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Pepper Pepper is a Portland, OR-based multidisciplinary artist. His work transforms vulnerability into spectacle - using artifice, technology, and camp to metabolize trauma into luminous, often magical performance worlds. Pepper has presented performances on stages and at festivals including Risk/Reward, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), Performance Works Northwest, NCECA, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. Their visual and installation work has been exhibited at Oregon Contemporary, Linfield University, Seattle Central College, and The Budapest Art Fair.
Pepper has incubated new experimental works at residencies like MacDowell, Monson Arts, Playa, Caldera, Signal Fire, and PonderosaTanz (Germany), Pepper’s practice bridges experimental performance and nightlife legacy. With over 20 years in cabaret and drag production, Pepper has appeared at and been featured at The Austin International Drag Festival, OUTstages (Victoria, BC), and is co-host of The Portland Drag Theatre Festival alongside frequent collaborator Anthony Hudson.
His ongoing project Pink Moment explores PINK as queer energy, ritual, and resistance while hybridizing performance, photography, and installation into an evolving archive of embodied glamour.
@thepepperpepper
www.thepepperpepper.com Learn moreRalph Pugay is an artist who was born in the province of Cavite, Philippines, and has resided in Portland, OR for the majority of his adult life. He creates imaginative and thought-provoking tableaus that prompt viewers to contemplate the boundaries of cultural norms, identity, and social perception. His works have been exhibited at various venues, including Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Seattle Art Museum, Upfor Gallery, Marinaro, Webb Art Gallery, Vox Populi, AA|LA, and King School Museum for Contemporary Art. Pugay is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, a Betty Bowen Award, and an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship among others. He has also been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Joan Mitchell Center, the Rauschenberg Residency, Vermont Studio Center, PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, Crows Shadow, and the University of Oregon’s Center for Artistic Research.
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