Tender Paths
Celebrating Paper + Print with Stelo’s 2022-’23 Technical Residency Artists
November 2, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Open Gallery Hours: Thursday - Sunday, 12-5pm and by appointment
First Thursday Programming: Nov. 2, 5-8pm
artist walkthrough at 6pm
About Tender Paths:
Portland, OR - October 25, 2023 - Tender Paths presents work from eight artists who participated in Stelo’s 2022–’23 Technical Residencies. This group exhibition celebrates alternative models and spaces for material exploration in art making from our paper and print residents. Exhibiting artists include Kristi Chan, Conner Darling, Satpreet Kahlon, V. Maldonado, Jenene Nagy, sadé powell, Vivian Sming, and Anie Toole.
As the world burns and floods all around us, and we emerge from a state of pandemic lock-down, we continue to process the lessons and continue to course-correct. How do we make space for the illegible process of becoming? How can we be soft with each other as we all meander through the tender paths of learning how to be better versions of ourselves? Themes of paths run throughout the exhibition, sharing the stories of eight artists' experiences exploring new ones - some literally go for miles through moss and ferns.
This exhibition opens up audiences to the possibilities of hand papermaking and letterpress printing as artistic mediums, and demonstrates the need for artists to have access to learning opportunities beyond higher education. Creating works through experimentation and guided by material learning, the resulting pieces speak to the importance of treading new paths, and the need to be gentle with ourselves and each other when mistakes are made legible.
During the exhibition we will release a publication celebrating the first six years of our papermaking residency program. We are excited to feature the exploratory process of making via the 24 artists who have participated in the program over that time, with 70% being locally based in Oregon at the time of their residency. Publication pre-orders will be available in November 2023, with discounted rates available to students, schools and libraries. This publication is generously supported in part by a grant from The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Program. We are honored to have this support to expand and strengthen our offerings.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Satpreet Kahlon is a Panjabi-born artist, organizer, and educator based on Coast Salish territories. She received a full-fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019. In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she is co-founder of yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective, an organization that has supported over four hundred artists in the Pacific Northwest with over $2 million of opportunities since its 2017 founding and is stewarding 1.5 acres of greenspace in South Seattle for public programming. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019 and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.” Satpreet’s practice has been supported by The Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Critical Minded, Vermont Studio Center, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, the RISD Museum, 4Culture, Henry Art Gallery, the Magnum Foundation, Brown University, the Chihuly Museum, the Neddy Award and others. She is currently a nominee for the national Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting and is preparing for a solo exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum, where she won the Biennial Curatorial Excellence Award in 2022.
https://www.satpreetkahlon.com/
@itssatpreet
Weaving and natural dye are at the core of Anie Toole’s studio practice that extends into printmaking, clay, and sound explorations. Her artistic research investigates language as layered weaves and speculative notations to extract systems of communication for multilingual speakers. Toole earned an MFA from Memorial University of Newfoundland, a Fine Craft diploma in Constructed Textiles from La Maison des métiers d’art de Québec and a BSc Honors in Mathematics from the University of Ottawa. Toole was awarded residencies at Penland School of Craft and Vermont Studio Center with a Windgate Artist Fellowship. She was the 2022 recipient of the Craft Ontario Helen Frances Gregor Award and the 2021 recipient of the Quebec City Emerging Fine Craft Award. Recent group exhibitions include “Fiberworks”, a biennial of contemporary Canadian fibre art in Cambridge, ON. Her first solo show opens at Galerie Engramme in Quebec City in the Fall of 2023.
Social media: @anietoole
Website: https://anietoole.com/
V. Maldonado is a multidisciplinary artist, freelance curator, and writer who lives and works in Portland, OR. Deploying both traditional media including painting, printmaking and drawing alongside contemporary strategies such as performance, installation and intervention, Maldonado expresses the power of identity to author experience and perception. Born in 1976 in Changuitirio, Michoacan, Mexico, Maldonado grew up in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California in a family of migrant field laborers. They received their BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Art (2000), their MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2005), and is exclusively represented by Froelick Gallery, Portland OR. Maldonado’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR. Most recently their work was included in Many Wests: Artists Shape an Idea at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
@creativemultiplier
Jenene Nagy is a visual artist living and working in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues in Los Angeles, Portland, New York, and Berlin. Her work has been recognized with grants and awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, the Oregon Arts Commission, Colorado Creative Industries, the Ford Family Foundation and in 2016 a nomination for the United States Artist Fellowship. Nagy's work is held in several permanent collections including the Portland Art Museum, the University of Wyoming Art Museum, and Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. Along with a rigorous studio practice, Nagy is one half of the curatorial team TILT Export:, an independent art initiative with no fixed location, working in partnership with a variety of venues to produce exhibitions. From 2011-12 she was the first Curator-in-Residence for Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon.
www.jenenenagy.com
Kristiana 莊礼恩 Chan (she/they) is a first generation Malaysian-Chinese artist, writer, and educator from the American South. Her work examines the material memory of the landscape and the excluded histories of the Asian American diaspora. She researches the political, historical, and environmental heritage of the landscape and its material elements, incorporating their elemental properties into her processes. Recent projects have focused on the lost stories of early Chinese diaspora settlers in California, and their connections to early industries like fishing and mining, resulting in objects like saltwater developed cyanotypes, screen printed sand and wild clay, and site-specific incense. These stories, images, and references combine the archival with the invented, while the gathered materials attempt to transcend gaps in the written record. By uncovering roots of her community’s origins, her work seeks to revive and reckon with lost histories and lives, their implications on both the sociopolitical and natural landscape.
@kristi_chan
www.kristiana-chan.com
sadé powell is a concrete poet from new york, exploring meaning-making through print and paper techniques. inspired by her upbringing, she uses the sonic, kinesthetic, and linguistic elements of her 1940s typewriter to experiment with dissemblance as black feminist poethics. sadé holds a M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch. her work has been supported by Triple Canopy, The Poetry Project, Kolaj Magazine, Hand Papermaking Magazine, Center for Book Arts, and Stelo Arts to name a few. her chapbook wordtomydead is out now with Ugly Duckling Presse.
Conner Darling is an installation artist and occasional farm hand originally from the suburbs of Houston. He received a bachelors in percussion performance from the University of Michigan and has since transitioned to focusing on visual art. His work turns towards the local landscape in an attempt to illuminate our place in it.
@connerdarling
www.connerdarling.com
Vivian Sming is an artist and publisher who experiments with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Since 2017, Sming has published a wide range of artists’ books through their studio Sming Sming Books. They work in close collaboration with artists whose works and ideas inform design, material, and printing choices. Sming is committed to promoting critical discourse, advancing cultural equity, and creating alternative sites of knowledge production through the act of publishing.
@smingsmingbooks
Smingsming.com
About the Technical Residencies:
The Stelo Letterpress Residency was launched in 2020, and focuses on engaging artists/creatives with little or no experience in letterpress and relief printing, and will offer them an opportunity to learn the craft and stretch the limitations of what the medium can do. Provided with instruction and guidance via technical assistance from a professional letterpress printer/artist and 24/7 access to the studio, residents will create new work in the idyllic print shop in the woods.
The Stelo Papermaking Residency was established in 2014 to engage artists with little or no experience in hand papermaking, and offer them an opportunity to learn the craft and stretch the limitations of what the medium can do. Provided with instruction and guidance via technical assistance from a professional papermaker/artist at Pulp & Deckle studio and exclusive 24/7 access to the studio, residents create and exhibit new work.
These two technical residencies were established in order to engage artists with little or no experience in hand papermaking or letterpress printing, and to offer them an opportunity to learn one of these crafts and stretch the limitations of what the mediums can do. We recognize that access to equipment, learning, time, and space can be barriers for artists to engage with these mediums, and by offering these programs we will prioritize applicants who have encountered these barriers within their creative practice.