Sep 27th - Oct 25th

Opening Reception Saturday, Sep 27th, 5-7pm

Performance
Saturday, Oct 25th, 7pm
by Amulets

Electric Mixer

Featuring work by

Dawn Cerny
Josh Faught
Craig Hickman
Michael Rey
Michael Salter
Kate Steciw
Sarah Wertzberger

Ditch Projects is pleased to present Electric Mixer, featuring work by Dawn Cerny, Josh Faught, Craig Hickman, Michael Rey, Michael Salter, Kate Steciw, and Sarah Wertzberger. The exhibition is curated by Mike Bray and Laura Butler Hughes. For this exhibition, Bray and Hughes bring together artists whose work share a common aesthetic thread inspired by the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, such as digital doodles, screen distortions, and copy and paste.

Craig Hickman’s Kid Pix was one of the first digital art programs, introduced in schools in the 1990s, encouraged curiosity and play with early computers and digital aesthetics. The 80’s and 90’s tech, that a generation of artists grew up with, is now embedded in both their on and off screen work, and can be observed in Dawn Cerny and Michael Salter’s digital, analogue, and spatial drawings; the pucker and bloat-like effect in Michael Rey’s large scale furniture and sculpture; Kate Steciw’s photoshopped and collaged images of wiring and cords, Sara Wertzberger’s woven explorations of color and fiber that feel like digital screen distortion, and Josh Faught’s use of an obsolete 1980’s knitting machine.

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Dawn Cerny (lives and works in Seattle, Washington) is known for her sculptural works that explore domesticity, humor, and the human body through abstract, furniture-like forms. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts in 2002 and her MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2012.

Cerny has had solo institutional exhibitions at Frye Art Museum (2025); The Seattle Art Museum (2021); The Portland Art Museum (2017); and The Henry Art Gallery (2008 and 2017). Cerny’s works on paper and sculptures are in public collections, including The Walker Art Gallery, SFMOMA, The Frye Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, The Portland Art Museum, and The Seattle Art Museum. Dawn Cerny’s work has been written about in Bomb Magazine, KQED, Variable West, Artforum, the International Sculpture Center Blog, The Brooklyn Rail, The Stranger, and The Seattle Times.

Josh Faught (lives and works in San Francisco, California) is a fiber artist and educator, who creates sculptures, textiles, collages, and paintings. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, and addresses topics of craft and queer history. His fiber sculptures, influenced by both domestic crafts and 20th century abstraction, are often either hung on the wall or stretched over scaffolding such as garden trellises; they are three-dimensional but forward-oriented. His work in the exhibition is part of the center for experimental sweaters project and made with a Brother KH-940 Knitting Machine.

Recent solo exhibitions include Sanctuary, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2025); Look Across the Water into the Darkness, Look for the Fog, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2022); Both Things are True, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2019); Casa Loewe, London (2019); Sanctuary, commissioned by Western Bridge, St Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle (2017); Siyinqaba, US Embassy in Swaziland, Mbabane (2015)

Craig Hickman (lives and works Eugene, Oregon) is an artist, programmer, and educator whose work has moved from photography to digital software. His Kid Pix program inspired a generation of young artists and introduced technology as a place for exploration and curiosity. His work included in this exhibition are from his Signal To Noise and Loose Leaf series.

Hickman is a co-founder of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon and Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Oregon. In 2014 he was honored as a pioneer who has made a profound impact as part of Apple’s 30th anniversary of the Macintosh. The Kid Pix archives have been collected by The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Michael Rey (lives and works between Los Angeles, California and Eugene, Oregon) holds a BFA from Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota and an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Rey engages automatic drawing and digital tools to generate familiar yet slippery abstract forms that manifest at times in large-scale wall works, sculptural furniture, upholstery, and ceramic.

Rey’s work has been the subject of international exhibitions most recently at Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; SOUTHFIELD, Southfield; Office Baroque, Brussels and Zero, Milan. Institutional presentations include Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Malibu; Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard; Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna, among others.

Michael Salter (lives and works Eugene, Oregon) culls through the avalanche of mass media and corporate branding to find poignant, absurd, and baffling pieces which become part of his work. His creations span all types of media including installation, drawing, kinetic sculpture, logotypes, animation, web art, styrofoam robots, graphics, and signage.

Salter received an MFA from University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a BFA in graphic design and sculpture from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Recent solo exhibitions include Gristle Sausage, Lump Gallery, Raleigh NC; STYROBOT: NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO; and VISUAL PLASTIC, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT.

Kate Steciw’s (lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) sculptures, video installations, and photographs have been associated with the post-internet movement and are inspired by events in popular culture. Her digital photographic collages interrogate the relationship between reality and virtual representation, splicing together a disparate group of objects that mirror how the internet is consumed; the images, taken out of their commercial context, are reimagined as contemporary abstract mosaics.

Kate Steciw lives and works in New York. She has exhibited extensively in New York, in solo and group shows at galleries including Toomer Labzda, Higher Pictures, Horton Gallery, BAMart, Stadium and Foxy Production. Her works has been exhibited internationally at Gallerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, France; Neumeister Bar Am, Berlin, Germany and Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy, among others.

Sarah Wertzberger (lives and works in Portland, Oregon) is an artist and designer working across mediums of weaving, ceramics, and painting, and specifically, her weaving practice spans hand, industrial, and digital weaving. Wertzberger explores ideas of play, color interaction, and the tensions that exist at the intersections of art, design, craft, technology, and DIY. Embraces intuition, her work is expressive and provisional as she allows for the process of making itself steers the work’s outcomes.

Wertzberger received her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited at Holding Contemporary (Portland, OR), Field Projects (New York, NY), The Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland, OR), The Design Center (New York, NY), and has been a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Weaving Mill (Chicago, IL), and AZ WEST - Encampment Residency (Joshua Tree, CA). Wertzberger lives and works in Portland, OR.

Electric Mixer was made possible with support by the Ford Family Foundation