SaveArtSpace presents Nature a group public art exhibition on ad space in Portland, OR. Selected artists are Michelle L. Purvis, and Alexis Duque.

Curation Panel: Kelli MacConnell, Artist / Shannon Hardman, Artist & Community Organizer / Christine Lan, Extinction Rebellion

The selected artists will be exhibited on ad space in Portland, OR for at least one month starting June 29, 2020.

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

Selected Artists

Public Art Location: N Interstate Ave & N Albina Ave, Portland, OR

I confess, I’m a tree hugger who shops at goodwill and I'm not embarrassed about it anymore! I jump at the occasion to address sustainable living to anyone who comes across my path and is interested in listening to me. My comprehensive art practice incorporates connections between the earth and our behaviors. Our shared environment plays a role in how we interact with each other. We instinctively adapt to innovation but disregard the impacts that it has on our environment until it's too late. Over the last four years I have been developing works specifically related to forest conservation and reforestation. I challenge my audience to be more thoughtful about consumerism, ecological preservation, and sustainable living.

Since 2005 my work has been ever changing but has always been concerned with concepts of sustainability. Reclaiming found objects as substrates was an important component of my work in the beginning as well as recycling paint from local paint distributors. In the last seven years I have been more concerned with the context of sustainability in my compositions rather than the materials themselves. Throughout my career I have been engaged in cross-disciplinary practices, combining materials that traditionally would not go together. I have explored combining canvas, recycled paper, thread, fabric, charcoal, graphite, watercolor and acrylic paint onto various two dimensional platforms.

My latest body of work begins with charcoal or graphite to sketch out figurative landscapes on canvas or gessoed watercolor paper. The first layer of paint I use mixes the carbon with the water media. This translucent layer leaves behind faint lines that I later use to develop imaginary landscapes integrating our bodies within the natural world. The support of my palette is muted expressing a sense of tranquility. My palette includes two hues of each primary color and white mixed together at different intensities. I find that mixing paint by picking up dabs of each color and blending them together onto the substrate creates dynamic layers. After finding my painted composition I bring the carbon media back into the work to define important areas. I am also able to create an illusion of movement while I draw outside the lines of the painted forms.

As I explore, my art practice plans includes multi-disciplinary and interactive site-specific installations for future exhibitions. These works will attempt to enlightening the community about the history of our shared land and how to adopt new behaviors to preserve the earth for future generations.

You can connect with Michelle on Instagram at @michellelpurvis.

Public Art Location: N Interstate Ave & N Albina Ave, Portland, OR

Alexis Duque holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Antioquia, Colombia. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues including: at El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center and Praxis International Gallery in New York; The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA; Champion Contemporary, Austin, TX; The Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, MI; RudolfV Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen, Denmark. Duque’s work has been featured in several publications, including: "Architecture: Artistic Visions Of The Urban Realm”, “Caribbean: Together Apart Contemporary Artists from (part of) the Caribbean", Imago Mundi - Luciano Benetton, Blue Canvas Magazine, LandEscape Art review, Beautiful Decay, Artistaday, New American Paintings, Studio Visit Magazine, The East Hampton Star, The East Hampton Press and El Diario of New York. Duque currently lives and works in NYC.

Duque’s portrait poses the question: what are we made of? His glamorous figure is composed of tiny symbols of consumerist desire, forming a woman of deceptively alluring beauty. Notably, the portrait includes the “eye of providence” the distinctive masonic symbol of the eye-topped pyramid that appears on the back of each dollar bill, and which can be seen here in a central position on the woman’s cheek. Logos of famous brands abound, including credit cards, oil companies, fast food restaurants and airlines. Revealing in the shades, shapes, and forms of these famous trademarks, Duque’s canvas is highly organized and carefully structured, yet trippy and absurdist. The artist suggests that contemporary society is merely an amalgam of the things we consume.

Artist Statement: I create paintings of lush nature and improbable situations stacked and densely conglomerated into trippy, absurd portraits. My compositions are detailed, meticulously depicted and baroque. I use perspectival tricks and surrealistic overlapping to render uncanny imagery within a single form, portrait, landscape or world.

Inspired by Latin American and European surrealists, such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Bosch and Leonora Carrington, I employ similar strategies and playful juxtaposition of images to depict portraits and landscapes with post- apocalyptic visions and utopian narratives questioning our present and future world.

This series of portraits and landscapes are intricately filled with images of dense jungles and paradise-like scenarios combined with images that reference the vast influence of western consumer society, as well as, the magic and sacredness of the natural world.

The depiction of real and imaginary beings are in great part sourced intuitively from my unconscious, by allowing surprise and accident to play out as stated in André Breton’s 1924 surrealist manifesto “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought”.

I chose to depict Greta Thunberg’s portrait to illustrate the beauty of mother nature the and the challenge we face as we live in a system designed to create environmental devastation and thus the fall of the human race.

You can connect with Alexis on Instagram at @duqueart.

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