ONLINE ARTIST TALK WITH ANNA DAEDALUS AND KERRY DAVIS EXPLORES PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES IN SITKA SPRUCE SWAMPLANDS
Artist Talk (Zoom): Saturday, October 23, 2021 @ 1:00 PM PST
Register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/palus-artist-talk-anna-daedalus-kerry-davis-tickets-170373559904
Oxygen Art Centre presents an artist talk and book launch with artists Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis. Oxygen hosted Daedalus and Davis for a remote residency throughout the month of August, during which the artists produced photographic works exploring the Sitka swamplands of the Grays River.
Daedalus and Davis are a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist team and cofounders of the former Roll-Up Gallery, an artist-run, contemporary exhibition space in Portland, Oregon. Having relocated in 2019 from Portland, Oregon to a rural hamlet on the Grays River, the artists live and work next to 55 acres of Sitka spruce swamp protected by the Columbia Land Trust. Over the past year Daedalus and Davis have been working with local organic materials and photographic processes to initiate a new body of work about this relatively obscure corner of the natural world.
Conceived under the title, “Palūs,” the Latin word for marsh, the residency is a continuation of their work with the Columbia River through alternative photographic and print processes such as the fugitive plant-based process of anthotypes that document flora and fauna, photograms documenting the swamp tides, and Japanese Gyotaku print methods. These material explorations, alongside the artists embodied reflections on the process, are included in an artist monograph published by Oxygen Art Centre.
The monograph chronicles Daedalus and Davis’s remote residency alongside an introduction by curator Rachel Lafo, an ecological perspective of the Sitka spruce swamp by environmentalist Andrew Emlen, and a poem by Robert Pyle. The book will be available to the public in print and online formats mid-October 2021.
Join us on Saturday October, 23, 2021 at 1:00 PM PST (Zoom) to celebrate the launch of the artist monograph, Palūs (2021), and learn more about Daedalus and Davis’s artist practice. This event will feature the artists Deadalus and Kerry discussing their artistic practice, as well as the remote residency more specifically. A question and answer period will follow the discussion. Admission is free or by donation. Everyone is welcome to attend. Registration required via EventBrite.
To learn more information about the artists, the residency, and the monograph, visit www.oxygenartcentre.org or contact info@oxygenartcentre.org.
Artist Bio: Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis are a married artist team whose multidisciplinary individual and collective work spans photography, installation, assemblage and book arts. Their four major projects have focused on themes of interdependence, environmental crisis and resilience, the Anthropocene epoch, and geologic time. Their work often employs alternative photographic techniques to foreground physical, tactile experience and the ideas of presence and immediacy. Davis studied photography and filmmaking at Portland State University and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Daedalus earned her BA from Reed College. Their collaborative projects have been supported by grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and shown regionally, including Portland State University’s Littman Gallery and Southern Oregon University’s Schneider Museum of Art. Their individual work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. Cofounders of Roll-Up Gallery, an erstwhile contemporary exhibition space in Portland, the team lives and works in Southwest Washington State near the mouth of the Columbia River.
Image Credit: Palus, anthotype using elderberry and skunk cabbage, 2021; Courtesy the Artists