The following description comes from the event organizer.

(June 04) MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is pleased to present Enduring Time | Material Emergence, the inaugural multimedia exhibition with works by Lauren Alyssa Bierly, Ilknur Demirkoparan, and Luis Zavala Tapia at Portland’s newest art venue located in the historic Ford building.

Amidst the contours of our newly fractured reality, we count time in incessant ways as our work bleeds into our homes, family members becoming coworkers, the touch of our labor separated from one another, and our patience ever exhausted. Time, that unceasing fugitive in our long wait for normalcy, is at once all we are after and all we lose track of. 

This artist-curated exhibition stems from a series of conversations surrounding the parameters of our existence in a slowly collapsed temporal grid worsened by the global Covid-19 pandemic. The various lockdowns of the past year, besides containing bodies in time and space, also expose the human need to make sense of our vulnerable collective presence.

Hailing from New York, Los Angeles, and Portland, the works of three artists shed light on the experience of time as they celebrate the touch of the hand by way of material and process. Grappling with themes of endurance in various iterations including painting, drawing, installation, and video, the works of these artists evoke history, mythology, labor, and memory while carving new spaces in which to describe identity and being.

Lauren Alyssa Bierly’s 2020 Light Dialogues, as part of her Architecture of Memory series, is a two-part project employing drawing and digital translation to document the passage of time in a given place, and its subsequent incarnations by the environments in which they are installed. Working quickly to trace the fleeting time, Bierly describes her multi-layered drawings as a living record of invisible conversations captured through abstract studies in color, sound, light, and geometry. Bierly’s drawings are accompanied by a video documentation of the artist’s process in timelapse.

Inspired by the abstract language of Turkish kilims, Ilknur Demirkoparan’s 2019 painting series, I want to Live Forever, at first appears as contemporary renditions of ancient symbols. In traditional kilim arts as practiced solely by women, the "toka" (hair clip) motif symbolizes the joy of life. When the weaver weaves strands of her own hair into the motif, she expresses the desire for eternal life. Demirkoparan recreates these motifs from a chaos of  scattered dots as if to mold them into contemporary talismans that breathe serenity to eternal madness.

Luis Zavala Tapia’s 2021 Mi Cielo oil on paper paintings derive their title from a Spanish term of endearment, translating in English to my heaven. Taking a meditative turn inward for self-recognition in time and space, Zavala’s interplay between mythology, fantasy, and the self speaks to the expansiveness of our being. Zavala’s series of paintings invite recognition for the multitude of histories that collide into the present to constitute one’s ever expansive self.

The intimacy of manual labor in these various iterations generates a new durational relationship to materiality. By capturing human presence through material expression, this exhibition works against the volatile relationship with time premised on the frailty of lived experience. Resilience is the primary radical act that intervenes in time through tenacious endurance. Thus, emerges an arresting display of material that is at once intimately perceptive and rigorously expository.

Enduring Time | Material Emergence opens on June 04, 2021, as part of Portland’s “first Fridays.” The exhibition runs until July 18, 2021 and is viewable by appointment. The MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is located at the historic Ford Building at 2505 SE 11th Ave Suite 233, Portland OR 97202. For appointments or inquiries, contact hello[at]postcollapse.art or visit our website https://mpac.postcollapse.art/