For Immediate Release:

Contact:

Gabe Flores, Director

Surplus Space

3726 NE 7^th Ave

Portland, OR  97212

surplusspace@gmail.com  

503 550 1885

For more information about Over and Back visit overandback2015.wordpress.com

Surplus Space is pleased to announce Over and Back, a dynamic exhibition curated by Ryan Woodring and special guest curator Roz Crews. 

 

Artist Talks: Saturday, April 25th at 11 am 

Talks will take place off-site at Likewise, an arts/sports bar. Brunch included

3664 SE Hawthorne Blvd 

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 25th from 7 – 10 pm

Open Call event/Closing: Thursday, May 14th from 7:30 – 9 pm

Over and Back refers to a rule in basketball in which a team who has taken the ball beyond the half-court line into the opponent’s territory cannot voluntarily retreat past that line without penalty. Since sports journalists are particularly prone to wordplay, the phrase was borrowed to describe a unique binary in professional sports culture relating to the act of remembering. On one hand, sports are characterized by an ephemerality in which players are cycled through their youth and each year, regardless of the previous season’s successes or failures, the standings reset. While players are encouraged to forget, those who watch sports engage in a growing economy based in remembering. Fans, and the market surrounding them, capture and monumentalize fleeting moments of muscular serendipity with an expansive set of recording devices. The artists in this exhibition use the material of spectatorship, from televisions to t-shirts, to form nuanced personal and communal takeaways from fandom culture. With arrow-sized sewing needles, motorized tracks, silkscreened memorials, and karaoke pep-talks, each artist effectively plays on both ends of the court.

Surplus Space, as a residential gallery, plays a fitting role in hosting an exhibition about domesticated sports culture. Greg J. Hayes‘ 500h49m, a series of over 150 individual photographic accounts of every game of the 2008 Red Sox season as seen on television, greets us in the parlor. Hayes set his camera’s lens on the televisions that broadcast each game and exposed each photograph for the entire duration of the game. The over-exposed television screens obliterate the content of the games while illuminating the static furniture that accompanies the restless Boston fan who waits the entire year for the team to return to the World Series.

On the other side of the parlor hangs Carolyn Castaño and Gary Dauphin‘s Asesinados United, a fantasy team of silk-screened shirts portraying eleven different murdered or mysteriously deceased soccer stars. Fan-fueled deaths rupture the perceived distance between player and spectator and public and private. The shirts (which are available to purchase in a range of sizes) serve dual functions as they memorialize the player while also identifying with the fan whose most common show of support is the donning of the jersey.

In the adjacent white box, Terry Boyd violently sews large canvases using a bow and arrow with an attached string. In Bow and Arrow Sewing, Boyd confines the act of archery to an unthreatening domestic space, allowing our eyes and ears to witness the cacophonous pairing of questionable myths (male as hunter) with current conditions of domestic dwelling. Using sewing as a backdrop, Boyd’s performance highlights, among several other intricacies of modern gender renegotiations, the enigmatic role of sports culture as both a promoter and an outlet for physical aggression on and off the field.

In the street-level black box, Hand2Mouth‘s Julie Hammond, Liz Hayden, Faith Helma, Erin Leddy, and Jonathan Walters (director) reconfigure their interactive Pep Talk play for a four-hour opening-night-only performance. In this comically exaggerated portrayal of sports mentorship, Hand2Mouth’s actors play the part of life coaches who channel famous sports speeches with the help of cryptic karaoke equipment. Pep Talk samples the unrelenting optimism of American sports culture to prompt more difficult conversations about the interchangeability of roles between coach and player, mentor and pupil, and ultimately, winner and loser.

Guest curator Roz Crews, creator of The Art and Sports Notebook blog is curating Surplus Space’s kitchen, hallway, and backyard. The artists who will be showing work include Amanda Leigh Evans, Adam Moser and Sean Starowitz.

Amanda Leigh Evans’ Open Call is a competition in front of a live audience that mixes the form of a sport’s tryout, juried application process, and reality TV show. Five artists will be selected from a pool of applicants to compete in a series of events that will test their intellect and creativity. The final round of the competition will involve a formal presentation of artwork by the artist in front of three selected jurors, who along with the audience will determine a winner.

Adam Moser will be opening drinks for the duration of the show with an amplified bottle opener. The sounds of cans cracking, pressure from a beer bottle releasing, and wine corks popping will travel through the interior of the house. Much like the way sound designers enhance our viewing experiences of sports on television this piece will generate similar excitement and engagement of spectators attending Over and Back.

Sean M. Starowitz‘ Equal Playing Field aims to organize a series of conversations and soccer games/tournaments that allows for an equal playing field between various powers, people, institutions, neighborhoods, and teams. Equal Playing Field is in collaboration with Alex Elmestad, a St. Louis-based artist and public programmer.

 

About the Curators:

Ryan Woodring is a Portland-based artist/curator and founder of Prequel Artist Incubator for Emerging Artists. Originally from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a second degree in French Studies. Woodring moved to Portland in 2013 to work as a visual effects artist at Laika on the Oscar-nominated film The Boxtrolls. He has taught painting at Carnegie Mellon’s Precollege Art Department, was a mentor for Brewhouse Distillery Artist Residency Program in Pittsburgh and currently teaches animation at Hollywood Theatre in Portland.  ryanwoodring.com

Roz Crews has curated and produced a variety of events and projects in Oregon, Maine, Washington, and several southern states. She received her BA in Anthropology from New College of Florida and is currently a student in the Art & Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University. She studied public archaeology and community engagement during college, and she is now the Artist in Residence in Portland State University’s Housing & Residence Life department. Born in Gainesville, Florida, she lives in Portland, Oregon.  seeroz.com

About the Artists:

Terry Boyd is proud to call Pittsburgh his home and was honored in both 2013 and 2014 with a nomination for Pittsburgh’s Emerging Artist of the Year Award. Most recently, he earned the Eben Demarest Trust Award from The Pittsburgh Foundation, a prize shared with Jackson Pollock. His current work focuses on large-scale sewing installations using a mechanical compound bow and yarn tethered arrows, meticulous neutral line drawings, and line drawings that are digitized and machine embroidered onto linen.  art.terrenceboyd.com

 

Carolyn Castaño

Carolyn Castaño is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work in painting, drawing, video, and mixed-media installations explores the personas and narratives associated with the narco wars and political dramas currently unfolding in Latin America.  Exhibited both nationally and internationally, Ms. Castaño’s recent exhibition Mujeres Que Crean/ Women Who Create at the New Americans Museum in San Diego, CA investigates the relationship between the female displaced victims of the Colombian armed-conflict, the environment, and historical representation of both in art. carolyncastano.com

Her work has also been featured in LACMA’s Fútbol: The Beautiful Game and the critically acclaimed exhibition, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, which traveled to the Museo Del Barrio, New York City and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, LA Now: Emerging Artists, Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris, Liquid Los Angeles: Contemporary Watercolor Painting in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Semi-Precious, The Public Art Fund, New York and International Paper, an exhibition of drawings at the Hammer Museum. Ms. Castaño has had solo exhibitions at Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles and Lombard- Freid Fine Art, New York. She has a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Fine Art from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture.

Amanda Leigh Evans works in social practice, ceramics, performance, and sculpture. She has worked on collaborative projects with traditional potters in rural Turkey, with her ceramic students at Biola University, with elderly adults, and with people who have developmental disabilities. She has also worked with other artists on projects related to food, ceramics, and history. From 2010-2012 she was a contributor to the Los Angeles Urban Rangers and is a founding member of Project 51, the collective behind Play the LA River. She has presented projects and publications at major institutions including MOCA, the Portland Art Museum, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.  Amanda is based in Los Angeles, CA. amandaleighevans.com

Greg J. Hayes is a Portland-based visual artist committed to building a more complex photographic idea. His art practice, based on the idea that art making is a way of thinking, engages questions about the conditions of perception, and insistently investigates the resonance of time and experience. His conceptual goals largely determine the form of his artwork, thus he has incorporated drawing, text, video and sculpture into a mostly photographic practice.

After an undergraduate degree from Northeastern University and a year of study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) in Boston, Greg received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. He has exhibited and published his work and participated in symposia and residencies in the US and abroad. In addition to making art, Greg’s creative practice includes teaching and community engagement. In recent years, he has held faculty positions at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, SMFA, and Marlboro College. Currently, Greg teaches photography at Oregon State University, and facilitates a class for the Exposures Program, a non-profit cross-cultural youth arts program. gregjhayes.com

Hand2Mouth is a permanent ensemble of artists who have been working together since 2001. Their mission is to make original theatre that is bold and accessible. Led by artistic director Jonathan Walters, Hand2Mouth creates original performances from their rehearsal studio in Portland, OR, and regularly performs in Portland, New York, Seattle and San Francisco. Walters founded Hand2Mouth in 2000 after training with street theatre troupe Teatr Biuro Podrozy in Poland. Hand2Mouth has since created 18 original performances (from its home in Portland, OR), and the ensemble has grown to include a core of company members and associate artists. Hand2Mouth performances are developed over a period of 10-18 months through intensive rehearsals; each show demands its own creation process and training which builds over months of exploration including long form improvisations, movement exploration, text research and songwriting. From these raw seeds, the company hones fragments into cohesive wholes, producing theatre that could not be created from the pages of a script alone. hand2mouththeatre.org

Adam Moser‘s practice often draws from his experiences as an athlete and fan, which has led him to do projects that have found homes in Major League Baseball, NBA.com, and in the hands and on the screens of his fellow pickup softball teammates. Moser hit 21 dingers in 2014. adamoser.com

Sean M. Starowitz’ work is executed in a variety of social, political, and community engaged contexts. Notable projects include Fresh Bread, BREAD! KC, and Byproduct: The Laundromat. He has also explored curatorial projects such as The Speakeasy, and Vagabond, Kansas City’s premiere pop-up restaurant. He has contributed writings to Proximity Magazine and Temporary Art Review, and has lectured at Queens College in NY, UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department, and at American University in D.C. He currently resides in Kansas City, Missouri as the artist-in-residence at the Farm To Market Bread Company. He is a 2010 graduate of the Interdisciplinary Arts program at the Kansas City Art Institute and a 2012 Rocket Grant recipient with support from the Charlotte St. Foundation, Spencer Museum of Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation. More recently, he is a 2014 Charlotte St. Foundation Visual Art Award Fellow. seanstarowitz.com

About Surplus Space:

Surplus Space is an alternative exhibition project based on the idea of a model-home located in Portland, Oregon. Similar to how a display home demonstrates layout and livable space, Surplus’ model-home demonstrates how each room within a house has the potential to become an exhibition space. Surplus Space offers interdisciplinary artists an opportunity to produce and show work that is in direct dialogue with currently unfolding issues of social and political significance. Surplus Space is funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts and Calligram Foundation/Allie Furlotti via Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Precipice Fund. surplusspace.info