Skip to main content
What do Mickalene Thomas, Guillermo del Toro and Carrie Brownstein have in common? They’ve all won the Portland Art Museum’s Cinema Unbound Awards.
Now in its sixth year, PAM’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow’s Cinema Unbound Awards honor a unique mixture of artists, filmmakers, and anyone blurring the line between mediums or expanding new media’s boundaries. This year’s class of brilliant individuals—honored live on Friday, May 30, at the Portland Art Museum—includes comedian and Saturday Night Live cast member Sarah Sherman, world-renowned digital artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla, author and illustrator Carson Ellis, and The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy. This year’s honorees embrace punk, DIY aesthetics, and a mindset that has become synonymous with Portland, regardless of where they are from or based.
Sherman might be best known for SNL, but her standup performances as Sarah Squirm earned her fans for her willingness to explore taboos like body horror with full gusto. Brambilla’s extensive kaleidoscopic installations often feature an amalgam of cinematic Hollywood moments to make work that is satirical and contemplative with images that alienate the familiar. Ellis and Meloy, both accomplished in their respective fields on their own, are being recognized for their work together on The Wildwood Chronicles.
Cinema Unbound showcases a phenomenal wealth of talent in media arts and cinema over the past several years, but also funds numerous programs associated with PAM CUT, including the Tomorrow Theater’s screenings, a quarterly artist residency, free classes for adults and kids, and Carte Blanche, a series in which PAM turns over the Tomorrow Theater to let artists do anything they want (David Byrne, Miranda July and Julio Torres are among those who have let their imaginations run wild). These offerings and artist support, offered at no cost to participants, are not funded by unicorns, glitter or thin air. Events like the Cinema Unbound Awards are proving crucial to keeping cultural organizations’ budgets, services and morale in place while budget changes from Portland and the Trump administration test best-laid plans.
PAM CUT director Amy Dotson spoke to WW while leaving the Office of Collecting and Design, a tricked-out cinema-focused Winnebago parked on a West Coast tour. She exuberantly celebrates Cinema Unbound honorees and their unapologetically imaginative visions. Responses have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
WW: What can you say about this year’s Cinema Unbound Award honorees that’s not already publicly available?
Amy Dotson: The folks we selected aren’t content to be contained. When they are making work, they are constantly changing the mood, environment, and the political climate. They are not afraid, they are bold.
The places Sara Sherman can go in her comedy, coupled with her exuberance and disgust, are palpable in her performances. Her feelings are turned up to 47, beyond the possible threshold! It’s the same way when you view Marco Brambilla’s work. His immersive, kaleidoscopic videos are very “of the moment.” How he takes stereotypes, tropes, images—especially of Hollywood stars we have seen a million times—and turns it inside out and shakes it, makes you reconsider what you are looking at. Despite the loops in Brambilla’s videos, they stop time. His work poses an interesting dichotomy since a lot of his art is derived from the past, but he makes it new.
Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy with The Wildwood Chronicles, the book series, and the forthcoming stop-motion animated movie coming out with LAIKA Studios—there is this consistent iteration to it that flows through that collaboration. They have ideas that keep growing, spreading, and being reinvented, and built anew. They are unstoppable in their creativity, which is overwhelmingly inspiring.
SEE IT: Cinema Unbound Awards at the Portland Art Museum, 1119 SW Park Ave., 503-226-2811, portlandartmuseum.org. 6 pm Friday, May 30. $500 ($350 tax deductible).