Skip to main content
Black Creative Collective: Brownhall comprises black artists and creatives who produce interdisciplinary art programming to address the dearth of black art and creative spaces in Portland. The massive offering of video, photography, mixed-media sculpture, oil on panel, installation and performance at the new BCC: Brownhall in Residence group show at Compliance Division is doing its best to fill the void.
It's an excellent, expansive collection that's too large to detail, with highlights covering everything from eco-commentary to futuristic fantasy. In a photograph from Elijah Hasan's series Catching My Eye, the foreground shows a colorful, overflowing trash can—the type commonly seen at street festivals. Behind it, in black-and-white, a crowd of people with their backs turned is walking away. The pieces of Do Bad Things, oil and poetry on panel by Analise Cleopatra and James Sneed, are all evocative, but the standout is a seated woman, shoulders broad and straight, head tilted back and haloed by her Afro. Between her wide-spread legs, lines of verse run like a life-giving river. Pacific Northwest College of Art student Bre Gipson's biomorphic mixed-media sculpture titled New Nature resembles a cyborg heart encased in a plastic box. The work both harks back to fairy tales and predicts the sterile future in which we'll tell them. Nubian Fairy by fantastical author, illustrator and publisher Brian W. Parker shows a dark and shining armed woman standing in a moonlit grove. Her ethereal pink wings extend above and behind her while she delights in the glowing orb of light she's cradling in her cupped hands. Calligraphic text on the piece quotes Socrates: "Wonder is the beginning of wisdom."
The show's real centerpiece is Jamondria Harris' installation holy & broken & rising: black bodies beyond anti-blackness. Soft, dark cushions cover the floor. Tall, white votive candles light the inner sanctum. All over, gold filigree and mirrors catch and refract the subdued, soothing illumination. This gleaming space is a chapel for mourning, healing, ritual and performance created by a community in pain—by and for themselves—a "space for rage, love, healing and visions of a world freed from anti-black violence."
Soon, the installation will grow to include space for visitors to bring gifts, offerings and mementos of their own personal experiences.
SEE IT: BCC: Brownhall in Residence and additional works are at Compliance Division, 625 NW Everett St., No. 101. Performances at 7 pm Thursday, Aug. 20 and 27.
WWeek 2015