Past
PICA and Pacific Northwest College of Art's MFA in Visual Studies present a public lecture by Jibade-Khalil Huffman, an artist and the author of three books of poems: 19 Names For Our Band (2008), James Brown is Dead (2011), and Sleeper Hold (2015). Huffman's art and writing projects, which span performance, photography, poetry, and video, have been presented at MoMA/PS1; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Poetry Project; and the Hammer Museum, among others. He is a 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem though otherwise lives and works in Los Angeles.
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 more2015 Time-Based Art Festival
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 moreYour forecast for the final day of TBA: Spicy, salty, and refreshing and bright with a Bloody Mary or seven...
Learn moreClosing night at THE WORKS lights up the sky with an explosion of a million stars. Enter the sensorial and phantasmagoric world of Evelyn.
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 moreHYPNOSIS DISPLAY is an original live sound and 16mm film collaboration between experimental vocalist and musician Grouper (Liz Harris) and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Learn moreJoël Barraquiel Tan (Director of Community Engagement, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) and Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, Reed College) will make prepared remarks that address the theme of this year’s symposium, Seniors, Sexuality & Spirituality: Art and Social Change. Remarks will be followed by a Q&A and broader.
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex's Artistic Director, Darren O’Donnell, provides a glimpse into the company's research and creative process; their numerous socially engaged art and performance projects (including TBA:14 performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had); and the broader landscape and politics of art and civic engagement with Ariana Jacob, a Portland-based social practice artist.
Learn moreThe first of two TBA Festival Flights, Gender, Culture, & Experiments with Tradition reflects a range of work by artists from diverse disciplines who rigorously examine the intersections of history, culture, language, gender, and aesthetic form, while experimenting with musical, vocal, and choreographic concepts and traditions that both exude and transcend particularities of time and place.
Learn moreJoin artists, activists, and thinkers from Portland and beyond for a participation-oriented community forum exploring ideas, practices, and possibilities within the shifting terrain of art and social change. Using a small-group format, eclectic teams--including performing and visual artists, scholars of multiple disciplines, activists working within a range of sectors, LGBT Requiem Mass Think Tank participants, TBA Festival audiences, and members of the public--will gather to tackle burning issues, discuss specific projects, and devise arts-based scenarios to address local problems. Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA makes transparent the creative process of a new commission and future TBA Festival project, Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass. Requiring extensive cross-cultural engagement across LGBT, faith-based, and contemporary art communities, PICA and Waller have convened a think tank of national and local specialists in various areas of queer and LGBT activism and advocacy; progressive, inclusive, and affirming churches; queer spirituality studies; and socially engaged art and performance. For this public roundtable, Waller will introduce LGBT Requiem Mass's broader artistic vision and political aspiration at this stage of development, while members of the think tank will share highlights from their previous day's convening. Together, the Roundtable conversation will launch a more expansive, day-long symposium that draws on and builds from some of its key questions, ideas, and critical concerns.
Learn moreMorocco-based choreographer Meryem Jazouli offers a workshop for contemporary dancers that proposes shared time and space to discover the realm where the poetic and vulnerable coincide. The class will start off with a warmup to activate the senses, followed by a dance Jazouli will share that each person will experience and personalize while imparting it with a unique meaning.
Learn moreOneohtrix Point Never, aka acclaimed experimental composer Daniel Lopatin, takes the audience on an odyssey through his latest work R Plus Seven. Hypnotic and unexpected in equal measure, R Plus Seven is full of satisfyingly complex sonic puzzles.
Learn moreIn Ground and Floor, chelfitsch Theater Company and revered playwright Toshiki Okada take the audience on an in-depth exploration into theater and the dream-like realms of fiction. Influenced by the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting impacts on Japanese society, Ground and Floor is a narrative of the dead and the living that is played out on the stage of a “Japan in the not-too-distant future.”
Learn moreIn GERMINAL, French artists Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort create one of the most talked-about recent works of contemporary international theater. Both whimsical and deeply philosophical in approach, GERMINAL asks: if we had the opportunity to start the world from scratch, how would we do it?
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreHalory Goerger and Antoine Defoort dissect GERMINAL’s philosophical investigations into a staging of the construction and deconstruction of society, civilization, and the world. Moderated by Kate Bredeson, Assistant Professor of Theater, Reed College.
Learn moreWE ARE THE INSTITUTION: after inside/outside there is this mass of people. We are already whole. We're all here together. Administrators need to be involved in the uselessness of practice. Beyond outcome and object, there is a culture of questions, a pursuit of pleasure, an acceptance of our inevitable wasting. This workshop will create a non-utilitarian space for the human basis of art. Though open to all, this workshop is designed for art’s administrators and artists working in concert in the hot bed of the studio. Come, be useless, be pleasure, be awkward, be sincere, be wasted.
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