Tomorrow Tomorrow, Jun 15 – Jul 21, 2017

CANADA is pleased to announce Tomorrow Tomorrow, a group exhibition featuring Demian DinéYazhi’ and Noelle Sosaya, MK Guth, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Kristan Kennedy, Evan La Londe, Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi, Michelle Ross, Storm Tharp, and Heather Watkins. These nine artists are preoccupied with physical abstraction, changeability, and working with materials to shape space with emotional purpose. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, the artists are part of a highly collaborative artistic community with a history of migration, mysticism, indigenous strength, and literary soul-searching.

The receptivity and endurance of textiles plays a critical role in the conversation. Michelle Ross’ fabric-based paintings and color studies flatten and rescale the body in queer, feminist geometries. Kristan Kennedy’s un-stretched linen paintings ritualistically absorb and express raw experience as they knot and billow across walls. Heather Watkins’ muscular, suspended sculptures of cotton cord and India ink infuse space with a wild poetics of flow and stasis. Demian DinéYazhi’ and collaborator Noelle Sosaya work with textiles and product languages to disseminate a radical queer indigenous vision of sacred reflection and punk activism. Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ table-top sculptures are cryptic worlds where bits of clothing, metal letterforms, and ceramic vessels become stages for new feminist myths and blessings.

Alongside the resilience and spiritual subtext of the woven, other artists in the exhibition explore the human form and its environment as a complex of inner experience and outer presence. Storm Tharp’s field of thirty-six portraits and color-field abstractions combine painting and printmaking to redraw subjectivity as a space of persistent transformation. Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi's tiny collages on gridded paper descale strip-mall signs and awnings into miniatures for reimagining immigrant experience. Evan La Londe’s pigment-based photographs snare beauty and perception toward philosophical questions of knowing and appearance. MK Guth’s instruction-based piece creates connections between the rest of the art in the show and will turn the gallery into a temporary communal space full of optimism and exchange.

We wish to thank Sarah Miller Meigs and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College for their support and collaboration.

Tomorrow Tomorrow is curated by Stephanie Snyder, the Anne and John Hauberg Curator and Director of the Cooley Gallery, and Wallace Whitney. The title of the exhibition comes from a song by Portland musician Elliott Smith.

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