HOLDING Contemporary Closes Physical Space in Portland’s Pearl District

After six years in Portland’s Pearl District, HOLDING is closing our physical gallery space. Our gallery has facilitated critical conversations, dynamic exhibitions, and meaningful connections within our Oregon community and beyond through our alternative gallery model.

We are excited to reimagine presentations and engagement of contemporary artists and artworks and we’re still considering what shape that will take in the future.

OREGON ARTS WATCH: NATURE AND NURTURE: STACY JO SCOTT AT HOLDING CONTEMPORARY

Installation view of Lo, A Vase in the Dark at Holding Contemporary. Photo credit: Mario Gallucci

I imagine Scott’s work in this show as a personal archeological site — her ceramic sculptures are the relics, and the archival prints are the photographs that archive these finds. However, in the case of Scott’s work they are closely intertwined. Both sculpture and prints memorialize her own personal history that is at once inherited and generated. Scott’s work seems to play with the idea of creating our own history, especially as a queer artist and what that means to their present, past and future selves, all at once. —Ashley Gifford for Oregon Arts Watch

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OREGON ARTS WATCH: WEAVING THE FUTURE: JOVENCIO DE LA PAZ AT HOLDING CONTEMPORARY

Jovencio de la Paz, A Languid Meter (2021). TC2 handwoven cotton, canvas, acrylic. 48″ x 48″.

Why shouldn’t we think carefully about our relationship to the machines of this world? Cumulative Shadow shows us that we do have some control over how we engage with and shape technology—de la Paz’s software remains a tool while also taking on its own creative life. Through the invention and evolution of artistic tools, de la Paz reinvigorates their medium’s original purposes. Weaving has always been connected to language, movement, and history. In de la Paz’s work, it also forecasts our future.

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PORTLAND MONTHLY: THE COOLEST GALLERY SHOWS IN PORTLAND RIGHT NOW →

Photo: Mario Gallucci

Jovencio de la Paz operates in the fascinating space between ancient artisans and modern tech: Cumulative Shadow features pieces de la Paz wove on an algorithm-powered loom.

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ARTFORUM CRITICS' PICKS: JOVENCIO DE LA PAZ →

Jovencio de la Paz, Bionumeric Organisms 2.0, 2021, handwoven Thread Controller 2 textile and canvas, 36 x 24".

In Legacy Russell’s 2020 book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, the author writes that “errors, ever unpredictable, surface the unnamable, point toward a wild unknown. To become an error is to surrender to becoming unknown, unrecognizable, unnamed. . . . This state of opacity is a ripe error to reach toward, an urgent and necessary glitch.” De la Paz actively yields to the creative potential of supposed failures by encouraging spontaneity, rupture, play, and freedom.

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VARIABLE WEST: SEARCHING FOR A MORE PERFECT UNION: TANNAZ FARSI →

The US Constitution makes provisions for processes of citizenship. But between the text and experience, what is lost, overlooked, or erased? Tannaz Farsi’s screen prints The Measure I and II (all works 2020) each feature a wall of stacked words, a lexicon conjuring the experience of “measuring up” to exclusionary migration policies. Marginalia in light gray shift the semantics of bold black letters, giving viewers pause. Among these and other references to language in A More Perfect Union, Farsi’s exhibition at HOLDING Contemporary, “we the people” is conspicuously absent. Instead of coldly asserting static facts or figures, Farsi’s textual and material poetics across the gallery negotiate nativist scripts by exposing their incongruities and discontinuities, rescuing the critical will of the people from oblivion.

Tannaz Farsi, The Measure I and II, 2020. Screen print and graphite on paper, 41 ½ x 27 ½ in. framed. Courtesy of HOLDING Contemporary. Photo: Mario Gallucci.

OREGON ARTS WATCH: VIZARTS MONTHLY: THE "FREEZE" EDITION

Farsi’s works are grounded in diasporic identity, bridging the structural and the ambiguous to reflect on citizenship, protest, and contrasts between distance and proximity. The word CITIZEN takes center stage in one of Farsi’s pieces for A More Perfect Union, prompting deeper thought on words as symbols of power structure and collective fear.

OREGON ARTS WATCH: VIZARTS MONTHLY: FLEXIBLE VIEWING OPTIONS FOR UNUSUAL TIMES

With Liquid Dungeon Byproduct, the prolifically inventive Tabitha Nikolai has teamed up with ESPer99 (sound) and Porpentine Charity Heartscape (writing) to create a multidimensional art experience in the form of a downloadable video game and window projection on location at HOLDING Contemporary. The video game, a first-person exploratory simulator, is simple to navigate, with a dreamlike, psychedelic landscape. On October 15, the gallery will host a Q & A session with the creators on Twitch.tv.

DAILY LAZY: UMICO NIWA AND PEAT SZILAGYI AT HOLDING CONTEMPORARY →

“Co-opting cultural associations between the floral and female genitalia, and acknowledging their real function as genitals within a heliotropic life-space, the phrase solar coochie is, at its simplest, bawdy slang for flower. Beyond this starting point, however, the exhibition becomes a fulcrum for upending a series of cultural assumptions (particularly Western cultural assumptions) by providing non-deterministic narratives and models of energy exchange, (pro)creation, and, transcendence.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES: BLACK ARTISTS FIND WAYS TO MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD IN PORTLAND

‘A portion of the exhibition “Stop Killing Us,” presented by Don’t Shoot Portland, a local group that works to end police violence, at the Holding Contemporary gallery this month.’ Photo by Mario Gallucci

VALE MAGAZINE: DON’T SHOOT PORTLAND PRESENTS ‘STOP KILLING US’ INSTALLATION

 “Don’t Shoot Portland, a nonprofit civil rights agency, is collaborating with Portland-based HOLDING Contemporary on its second exhibit in a series designed to shine a light on injustice.” – Katerina Papathanasiou, Vale Magazine

‘Stop Killing Us: A Black Lives Still Matter Multimedia Installation’ – Photography Credit: Mario Gallucci

WILLAMETTE WEEK: A NEW GALLERY EXHIBIT ABOUT DON'T SHOOT PDX SHOWS THAT WHILE THE CONTEXT OF THE PROTESTS HAVE CHANGED, THE MESSAGE HAS NOT →

"We still have to say, 'Stop killing us. Things haven't changed in the fact that we still have to take to the streets with our children to protest police brutality. Black lives still don't matter in the city of Portland."– Tai Carpenter for Willamette Week

SAY HIS NAME: Demonstrators protest the police killing of Quanice Hayes in 2017. IMAGE: Don't Shoot PDX.

DON'T SHOOT PORTLAND IS INSTALLING A NEW EXHIBITION IN THE PEARL →

“They really believe in the messaging we put out and aren’t afraid to let us showcase what we want,” Carpenter says. “They don’t try to censor us, they know you can’t control art, and we love and appreciate them for that.” – Tai Carpenter for Portland Monthly

KBOO: KRISTIN DERRYBERRY'S INTERVIEW WITH TIFFANY HARKER & IRIS WILLIAMSON OF HOLDING CONTEMPORARY

Kristin Derryberry's interview with Iris Williamson and Tiffany Harker from Holding Contemporary

On Tuesday May 12, 2020 at 11.30 a.m you can hear Kristin Derryberry's interview with Iris Williamson and Tiffany Harker from Holding Contemporary. They will talk about their show "If a Tree Falls," and their weekly zoom happy hours featuring the artists. The show itself revisits some past works from artists they have shown in the shareholder's program at Holding Contemporary. 

OREGON ARTSWATCH: CELEBRATING MUNDANE INTERIORS →

“When photographing mundane subject matter, that to which we typically are oblivious or wouldn’t otherwise think to document, the goal is not to have the final image appear as a manipulated/staged vignette, but instead use framing and technical abilities of the camera to elevate that which is seen. Success comes in how well one illuminates the extraordinary that lingers within empirical reality.” – Patrick Collier, OREGON ARTSWATCH

FIRST THURSDAY: SOLITUDE AND CONNECTION →

“Gallery co-owner Iris Williamson echoed my initial impression of the sick-day doldrums. She told me that as she and her team installed the show, they began to see parallels between the scenes of quotidian interiors and angular, glowing interplays of light and dark to recent news stories of quarantined coronavirus patients, stuck at home or in hotels and cruise ships for weeks on end. The connection wasn’t intentional, she insisted, but once you see it, it becomes impossible to ignore.” – Martha Daghlin, Oregon Artswatch

Graphite and ink drawing by Erin Murray/Courtesy Holding Contemporary

CRITICS' PICKS: JESS PERLITZ →

“Jess Perlitz is well-known for her performances that embrace the awkwardness and embarrassment of inhabiting a body, with repetitive, slapstick-like movements and obsessive behaviors. Props or costumes (which recently took the form of rocks) inject allegory and myth into the mix. Her newest group of sculptures similarly addresses the body in uneasy terms, but here in the gallery, the terms of engagement are more mysterious.” – Stephanie Snyder, ARTFORUM

Jess Perlitz, Crotch Pipe, 2​019, steel, 90 x 15 x 24".

SARAH WERTZBERGER: COLOR VISION →

11 PORTLAND ART EXHIBITS TO FRESHEN UP YOUR FALL →

“Artist and designer Sarah Wertzberger continues to push the possibilities of the technology and her medium, combining free-form stylings with hyper-saturated colors in blankets that can stand in as op-art wall hangings.” – Briana Miller, The Oregonian

Sarah Wertzberger’s woven piece, “Rising, Falling, Floating” (2019). (Courtesy of HOLDING Contemporary)

ART PRACTICAL / DAN PAZ: the sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building →

Dan Paz. Credits, 2019; video; installation view, The sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building, HOLDING Contemporary. Courtesy of HOLDING Contemporary, Portland. Image by Mario Gallucci

“There is a direct correlation between race, poverty, and imprisonment; surveillance and national educational frameworks play a role in eliciting the behaviors they supposedly seek to prevent. Ultimately, the video and sculptural works in Paz’s exhibition meditate on the buildings where society has placed its youths at a formative time in their lives. These buildings and questions surrounding the modes of community support they advertise lie at the heart of contemporary criticism for our prisons and schools alike.”
— James Knowlton for Art Practical