RACC Blog

PORTLAND, ORE – Open Signal and the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) have partnered to support an artist-in-residence, Kalimah Abioto. The residency is part of Night Lights, a monthly digital media event in which artists project their work onto the north exterior wall of RACC’s downtown offices on First Thursdays. Abioto will produce a new work for the next edition of Night Lights on Thursday, March 2.

A graduate of the film program at Hollins College, Abioto’s work includes experimentally edited short documentaries and narrative films, with a focus on the Portland and Memphis African-American communities.

Through Night Lights, Abioto was granted a stipend of $5,000 from RACC and use of Open Signal media equipment, facilities and training. In November, she used these resources to travel to Mali, West Africa, where she collected video footage in Dogon Country, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Since returning to Portland, Abioto has collaborated with local dancers, musicians, filmmakers and prop-makers to create her Night Lights film entitled Sight. The film tells the story of three young girls with the ability to travel to different dimensions, who help an adult woman to rediscover her own power.

“It’s a film about spirituality—going inside to retrieve your gifts and share them with the world,” Abioto said. “Embracing your shadow, in a way.”

Through her residency, Abioto had access to Open Signal’s equipment and production studios, which she used to create one of the dimensions in Sight. Dancers Uriah Boyd, Akela Jaffi and Mia O’Connor staged a dance alongside the three young leads in Open Signal’s Cyclorama green screen studio, to music written and performed by Abioto’s sister, Amenta Abioto.

“The green screen studio is phenomenal,” Abioto said. “So is having the office space to meet with the team and the talent, as well as access to the equipment—it’s like having a support team.”

Abioto will debut her film at Night Lights on Thursday, March 2, starting at dusk, at the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s north exterior wall, 411 NW Park Avenue in Portland.

Abioto will also share her work in progress during Open Signal’s first Open House on Saturday, February 25 from 4-8 p.m. at 2766 NE MLK Jr. Blvd. in Portland.

On Wednesday, March 22, she will deliver an artist talk in conjunction with her collaborators at Open Signal at 7:00 p.m., screening her film again, discussing her filmmaking process and taking questions from the audience about its inspiration and production.

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About Night Lights
Night Lights is a monthly public art event that promotes digital media, urban intervention, and technological innovation. On the First Thursdays of October through April, select artists are able to showcase their work on the north wall of the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Night Lights is a collaboration between Open Signal and RACC.

About Open Signal
Open Signal is a media arts center making media production possible for anyone and everyone in Portland, Oregon. Launched in 2017, the center builds upon the 35-year legacy of Portland Community Media to create a resource totally unique in the Pacific Northwest. Open Signal offers media workshops, an equipment library, artist residencies and programs five cable channels with locally produced content. Open Signal delivers media programming with a commitment to creativity, technology and social change. Learn more at opensignalpdx.org.

About RACC
The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) was established in 1995 and is funded by public and private partners to serve artists, arts organizations, schools and residents throughout Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington counties. RACC provides grants for artists, nonprofit organizations and schools; manages an internationally acclaimed public art program; raises money and awareness for the arts through workplace giving and other programs; convenes forums, networking events and other community gatherings; provides workshops and other forms of technical assistance for artists; and integrates the arts into K-8 curriculum through The Right Brain Initiative. Online at racc.org.

PORTLAND, ORE – Drawing on her previous work exploring materials with unusual and interesting physical properties, Stephanie Simek will install her deftly crafted, hand-built “table of holograms” in the Portland Building Installation Space beginning February 21^st.

Simek’s project, titled Table of Elements (and Minerals), was designed with the architecture of the Installation Space in mind. Her installation not only serves as a way to engage visitors with a set of optical illusions (illusions that depend on the clever use of optical principles rather than complicated electronics) but it also functions as a conceptual container or vitrine for the artist’s personal table of elements—silicon, quartz, calcite, iron, copper, and bismuth. “It’s a table within a table, a reliquary for various elemental materials with remarkable inherent potential.” Simek says, “Each possesses unusual magnetic, electrical, or optical capabilities, and all have the ability to do work, such as carrying a signal or storing information.”

These familiar, but perhaps under-recognized, minerals have been used by the artist in her past installations to great effect. Those projects include the design and construction of a room-sized crystal radio, an invisibility cloak, a levitating sculpture, and an 8 byte data storage device.

About the Artist: Portland artist Stephanie Simek produces a wide array of work in multiple mediums. She received her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and has shown and performed her work in the Pacific Northwest, New York, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Simek has received two Oregon Arts Commission Career Development Awards and was awarded a Regional Arts & Culture Council Project Grant in 2014. Her work will be included in a two-person show at Oregon State University in 2018.

Viewing Hours & Location: The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5^th Avenue in downtown Portland and is open 8 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday. Table of Elements (and Minerals) opens Tuesday, February 21 and runs through Friday, March 17.

The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) manages the 13’ x 8’ installation space in the lobby of the Portland Building and presents installation based art there year round. For more information, including images, proposals, and statements for projects dating back to 1994, go to www.racc.org/installationspace.

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The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) provides grants for artists, nonprofit organizations and schools in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington Counties; manages an internationally acclaimed public art program; raises money and awareness for the arts through Work for Art; convenes forums, networking events and other community gatherings; provides workshops and other forms of technical assistance for artists; and oversees a program to integrate arts and culture into the standard curriculum in public schools through The Right Brain Initiative. RACC values a diversity of artistic and cultural experiences and is working to build a community in which everyone can participate in culture, creativity and the arts. For more information visit racc.org.

PORTLAND, ORE – For February’s installment of Night Lights, artist Laura Heit will present Hypothetical Stars II on RACC’s north exterior wall at 411 NW Park Avenue in Portland on February 2 between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. This month, Night Lights is an affiliate site for The Portland Winter Light Festival, which is now in its second year.

Hypothetical Stars II is a hand-drawn animated installation that employs the artist’s marks as interventions into 16mm footage taken from the NASA Apollo 12 mission. Being the first mission after the moon landing, it was notable for being the first to bring a color TV camera. And for the fact that, upon landing, the camera was pointed at the sun and inadvertently destroyed, immediately terminating the television broadcast. This piece asks us to consider a new view of that which we cannot see with the naked eye, where images sent back from the outer reaches are not seen as scientific truth but as deeply connected to our own desires and mirrors of our unconscious. Hypothetical Stars II uses thrown shadows from tabletop dioramas and reflected and refracted animated projections to create a universe of hypothetical stars, moons, and planets. Recreated on a large scale for Night Lights this piece transforms the parking lot into a 360 degree speculative star system. This installation coincides with two films completed in 2015 when NASA released its image archive into the public domain that spring.

About the Artist: Laura Heit is a multidisciplinary artist who engages experimental animation, performance, installation and writing. Disquieting and evocative, her work seamlessly crosses genres to unfold poetic visual narratives. Heit employs a strong handmade aesthetic, an irreverent sense of humor, drawing, puppetry, and animation, to bring together ideas and stories about ghosts, catastrophe, and invisibility. Screenings include; Rotterdam IFF, Annecy, Hong Kong IFF, London IFF, Ann Arbor Film Festival (1997, 2012, 2015), Black Maria, Walker Art Center, MOMA, Millennium Film, and the Guggenheim Museum, REDCAT, Aurora Picture Show, Pacific Film Archive, and others. She currently lives in Portland OR, USA.

Night Lights is a monthly public art event that promotes digital media, urban intervention, and technological innovation. On the First Thursdays of October through April, select artists are able to showcase their work on the North Wall of the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Night Lights is a collaboration between Open Signal and RACC.

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The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) was established in 1995 and is funded by public and private partners to serve artists, arts organizations, schools and residents throughout Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington counties. RACC provides grants for artists, nonprofit organizations and schools; manages an internationally acclaimed public art program; raises money and awareness for the arts through workplace giving and other programs; convenes forums, networking events and other community gatherings; provides workshops and other forms of technical assistance for artists; and integrates the arts into K-8 curriculum through The Right Brain Initiative. Online at www.racc.org.

With a commitment to creativity, technology and social change, Open Signal makes media production possible for everyone. We provide skills, equipment, inspiration and we amplify local voices on five cable channels. www.opensignalpdx.org

The Portland Winter Light Festival, is a premier winter event hosted at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). This outdoor celebration illuminates Portland’s waterfront through contemporary light-based art installations, engaging performance, and fun activities for all ages. Free and open to the public, this nighttime community-supported event generates critical opportunities for artists, designers, creatives, makers and performers to collectively expand art, performance and technology innovations in our region. No tickets are needed for this outdoor event – simply show up and enjoy the show! Go to www.pdxwlf.com for more information and festival locations.

PORTLAND, ORE – Architect Aaron Whelton will present his Stacked Toroid project at the Portland Building beginning January 17^th. This room-sized installation is part of Whelton’s design research at Portland State University’s School of Architecture and his ongoing investigation of the physical manifestations of digitally designed architecture.

The installation, titled Stacked Toroid, is site-specific and is designed to fill the lobby gallery space from floor to ceiling. This sculptural figure, the toroid, is a shape resembling a torus (like a doughnut) that is formed from lofted elliptical profiles. Visitors to the Portland Building will immediately notice that the shape of the installation seems to shift significantly as they move past it. Walking a closer elliptical orbit around the object reveals a variety of effects generated from a single detail—stacking—as the structural wood lattice intersects the boundary of the toroid’s surface.

Stacked Toroid combines sophisticated digital design technologies with simple methods of construction and assembly to explore the relevance of manual labor in the age of computation. The simple, primitive act of stacking wood, a utilitarian, space-making impulse, is given new expressive potential by forming a complex, computationally generated figure.

A number of logistical challenges had to be worked out to create Stacked Toroid, the primary one being that it is composed of over 650 individual wood members stacked in precise arrangements, but Whelton’s architectural and public art experience have prepared him well. The entire process of installing the work at the Portland Building has been carefully orchestrated to belie the intense, repetitive physical effort required for its making, and the final result presents the polished “easiness” we expect from digital objects.

Meet the Artist Event: Join us for a chance to meet the artist and discuss the installation in person on Wednesday, January 18^th from 4:00 to 5:00 pm.  

About the Artist: Aaron Whelton studied architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Kentucky and is currently Assistant Professor at Portland State University’s School of Architecture. His practice includes work on public art commissions where digital design informs new ways of making place. These include the David Campbell Memorial in Portland and several collaborations with the artist David Franklin including the public art project Drift Inversion opening in Denver later this year.

Viewing Hours & Location: The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5^th Avenue in downtown Portland and is open 8 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday. Stacked Toroid opens Tuesday, January 17, and runs through Friday, February 10.

The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) manages the 13’ x 8’ installation space in the lobby of the Portland Building and presents installation-based art there year round. For more information, including images, proposals, and statements for projects dating back to 1994, go to www.racc.org/installationspace.

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The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) provides grants for artists, nonprofit organizations and schools in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington Counties; manages an internationally acclaimed public art program; raises money and awareness for the arts through Work for Art; convenes forums, networking events and other community gatherings; provides workshops and other forms of technical assistance for artists; and oversees a program to integrate arts and culture into the standard curriculum in public schools through The Right Brain Initiative. RACC values a diversity of artistic and cultural experiences and is working to build a community in which everyone can participate in culture, creativity and the arts. For more information visit racc.org.