Continuing through August 27, 2016
During a residency at the World Financial Center in New York, conceptual artist MK Guth collected fabric donations from the public, which she braided together as part of a performative work. Those long multi-colored plaits now make their way to Portland, where Guth has intuitively shaped them into a series of highly textured abstract vessels. Industrial wheels serve as feet for some of the pieces, giving static objects the illusion of future movement as they contort themselves into biomorphic forms.
Another piece grows up around the legs of a stool, completely encasing it, the way a Kudzu vine takes on the shape of whatever it has suffocated. Each sculpture is named after the person or people who donated the textiles — e.g. “2 Teenagers,” “Molly” — and who, for reason's known only to the artist, have stuck in her mind. The labor involved in creating the vessels acts a remembrance of time and place. The negative space inside each one holds the energy and memory of the people to whom its materials originally belonged.
