Past
WEST COAST PREMIERE: An evening of protest songs to soothe your despair and stoke your outrage, unless Morgan screws it up! Drawing on the tradition of protest albums, stand-up comedy, new age ritual, experimental narrative, and cabaret, Morgan Bassichis Sings Protest Songs is an evening of queer world-making and unmaking accompanied by Senior Energy featuring Elizabeth LoPiccolo (flute, vocals), Kyle Combs (electronics, percussion, vocals), Rhys Ziemba (bass), and Sam Greenleaf Miller (percussion, vocals).
Learn moreBIGHT OF THE TWIN tells the story of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Hazel Hill McCarthy III's journey to Ouidah in Benin to explore the origins of the Vodoun (Voodoo) religion.
Learn morecvllerjerx (angelica maria millan lozano, maximiliano carlos - raphael francisco martinez) exclaim “nothing is civilized anymore. esta noche the kids get loud! they’re not going to bed early tonight. ART AS BRAT through clothes, poetry, performance and dance.”” As resident artists within the festival the collaborators will interrogate and celebrate the spaces art and audiences inhabit while exploring the value of collective and absurd outbursts en un mundx locx.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bassichis will present an evening of “new and preexisting” daily meditations alongside musician Kyle Combs. In Morgan’s own words, “Maybe you don’t have time and it’s hard because you’re on Amazon looking for adrenal formulas and you don’t know how to work the podcast app and the MTA is crumbling as a kind of mood ring of everything else and in those cases you could come to this night and we will meditate for you, not in your place but on your behalf, especially if you didn’t have a chance to fully grieve George Michael as if that’s even possible, as if anything is ever fully grieved, as if anything is ever fully over, as if you really want to spend an entire evening of your life in a room with other people, back to back, front to front, side to side, cheek to cheek, and not run, but stay put and meditate to some songs about secret pools and Polish forests and being scared shitless or shitful, being scared shitty. You don’t need to bring anything! Feel free to bring your roommate or come alone, it’s totally fine either way.”
Learn moreA weekend-long, build-it-ourselves outdoor modern art museum, artist Libby Werbel orchestrates an exhibition in the heart of the city, inviting an impressive roster of performers to engage with the space. PMOMA draws a direct link between Portland’s lack of a major contemporary art museum and the impressive output of our creative community. Do Portland’s quickly shifting economic demands endanger the cultural equity essential to maintaining the quality of any major city? Is it possible to have a museum without an established infrastructure to support it? What does a museum look like when fashioned through our ideal ethical processes?
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: A Smeary Spot, 2015 is a 53 minute 4-channel video installation drawing on theater and documentary methods to rework the genre of science fiction. The title, A Smeary Spot is a references to the sun borrowed from feminist sci-fi writer Johanna Russ. The sun, a dense concentration of heat and light, is an organizing principle of time, place and ego. What potential emerges when we glance away from the source and settle into the blurry residue of the afterimage? This work re-orients the audience within a speculative present. Shot in two locations: on public lands in the deserts of southern Utah and inside a black box theater, where performers deliver recitations of appropriated and altered texts that compose a loose manifesto on being. Inside this cinematic experience is a surreal narrative of bodies in transition (both movement and definition) that act out, delivering curious combinations of language, materiality and gestures. Among these bodies, the land, the water, the refuse pile and the theater are not simply grounds, resources, waste or stages upon which these actions occur, they are sprawling protagonists, like the sun—permeating and persistent.
Learn moreDan Seward, also known as Bunnybrains, is a musician, curator and promoter in Hudson, New York, where he runs the celebrated (and somewhat nomadic) record store, John Doe Records. This exhibition focuses on Bunnybrains thirty plus years as a transgressive, mutable, collaborative, performative project and what it means to illustrate the life of a true muse. From live broadcasts of Bunnybrains radio show Battlefield Earth, participatory workshops, rotating guest exhibitions, spontaneous happenings and performances, the artist shares their space with you in an effort to vivify "Bunnybrains is all".
Learn moreH.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace book, published after the author’s death, consists of 221 short ideas and sketches for weird fiction. In their lack of narrative outlines and prosaic structure, they appear almost more potent than they would be as long- form formal works. Karl Larsson’s Commonplace takes Lovecraft’s book as a starting point where fragments of horror, poetry, craft, CAD, waste, design, play, and climate change assemble in a book and an exhibition for TBA:15 where the unfinished idea, the formless form, and fear of what can never be fully grasped works as a methodological engine.
Learn moreAncient Japanese haiku describes the sea as "hinemosu notari notarikana… all day and night it moves slow and calmly," with the shapes of waves never ceasing to shift and turn. In his work Nami, meaning waves, legendary sound artist Akio Suzuki translates this idea as sound installation.
Learn moreTannaz Farsi renders in light text by Bertolt Brecht with 5000 LEDs programmed to brighten and intensify parts of this well-known author’s writing. The decentralized method of reading and understanding this text disrupts narrative, highlighting words as “vehicles of ideas” and with compelling simplicity suggests a thesis on the relationship of visibility to power.
Learn moreA continuation of Jenkins’ experiments with light and architecture, this installation is constructed and composed using a system of tarps and ducts to effect and capture the light. The work evokes mass infrastructures but is made of readily available consumer materials and deployed in contradictory spaces that raise questions of individual agency in relation to the complex historical, financial, and social structures that form spaces for living and working.
Learn moreNothing To You is a temporary site-specific installation that will act as a frame for an encounter. MPA will direct an action that tours the perimeters of thoughtful collision between bodies, objects and sound within the space. Here, speakers mature into characters, and bodies regress into objects, calling into question the notion of pre-tense, the state of being before action, during approximately 45 minutes of provocative and attentive collapse.
Learn moreKarl Larsson and Pascal Prosek (Sweden) with Morgan Ritter and Gary Robbins (Portland) discuss their TBA project, Commonplace, the genesis of their collaborations, and attempts to create a book that defies its own form. With Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator, PICA.
Learn morePictures of the moon, is the holy spirit, is the tongue of fire, is the ghost body, is host body, is the formless thing, is anxiety, is ecstasy, is seeing through the mirror, is energy, is neither here nor there, is god, is G–D, is godS, is NO GOD ever was, is inside you, is clay, is crystal, is vapor, is hair, is sound, is gold, is light, is words, is wave, is lump, is desert dot, is geometry, is concrete, is floating, is memory, is trickery, is hawk overhead, is notion, is nature, is knowing, is never knowing, is why go on.
Learn moreWHAT IS TIME? a new site-specific performance composition illustrating historical perceptions of time in the ‘age of anxiety’. Referencing philosophical topics such as the meaning of life, existentialism, and time, this work intends to explore, interpret, and draw lines of interconnectivity through improvised movement and sound.
Learn moreFor TBA:15, Jibade-Khalil Huffman presents two concurrently running video works. Within the exhibition space, each will operate independently finding moments of alignment that express a larger narrative between the two. The result is an exploration of adaptation, mediation, and the act of seeing by way of pursuing the vanishing point and the nostalgia of drive-in movie theaters.
Learn moreSimensky’s multi-part Surface Contents 1 & 2 employs gold in a series of actions, prints, and architectural interventions. The resulting work will form a dialogue that sees gold as a literal index of locatable value and something ever-shifting in meaning and immense influence.
Learn moreWeird Fucks Re-imagined, writers and interdisciplinary artists who are engaged in weird fuckery of some kind.
Learn moreA charged site. Ways and means. “...various little ways of changing things.”
Learn moreThis is a story about mosquitos and how much I hate them. It all started with arguments of criminality based on a reading of the French Playwright, Jean Genet. I will deprecate the achievements of the mosquitos in my immediate world. In my work, I often ask, can I physically experience hypothetical graphs? This time, I will plot lines in skewed positions and will track them with the intent to judge the things that make my life so skewed. Reps of boot camp exercises help dissect emotional discomforts that are so little that I could otherwise ignore them, but should not. This is a story about petty crimes vs. noble crimes.
Learn morePositioning three Chrysler minivans atop 42 inflatable airbeds, Sugarmann creates a slow-motion wreck.
Learn moreJennifer West launches the first of her new pre-post fragmented cinematic environments where viewers are invited into an environment of flashlights, projections, filmstrips, images, and shadows. The Los Angeles-based artist will premiere the first in this series of interactive cinematic installations at this year’s TBA Festival.
Learn moreJennifer West launches the first of her new pre-post fragmented cinematic environments where viewers are invited into an environment of flashlights, projections, filmstrips, images, and shadows. The Los Angeles-based artist will premiere the first in this series of interactive cinematic installations at this year’s TBA Festival.
Learn moreLos Angeles-based visual artist Jennifer West discusses her newest TBA:14 project, Flashlight Filmstrip Projections, and experimentation with the synesthetic, performative, and material qualities of film with Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator at PICA
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