Posts tagged with anna wiener
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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)
![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)
![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)
![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)
![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)
![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)
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.”
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![American Two Shot: Art, Clothes, & Coffee
An airy boutique-slash-gallery-slash-clubhouse straddling the border of SoHo and Chinatown in New York, American Two Shot is a Venn diagram of fashion, art, entertainment, and some very strong coffee. At the center is the “City of Friends,” a casual ATS-curated collective of young creators who orbit and collaborate with the shop.
Owners Stephanie Krasnoff and Olivia Wolfe, Miami natives who have been friends since childhood, joined forces in 2011 after clocking up several years in the fashion and art worlds. The store is a Russian doll of retail: inside the boutique is an art gallery; inside the art gallery is a coffee bar. Said bar — formally known as Café Integral — is owned by César Vega, a photographer with a passion for Nicaraguan coffee who previously delivered beans across New York on a bicycle.
American Two Shot’s spirit is playful and knowing, clever without being pretentious. The shop is rife with sly cultural references (a recent display of elegant maxidresses was labeled “Insane Gown Posse”), and the racks showcase local designers alongside quirky vintage finds. American Two Shot’s employees are chatty and welcoming, effervescent without being pushy. With Drake and Stankonia-era Outkast on the stereo, the smell of freshly ground coffee floating over some colorful, killer pieces, and a revolving roster of friends popping in to say hi, it’s a struggle not to kick up your feet and stay for a while.
What is American Two Shot, and how did it come to be?
Stephanie Krasnoff: We have a lot of friends who are young artists and creators — young designers — and we noticed a gap in the marketplace for a creative space that was also an enjoyable shopping experience. One day we were like, “this is what we should be doing,” and the next day we started doing it. We call it a lifestyle store. We want it to be like going into someone’s apartment, not just their closet.
Olivia Wolfe: It’s a tough question to answer, and I think the answer changes. Our intentions are the same: We want to give new talent a place to be seen, whether this is with art, clothing, or César’s coffee business. There’s so much creation all the time in New York. We think of new things every day, so it’s bound to keep changing.
SK: It snowballed. Like the coffee bar … that was something that happened a little bit later. César, who owns Café Integral, is a good friend of ours. We weren’t looking for him, he wasn’t looking for us — it just worked out.
What were some of the other things that snowballed?
SK: We knew that we wanted to have some sort of gallery aspect to the store. At the beginning it was only women’s clothing and a gallery space, and then on a whim, almost at the last minute, we decided to bring in some men’s products. Men started shopping a lot, so we chased after that business. We needed flowers for the store, so a friend introduced me to Taylor Patterson, who just started her own company, Fox Fodder Farm. Now every Friday we do a residency with her called Fox Fodder Fridays. So we’ve made a new friend, customer, and business partner. It’s a tumbleweed effect. Snowballs, tumbleweeds …
OW: Tumblr.
SK: Same thing! We keep meeting new people who we enjoy working with, but we don’t just want to work with them once. We want them to bring in their networks, their ideas.
ATS is designed to accommodate a good party. What kinds of events have you thrown here?
OW: We’ve had shopping events … we have our third art opening coming up, we had a book fair, the flower shop, a fun Fashion’s Night Out party. We’re going to bring music into the mix soon, too.
SK: It’s not necessary that people are shopping at the event — they’re getting a sense of the lifestyle. We want people to have a good time, and we want them to bring their friends to the next event. When we have our friends at the bar and our friends DJing, it’s nice.
This is your first business. What were some of the things that surprised or challenged you?
SK: Everything surprised us. The most challenging thing was the construction, the build-out.
OW: It’s one thing to figure out daily operations, but trying to be the site managers on a build-out is something very, very foreign. We redid the space top to bottom. We wanted to keep as much of the integrity of the space as possible, but we still wanted it to feel warm.
Where, or to whom, do you look for inspiration?
OW: Really, everywhere. We watched A League of Their Own the other night, and I was super inspired for a couple weeks after watching that. But also walking down the street, meeting someone new, hearing a song, seeing some art … all of it. It all produces the same reaction in me.
SK: Olivia inspires me too.
OW: [Happy-embarrassed noise.]
SK: It’s true! She’ll get her roll of film back, she’ll put it on Tumblr, and there will be like, a photograph of a trash bag on the ground. And I’ll think, “oh yeah, that actually looks kinda cool.” She will walk down the street and I cant keep up, because she’ll be pointing at things on the ground and pointing at things in buildings, and it’s like, where am I supposed to look? I’m just watching people walk down the street.
How do your personalities and backgrounds play off each other?
SK: We say that Olivia is the balloon that floats around, and I just hold onto the string and walk it down the street.
OW: I think that’s why this is working really well — the balance. We both do a lot of things in the business, but we fall into our roles.
What are your ideas for the future of ATS?
SK: We’re always working on so many projects at once, it’s hard to say … our ideas evolve a lot. We want to continue to brand American Two Shot. We’ll be making our own line, maybe another store. I don’t think we really have a concrete answer, but every day we’re working on projects that will hopefully take us there.
OW: I think it’s finding that weird balance between wanting to grow and get really big but also wanting to feel like a neighborhood spot — while continuing to actually be a neighborhood spot that people can always go back to.
How does ATS use Tumblr?
OW: We started using Tumblr in December 2011, just to document the beginning of ATS. I don’t even know if anyone was looking at it yet. Maybe our moms, and our friend Sabrina. But we’d take pictures of everything — like driving out to Trenton, NJ, to look at mannequins. It allowed us to leave a footprint of what the process was like for us. We’re still nuts about it, and we try to post every day. Every Monday we put up a City of Friends postcard of someone we’ve met or worked with, and every Friday we’ll let the world know it’s Friday.
SK: Olivia is very good at managing that and keeping it almost entirely original content. It’s all her film photos. She keeps it real. I love it. It’s a journal of what we’re doing and where we’ve been.
— Anna Wiener](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdfix7ecy71rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
American Two Shot: Art, Clothes, & Coffee
An airy boutique-slash-gallery-slash-clubhouse straddling the border of SoHo and Chinatown in New York, American Two Shot is a Venn diagram of fashion, art, entertainment, and some very strong coffee. At the center is the “City of Friends,” a casual ATS-curated collective of young creators who orbit and collaborate with the shop.
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