February 1st - 23rd

Exhibition Reception: Saturday, February 1st, 5-7pm

Sonja Dahl
The Pattern Within the Pattern Within the Pattern

The late writer Barry Lopez helped me find the title for this exhibition. He lived for 50 years in a cabin on the McKenzie River until his beautiful land was decimated by the fires of 2020. He spoke about the syntax of the river, the syntax of place, of looking for “the river within the river within the river”; a way of paying deep attention to the place you are in and learning from the patterns that exist there. This was his advice for how to create works of meaning in a world in flames: “Pick a place and become an apprentice…and start to look for the patterns.”

In many ways, I realize this is what I have been trying to do, and is the root from which this body of work grows. As an artist devoted to the medium of textiles, pattern is an innate building block for both technique and meaning - patterns are the bricks we build our temples with as workers of cloth. And the materials tell the stories. A series of triangles tiled together become like morse code, become the patterns of historic quilts made by settler women to tell the story of their migration to a land of pine trees, mountains, rivers and valleys. Pendleton fabrics contain patterns appropriated from indigenous tribes, and the material tells a complex story about the unfolding relationship between those people for whom this land is ancestor and family and those of us who came after, with our severed roots and hunger. A Byzantine representation of a many-eyed angel in a basilica in Venice speaks to me about paying attention. The bricks and arches of ancient Rome offer metaphors for the enduring nature of time itself and humanity’s constant projects of conquest and homemaking. And the river, the river is always there whispering to me from the deep reaches of the imagination, a place that is not mine alone.

It is my hope that by paying deep attention to the patterns within the patterns within the patterns of any place I find myself in this world, but especially here where the McKenzie River flows from the taps of my home and fills my glass to brimming, that I can create building blocks of beauty and meaning in a world in flames.