Casa Santa Ana

July 27 - October 6, 2024

La Loma Projects Annex

June 23-Aug 31, 2024

In the mottled light of early summer, a new collaboration emerges: May Barruel, owner and director of the Portland art gallery Nationale, will present a curated selection of paintings by Portland- and Los Angeles-based artists at La Loma Projects’ airy Annex space. Aiming to facilitate fruitful conversations between artists, curators, and collectors in the two cities, A Place Between will unveil fresh works by new Los Angeles dweller Shiela Laufer, Los Angeles-based artist Sherise Lee, and Portlanders Anya Roberts-Toney and Amy Bay.

Shiela Laufer's warm compositions envision a secret garden imbued with an inner light. Swirled patterns, evoking nautilus shells or Vitruvian scrolls, become wrought-iron gates tangled with floral forms. Inspired by the rural motifs of her childhood, Laufer conjures spiraling spacial poems referencing Pennsylvania Dutch folk art and hex signs, which have adorned barns and prompted curious superstitions for centuries. Her layered mark-making shimmers along a decorative yet talismanic line, as though Hilma af Klint or Agnes Pelton dropped by a roadside flower stand.

Anya Roberts-Toney's jewel-toned oil paintings feel perfectly in place near Laufer’s dreamy compositions and represent a move toward more abstracted, spiritual reckonings. Roberts-Toney’s romantic sensibility is pensive here; faceless feminine figures ruminate near heliotrope pools and gaze toward surreal skies. While Roberts-Toney’s spirit- like forms have oſten found moments of revelry and ritual, they seem to pause in these paintings, perhaps reflecting on themes that are front of mind for the artist—motherhood, longing, new life, and eventual death—or envisioning aquatic portals of connection amid darker nights of the soul.

Sherise Lee’s oil paintings also pour forth from an intense period of caretaking and loss. Lee opts to process the pain of the material world with time-bending visions: What if her ancestors could explore karst topographies, dark and chalky with gypsum? What if souls could transmute in beachside caves, or amid the Superbloom? What waves of generational solace might ripple or surge there? As a first-generation Asian American, Lee’s thick, sumptuous landscapes play with Western constructs to engage with her own lineage, compelling the invisible forth and visualizing healing.

Amy Bay's enduring interest in floral painting as a radical act develops further as she translates swollen petals and protruberant blooms on handmade paper, creating impulse-driven compositions that evolve over long periods. On canvas, Bay explores forms of patterned and symmetrical wallpaper-making. Emphasizing wallpaper’s role as a casual observer of our interiority, Bay also hints at its relationship to notions of feminine hysteria, à la Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in a range of electrified and desaturated hues. Dodging art history’s typical association of flowers with frivolity, Bay centers a decorative, domestic, and luxuriant aesthetic; floral forms erupt from each painting’s entire frame. The results assert their place firmly within the traditionally male oil painting canon, and speak to themes found throughout the show—liminality, death, ornamentation, care, and dreaming.

In A Place Between, Laufer, Roberts-Toney, Lee, and Bay expand their visions to explore juicy concepts of liminality, heritage, and transformation. The exhibition’s works form a spiritual arc between Portland and Los Angeles yet remain grounded, buzzing with sense-driven elements like a summer garden teeming with life.

Nationale

June 2 - July 9, 2023

Nationale is thrilled to present They Always Have, and Still Do, an exhibition of paintings by Portland artist Amy Bay. In this new series, Bay continues her focus on reclaiming floral imagery as a rich and even radical subject in contemporary art. In offering a feminist counterpoint to how flowers have traditionally been dismissed by art history as a subject because of their association with femininity and the decorative, her paintings unfurl the beauty and poetry of a visual tradition that is ripe with meaning, precisely because of its close connection to the domestic spaces where our lives take place.

The subjects of the paintings in They Always Have, and Still Do are nominally flowers. But perhaps they should instead be called florals: decorative interpretations of plants’ reproductive structures, designed to march across walls and textiles in an infinitely repeatable grid. In Bay’s work, the floral pattern is granted autonomy from this rigid system— tendrils curling around the canvas and petals pressed against each other as they crowd inside their frames. Apparent symmetry is undermined in sets of “twinned” paintings, like a rose is a and rose is a, whose mirrored compositions only serve to highlight their differences. Bay’s use of classical oil painting techniques like imprimatura, glazing, and sgraffito adds complexity to subjects that would conventionally be depicted through restrained colors and simplified lines. What began as flat wallpaper starts to hint at depth, opening into hazy landscape-like spaces, with heavily textured surfaces that evoke the accumulation of emotion, memory, and tradition through decades of life.

Noting the use of floral motifs as symbols for a vast range of ideas including “affection, sadness, sympathy, revulsion, desire, death, the quotidian,” Bay reminds the viewer that paintings of flowers “are rarely about one particular thing.” Her titles reflect the multitude of associations that emerge throughout the creation of a painting, and that each viewer might bring to the work themselves. The name of the exhibition is snipped from a line in an experimental memoir by writer Joe Brainard titled I Remember, a sprawling ode to the ephemerality of youth and memory that is by turns humorous, critical, sensual, and visceral. Titles of individual paintings like And What You Lost or Too Deep for Tears are also borrowed, from songs, books, and everyday conversations. Bay’s practice of obliquely associative naming, like her paintings themselves, acts as a method of lovingly framing and unfolding potential layers of meaning once flattened by the weight of history.

Text by Martha Daghlian

Ditch Projects

February 11 - March 5, 2023

Amy Bay’s paintings are characterized by floral motifs, evocative color, and a deeply tactile approach to painting. She has a love/hate relationship with the historical foundations of her chosen medium. Flowers step forward, uprooted from the traditions of landscape, still life, and decoration. There is an emotional and playful tenor to the work. Invention and discovery are valued over verisimilitude. Beauty, disquiet and joy coexist as the works vacillate between landscape and abstraction.

Me and You and You and Me features a selection of paired paintings punctuated by individual works. Copying and mirroring symmetrically, the pairs at times function like identical twins - imperfect repetitions of one another. They share a mutual language while expressing subtle differences. Ultimately, they remain separate paintings that have a tender, visual intimacy. Like biological siblings, they can stay together or live apart, with all the emotional harmony and discord of their shared elements.

Melanie Flood Projects

March 6 - April 10, 2021

Say It With Flowers

In the midst of a year of deprivation, Amy Bay indulges us with abundance. Her floral compositions are frequently described as "lush," and with good reason: the oil, wax, graphite, and marble-dust flowers are bunched so densely that there isn't a center or single focal point. Her massed foliage spreads to the edge of the canvas, where it’s cut off, evoking an unruly, expansive garden rather than a stand-alone bouquet. Despite her subject matter, the term "still life" doesn't apply to Bay's work; she doesn't paint from observation, and the overflowing configurations feel agitated and restless.

These works originated with wallpaper patterns. The artist drew and redrew the original designs, adding, subtracting, adapting, so that the paintings in this exhibition have underlying genetic relationships. They are interpretations of an interpretation, each tangled profusion is related to the others. At times, the lustrous colors seem stereotypically feminine: soft, powdery pastel pinks and lavenders alongside saturated vermilions—the colors of blush and lipstick. These are undercut, however, with bright acidic chartreuse and lemons, and often clustered in bunches with melancholic blue-gray, or the dark blues and purples of bruises, or a heavy, visceral, liver red. Bay’s hues seem less connected to hothouses and gardens than they do to the human body—to its complexities, frailties, and possibly its cosmetic enhancements. This mélange, achieved with both thick paint and glazing, cannily pushes her arrangements of blossoms, blooms, and foliage to the edges of a conventional vernacular of beauty.

Beauty is tricky. Its effects are often achieved by what amounts to deceit: concealer to hide a facial imperfection, foundation to look youthfully dewy, or wallpaper to cover the cracks in plaster. To be attractive or make something alluring, whether on the exterior of bodies or the interior of houses, is still designated as a stereotypically female pursuit. It's no surprise, then, to learn of Bay's interest in folk art, particularly in domestic forms such as textile and wallpaper patterns, and the needlework that comprised the bulk of a girl's education in early America. It's also no surprise to remember that this explicit connection to the feminine is exactly what makes these art forms—what makes the idea of beauty itself—seem frivolous and dismissible. Yet in the last five years, Bay has embraced the decorative unapologetically: "Beauty is a big concern of mine, but I've struggled with my relationship to it," she tells me. "It's liberating to think I'm just going to bombard the viewer with flowers." And bombard she does. The greenery in these canvases is massed so that it creates a hungry, lavish wetness, like a burgeoning garden after late-spring rain. It's not so much floral—being a representation or likeness—as florid, a re-interpretation of the affective connotations of what we do with flowers: make things pretty, say thank you, I love you, I'm sorry, forgive me, congratulations, feel better. Bay's foreswearing of moderation also says fuck off with flowers. At the end of a presidential term characterized by misogyny, in a year when more than two million women buckled under the strain of caregiving and left the labor force, Bay's reclaiming of this defiant form of beauty feels deeply, and perhaps perversely, satisfying.

Bay is process-oriented, making decisions about depth, color, and texture as she goes. With thick smears of densified paint, she builds the petals and then scrapes them down again to create flowers with a fleshy, sensual viscosity. There's a distinct intimacy in this—one must get close to the works to really understand their tactility. From a distance I see flowers and the way that they communicate social, emotional connections between people; but when I look closely, the sound I hear is not the rustle of greenery in a damp breeze, but the scrape of a metal blade against the canvas. It is a noise apropos to the last year of our lives. I think of women, and how life carves them. I think of the constrictions of clichéd femininity, its curvy softness, its artificial blushes, how it takes up space and apologizes for it at the same time. I can imagine a viewer walking into the gallery exclaiming, "How pretty!" I want them to know that this prettiness was created with a knife.

–Exhibition Essay by Bean Gilsdorf

Hayley Barker, Amy Bay, Mariel Capanna, Emma Cook, Ann Craven, Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, and Maureen St. Vincent

Adams and Ollman

November 7 - December 19, 2020

Adams and Ollman is pleased to present the group exhibition Eartha. Using painting as a common language, the artists included in Eartha examine the concept of the natural world and their relationship to it. Together, the works offer a different way of being in the world, one that is personal, interconnected, and spiritual, while raising questions of representation, politics, gender and pleasure. Artists included in the exhibition are Hayley Barker, Amy Bay, Mariel Capanna, Emma Cook, Ann Craven, Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, and Maureen St. Vincent.

Images are revealed as rhythmic dashes, and dots of luscious color accumulate on the surfaces of Hayley Barker’s (lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) visionary paintings. Mediumistic and deeply spiritual, the images in Barker’s works are formed by ecstatic movements that create parallel worlds, ones in which divisions of figure and ground, interior and exterior, dream and reality, dissolve amidst undulating layers of light and shadow.

Amy Bay (lives and works in Portland, OR) mines stereotypically feminine realms—floral motifs, pattern, and decoration—in an ongoing series of lush, small-scale paintings that capture flowers in vibrant hues of red, blue, and yellow. Since 2017, Bay has explored the varied ways that flowers are depicted in everything from classical still-life paintings to folk art, wall coverings and textiles. Embracing the decorative, Bay celebrates the beauty and life-giving forces of flowers, depicting them in immersive realms of pure color, shape, and pleasure.

Working from films, documentaries, slideshows of found photos, and home videos, Mariel Capanna (lives and works in Salt Lake City, UT) captures landscapes in motion. With deft brushstrokes and thickly applied paint, Capanna depicts details as they move across the screen and out of the picture. Her dense surfaces are accumulations of flowers, cars, fountains, chairs, fires, and other images that come quickly into focus and then out of sight, marking a simultaneous awareness of both stillness and the passage of time.

In Emma Cook’s (lives and works in Austin, TX) monochromatic paintings, signs and symbols emerge from patterned fields of undulated lines or dense foliage. In these shape-shifting environments, female figures, candelabras, symbolic gates and newspaper headlines spring into focus from graphic grounds, functioning like a visual archaeology of place as they hint at unsettling narratives and latent histories.

Since 1995, Ann Craven (lives and works in New York, NY and Cushing, ME) has been capturing the moon in a series of paintings made in plein-air from the coast of the Eastern Seaboard—in Connecticut, Maine and New York City—to the cities of Paris and Reims in France. Each marked by a date, a time and a place, Craven’s catalog of moons, rendered in oil paint with assured strokes and luscious color, explores the astronomical body as a feminine symbol and as a marker of rhythms, cycles, and time.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith’s (Klamath Modoc; lives and works in Modoc Point, OR) bold, colorful paintings are rooted in Indigenous aesthetics and the history of abstraction. Engaged in formal experimentation and play, the works use a distinct visual vocabulary that includes text, pattern, symbol, line, and gesture to explore the landscape in between Indigenous and western paradigms.

Maureen St. Vincent (lives and works in the Bay Area, CA) employs a surrealist vocabulary as she isolates and re-contextualizes elements of both the figure and the landscape. Sinewy lines create a road map through a terrain of erotic female body parts while we catch glimpses of the landscape through vagina-like portals. Rendered in soft pastels, the works show us an uncanny interconnectedness of body and land.

Amy Bay, Melanie Flood, Rainen Knecht, and Bobbi Woods

Rubus Discolor Project

July 15 - August 15, 2020

Rubus Discolor Project is pleased to announce Heathers, a group exhibition featuring artists whose work shares an interest in notions of vanity, homage, connection, desire, beauty and frivolity. The artists prize the transition to womanhood and see it as a difficult but fertile time that is a source to draw from and celebrate. Working with painting, photography, and appropriated materials, their practices are united by concerns surrounding female stereotypes and the cultural expectations, pressures and contradictions they embody.

Amy Bay’s aggressively decorative work probes the subtle and not so subtle ways that “feminine” content is dismissed and quieted. Her heavily worked floral paintings use motifs and imagery that borrow from decorative arts, craft traditions, nostalgia, and discourses of politeness within our culture that have historically been framed as female.

In a departure from her constructed still life photography, Melanie Flood pulls photos from her personal archive to create an homage to a beloved friend, Sasha, whom she both adored and feared. Taken in the 1990’s during her teenage years while still learning her craft, Flood documented Sasha in the apartment she shared with her Mother, which felt like an extension of the girl herself. The photos represent a period of experimentation with drugs, problematic sexual encounters and aggression, but also a time of intimacy and sweetness. They are a testament to girlhood and all its complications.

The figures in Rainen Knecht’s paintings are at once seductive and discomfiting. Posing dutifully for the viewer, they upend any kind of objectifying gaze as they edge towards the feral. Drawn from fables, horror films, movie posters and folk costumes, Knecht’s worlds are imbued with otherworldliness that borders on tenderness. But there is also a sense that these girls will not be easily controlled.

Bobbi Woods' works document and reframe the popular idioms, brutal banalities, and nervous tensions between pleasure and hilarity, fear and desire. In this exhibition, spray painted movie posters complicate time as it relates to manufacture of desire. Something has happened or will happen—its format conjures unrequited allure. Energetic and unruly, austere or sarcastic, they try on different voices while inserting them into the predominantly masculine order of advertising, taunting language as form, material and visceral space.

Melanie Flood Projects

August 10 - September 8, 2018

The paintings in “Yes Please Thank You” are something of a departure for Amy Bay, though they are rooted in ideas she has been pondering for several years. These rich and evocative works, with their myriad layers of references and gender coding, were born from a deep interest in the conventions of the “feminine,” as proscribed in art and in society. In her imagery and in her titles, drawn from poetry, from samplers, and from the discourse of politeness, Bay explores ways in which women have claimed a space in a painting tradition that has favored the male artist.

Bay’s training and practice involved sculpture, drawing, photography, and site-specific installations. While she had some experience in painting, she did not study it in any depth. As a mature artist, she was intimidated by the weight of its history and her relative ignorance of the medium. But a few years ago she began making gouache renderings of fabrics—she had experimented with textile surface design by taking a few classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology-- and also thinking about the importance of the grid in modern art. She looked at work by a range of women, from the austere elegance of Agnes Martin to the gestural strength of Dana Schutz to the rococo flourishes of Florine Stettheimer. And slowly, she started to paint, moving from gouache (which she curiously considered a drawing medium) to oil paint. What first evolved were abstractions—interwoven lattices of color that play with notions of space, depth, and texture—a kind of reimagining of the grid, with its power to command and control a surface.

In 2017, Bay turned her focus to flowers—specifically, to the traditions that have assigned flowers to femininity—and to challenging those traditions. She delved into the ways in which flowers have been depicted in everything from classical still life paintings (in western culture, a genre thought suitable for women) to folk art, including theorem paintings: the art of using stencils to paint on velvet. She looked at embroidery, Golden Books, wall coverings, textiles, and the overly saccharine worlds of greeting cards and giftwrap. She reread Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine. She thought about the negative associations of “decoration” and the thin line that divides the lusciously beautiful from the grotesque. And she considered flowers, not as botanical specimens, but as colors and as abstract shapes. In so doing, she removed them from the realm of the feminine and resituated them in a modernist context.

Bay’s paintings are subtly overwhelming and assertive. They evoke the celebration of natural beauty and the messages of mortality encoded in early still life paintings, while also nodding to abstraction, and to kitsch. The addition of marble dust, glitter, and graphite powder animates her paintings, where passages of impasto alternate with thin layers of oil paint.

In works such as Rest Your Head and You Worry Too Much, she loads the surfaces with an array of flower shapes, changing the still life convention into a visual overload, made even more dizzying by the addition of checkerboard and lattice patterns. Here, you are looking not so much at a composition as at a cropped section of one, in which shapes are deliberately cut off: there is simply too much for the painting to contain. A Letter Was Nicely Sent is one of a series of quieter, small paintings. The title suggests its source in a greeting card, which its size (7 by 5 inches) also alludes to. In a larger work such as Xanadu (Now We Are Here), the silver flashe ground references wallpapers of a certain era: Bay likes its reflective and intransigent qualities.

Seen together, the works in this exhibition mark the ways in which Bay is, as she puts it, “pushing back at some of the associations with flowers and femininity, such as delicacy, frailty, obedience.” While there is no overt political reference, they are paintings with questions imbedded in them: in particular, questions about the roles of women and the idea of the “feminine” in our contentious era.

–Text by Prudence F. Roberts

Sometimes you get so lonely

Sometimes you get nowhere

I've lived all over the world

I've left every place

Please be mine

Share my life

Stay with me

Be my wife

Sometimes you get so lonely

Sometimes you get nowhere

I've lived all over the world

I've left every place

Please be mine

Share my life

Stay with me

Be my wife

Sometimes you get so lonely

—David Bowie