Windowfront Exhibitions
Artists responded to Windowfront Exhibitions Call to Artists. The goal of the call is to provide professional opportunities for artists and creatives to present their work, support and increase the presence of art in downtown public spaces, celebrate diversity, engage community, provide a platform for historically under-served communities and support and increase positive interactive activities downtown. The panel reviewed 32 stellar proposals and 13 proposals were accepted.
Kum Ja Lee
Meditative Layers | fiber, basketry, paper craft, thread, wood, nail, hook, concrete stone, reed, straw, tissue paper, LED puck light, projection lights
Dates displayed: March 4 - June 12, 2022
Location: 856 Willamette Street
About: Combining Western and Eastern concepts, my work explores the different relationships that exist between contemporary practices and conventional approaches in visual arts.
This work is a self-reflection about how we can construct our internal world by contemplating time. My work explores visibility and invisibility with the concept of time and spontaneity and physicality in the process of installation. It examines worldviews of time and space through Eastern and Western perspectives and reflects the meditative experience of emptiness as dynamic space. My work is rooted in the Asian belief that life is a cycle while also reflecting the principle of Yin and Yang. I use these concepts and theories in order to express my response to the natural flow of life and the duality of ideas between the East and West. My installations incorporate both concepts of time from the West and East — one from the West where time is understood as linear and one from the East where it is regarded as circular. They represent the progression of time that embraces and filters all human emotions in its immeasurable vastness.
In eastern Asian cultures, a lotus flower symbolizes the one who overcomes the pain that prevails in the material world and becomes enlightened, just like the lotus flower that grows in dirty and muddy water but manages to surpass the water and produce a perfect flower. The lotus flower centered in the forest of threads signifies purity, enlightenment, self-regeneration and rebirth as a symbolic meaning regarded in eastern Asian cultures. klee1@pnca.edu
Hannah Hamalian
Walking the Butte/Dancing the City | digital video and Isadora performance capture
Dates displayed: March 4 - June 12, 2022
Location: 1004 Willamette Street
Credits: Video and Concept/Hannah Hamalian, Technical Support/Michael Maruska, Movement Performers/Colton Brown, Jung-chen Liang, Grace Roberts.
Project description: How do we move through familiar spaces? Who sees the city from the top of the Butte after a hike? Who witnesses the changing face of the city as they move through its streets? Different locations create the opportunity to make a choice for a different kind of movement, which in turn affects the way we see the world. By offering a view of the city that would normally be impossible to experience from within it, this corner can become a mirror or a portal to those who move beside it. Here is a chance to be transported high above the city, out into nature, and back to the corner of 10th and Willamette, all while considering how our bodies can decide to move or dance between them.
This site-specific video installation combines video footage recorded from the top of Spencer Butte with documentation of a dance performance. The software called Isadora was used to capture video of dancers in front of a camera and create an animated render of the movement in combination with sound inputs in real time. The resulting pulses and stylized changes in the image are the results of a now-lost soundtrack, replaced with the sounds of the buses, cars and people around the installation.
Artist statement: Hannah Hamalian (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who is curious about how movement can be used to represent the unspoken processes that weave us together, both as individuals and as a community. She is intrigued by how complicated the world is and aims to speak the language of complexity by experimenting with animation and film in poetic, rather than narrative, modes. She works with the motion of dance and structure of landscape to wrestle with paradox, seeking the multiple layers of experience at work in any given moment. Her intention in any of her work is to create a space specifically designed for asking questions.
Hannah is currently based in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches at Lane Community College in the Media Arts department. Her work has screened and shown at festivals internationally, including ADF's Movies by Movers, KLIK Amsterdam Animation Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio, USA), and the Squeaky Wheel Animation Fest (New York, USA). She received her BA from Carleton College and her MFA from UW-Milwaukee. hannahhamalian.com
UO Student Collaboration
Seeing Within (Seeing Without) | glass, mirrors, reflective films, digital collage/projection, scavenged objects
Dates displayed: March 4 - June 12, 2022
Location: 833 Willamette Street
Contributing artists: Abby Pierce, Audrey Rycewicz, Zachary Smith, Tahoe Mack, Ellen O’Shea, Anastasiya Gutnik
Project description: This project, “Seeing Within (Seeing Without),” is an invitation to the community of Eugene for a cathartic experience, a space to process all that we have collectively felt in this time of the pandemic, social uprising, wildfires, etc. As the pandemic drags on, emotions manifest, ebb and flow in myriad of ways. We find ourselves finding refuge in new avenues, shifting our values of what is important and finding more gravity in celebrating the everyday while feeling the weight of a radically shifted world. Some experience grief at lost familiarity, grief at the loss of ourselves as we were, and grief for the loss of loved ones. Similarly, we have found that joy and wonder spring up in unexpected or even mundane places. The works collected were open-ended interpretations, guiding participants only by a prompt that invited the widest form of submissions. We asked our community what grief and joy look like in their lives. We offer an introspective reflection via various physical diffractions suspended in the space. We create a tapestry of lived human experiences in this work. Upon passing, catching sight of your own reflection adds to this web of experiences, connecting present to past, with your own fleeting experience.
Artist statement: We are a group of University of Oregon students pulling from our various backgrounds of sculpture, ceramics, digital arts and landscape architecture. With the culmination of our various creative abilities and our shared — yet isolated — experiences, we have imagined this wonderful and meaningful creation for our community here in Eugene. We are grateful to have the opportunity to come together to envision and install a public art piece with the capacity to bring people together to reflect upon what we have lost, what we have gained and what we will remember from the past two years. Through the collection and sharing of digital memories from the community, we hope to create a space which is interactive, introspective and cultivates interconnectedness. Thank you to all who contributed to this project! griefjoyeugene@gmail.co
Lindsay Swing, Honey + Sass
Spring Emerges | mixed media
Dates displayed: March 4 - June 12, 2022
Location: 280 West Broadway
Project description: “Spring Emerges” is a celebration of the vernal equinox and the early signs of the world around us awakening from its winter slumber. Using mixed media to capture the feeling of a season, “Spring Emerges” aims to elicit the same excitement and joy as the first sunny days through the eyes of a person looking to the sky and seeing the first blooms and songbirds of the year. The feeling of relief that comes with the end of winter in Oregon also mirrors our community’s feelings as we pass through another season of isolation during this pandemic. This piece represents hope for the future, reemergence of creativity and community and the glory of the natural world that we are so lucky to be a part of in the Pacific Northwest.
Artist statement: Captivated by the beauty of the natural world, Lindsay strives to capture the wonder in all things around her by exploring non-traditional mediums. With her scientific background heavily influencing her work, she enjoys the challenge of creating with natural and salvaged materials with vintage windows as her primary canvas. She employs manual etching and freehand illustration to create each one-of-a-kind piece. Her assemblage pieces combine foraged biological oddities, such as bones, insects and botanicals, with clay and grown crystals to create surreal worlds with an emphasis on cultivating a respect for nature and conservation. She strives to capture the imagination of her viewer by using unexpected ways through unexpected mediums to highlight the beauty of the world around us. honeyandsass@gmail.com