manuel arturo abreu and Christopher Paul Jordan, Place Names

March 20, 2018 – May 20, 2018
Opening Reception: March 18, 2018 from 5 – 7pm

Art Gym
Marylhurst University
17600 Pacific Highway (Hwy. 43)
Marylhurst, OR 97036-0261
http://theartgym.org/

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Sunday, Noon to 4 pm
Closed March 30 – April 1, 2018 (Easter Weekend)
Admission: Free to the public.
Parking is free.  The gallery is located on the third floor of the central building on campus – BP John, on the south side of the building.

Place Names is an exhibition by regional artists manuel arturo abreu (Portland, OR) and Christopher Paul Jordan (Tacoma, WA). Through painting, sculpture, built environments, and explorations of language, Place Names explores the abstracted visual and emotional cues that influence how a sense a “place” is communicated. The artists each construct visual narratives from notions of the geographical and cultural locales that have been generative to their thinking as artists and poets. The works in Place Names appropriate objects such as stray window frames, graffiti-laden panels, well-worn maps, and evocations of their workspaces as signifiers of the cultural, economic, and racial influences within inherited identity.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is an artist and writer from the Bronx. They received their BA in Linguistics from Reed College in 2014, and currently lives and works in a garage in southeast Portland. Recent group exhibitions with Rhizome and the New Museum (online), the Cooley Gallery (Portland), Chicken Coop Contemporary (Portland), Veronica project space (Seattle), and AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles). Recent publications in Art in America, Rhizome, CURA, SFMoMA Open Space, AQNB, et al. abreu is the author of List of Consonants (Bottlecap Press, 2015) and transtrender (Quimérica Books, 2016), and their debut collection of critical writing is forthcoming 2018.

Christopher Paul Jordan integrates virtual and physical public space to form infrastructures for dialogue and self-determination among dislocated people. Jordan’s paintings and sculptures are artifacts from his work in community and time-capsules for expanded inquiry. Jordan is a recipient of the 2017 Neddy Artists Award for painting, the Jon Imber Painting Fellowship, the GTCF Foundation of Art Award, the James W Ray Venture Project Award, and the most recent summer commission for Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

Place Names is the inaugural exhibition curated by Ashley Stull Meyers, the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Director and Curator of the Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion, Marylhurst University.