SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
A BEAT HAPPENING Presents LUVJONEZ x SUCKERFORLIGHTS Live at The Sou’wester Lodge
12/14/2024 | 7pm
Free and open to the public!
A BEAT HAPPENING: A Beat Happening is a free, monthly, all ages, all genres, all identity inclusive music producer and DJ showcase based in Portland, Oregon.
LUVJONEZ: Luvjonez is a Puerto Rican instrumental hip hop music producer based in Portland, Oregon. He weaves a nostalgic and downtempo blend of musical influences from his cultural roots, extensive travels, and multimedia visual art practices. His instrumental tracks combine Down South, East Coast, Pacific Northwest elements and ancestral Caribbean vibes, creating a genre-defying mix of lofi, jazzy, downtempo, and boom bap styles.
SUCKERFORLIGHTS: Husband and wife dream pop duo from Portland, OR. Their last full length album, “Hearts Fade”, is a lush and expansive pop record covering themes on the many facets of love.SOU’WESTER PRESS
What If
an intimate solo exhibition of sculptural works by Dawn Stetzel
Fire Coversall Fire Coveralls
2023
zip hazmat suit, image transfers, urban fire zone
Fire Coveralls is a hazmat suit covered in flames, wearable, by me, by many. I use this wearable fire suit as a garment that I can climb into, as a way to try to enter, to attempt to more fully engage in a conversation I am unable to understand. Temperatures rise and extended fire seasons intensify. I made Fire Coveralls as fire seems to cover all, and I don’t know what to do about it. This work gives me the opportunity to grapple with how to exist in our climate crisis and live in our house on fire.
Biography
Dawn Stetzel is a visual artist from the United States living on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Her body-activated sculptures become ambitious attempts at reimagining a sustainable existence. The heart of her deep emotional distress lays within the climate crisis and its impact on disparity and spatial and environmental justice. Using a tinge of the ridiculous, these works suggest struggles seeking opportunistic-existence within dysfunction.
She has a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has exhibited widely through multiple solo exhibitions, public art commissions and group exhibitions across the United States including Grounds for Sculpture, Disjecta and the Portland Biennial. Her work is included in permanent public collections at The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Shiwan Ceramic Museum in the Guangdong Province of China. Her work is printed in multiple publications, she has shown internationally and has lectured in the United States, China and Brazil. Innovative in her field and in recognition of the quality of her work and dedication to her art over a period of many years, she was recently awarded a 2024 Individual Support Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in New York.
web: dawnstetzel.com
Artist Statement
I make sculptural objects, contraptions that interact with a specific environment. These environments are usually in the margins of places, feeling somehow desolate, vast, or lonely due to forms of neglect or absence. These are places I find oddly fascinating, sometimes disgusting and pull at visceral threads in my being. Often these landscapes exhibit hints of resourcefulness and potential paths to new ways of living in a place, thus they feel somewhat like home to me.
Within this environment I use my sculpture as a tool, or mode of locomotion in which to navigate the landscape. Manually operated, these pieces require me to physically propel, push, pull, row or ski and push the limits of my physical strength, safety and comfort levels. This process places my work between sculpture and performance.
My sculptures embrace the aesthetics of resourcefulness, repairing, adaptability and invention. I prefer a low-tech approach and glean materials from my surroundings. I select all materials for their inherent story of place relevant to the concepts within each sculpture. This process of collecting materials puts me in the edges of places, a process I need to connect me to my emotions, the specifics of place and a non-threatening bridge of connection to other people through their discards.
I am currently making work that struggles with seeking moments of survival within a dysfunctional system, on the move, searching opportunistic existence. I use a tinge of the ridiculous and make pieces that function but just barely. I am exploring spatial and environmental justice, systematic disparity, and the climate crisis. The heart of my deep emotional distress lays within our overlapping crises as the climate crisis connects us all and at the same time amplifies our disparity gap.
Implementing a mechanism of survival is not a safe feeling; it is one of risk, uncertainty and maybe just barely making it. The solo nature of this work and many of my pieces reflect my extreme independence as a trauma response. It contains a longing for trust in the universe, in humanity and political systems to equitably help and protect when needed
SOU’WESTER ARTS SOLSTICE CELEBRATION
SAT, DEC 21ST | 6PM-10PM | FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
Sou’wester Arts proudly presents its inaugural Solstice Celebration: an enchanting evening of exhibitions and performances.
Live Performances by Anis Mojgani (Poetry) & The OO-Ray (Cello)
Anis Mojgani (Poetry)
Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s 10th Poet Laureate, co-creator of the Oregon Telephone Poetry Hotline, and a two-time individual winner of the National Poetry Slam. The author of six poetry collections, an opera libretto and a children’s picture book forthcoming, his most recent collection is, The Tigers, They Let Me. Originally from New Orleans, Anis lives in Portland Oregon.
The OO-Ray (Cello)
The OO-Ray is the alias of Ted Laderas, an improvisatory and experimental cellist from Portland, OR. A systems biologist by day, he extends his experimental attitude to exploring the outer possibilities of the cello, often distorting, looping, or pitch-shifting his instrument beyond recognizability into waves of reverberation and extended drones. Inspired by the gauzy textures of My Bloody Valentine, he calls his style “shoegazer cello” or “chamber drone”. His music explores the realms of electroacoustic, shoegazer, and ambient.
Live Music: Twin Bridges and Nate Norton
Twin Bridges’s melancholic aesthetic is the result of fusing classical and chamber music’s instrumentation and musicality with folk and indie-rock. Hailing from New Mexico, Twin Bridges currently resides in Portland, Oregon. “Born out of personal turmoil and heartbreak, Twin Bridges’ music is a testament to the healing power of art. “ – Voicemag UK
LIVE MUSIC BY THE REPTALIENS
JANUARY 1ST 2025 | 7PM | FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
Reptaliens began in 2016 as a bedroom recording project for Bambi to musically explore surreal realms of high-concept synth pop music. Utilizing analog synths, strings, effects, and layering melodies, her obsessive interests in cult mentality, conspiracy theories, and high concepts were created.
Reptaliens are a dreamy, psychedelic band who’s sound is carefully curated for your listening pleasure. The band consists of Bambi, Thomas Hoganson, Julian Kowalski, Graye Guidotti, Kyle Indigo, and KC Jonze.
Seeking to delight all senses, the live performance is accented with skits and characters that appear throughout the set.
Live Music: Leo Moon
Leo Moon is the solo incarnation of singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Brian Adrian Koch. California born and Oregon raised, Brian has been active in the Portland music scene since arriving in 2000. He is a current and founding member of indie rock band Blitzen Trapper (2000-present) and psychedelic folk duo Dead Lee (2018-2023) Appearing now as a solo acoustic performer, his minimal and haunting tunes are stripped down paeans to the glorious absurdities of life; harmonica spattered psalms to the void. He is preparing to release his first full length album, The Fool.
LIVE MUSIC BY BRYAN JOHN APPLEBY
FREE AND OPEN TO ALL! 7PM | JANUARY 25TH, 2025
Bryan John Appleby is a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Seattle. His folk-centric body of work draws elements from mid-century pop, wall-of-sound, psychodelia, tropicália, and classic cinema.
His latest full-length, Underwater Easy Breathing (Plume Records) exemplifies Appleby’s distinct production palette. Lush, coastal, synth-laced; the album is a natural next step in his wandering, often densely layered folk repertoire. Previous works include The Narrow Valley (2015), a dense, maximalist concept album drenched in dreamy, orchestral layers and experimental sounds, and Fire on the Vine (2011), a darker collection with more conventional folk structures and instrumentation.
Since moving to the Pacific Northwest from the Central Coast, he’s toured with Deep Sea Diver, The Head and the Heart, and Tomo Nakayama, and shared stages with Damien Jurado, Maita, Y La Bamba, Shaina Shepherd, Dean Johnson, Sera Cahoone, Pure Bathing Culture, and many others. He enjoys guest membership in several West Coast bands including Gary V, Tomten, Fine Arts, Vinta, and K Skelton.
LIVE MUSIC BY LAKE LACONIC
FREE AND OPEN TO ALL! 7PM | February 1st!
Lake Jiroudek balances the obstacles of a musician with the day to day grind that many artists find themselves in, working a part-time job and also doing everything they can to keep making music. A unique background, growing up in the small town of Cannon Beach, OR and then going to the prestigious Juilliard School in the big apple New York City, Lake’s mind and body have been jumbled around east coast and west. Through trial and error, he has found himself writing songs that get through the manure and blockage of the brain and sprout new seeds with years of attention and care.
After college, Lake spent time in Los Angeles recording and performing in a band called Innocent Alex, which he co-leads with his brother Evan. The brothers have developed a way of working together and creating music that is their own, influencing Lake in his solo pursuit and leading him to some feeling of arrival as a songwriter.
Lake wrote a series of songs, while in Los Angeles and dealing with immense physical pain, that he later took back to his hometown during the outbreak of covid-19 and recorded mostly by himself over the span of a year and a half. At the end of this long process, Evan helped to finish the project by tracking drums and years later, mixing the album with Lake standing over his shoulder. The self-titled album Lake Laconic was released in September of 2024.
Lake now resides in Astoria, OR where the town’s fruitful community originally exposed itself to him through a cook job at a cafe. Over the years he has gotten to know the community and become a prominent part of its eccentric, growing music scene. Among many highlights living in this hilly town hanging over the Columbia River, Lake opened a sold out show at Astoria’s hundred year old theater, The Liberty Theater, for acclaimed local indie band Blind Pilot.
Live Music: Weezy Ford
Weezy Ford is a musician and songwriter who lives in the Columbia River Gorge. Her first musical endeavors incorporated slide guitar, vintage feels, garage-rock fuzz, and tap dancing on her EP Bobbypin Graveyard. She got tired of carrying around a box to dance on, and began writing songs on a tiny synthesizer that would eventually become her first full-length record titled Sugarcane in 2019. She collaborates with her partner, Mark Robertson (multi-instrumentalist, engineer) in their homestead studio where they mostly grow vegetables. None of the knobs are labeled. During the pandemic they recorded a handful of acoustic songs onto tape released as all at once. She started a twangy side project with her sister, Sallie Ford, called The Barbaras and recorded Oh My God Barbara in 2020 on Orcas Island, WA. Her latest album “In the Movement” was released in March, 2024.