Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University
September 14 –December 20, 2019
Traveled to Umpqua Valley Arts Center and Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon (March 15–May 8, 2019) and Disjecta, Portland (February 15 –July 19, 2020)
What Needs to Be Said brings together the work of the thirteen artists who received the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts between 2014 and 2016, an award given annually to artists living in Oregon based on accomplishment, depth of practice, and future potential. These artists—Karl Burkheimer, Ben Buswell, Tannaz Farsi, MK Guth, Anya Kivarkis, Geraldine Ondrizek, Tom Prochaska, Wendy Red Star, Jack Ryan, Blair Saxon-Hill, Storm Tharp, Samantha Wall, and Lynne Woods Turner—evidence the rich and nuanced field of visual and cultural production in this region. There is no single theme that unifies their diverse practices, but rather, seen together they illuminate the breadth of approaches that define our globalized art world.
What Needs to Be Said attempts to relay the urgency and intimacy of what happens in the artist’s studio. Its title is drawn from an artwork by MK Guth on view here: a series of blank books in which the audience is invited to write down their responses to the prompt suggested by the title. Guth’s books are objects that encourage, record, and contain critical expressions without fully revealing them—an apt metaphor for the possibilities of artistic practice. Art is something we do for ourselves, and something we undertake in the spirit of the collective, sharing our thoughts and investigations with others through exhibitions and conversations. It is, simply, the expression of what needs to be said. While for each artist this is understood and manifested differently, it is an idea that suggests the importance of artistic practice for the individual and society more broadly—something the Hallie Ford Fellowship unquestionably supports.
While the thirteen artists that have work on view here employ different mediums including photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, installation, sculpture, sound, and public engagement, and address different subject matter, their works each suggest the importance of artistic exploration as a means to understand the world and continually question and reorient our perspective on it. An interest in time and the ways in which we pass through, mark, and remember it is evidenced in many of the works on view, which particularly reveal the artist’s hand. An engagement with the images and material of history, and our place within larger narratives, is also addressed by a number of projects. Taken together, the artists in this exhibition create a record of being here and bearing witness in an era defined by speeding time, disposable images, and mutable facts. There are so many things that need to be said, and as these artists demonstrate, so many ways to say them. These varied expressions represent a critical means for declaring one’s presence, connecting to others, and being attuned to an increasingly complex world. As such, they are an invitation for us to do so as well.