Anna Daedalus, Kerry Davis and Jon Gottshall, Open Channels

November 3rd – November 26th
Artist talk: November 20th, 2pm

Gallery 114
1100 NW Glisan,
Portland, OR 97209
https://www.gallery114pdx.com/
(503) 243-3356

Grounded Glass takes as its subject a Sitka spruce swamp and the muddy matter in its tidal flow. These close views of the swamp through mud-caked glass plates challenge the mythology of landscape hierarchy, both in terms of beauty and value; and raise mud to another level. Our mark-making on the murky glass borrows from the cliché verre process to create windows through which elements of the landscape appear in varying degrees of clarity. In dialogue with Floodplain II, which explores urban wetlands impacted by industry, Grounded Glass focuses on a restored swamp after 150 years as rural farmland. The project is a continuation of Palūs, a meditation on this same swamp near the mouth of the Columbia River. Through constructions, photography, and time-based installations, Palūs observes the tidal wetland’s liquid respiration as the waters rise and fall each day.
– Anna Daedalus & Kerry Davis

Floodplain II is a continued exploration of the Columbia Slough, an engineered remnant of the shallow streams that once braided the land along the Columbia River as it flows past Portland. Once a highly productive habitat, it was drained and developed, reflecting our historic belief that wetlands were places of disease and pestilence, and that economic activity gave it actual value. Despite a century of industrial waste and runoff, many creatures that depend on wetland habitat have somehow survived. More recently, reflecting our shifting awareness, the Slough has seen some efforts at restoration. Given time and space, nature reasserts itself.

Open Channels, our collaborative exhibit, challenges historical perspectives and asks a provocative question: how do we revitalize a wetland, or any damaged habitat, when we are all too often still engaged in the same activities that diminished it? How do we remake our economic life into something not hostile, but rather sympathetic to the environment, to our mutual benefit?
-Jon Gottshall