Ellen Lesperance: You & I Are Earth

Ellen Lesperance: You & I Are Earth
September 5–September 27, 2014

Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce an exhibition with Portland artist Ellen Lesperance on view from September 5—27, 2014. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Portland.

Lesperance's paintings, sculptures and textiles pay tribute to direct action campaigns and feminist activism. With You & I Are Earth, Lesperance explores the form and practice of protest and public space with a series of paintings that touch on eco-activism surrounding pressing environmental concerns such as global warming, fracking and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The works skillfully conflate the political with the poetic to merge ideology and individualism.

The titular piece in the exhibition, You & I Are Earth, references a 2009 Earth First! and Cascadia Rising Tide roadblock that was organized to prevent logging in the Elliot State Forest near Reedsport, Oregon. Other works such as Through a Rustling of Trees and Still in the Pre-Dawn Dark, O Mother, the Police Draw Their Guns Against Us to Serve the Corporate Agenda refer to a 2013 anti-fracking protest by Elsipogtog First Nation tribe members in New Brunswick, Canada.

The artist's gouache on paper paintings are inspired by sweaters worn by women at protests, sit-ins, demonstrations and during civil disobedience. These handmade articles of clothing, like other forms of creative direct action such as picket signs, banners, street theater, body painting and costumes, offer narrative and invite personal interaction. Analyzing the sweater's gauge of yarn, cut and construction, Lesperance paints its pattern square by square, stitch by stitch. Pattern, shape and symmetry emerge in the artist's hightly detailed compositions that merge figuration and abstraction, while still very directly referencing the body.

Often these paintings guide the artist as she re-activates the image by knitting the garment, thereby outfitting a new person and inviting them to join in the conversation. One such work, the artist's largest sculptural knit piece to date, consists of a jacket, pants and belt and will be on view alongside the artist's two-dimensional work.

By translating and tranforming such source material into something abstract and universal, the works speak to participation and protest, not as not radical, but essential and personal. The work literally embodies voice and opinion and serves to remind us to be present in order to affect change.

Ellen Lesperance (born 1971, Minneapolis) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been exhibited widely most recently at the Seattle Art Museum, WA and in the People's Biennial which traveled to Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; the Dahl Arts Center, Rapid City, SD; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; and the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA. Her work is included in the upcoming exhibition, Thread Lines, at the Drawing Center, New York, NY and is represented in the following public collections: the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Art and Design, the Portland Art Museum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Kadist Art Foundation. The artist has been honored with the Betty Bowen Award and a Ford Family Fellowship in the Arts.