Along these lines

Julia Bradshaw, Ron Linn, & John Whitten

October 1 – 30, 2022

“The grid per se is of absolutely no importance to any of the artists in this exhibition, providing, as it does, merely an armature for a variety of styles, means and contents.” Lucy Lippard, Top to Bottom, Left to Right, 1972

Along these lines is an exhibition of recent works by Julia Bradshaw, Ron Linn, and John Whitten. With landscape as their primary subject matter, these artists use time-intensive techniques in photography, painting, and drawing to explore the ambiguous authority of the grid when used to map spaces. These artists challenge the sociopolitical/historical gridded division of the landscape, employ the grid in scientific myth-making, and play with the breakdown of the pixelated pictorial space.

Artist bios:

Julia Bradshaw’s projects often have an artful playfulness. Projects are responsive to her environment such as being a foreigner, flying, reading or photographic technologies, and the intersection between science and art. She received her MFA in 2007 from San José State University and teaches photography and video-art at Oregon State University. Bradshaw has exhibited her video-art and photography projects throughout the United States and internationally in Guatemala, The Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. Her artist book “Flying” is in the Getty Research Collection. Her print “Working Back-Up” is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection and the Oakland Museum of Art. Bradshaw attended artist residencies at Djerassi Artist Residence program in California and Playa in Summer Lake, Oregon for which she received funding from the Ford Family Foundation. In 2020, she was an Oregon Arts Fellow courtesy of the Oregon Arts Commission.

juliabradshaw.com

@juliabradshaw.art

Ron Linn is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is primarily based in drawing. He received his BFA from Brigham Young University in Studio Art and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. His work engages in issues of place and the connection between human and non-human nature through an examination of memory, myth, and both personal and imagined histories. He has participated in multiple residencies, including several Signal Fire wilderness artist retreats, and the NES artist residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland.  His work has been shown at Carnation Contemporary, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, the Rio and Alice Galleries in Salt Lake City, Bountiful Davis Art Center, and PDX Contemporary Art. He currently teaches painting and drawing courses at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he lives and works, and where he is a founding member of the PARC artist collective.

ronlinnportfolio.com

@ronlinn87

John Whitten is a visual artist, designer, and web developer whose practice is rooted in both traditional drawing and digital media. His work aims to excavate the philosophical significance of what it means to wander through the signals and noise enveloping our world. He co-founded the Thunderstruck Collective and Carnation Contemporary in 2018 and Well Well Projects in 2021. He earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon and his BFA in Studio Fine Art from Watkins College of Art in Nashville, Tennessee. His work has been exhibited internationally and throughout the United States, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and residencies. John’s home and studio are in Portland, Oregon. 

johnwhitten.com

@john.whitten

Dr. Kirsi Peltomäki is a contemporary art historian with a focus on experiential and participatory art, ranging from sculpture, conceptual art and institutional critique to adaptations of craft, relational aesthetics, and installation art. Peltomäki’s recent publications include the book Situation Aesthetics: The Work of Michael Asher (The MIT Press, 2010) and the edited collection Public Knowledge: Selected Writings by Michael Asher (The MIT Press, 2019). She has published articles in the journals Art Journal, Afterimage, and Tacet: Experimental Music Review as well as in anthologies Paradigmen der Kunstbetrachtung: Aktuelle Positionen der Rezeptionsäesthetik und Museumpädagogik (Peter Lang, 2015) and Sowohl als auch Dazwischen: Erfahrungsräume der Kunst (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015). She is currently working on research projects on late modernist sculpture and on the experiential turn in architectural sculpture in the 1970s. Peltomäki’s research has been funded by a Fulbright grant, a Henry Moore Institute fellowship, the Academy of Finland, and numerous grants by Oregon State University.