The artists in Contemporary Oregon Visions present on their work.
 Jo Hamilton. I Crochet Portland, 2006–09. Mixed crocheted yarn.Image courtesy of the artist. |
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Jo Hamilton, born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1972, found her true home when she moved to Portland in 1996. After painting for almost twenty years, her artistic practice was transformed when she visited a non-traditional textile arts exhibition. From there she was inspired to fuse the two parts of her life that were closest to her—her daily urban environment and her grandmother’s tradition of crochet. Often portraying friends and co-workers from her days in the food-service industry, Hamilton’s work displays a whimsical and affectionate vision of working-class Portland. As her work has progressed she has taken on other subjects as well, including mug shots from Multnomah County, industrial landscapes of Portland, and full-figure nudes.
Irene Hardwicke Olivieri was born and raised in southern Texas and educated in New York and now lives and works off the grid in the high desert of central Oregon. Her intimate knowledge and passion for the natural world pervades her artwork, which expands on her engagement with natural elements to develop complex and idiosyncratic mythological worlds. A diverse assortment of tropical animals and woodland creatures serve as avatars for the artist and her loved ones. Language is also a key element in Olivieri’s painting, where dense layers of poetic, visionary, and autobiographical text are interwoven with the background and the figures. This exhibition also features a selection of her inventive sculpture series Paleogirls. On frequent meanderings through her local landscape, Olivieri collects owl pellets, from which she extracts and cleans the fragile bones of small animals that have been devoured, carefully piecing them together into delicately articulated mosaics of female figures and hybrid creatures.
