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.

Locus Turris by William Rihel and David Valdez is a low tech, real time exploration of visual science. By focusing on the physics of what humans can hear and see, both pattern and reaction transform into art.

Locus Turris explores light and sound in a way that is, not new to many, but is different in how it isolates the results. In addition to the creation of more complicated experiments, festival goers will get a chance to make their own patterns and see what impact their small scale visual concoctions have on a large scale projection.

Locus Turris sheds light on the parallels of the micro and the macro, to see how a simple ripple becomes a big wave, showing how the forces of the universe are constantly in flux.

William Rihel serves as RACC’s Public Art Program Specialist.

See the Portland Winter Light Festival schedule.

Drawing on her previous work exploring unusual and interesting physical properties of materials, Stephanie Simek will install a deftly crafted, hand-built “table of holograms” in the Portland Building Installation Space.

The holograms consist of three-dimensional images of common minerals that appear to hover in space above the tabletop. The table structure not only serves as a way of building an illusion, but also functions as a container for Simek’s personal table of elements, an offering of 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 magnetic, electrical, or optical capabilities, and all have the ability to do work, such as carrying a signal or storing information.” These familiar minerals have been used by the artist in her past installations, projects that include the construction of a room-sized crystal radio, an invisibility cloak, a compass, and a levitating sculpture.

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) runs from February 21 to March 17, 2017.

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.

Thank you for supporting the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Work for Art and The Right Brain Initiative. We invite you to keep track of your donations to all cultural nonprofits in Oregon. If you match the total with a gift to the Oregon Cultural Trust, you receive a 100 percent tax credit on your gift to the Trust!* That’s right, you double the impact of your cultural donations for free!

Oregonians fund the Cultural Trust. The Trust in turn, funds the artists, potters, rappers, acrobats and dreamers who make Oregon, Oregon. Every year they disperse funds via the state’s 1,400+ cultural nonprofits, 45 county/tribal coalitions and five statewide partners. Learn more at CulturalTrust.org

Donate by December 31, 2016.

*You can donate all you like to The Trust, but the tax credit is limited to $500 for an individual, $1,000 for a couple and $2,500 for C-class corporations.