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![Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
— Anna Wiener](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdqv3kIicM1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
Photo: Chris Lawrence
![Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
— Anna Wiener](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdqv3kIicM1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
Photo: Chris Lawrence
![Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
— Anna Wiener](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdqv3kIicM1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
Photo: Katie Shelly
![Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
— Anna Wiener](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdqv3kIicM1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
Photo: MSHR Collaborative
![Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
— Anna Wiener](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdqv3kIicM1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
Photo: MSHR Collaborative
![Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
— Anna Wiener](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdqv3kIicM1rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
Photo: Katja Novitskova
Resident Curation at Appendix Project Space
When Zack Davis and Josh Pavlacky moved out to Portland and into the house on Alberta Street, the last thing they planned to do was open an art gallery. It was 2008, and the two friends, both artists fresh out of college, had only hoped to find a home with some extra space to work.
“A lot of our future was determined by finding the house,” says Davis. As he, Pavlacky, and friend Ledah Wilcox settled into their new digs, the garage out back of the house gradually morphed from studio space to community space. Pavlacky had developed an interest in urbanism and radical space use and was eager to experiment, so the trio began hosting parties and public figure-drawing classes. “We were meeting a lot of local weirdos and Portland hippie types,” says Davis, “which was a lot of fun.”
As it turned out, Alberta Street was already home to Last Thursday, a monthly street fair with a focus on local artisans and makers organized by Art on Alberta, a community nonprofit. On a whim, the three housemates decided to pull together a show of their undergraduate thesis work to coincide with the event. Though the garage can only be accessed by an overgrown alleyway, the show attracted a significant number of visitors. The next month, Davis, Pavlacky, and Wilcox invited a handful of Portland artists to present work in the space; eventually, they were hosting DIY art openings on a regular basis.
That winter, artist Maggie Casey joined the team, after quite literally stumbling upon the garage. “She just came down the alley randomly,” says Davis, “and she was really into the space and proposed a show that night.” Eventually they gutted and stripped down the garage and painted it gallery-white. (“We white-cubed it,” Davis says.) From there, Appendix Project Space was born.
In the spring, Appendix hosted a show by Matthew Clifford Green, a Portland artist whose work could be filed somewhere between performance art and self-described “punk spectacle.” Green hid in the rafters of Appendix, playing electric guitar that fed into an amplifier hanging from chains in the center of the space. A hole in one wall spat a steady stream of fog, while a television in the back played a disco ball on loop. The overall effect was eerie, jarring, and, for the Appendix team, totally inspiring — as curators, Green’s show was a turning point that got them thinking more seriously about hosting three-dimensional, site-specific installation work.
In 2010, Travis Fitzgerald moved into the Appendix house and joined its curatorial team. Shortly thereafter the gallery launched a residency program, in which visiting artists live in the house with the curators, develop work, and ultimately hold a solo show in the gallery space. For a while, residents would have to contend with a family of chickens that lived in a coop outside the living room, an inconvenience offset only by the daily routine of reaching through the window and plucking out fresh eggs for breakfast. (Such idyllic snacking came to an unfortunate end when the chickens were mauled by a raccoon.)
Opening their home to the public — and on an even more intimate scale, to artists — has its costs and benefits for the resident curators. “It is definitely somewhat psychologically stressful for the house to always be in this state, to have a pile of tools on the kitchen table and only one to two weeks of clean, normal domesticity every month,” says Davis, “but on the other hand it’s very dynamic and energetic. The personal and professional benefits are incalculable.”
Fitzgerald agrees. “It’s a vital, necessary experience. We’re inviting these artists because we like their brains and like what they’re doing, and we want to learn more about their thoughts, their process. We’re giving them a show, but we also get something from it — we get to be around these wonderful humans who are working in new ways.”
Many of the artists who show at Appendix play with digital interfaces and themes of selfhood and information in an age of digitization. Katie Shelly, a New York-based artist who held an Appendix residency this past August, focused her solo show, “Paragon+”, on the concept of 21st-century digital utopia in which the ideal citizen could be anything from a “hacker-amputee” to a “videographer-coder-forager.” Brian Khek and Micah Schippa’s collaborative “Touching You Touching Everything” also played with ideas about social evolution, technology, and the transmission of information.
Excited about the possibilities of digital art, and recognizing the relative ease of hosting such work in a digital space, Appendix began holding openings on the gallery website. Among the artists who have debuted work on the Appendix site are Katja Novitskova, an Amsterdam-based artist whose “Curiosity and Opportunity: 2012”, a 360-degree panorama of a forest near her childhood home in Estonia, was inspired by NASA’s 360-degree panoramic image of the surface of Mars; Iain Ball, who saw the opportunity to present his work, “[Rare Earth Sculptures] – Cerium”, in a digital forum as an “exploration of nonlocality that points both toward and away from the exhibition space”; and Joe Hamilton, whose “Div/Contour” takes on the issue of mapping and visualizing (digital) space that is uninhibited by geographical distance. Hamilton also runs Hyper Geography, which is a similar and ongoing endeavor run entirely on Tumblr.
In 2011, Pavlacky moved to Philadelphia and then to New York. Appendix has taken on a fourth curator, Alex Mackin Dolan. Pavlacky and Fitzgerald have also teamed up with Daniel Wallace (of Philadelphia gallery Extra Extra) to launch a New York-based curatorial venture, American Medium; the first show was held in May 2012, and featured work by multimedia artist Jon Rafman, who is best known for artworks that source images from Google Street View.
Despite the success of American Medium, the curators agree that Portland is the right place for Appendix; distance from the more established art centers in the United States (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) complements their mission. “We think what we’re doing is important for artists,” says Fitzgerald, “they get to have a show that can be experimental and outside of their comfort zone, but which will also be seen by a large audience.”
Even in Portland’s own art scene, Appendix fills a specific niche. “Appendix is focused, moreso than any other space, on sculpture — and we’re selecting from a group of artists who are younger, who are quivering on the edge, who are gaining momentum but need a couple more years,” says Davis. “We’re also pulling in people from outside of Portland at this point, and it’s really good to be bringing in work that makes people hungrier.”
Appendix has received tremendous support and attention from both the Portland community and the larger art world, but the curators remain modest and inspired. “It’s still crazy to me when people want to do something with us,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s just crazy. These are artists who I really respect and want to see do well in the world, and when they want to work with us I get taken aback. It’s really great. It’s so humbling. It’s an affirmation that we’re doing something important.”
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interesting idea for a gallery. reminds me of the straylight grey exhibit a bit.
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