Surplus Space presents a series of individual works examining the materials, tools, and choreography of under-recognized forms of labor. An opening reception will be held Saturday, August 30th from 6-9pm. The exhibition runs through Saturday, September 20th.
Tori Abernathy presents Swing Shift, a series of duets responding to the movements of Downtown Clean and Safe public maintenance and sanitation workers. Dancers in the Swing Shift ensemble act when the Clean and Safe crew is off-duty. Workers and dancers alike respond to surges in waste production. Formalizing the interplay that already occurs between maintenance workers and unexpected zones of local activity, Swing Shift recasts these work patterns into a visual choreographic score and subsequent movement. Swing Shift is directed by Tori Abernathy, with choreographic score produced by Grace Poetzinger, costume design by Alyssa Beers, performances by Hannon Welch, Keyon Gaskin, Leah Wilmoth, Simone Wood, and the Clean and Safe Crew.Tori Abernathy is an artist, activist, curator, and writer from Miami living in Portland. She is founder and co-director of RECESS.
Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen will be showing a small selection of pieces that play on the signage and choreography of roadside sign dancers. Gray and Paulsen are a collaborative artist team whose current interests center around reading and writing holes into the political and institutional predicaments that make life worse. Their projects have been seen at PDX Contemporary Art, The San Diego Museum of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Publication Studio, and PICA's Time-Based Arts Festival.
Jabari Jordan-Walker is a writer and artist currently based in Portland, OR. Jordan-Walker’s work employs video and sculpture as meditative elements toward a wave of ephemeral objectives that architecture and sociopolitical policies produce between an individual's relationship within the aesthetic and bureaucratic function of architecture as an esoteric discipline. His work, Monks Bond, borrows its title from a masonry term describing a form of brickwork used in early 20th century Flemish architecture. Here it is used to characterize the site where Jordan-Walker will be using three bonded bricks recovered from a demolished Portland apartment complex as a relic to meditate on the “brick” as natural material. As a relationship toward an investigation on the Mount Angel Abbey Library, Alvar Aalto’s last project before his death, the performance which will conclude at Surplus Space with the construction of a brick wall, will ultimately be dictated by Jordan-Walker’s pilgrimage.
In an effort to put more of our resources to work Surplus Space will be debuting a new series of programming where guest curators are invited to curate the kitchen, hallway, and bathroom of Surplus. This month we welcome guest curators: Fo(u)rt collective who will be exhibiting: Rachel Mulder, Damon Sneed, and Braeden Cox.
