Nov 4 - 26

Opening reception
Saturday, November 4th, 5-7pm

Pat Boas & Michelle Ross
moves without an ambit / pulls without a magnet

^{The body, like a crowd, moves without a mind. Moves without
an ambit. Tilts without an axis. Pulls without a magnet. A school
of fish could tell you that: the wind is more a rudder than a mast.
– from Revision by Jane Huffman, 2019}

This two-person exhibition of paintings and related work by artists Pat Boas and Michelle Ross reflects a shared but individualized search in which questions that once seemed to have bee answered now present themselves as open-ended. Working in the gap between sight, mind, and hand, the artists – longtime friends and colleagues – make use of what filters in fro multiple visual vocabularies while navigating the tension between structure and impulse.

The work here has a direct relationship to studio process:
cycling, positioning, repositioning
moving, recording, forgetting

Boas presents large-scale pigment prints from the AM-FR series alongside several small paintings that chase after a kind of un-deliberate deliberation. Influenced by the process of making the prints, the paintings share a similar collage sensibility, bringing together fragmented artifacts and incorporating suggestions of figuration as they arise. They function as studies happening at the periphery, more or less beyond the pressure of expectation.

The Auditioners, a project in which Ross gathers small speculative works onto a pair of custom shelving units, infer a domesticated position and the possibility of change. Reminiscent of the dry ephemeral pools of the Great Salt Lake or lenticular clouds on the Oregon coast, Ross’s restless observations of land, sky and other embodied sensations manifest as small abstract paintings that inquire into and reflect on the potential of myriad studio decisions.
Simultaneously withholding and revealing; gestures of reconfiguration, codependency and alte ego characterize these small works in search of new language and subject. The Auditioners will be cycled through various positions within the space by deputized conductors over the run of the exhibition. Other new paintings are presented in dialogue with Boas’s work as well.

^{Image: (left) Pat Boas, Saturday Painting #5, 2023; (right) Michelle Ross, Second Thought, 2023
Revision by Jane Huffman appeared in Poetry (December 2019), The Poetry Foundation}

Bios:

Pat Boas’ paintings, drawings and digital projects have been shown in solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally. She is a 2017 Hallie Ford Visual Arts Fellow (Oregon) and a 2012 Bonnie Bronson Fellow (Oregon), with select awards that include the Corporation of Yaddo (New York), Ucross Fellowship (Wyoming), The Ford Family Foundation (Oregon), Jentel Foundation (Wyoming), Oregon Arts Commission, Portland Art Museum, and Oregon’s Regiona Arts and Culture Council. Represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, she is a professor emerita in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University.

Michelle Ross makes paintings out of a variety of materials in order to conjure a physical record of being in the world. In 2020 Ross completed a suite of four architecturally site-specifi paintings for the Standard Insurance Company. She was recently a resident at Yucca Valley Material Lab (California) and at Iris Projects in Venice Beach (California). Ross has received a Hallie Ford Fellowship (Oregon), a MacDowell Fellowship (New Hampshire), a Portland Ar Museum Contemporary Northwest Art Award (Oregon) and was named a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (Italy). She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon and is currently Visiting Professor and Chair of Painting and Drawing at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University.