JOHN & JULIE
“We Do”

An art exhibition in The Art Trailer Gallery July 14th-July 23rd 2023

Lifelong creative folks, John and Julie met in 2017, started drawing together and haven’t looked back. They each had established artistic practices – John is a painter primarily and Julie is a filmmaker primarily – however both are open to working in ways that push them out of their comfort zones and allow for spontaneity and improvisation. They have made drawings, paintings, films, sounds, saunas, and land art together. To celebrate their “first date anniversary” each year, they look at Wikipedia’s list of traditional wedding anniversary gifts and have a ritual of making art using the material assigned to that year. They cater the event, ie; order take-out, and reflect on the year past and the year ahead for their relationship. The result is this collection of works presented here on the occasion of their wedding taking place July 22, 2023. We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, Connection and Enduring Love is a book by Stan Tatkin that has been a guidebook for building John and Julie’s relationship.

John Frentress has made art since the age of three and studied art at Kirkwood College with Doug Hall who was an amazing multi-disciplinary artist. He went on to study and work at several schools and community education centers on the west coast and considers himself to be primarily a “proper” art school short timer, and an auto-didactic life long learner. Like many artists, he has a BS degree in Psychology. John had the privilege of occupying a studio in the Blackfish gallery in the Pearl district of Portland for 19 years – sadly the building is now sitting vacant waiting for a bulldozer. He works with brushes using oils, acrylics, sumi ink and watercolors – sometimes paints on light bulbs and other trash.

Julie Perini is a filmmaker, daily videomaker, diary keeper, video artist, reader, writer, teacher, question asker, raw nerve, hot spring hopper, product of white suburbs of New York and DIY culture of the 90s, and friend to many. Her involvement with the post-9/11 “War on Terror” spurred her work with prison and police abolitionist movements. She exhibits work in theaters, community spaces, galleries, campgrounds, storefronts, the sides of bridges, and many other venues. She sees movies in actual movie theaters. Julie likes old cameras and eats pancakes at a diner at least once a week. Originally from New York, she is a Professor of Art at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

curated by Nikki Cormaci

DIY Screen Printing with Azenath and Ian

Screenprinting is a hands-on medium that allows students to reproduce any artwork they want in multiple colours and on many mediums. Our workshop, aimed at beginner students, will show how to undergo the entire printing process using a combination of recycled, homemade and a few purchased tools. Students will leave with the handmade screens and prints they made in the workshop, a booklet of historical art and propaganda prints from our collection, and inspiration and understanding to help them start screenprinting on their own.

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“Barn Rave, 2011” by Tori Wheeler

ON VIEW
JULY 27 2023 – OCTOBER 12 2023

Tufted, and interactive artwork, Barn Rave, 2011 encapsulates the frenetic, feral exchange of energy found in a packed dance floor. The modular work recalls a night in a remote barn outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Its tessellated pieces intertwine, forming a hazy, abstracted scene of kids drenched in sweat, a barn filled with fog, hay, pulsating music, and a mix of suspicious substances. This ephemeral experience imprints neural pathways.

The puzzle-like components and imagery pay homage to a transformative and hedonistic celebration of youthful exuberance. The liberated sensuality and sometimes-brainlessness of infectious bassy beats become the unyielding desires to relinquish the burdens and constraints of adolescence in small town surroundings. The pieces move and connect, at times surpassing a perfect fit. Capturing the raw energy of dancing amidst others. Capturing unbridled energy. Their arrangement allows for infinite reconfigurations—a reflection of the ever-shifting nature of the dance floor.

Tori Wheeler is an artist, designer, and dancer whose work is influenced by ecstatic human exchange, touch and tactility, music-and-nature-induced-trance-states, and a dash of trickster humor. Their creative practice mirrors that of a desire path.

Tori holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design from the Kansas City Art Institute and works as a textile artist, gold leaf gilder, and fairweather graphic designer.

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

Exhibtion opening in our Art Trailer Gallery

No Lo Tenia Escrito / It Wasn’t in My Plans by Jade Mara Novarino

No Lo Tenia Escrito showcases a short film, Mi Abuela La Hormiga / My Grandma the Ant (40 minutes, 2023), and several prints and works on paper. The footage and the work are from a trip to Argentina in February of 2023. This work was made in order to remember—my grandma, us, a place, and a time. In a sense, it is a small archive, a document that marks a special moment in our relationship. Initially, for the film, I had set out to ask my grandmother many questions, and in some cases succeeded in receiving answers—but in the still and quiet moments of the footage, when the camera was just another piece of furniture and not someone to act in front of, was where I learned the most. The film is conscious of its own form, and the camera itself is acknowledged multiple times. Even so, the main subject—my grandma—doesn’t seem shy or to change before its presence. The prints and works on paper are reflections, journal entries, and photographs made within the year leading up to the show. 

Jade Mara Novarino is a first generation American artist, educator, farmer, and community member born and raised in San Diego, California. Her work draws on inspiration from her family and the seasons, personal narrative, site-specificity, songs, and attempts to highlight the everyday as sacred. Her multidisciplinary work spans from socially engaged projects to imaginary restaurants to calligraphy to video to collage, photography, painting, and found sculpture. She runs an artist space and farm from her home in Milwaukie, Oregon. Her birthday is in February, her favorite month is September, and she looks forward to planting garlic every October. She is always looking for new pen-pals. 

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

FREE Public screening in The Sou’wester Lodge

12/1/23 at 7 p.m to open our Winter exhibition in our Red Bus Theatre featuring

Wide Blue Yawn – An experimental documentary film by Eva Knowles

The idea for Wide Blue Yawn occurred to Eva after observing a UFO while alone on the beach in October 2020. She always had a powerful relationship to the Long Beach Peninsula, having grown up coming here for family getaways since she was a child–and so, after her mysterious encounter she decided to embark on deeper research of this place and make a film about it. Wide Blue Yawn attempts to capture layers of history at the mouth of the Columbia River and to honor the specific feelings evoked by the rugged pacific northwest geology, the spiritual presence of the first human inhabitants (the Chinookan people), and all that has unfolded since Lewis and Clark hit the scene in 1805. Wide Blue yawn spans centuries and wonders at how we ended up here, in our strange present reality.

Eva Knowles was born in 1990 and grew up in Bonney Lake, Washington. Her films are shot with a handheld digital camcorder and have an intimate and personal feeling. As an artist Eva is concerned with the mysterious, the sublime, and the mundane. She has worked as a teacher, a farmer, and also practices reiki. She has many projects in the works about fascinating topics.

Contact: email: eeva.knowles@gmail.com / instagram

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

Collective Release Fire 

Outside in the trailer court in front of the lodge, we will gather into an expanded moment of presence with the weight of the world, a time of reverence through lively celebration of the complexity of existence in togetherness, where whatever wishes to unfold may do so naturally through the intentional lighting of a fire.  There will be pieces of paper and pens on which to write and reflect and then offer the writings into the fire, instruments with which we can play, and an invitation to donate whatever resources are available, financial or otherwise, to Source Food and Goods, a group offering community aid to the local Palestinian community in Portland, OR .

*No drinks in public. Quiet hours after 10p.

Each March The Sou’wester is given over to 30+ artists and art collectives for a week of residency work culminating in a public exhibition of performances, installations & studio tours. Arts Week highlights the creative process and experiential nature of the Sou’wester Artist Residency Program. Arts week 2024 hopes to create communal movement from the confluence of individual flow states. Through each of our visions, we come together to share in making something bigger. How does this energized space wash back on us? How does it inspire us, heal us, move us towards a sense of belonging? What do we take back from this exchange to seed  our own revisioning?

Schedule and itinerary TBA

ARTS WEEK ARCHIVE

Each March The Sou’wester is given over to 30+ artists and art collectives for a week of residency work culminating in a public exhibition of performances, installations & studio tours. Arts Week highlights the creative process and experiential nature of the Sou’wester Artist Residency Program. Arts week 2024 hopes to create communal movement from the confluence of individual flow states. Through each of our visions, we come together to share in making something bigger. How does this energized space wash back on us? How does it inspire us, heal us, move us towards a sense of belonging? What do we take back from this exchange to seed  our own revisioning?

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC MARCH 15-17

FRI, 6-10p @ ILWACO ARTWORKS
SAT, 10a-12p @ WAVE PRESCHOOL
SAT, 12-10p @ THE SOU’WESTER
SUN, 11-1p @ ILWACO ARTWORKS

Schedule and itinerary TBA

Always Moving / Magical in Motion By LAURA HEIT + MONA HUNEIDI

• OPENING FILM SCREENING 6/16/24
• FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
• FILM WILL BE SCREENING DAILY 11a & 4p or by request with the front desk

“I am interested in everything that is opaque, that which takes place in secret and behind curtains or in the shadows. My aim is not to make clear or justify, rather I aim to watch/show as if in a dream. My work focuses on the minutiae of human behavior, obsessive habits, arduous matters of the heart, betrayal, espionage and inexplicable phenomenon. These themes are the impetus and the architecture that builds the sets, the mise en scene and the characters I create. 

I use wood, glass, transparencies, wire weaves, paper dolls, found objects, doll parts, shadows, tea leaves and texture to create space and the characters that inhabit it. I believe that everyday articles are curious when taken out of context and that still objects, no matter how pedestrian, are magical in motion.”  —  MONA HUNEIDI

Always Moving / Magical in Motion features the stop-motion, live-action puppetry, hand drawing and computer animation in the short films of artists Laura Heit and Mona Huneidi. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes abstract, sometimes in orbit, these films visualize the things we cannot see, fears, hypothetical stars, moments inside catastrophes, and the future. On view at The Sou’Wester’s Red Bus Microcinema, 3728 J Place, Seaview, WA, June – September,  2024, with screenings at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily. A special closing event attended by filmmaker Laura Heit will take place in September. More details to come.

Laura Heit is an interdisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Portland Oregon. Her work has been exhibited and screened in the US and abroad, at venues including Track 16 (Los Angeles, CA), Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), The Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR), The Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland OR), She Works Flexible (Houston, TX), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), MoMA (NYC, NY), Millennium Film (NYC, NY), Pompidou (Paris, France), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), the Guggenheim Museum (NYC, NY), Walt Disney Hall (Los Angeles, CA), and Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit, MI) among others. Her grants include; 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship, Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, The British Council, and the MacDowell Colony. She has previously held positions at PNCA as chair of Animated Arts, SAIC, and Cal Arts where she was co-director of the Experimental Animation Department. Her book Animators Sketchbooks was published in 2013 by Thames and Hudson. 

Mona Huneidi is an animator/filmmaker who was born and raised in Kuwait. She went to primary schools in Lebanon and Kuwait and arrived in the US in 1980 to pursue her education. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. She worked as an assistant producer for television productions in Kuwait in the late 80s and early 90s. Upon returning to the US, she joined the pre-production team at Imago Theatre working as a puppeteer, a dramaturg, prop master and a set dresser. She earned a Drammy award in 2004 for the projection design on the play Missing Mona. She writes, creates and produces her own animated films, which have been shown locally at Performance Works Northwest, Imago Theatre Cabaret and PCC’s Art Week. Her work has also been screened internationally at  Festival Du Cinéma Bruxelles, Festival De Cine Internacional De Barcelona, Animacam Online Animation Festival Galicia, and the Cannes Short Film Festival.     

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

Recent Master of Art graduate from Notre Dame and new studio manager at Ilwaco Artworks, Hans Miles will share details and stories of his 15 years in the ceramic field- from explorations in salt fired pottery, time leading an art residency program at a ceramic sewer pipe factory and his move into monumental sculpture. Hans has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, and was the recent recipient of the annual purchase award at the Midwest Museum of American Art. His exhibition “Dyer 15”  will be on display at Ilwaco Artworks art gallery from September 14th – October 31st.