Pamela Chipman, “Hireath” – the longing for a romanticized past.

April 5 – April 29
Opening Reception:  Friday April 5th 6-9pm

UnionKnott
2726 NE MLK Blvd.
Portland, OR
(next to Bridges Cafe (Parking in back)
971-207-1232

OPEN Hours: Mondays: April 8,15,22 9am-noon, Wednesdays: April 3,10, &17, 4-7pm
Film Screening April 13th, 7pm – rare films by Pamela Chipman
Closing night: April 29 6-8pm
Portrait sittings: Show up during the open hours schedule.  
darmacrash@yahoo.com

In this exhibit Chipman employs gold leaf in her photography to explore the concepts of longing for something that is gone. The Welsh have a word for it, “Hireath”. It is about the yearning and longing for someone or someplace that you can never experience again.

Chipman visited Santa Rosa California 6 months after the Tubbs fire and Paradise California 4 months after the Camp fire, both fires decimated whole neighborhoods, she photographed was was left. Juxtaposing that with gilded images of childhood and childhood artifacts she builds upon this theme of grief or sadness for who or what you have lost, losses which make your “home” someplace you can never return to.

www.pamelachipman.com

As an artist, Pamela Chipman produces work that explores personal identity through a variety of portals. She studied video and photography at UCLA. In the late 1980’s she moved to Portland and co-created the Blue Gallery, an innovative gallery and performance space designed as a place to present challenging art. Chipman’s work has screened across the country in galleries and on community television channels, and is held in private collections.

Her current work in photography and video explores personal identity through the dialogue of artifacts and language. Chipman’s work revolves around ordinary people performing ordinary tasks, emphasizing their movements, their space, their quiet, their noise, their relationship to the air around them, and the influences on their lives. Working in a non-liner fashion, she explores her subjects’ relationships to the past, and creates a visual space for her subjects and their reflections to inhabit. Starting with simple memories and stories she reveals their power as tributes to the personal courage and introspective depth of her subjects.

Throughout Chipman’s career she has explored the potentials of the video medium through a wide variety of project, ranging from video-poetry, live television, game- shows, installations, and documentary projects. Through all of this work she has focused on video and photography as tools for reaching a broad artistic audience, and for building community. She continues to explore new methods of integrating media into our visual world through installations and video books, and public art.