the "abacus" familiar to some of the students is in this piece.Gesturing to the lamp posts, the public art and the exterior facades of the surrounding buildings, Bretz's guidance introduced students to greater understanding of their environment.At Butters Gallery.Butters Gallery.Butters Gallery.Butters Gallery.Butters Gallery.Butters Gallery.Butters Gallery.Looking at public art: Nepenthes by Dan CorsonInstructor Bretz teaching about the ability of the public to touch, handle and directly have contact with public art---not so the case with art in galleries where the etiquette is much different. Here, Dan Corson's Nepenthes.Looking in shop windows and noticing the use of fonts, display of art and various other visual "cues."Froelick Gallery.Froelick Gallery.Froelick Gallery.Froelick Gallery.Froelick Gallery with gallery director, Rebecca Rockom.Froelick Gallery.Augen Gallery.Augen Gallery.Augen Gallery.Augen Gallery's Bob Kochs talks to students about the current international art market.Augen Gallery.Augen Gallery.Students gathered brochures for art exhibitions in Portland from the galleries.Watching Regional Arts and Culture Council install permanent plaques for the public art installation by Dan Corson: Nepenthes, Davis Street in Old Town | Chinatown.Reading the public art plaques installed by the Regional Arts and Culture Council for Dan Corson's Nepenthes on Davis Street.
Damien Gilley | Image Courtesy of Oregon Arts Commission | Sabina Samiee
For those of us lucky enough to have encountered a visual arts, design or creativity-based education somewhere in our past, at one point, we, invariably, were exposed to the fundamentals of formal analysis—an effort to analyze formal aspects of a work of art by dissecting the artist’s efforts into elements and principles. It is a concept and a process that usually begins at the beginning: with a discussion of composition and the use of the simple line.
A line. It has the uncanny ability to take us from one place to another. It leads, we follow. It can be many things: thick, thin, horizontal, vertical, short, tall, diagonal. However, it is anything but basic. This extending mark or lingering stroke, stretching into space without much width to speak of, is the fundamental mark in all works of art. It defines, it divides, it embellishes, it conquers: it shows us the way. It can flow like a Rodin sketch, strut across a wheatfield with van Gogh precision, it can soar into the heights of a cathedral or flee into oblivion; it can provoke us Rising Down in a Mehretu. It is a shape that defies shape, a force not purely found in nature (a place that seems to have realized the value of mass and substance), and a definition of all things both real and imagined.
Into this linear exploration of the possibility of contour, comes Damien Gilley armed sometimes with only his ubiquitous roll of masking tape. Perhaps best described in his own words, Gilley is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in Portland, Oregon. And he makes use of the line. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Hardly. Take a look.
His biography tells us his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Tetem Kunstruimte (Enschede, Netherlands), EastWestProject (Berlin, DE), Las Vegas Art Museum, Arthouse (Austin), the Art Museum of South Texas (Corpus Christi), and in Portland at Rocksbox, Linfield College, Wieden+Kennedy, the American Institute of Architects, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and the Portland 2010 Biennial, among others. Creating work with a global acceptance, Gilley is finding his method embraced by varying public and private entities.
His work has been reviewed by Artforum.com, the Oregonian, Willamette Week, Portland Mercury, Las Vegas Review Journal, the Austin Chronicle, drainmag.com, and was included recently in New American Paintings.
This winter term 2013 at the University of Oregon in Portland School of Architecture and Allied Arts, Damien Gilley joined us as an adjunct instructor for the Digital Arts Program. He is leading the pack of voracious fifth year BFA Digital Arts students in more ways than one: ambitiously planning student exhibitions in our White Stag Light Commons space, inviting special guest presentations and critiques to interact with his students, and planning future review sessions. He has taken to our space like a well-seasoned regular, utilizing the Output Room and radiating out his special brand of digitalesque-handmade work. And that is a key part of his intrigue—that unification of the digital with the hand-done. It might seem mystifying and slightly oxymoronic but it works in a very avant-garde, technology-based Portland-cum-DIY way. This year, in particular, his presence seems somewhat unstoppable. Get off a plane at the Portland International Airport, and winding your way through Concourse A, you get to pass Gilley’s latest in-the-public-eye installation. It is large and mesmerizing–blue masking tape spanning, reaching, breaching, transporting us away little by adhesive little. It is Gilley in his element—taking us places using technology and masking tape– and all we have to do is stand and stare and visually wander. Even when the tape begins to dry, the sticky-stuff harden and peel off the wall, Gilley delightfully accepts this as all part of the process–“that’s what happens,” he cheerfully insists, “that makes it handmade.” His philosophy on this merging of true high-tech and lowly rolls of hardware-store tape truly provides the cohesive core the medium (tape) might lack.
Damien Gilley’s new exhibit ‘Skywalker’, located along Concourse A, is a masterpiece crafted entirely from masking tape. Image from Port of Portland Facebook page.
I asked Gilley to tell me about his practice, his process and his experience (or the experience he hopes to have here at the UO in Portland). And while I was fascinated by his recent installation at the Portland International Airport and the idea of masking tape (still absolutely captivated by the idea of masking tape….), this was to be a chance to let Gilley enlighten our left brain | right brain balance and give us a glimpse of how he is able to use a line in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
Gilley says,
My practice finds its home in a fine art context, creating installations and large-scale drawings in situ that challenge a viewer’s rational understanding of space. I use digital design programs to sketch and plan these experiential projects, ranging from Illustrator to Google SketchUp, which I utilized first as a graphic designer in Los Angeles a decade ago. Now I use these tools to produce work that references digital languages, but are ultimately executed by hand in materials that step away from digital processes, like masking tape for instance.
Cashmere Fatigue vinyl and airbrush East/West Project, Berlin, Germany
Regarding his work with the Digital Arts’ students:
I am excited to develop dialog with the students about the hybrid nature of art making today, especially in the context of a digital/physical relationship. I think it is critical as artists to continue to question processes of making and develop lateral thinking strategies that explore new methods of understanding our world. The students do not need to invent completely new processes necessarily, but instead find a personal relationship to their investigations of our contemporary, digital society. This leads to a variety of complex projects that explore unique approaches to making and alternative exhibition possibilities.
Being an artist who identifies with both traditional media and digital processes, I love the opportunity to contribute my conceptual interests in the field to the AAA dialogue. I feel programs that saturate themselves in the current digital reality have the most potential of new programs today, really digesting the contemporary landscape in a complex way that investigates visual, cultural, virtual, and interactive phenomena.
And what we have to look forward to this term:
The students will create new work for a midway exhibition in February in addition to the development of their thesis culmination in May. Throughout the term various artists will come share their work, in particular artists who traverse both contemporary art and design practices. These will be valuable interactions with active exhibiting artists. It is a great opportunity for intimate discussion and conversation about how to exhibit locally and nationally, what digital processes do for artwork today, and how the art and design worlds correlate.
Pene gave her presentation as part of this year’s Gunilla Finrow Distinguished Lectureship in Interior Architecture for the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Gunilla Finrow attended the lecture. Commenting on Professor Finrow’s attendance, Pene said,
I was very honored to have Gunilla Finrow, for whom the lecture series is named, come down from Seattle to attend my lecture. And pleased also to have many colleagues, students and friends both from the university and from the Portland community attending. Some of which were from GBD Architects and team members on many of the projects I presented. It was nice to be able to share the highlights of my career with both old and new acquaintances.
Jody Pene greeted by Gunilla Finrow just prior to Pene's Portland lecture at the UO White Stag.
Associate professor Alison Snyder from the UO AAA Department of Architecture introduced Pene, commending the visiting professor on a long and varied career that involved significant commercial and graphic design work and color expertise. Snyder remarked favorably on the opportunity to have Pene deliver her lecture both in Eugene (November 7, 2012) and in Portland; noting that it is a privilege to be able to “bring what we do in Eugene outside of Eugene to Portland and beyond—being seen and heard in places farther away” and to have the ability to provide lectures of this content and calibre to an interested community and metropolitan audience, such as that in Portland.Pene, in addition to her visiting professorship, is also on the UO AAA Board of Visitors. Professor Snyder thanked Pene for her ongoing and multi-tiered involvement with the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts.
Beginning by illuminating her design philosophy, Pene spoke of several key factors that have played a major role in her career: the need for having a strong concept, recognizing an individual culture and goals, and being able to identify the appropriate environment of the business or client—these factors merge together in the creation of a project solution that is unique to each design venture.
Pene graduated from the University of Oregon in 1972 with a bachelor of interior architecture. She immediately moved into her professional career relocating to Pittsburgh to work in graphic arts and interior design. At this early juncture, she found value in working with a team-based approach and discerned significant demand for her skills in signage and graphic design. In the 1970s, Pene relied on her, what she calls “old fashioned” handcrafting skills of drawing everything by hand and using tools such as pastels and pencil to convey ideas.
It was early in her UO studies and work career that Pene discovered her great love of “color and the play of patterns.” Calling upon this interest and her ability to bring together meaningful and attractive explorations of color and pattern once in a professional context, Pene’s career blossomed. She returned to the West Coast in the late 1970s to begin work with two highly significant Oregon architectural firms, Boora Architects (1978-1984) and GBD Architects Incorporated (1984-2010) where she held the position of principal for sixteen years and the principal-in-charge of interior design for twelve of those years.
Pene spoke of realizing the importance of collaboration in projects and of working with the entire team to create a strong concept. While her expertise would lie in the designing of the color palette and graphic arts component of the project, she consistently realized that it was vital everyone in the firm work together to pull the project together to create something remarkable.
Pene feels a pinnacle of her career came with her work on the renovation of Portland, Oregon’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Here she worked on the interior to come up with fifty-four new colors that would accentuate the Italian Renaissance details and inform the aesthetic of the greater interior. Everything from overall carpet patterns and specific border patterns, to the overall interior design concept complete with soaring theatrical spaces culminates to present a space of intricate detail and graciously considerate historical appreciation. It became a space uniquely suited to its culturally-grounded purpose.
During her lecture, Pene discussed her range of work incorporating independent interior projects such as those at elegant Portland accounting firms and law offices. Pene recalls that she remained true to her own design philosophy whether designing way-finding signage for a stadium or the exclusive interior of a highly prestigious law firm: the importance of designing to the individual personality of the firm or the business always remained at the forefront.
As time passed and her career continued, Pene began to realize changes in the field and practical changes in the greater societal situation that would have consequences for how she worked and what she designed. In the early 2000s, Pene saw a shift in how people would relate to a building and how the interior design could be used to create spaces conducive to stimulating creativity. The design work at Wieden + Kennedy’s Dekum Building illustrated to her how a more casual building “painted white and with playful sculptural forms” could be used to encourage innovation and creative work.
This was a change Pene had seen emerging about a decade earlier. As the 1990s had progressed, she noticed that there was a transition occurring from traditional design to design that was more responsive to change and to the creation of warmth in spaces –spaces that could foster person-to-person interaction, collaboration, and conversation.
The future of design, says Pene, was venturing into the realm of exploring flexibility and adaptability in the workplace. This new approach embraced the concept of an open office that can be re-configured to contribute more effectively and cooperatively to a collaborative workforce. Some of the initial big businesses to adopt this free and flexible design philosophy were places like Wieden + Kennedy, Columbia Sportswear, and Nike. Pene’s design theory, readily adopted by the aforementioned clients, forged ahead creating spaces that affirmed creativity while retaining corporate identity.
By establishing connections to the corporate ethos and maintaining strong ties to the sense of a unified whole or corporate campus, Pene was able to design spaces that respond to a human element, are comfortably sociable, and encouraging to innovative thought. In addition to being sensitive to place and her understanding of the humanistic component, throughout her career, Pene advocated for a palette of materials as well as colors that would allow a positive psychological emotional response, physically provide a comfortable space, and energize inventive behavior. Sometimes inspired by “aesthetically unconventional interiors,” Pene spoke of the ability of a space to encourage or foster creativity and innovation.
As changes occurred in the economy and global marketplace, Pene traced progressions in the way designs changed for her clients. Developments in environmental considerations brought new products and the desire for sustainable materials. Pene saw opportunities to integrate the newly renovated spaces of previously industrial buildings into simple and contemporary spaces blending the existing exposed structural elements as a beautiful, raw part of the entire concept. Patina-coated steel columns would become exposed, a testimony of history and permanence and be combined with a new concrete structure to produce a relaxed and informal atmosphere encouraging teamwork. [Such as with GBD’s new Pearl District building.]
These innovative design principles intentionally promoted client and staff intermingling which was a distinct shift from the decades previous where offices might be cubicle-style, isolated or closed off to integration and interaction with others. Pene explained the changes in the nation’s economy and the world led to a more competitive global economy. This, in turn, brought about another change in the needs of corporate and office design: with the new digital age was the demise of the on-site printed book or need for prodigious library-like rooms in design projects for law firms. Instead, research could now be done online, at desks with computers in shared spaces and more open places.
Another change, altered the ubiquitous conference room. Communication was more electronic and conference centers could have multi-purposes with the invention of privacy screens and glass (technological innovations that changed the needs of the space). With economic and financial considerations in mind, saving money and cutting costs was a definite concern, too. Consequently, only one floor needed to receive and be open to the public thus decreasing overhead costs. Spaces were becoming lighter and brighter. People were to be encouraged to work together, to create in a more warm and welcoming environment and to realize to potential of shared spaces and daily interaction.
Pene highlighted development of trends we might consider commonplace today: the on-site workplace cafe and simple, social gathering spaces. Both of these concepts encourage on-site lingering collaboration, conversations and teamwork. People stay together longer, have more conversations and work gets done leading to greater productivity and the exchange of ideas. Even the advent of more modular furniture in the workplace allows for more space and more efficiency letting departments grow and shrink, use space and easy-to-move furniture as needed, and be more flexible to the needs of people.
The interior designer described how previously high-end law offices began to transition to interior spaces that were “home-like in quality” rather than strictly formal, dark and heavy. Pene associates these specific developments with creating spaces that let people “linger, relate, converse, and exchange ideas.”
Summing up her recent projects with slides of the Meriwether towers on Portland’s South Waterfront and the Center for Health and Healing (OHSU), Pene discussed her continued exploration into a design philosophy that creates a “living room feel.” At the Health and Healing center, Pene designed an interior that was restorative and innovative while being LEED Platinum: she was stunningly successful. She spoke of her work with Camera World and how she limited the palette there to mirror the products relying on black, silver, and nods to technology as a overall theme.
With a full and productive career, Pene now plans to continue semi-retirement sharing her time between Oregon and her beloved home in Montone, Italy where she finds pleasure in photographing and drawing the fields and farmland. This rural Italian paradise provides Pene with plenty of time to discover history, art, architecture and landscape…..and she continues to enjoy depicting her environment (by hand) in pastel, appreciating and being “enthralled by the seasons, the colors, the patterns.”
Pene showed a series of her photographs and pastels: a collection of images including poppy fields, mustard fields, a field of onions in bloom, sunflowers, an olive orchard. She spoke with great affection for the natural and agricultural environment that surrounds her in Italy and explained the “sense of revealing, in color and texture and shape, the potential of light and shadow, the symmetry and order, the curve and line, even in a random, eclectic pattern of blooming poppies in a field.”
As she looks towards a future well-immersed in the things she loves and still active in a field she has made great contributions to, Pene noted that with her recent experience at the University of Oregon as an instructor, she has now discovered a new interest: teaching and working with students. She would like to teach abroad in Italy to exchange students traveling there for the first time. Her career, she says, has allowed her to see the importance of international study to enhance the forward progression of one’s design ability and knowledge, reviatlizing creativity and bringing fresh perspectives. She encourages all students to step into the international sphere of educational experience to ignite their creativity and expand their reference. And, even in an age of digital dominance, students, she recommends, still need to learn to draw by hand.
Regarding her own continual exploration of trends, and innovative design thinking, Pene says she relies on her photography, her sketching and various sources of media to help inform and expand her knowledge and bring inspiration. She also gratefully acknowledges her frequent world traveling and attendance at fairs such as the The Milan Furniture Fair (Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano) and NeoCan Chicago as key in continuing to fuel her creative energy and staying appraised, or even ahead, of trends. Keeping in touch with the pulse of the contemporary design field is further accomplished, she says, by reading a plethora of online sources and publications.
A current that continually flows through Pene’s design work and consistently infuses her ability to design meaningful, thoughtful and yet dramatic and captivating interiors, is her understanding of the importance of collaboration on her projects. While she acknowledges the design community has changed over her forty year career, she cites how important her graphic design experience has been in assisting her creative work from the beginning. There is “a strength and a clarity” to projects today, she remarked, to the way people work together which she finds quite beneficial and refreshing. Being conscious of patterns and color, and tying a project together by identifying what is required to accomplish the specific goals remains the main objective of Pene’s work ethic. She emphasized the interaction between all involved, but overall, it is the sense of collaboration that is the sine qua non of every project.
Remarking on the tremendous changes in the design field, both in approach and materials that has taken place during the last four decades, Pene recalled that as trends emerge, and change is inevitable, the observation of what is needed, and wanted and being able to adapt that to a design is a vitally important aspect of any project.
The years have defined a gradual progression in her work projects—projects that moved from the creation of formal spaces to the innovative and imaginative formulation of casual spaces. And along with this inventive approach to the workplace, human, and space interaction, Pene has seen that letting people be comfortable encourages interaction, bringing about more creative and worthwhile production, and, in the end, making a more successful product.
Jody Pene at the White Stag, UO in Portland to deliver her lecture, 40 Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward.
Jody Pene | Pastel sketch called "Poggiolo," a fall scene of the countryside at a villa in Chianti, Tuscany (Italy).
