FISHBOWL II Curated by Gene Flores October 2022 - May 2023
Guest Curator:
Gene Flores
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
My curatorship is focused on the work from a wide array of artists with different perspectives of “art:”
I am focusing primarily on artists of color that will display works from a vast spectrum of the art fields from printmaking to graphic novels. I have invited artists from the Oregon and Washington areas to participate in this program. My hope is to bring attention to the contributions of artists of color from around our community that often get overlooked and ignored.
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-Gene Flores
I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, received my Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) and my Masters of Art and Masters of Fine Art (with honors) from the University of Iowa. I have taught various art classes at UTEP, the University of Iowa, Clackamas Community College and Portland Community College. I continue to exhibit my work nationally and internationally. My work can be found in collections at the University of Iowa, the El Paso Museum of Art, University of Texas El Paso, Sonoma State University, Universidad de Costa Rica, and Mira Costa College as well as numerous private collections.
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I am currently the Program Dean of Art and Design at Portland Community College, in Portland, Oregon.
Featured Artist:
April 2023
Rochelle Kulei Nielsen
Rochelle is a member of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation. She was very involved in the Native American community having spent the last ten years as Coordinator of the Native American Education Program in Vancouver, WA. She currently is an Adjunct Professor of Art and Native Studies at Portland Community College, Eastern Washington University, and an affiliated faculty with the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at Portland State University having taught a course on Indigenous Critique of Native American Art. Rochelle served as the coordinator of the Northwest Indian Story Teller Program with the Wisdom of the Elders, Inc.
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In this exhibition, Nielsen explores the impact and legacy of schooling in the US including the many ways formal education participates in the violence of settler colonialism. Scholar Sandy Grande has argued that both Indian Boarding Schools and other forms of US public education, were integral to the goals of subjugating Indigenous peoples, contributing to the colonization of Indigenous minds and bodies. Nielsen highlights the role schooling played in colonization with work like “E is for Erase” which features two photographs of a young boy named Thomas Moore Keesick from the Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation. This photographic pair shows Keesick upon admission to the Regina Indian Industrial School in 1897, and after school leaders forced him to remove the clothing and long hair that connected him to his community. Images like this portrait pair serve as heartbreaking reminders of the history that Nielsen explains was not taught to most US citizens, by their family or by the education system. As Grande has argued, indoctrination through education was a vital component of the theft of Indigenous land, resources and labor.
WEBSITE: www.rochellekulei.com
Featured Artist: March 2023
Una Kim
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paint from both reality and imagination. As an immigrant I am caught in the historical crosscurrents of two very different cultures and two very different modernisms. While Korea still has shamans, peasants, and ritualistic festivals and dances, American modernism long ago relegated such realities to the primitive slot. I try to bring this reality to my work because it informs my way of looking at the world. My works are the result of my struggle with content and form within my historical situation and not any particular artistic process or skill that I have mastered. Because of my migration to America from a very different place my pictorial possibilities are not limited to the Western canon. There are times when I use the simple beauty of the written Korean language for its resonance with other images and forms. I like colors and images to radiate off the canvas and I often paint images of exuberance and motion, of the power concentrated in the human form. I also paint images of submission and the theme of “not seeing” figures in my work. While I do not paint animals I do paint monstrous beings that inhabit a nebulous space in the world of my imagination. I try not to let the boundaries between representative art and abstract art influence my work or for that matter, my thinking and seeing.
Featured Artist:
February 2023
Alex Bubb
Featured Artist:
December 2022 - January 2023
David Torres II
Born in West Palm Beach, FL, David Torres is interested in the history of stories where the unseen forces of morality are at work. The PTSD factor embedded in culture has drawn David's work to the idea of the “hero” as an empathic ideal for people to aspire to. David Torres is also interested in the illusion and delusional discussions that surround the complexities of the racial, sexual, religious, aging; old and young identities in culture. As a way of investigating these identities David Torres created “Riakman”, an alter ego, designed under the influences of 1990’s anime, video games, and his father’s middle school drawings. Riakman’s birth expanded into the Sunkeepers, a race of warriors fueled by the cosmic power of the sun. Through worldbuilding and storytelling, David finds pathways between high art and popular culture. Through the Sunkeepers, David tells stories within his fictional planet “Runetech” about a way of being in the world. Exploring a narrative with an embedded nostalgia for the future is the illusion David Torres uses to contend with the disillusions that exist within culture. David received his BFA in Painting at Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Visual Arts at Mason Gross School of Arts.
IG/Social Media Handle: @djtorresII
Website: https://sunkeepers.art/
Portal Maiden
pen & ink on paper
18 x 24"
2022
$800
Awaken Zyl
pen & ink on paper
14 x 11"
2021
$600
Edensphere
pen & ink on paper
11 x 14"
2021
$900
Film, video games, animation, and the networked globalization of images are the lingua franca of our time. These mediums, in particular film and gaming, don’t merely reflect back the world or point out our interaction, but directly model it. I am interested in the history of stories where the unseen forces of morality are at work. The PTSD factor embedded in culture has drawn me to the idea of the “hero” as an empathic ideal for people to aspire to. I am also interested in the illusion and delusional discussions that surround the complexities of the racial, sexual, religious, aging; old and young identities in culture. As a way of investigating these identities I created “Riakman”, an alter-ego, designed under the influences of 1990’s anime, video games, and my father’s middle school drawings. Riakman’s birth later expanded into the Sunkeepers, a race of warriors fueled by the cosmic power of the sun! Through worldbuilding and storytelling, I re-link pathways between high art and popular culture. Through the Sunkeepers, I tell stories within my fictional planet “Runetech” about a way of being in the world. Exploring a narrative with an embedded nostalgia for the future is the illusion I use to contend with the disillusions that exist within culture today.
Featured Artist:
November 2022
Kanani Miyamoto
Kanani Miyamoto is an individual of mixed heritage and identifies most with her Hawaiian and Japanese roots. Miyamoto often combines Eastern art aesthetics and techniques with Hawaiian philosophy. Sharing and celebrating her unique mixed background in our contemporary art world and representing her community and the beauty of intersectional identities are important to her work.
Miyamoto holds an MFA in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), and a bachelor's degree in Art Practices from Portland State University. Miyamoto is an artist and educator. Her art work has shown nationally. Miyamoto’s work is rooted in traditional printmaking but has evolved into large scale installations. She is originally from Honolulu, Hawai`i and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.
IG/Social Media Handle: @mamakanani
Website: Kananimiyamoto.com
Featured Artist:
October 2022
Kim Manchester
I am primarily a photographer and printmaker, but I find that more and more recently, my photography is about textiles and my printmaking has an affinity leaning towards textile as well these days. I grew up in a textile and tactile family, my grandmother crocheting pearls into cocktail rings, my mother teaching me to sew on the machine where she made her wedding dress, my own gathering of old clothing and modifying it to fit my own style and sense of fashion as I moved into my teen-age years. The last few years have been a dry-spell of sorts with regard to photography. Nothing seemed to connect. Instead, I found myself knitting and sewing. Six stitches to an inch. Four inches and twenty-six rows for gauge. My time inside spent idly and furiously productive. Knitting especially, is something that I do to help myself focus and stay in one place. A sort of reverse eye of the tornado - the outside seemingly calm while the inside spins.
I teach photography at Portland Community College and have had the distinct pleasure of helping build the photography program since 2005.
IG/Social Media Handle: @kim_idlehands
Website: https://idlehandsphoto.com/
What drives my most recent work is that while I love using a lens to capture light I am recently enjoying more of the iterative, step-by-step process of making. I am discovering how building towards something that isn’t preconceived can welcome experimentation and adventure - how the process becomes an integration of each texture, color, pattern - like fabric. Something cumulative out of small parts, not always greater than, but a cooperative effort that creates a subtle hand-loomed effect. Nowhere have I been better able to explore this approach to my art than with the Cyanotype photographic process.
The Cyanotype is a process that came to mind when I was traveling abroad with students this Summer as a way to connect them to the land and cement their understanding of exposure, history and process through experience. We made blue impressions of coneflower, sage, clover and blackberry in the sun in the Czech Republic and later, I spent time, alone, on the far West coast of Ireland, and made my own impressions in blue.
FISHBOWL II Looking Back ... September 2021 - May 2022
Blackfish Gallery has supported artists in the Pacific Northwest for many years via a free opportunity to exhibit work in our street-side Fishbowl II window in Portland, Oregon.
In response to the events of 2020, the gallery has committed to shifting the emphasis of that space to increase opportunities for artists of color in our community to be seen and heard. We welcome working with this year’s curator, Christine Miller, whose vision and voice is launching a pilot platform specifically for Black-identifying artists in the Pacific Northwest, with emphasis on artists from the Portland Metro area. This pilot, titled “Without Form and Void,” will run in Fishbowl II through May 2022, with a new artist’s work curated into the window each month. Our hope and intention is that this will become an established program and continue after the pilot.
CURATOR
We're excited to welcome Christine Miller as the first curator for this program. Christine Miller is a conceptual artist and curator currently based in Portland, OR. Her work centers around racial imagery, products and histories while simultaneously reframing her own cultural identity. In addition to her own work, Christine’s curatorial practice centers on bringing underrepresented contemporary artists to the front of the Portland art community and beyond.
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STATEMENT | “Without Form and Void centers around the thought of creating in darkness and detaching away from traditional Eurocentric definitions - such as evil or lack. Inspired by a sermon from Pastor Toure Roberts, the message spoke to theological creation, with the verse “let there be light” symbolizing revelation in the light and creation in darkness. Without Form and Void focuses on the importance of darkness as time and space to create from an inner place. This theme is also inspired by Legacy Russel’s Glitch feminism as it applies to the concept of looking at non binary gender as going back to abstraction, reexamining the definition of the word body.
My curatorship is in support of the Absence of Light documentary on HBO which features some of the most monumental Black contemporary artists speaking of their resilience to keep creating without recognition and praise from prominent art spaces and critics. Thus this call is specially for all Black artists in the Oregon, Washington & Idaho areas. As Black creatives living in the Pacific North West, Portland specifically is a space that not only excluded us in legislation but was not created prioritizing Black life, Black lenses or Black creativity. These exhibitions address what was created during the time of darkness and give commentary of this new season of attention."
-Christine Miller
September 2021
d.a. carter
d.a carter kicks off “Without Form and Void” with his work ‘black want.” Derrais Carter is a teacher, writer and artist from Kansas City, Kansas. Sometimes he makes work oriented around the aesthetics of Black life. Featured in Fishbowl II from Thursday, September 2 – Saturday, October 2, 2021.
October 2021
Tieara Myers
Tieara Myers is an African-American abstract artist living in Portland, OR - making art for over 20 years in various mediums and styles. Currently working primarily with acrylics melding empty spaces with impactful symbols and lines. Circles are dominant symbols in her artwork.
This theme was sparked after a death in my family. I began to explore the journey of forgiveness in all its imperfections in their life and afterward in my own. Since then, this theme has only expanded and grown in depth and viscerality.
I am inspired by the abstract, the magical, the surreal, the spiritual. I have a passion for artists like Hilda of Klint, Frida Kahlo, Agnes Pelton, Remedios Varo, and Bisa Butler.
I believe that forgiveness is something everyone can have for themselves and others. Life isn’t perfect, and neither are our individual journeys. I believe there is a simplicity and beauty to accepting, admiring, and seeing the imperfection of life. There is beauty in forgiveness. I communicate these themes and my vision of life through my art. I create art that sparks a reaction in people, bringing them closer, and engaging them in their own sense of feelings, emotions, and memories.
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IG/Social Media Handle: @ tiearamyersart
Website: https://www.tiearamyers.com/artwork
November 2021
Sharlene Prosser
Sharlene Prosser Oregon based artist is a non-binary, mixed race African-American
maker who has been honing their skills in ceramics for the past five years. They are a recent
graduate from Pacific Northwest College of art class of 2021 after transferring from the Oregon
College of Art and Craft in 2019. They make work based on the experience they have in their
body, racial identity, social justice, self love, and community. Through the lens of ceramics they
are inspired to make their own artifacts since they are unable to connect directly with the West
African side of their heritage.
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IG/Social Media Handle: @art.by.sharlene
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December 2021
Nikster Productions
My practice involves making hand-sculpted, one-of-a-kind toys and packaging. Although I call them toys, they are not meant to be played with or opened. My toys are witty, comical, and most of the time inappropriate. My work says what everyone is thinking but may be too polite to bring up. Through these toys, I am able to speak about topics that are scary, frustrating, and uncomfortable to deal with.
The toys of my youth made adulthood look easy. They didn’t tell us what went into getting the dream house and convertible. There was no mention of the debt, small apartments, and long hours at the job. My toys present a packaged reality of how life actually is. Sometimes it's hard but most of the time there’s something to laugh about. My toys draw upon childhood nostalgia to riff on contemporary society while providing the catharsis of childhood play. My toys use humor and sarcasm to deal with events far outside of my control
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IG/Social Media Handle: @niksterproductions
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January 2022
Nia Musiba
Nia Musiba is living and eating and sleeping and creating work and making friends in Portland, Oregon. Her identity as an African-American woman and the daughter of a Tanzanian immigrant influence her work and her exploration of Blackness throughout history. Nia's creations are about being human, about hands and feet and bodies and love and sadness and flowers and sunshine. She views her depictions of Black and brown bodies as a direct response to the hyper-sexualization, brutalization, and overall negative depictions of BiPoC individuals within art and media.
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IG/Social Media Handle: @niamusiba
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February 2022
Rose Léon
Rose Léon is a Nigerian-American Visual Artist based in Portland, OR. His artistic pieces are an ode to his community who are an integral component of his body of work. In this series "Give Them Their Flowers" he has teamed up with Creative Floral Installation Artist Vytell (Vanessa Tello). “This series is dedicated to the artists in our lives, whom we would like to celebrate and give their flowers to them before our chance to closes.”
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IG/Social Media Handle: @rosexleon
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March 2022
Ruby Joy White
Ruby Joy White (b. 1988, Denver, CO; Prince/She) is a stylish, 30-something, sapphically-inclined, writer-altarist-violinist-dancer-Sagittarius-TOMBOY, based in Portland, OR. A neurodivergent radical imaginist, Prince is a cultural curator, and plans & executes creative events, art talks, festivals, and installations that center People of Color and all their intersections. Additionally, Prince is a sociologist, and hosts conversations on equity in creative spaces, engages with youth, and has a background in the academy. She is a Content Writer and Editor for Art for Ourselves, a creative essayist, an anti-racist educator, and is an equity manager for a department in regional government. In creative practice, Ruby curates and creates vibrant experiences that aim to transport those engaged into realms that connect the soul to the beauty and intersections of the self.
Prince’s work is best described as aesthetic, altar-like intimacies that tell stories, illuminate Queerness (in all its forms) and challenge the cacophony of the static norm. These installations come together in a multitude of forms: always centering writing and complemented by paintings, drawings, collages, and antique props. Within her writing practice, Ruby’s swirl of mind and sociological exploration dig into the questions, appreciation, and confusion of self that she finds to be so common amongst her Black Diasporic siblings. Ruby aims to use her artistic and written vehicles as stewards of the power that stems from the granting of self-agency, and the ability to define reality for our(BIPOC)selves.
Ruby holds degrees in Journalism: News/Editorial and Sociology: Family Studies, with a minor in Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado.
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IG/Social Media Handle: @rastaroo
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April 2022
Jae Lamar
Jae Lamar is a mixed media artist living in Medford, Oregon who just finished her Bachelors of Fine Arts. While she enjoys working with a variety of mediums, her particular interests are painting on textile surfaces. Since childhood, she has enjoyed the democratization of art achieved by using utilitarian mediums such as T-shirts, felt, bed sheets and more. She believes there’s something special about wearable, usable art- it makes room for people who enjoy aesthetic beauty but don’t necessarily have the privilege to purchase large framed or canvas works.
All of her art is focused on inviting as many people to the conversation as possible. Art, she believes, is the true litmus for the values, hopes, fears, and social norms for any society. In addition to painting, she has explored these themes in the medium of sculpture, video, digital art, performance art and several others. She hopes to continue on in her mission to share art with people generally excluded from conversations about art; maybe in the form of a non-profit dedicated to community art projects.
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IG/Social Media Handle: @Jaeleelamar
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May 2022
Myles Parker
Myles Parker is a local painter/clothing designer that currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon. As an artist with multiple creative outlets, his passion in painting is particularly driven by his fascination with the in depth exploration of the vast color wheel. This passion is brought to life through his expansive canvas to canvas contemporary art pieces. When creating, Parker strongly believes in relaxing his mind and letting the paint and his intuition lead the way. Once he feels like a piece is complete, he evaluates and the process begins again.
When consuming his work, please note that Parker strongly believes that interpretation is up to the viewer. There is no right or wrong, whatever you feel and see is true. Feel free to share your thoughts with him at @artbymylesp.
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IG/Social Media Handle: @artbymylesp
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