 Hi everyone, and welcome to the Union of Main Visual Artists Gallery here at the Portland Media Center. I'm Natalie Brown, your featured artist for March and curator of the exhibit Empty Spaces, A New Normal. This exhibit features 15 large-scale black-and-white photographic works by myself and a curated section by four other members of the Portland arts community. We're really excited to bring you this collection in a hybridized way and hope that you can enjoy it from home or in person. The collection focuses on the pandemic and the impacts that it's had worldwide on different artists and different people all in different ways. For me, this meant highlighting the eerie silence and the overtake of nature and stillness where I lived at the time in Western Europe. For each of the other artists, I left the floor open for them to discuss and divulge into things they felt more pertinent to them and their artistic practice. The collection will go live on March 1st and be available through the 27th in person here at the Portland Media Center with pre-existing appointments. You can view the collection through the duration of the month online from the Portland Media Center, the Union of Main Visual Artists and my own website, nataliebrown.com. Without further ado, the collection. I'm here with the first two pieces of the collection and the Gallery Lookbook that I've recently published, also entitled Empty Spaces, A New Normal. This lookbook features prints of the entire collection with some bonus images and prose and extra stories of the collection, some of which I'll be telling over our tour. Here at the first piece, which is called Place of Worship, I took this photo in somewhere in Switzerland, again in Western Europe where I lived at the time, and it was completely deserted. I was absolutely inspired by the beautiful dramatic lighting and the completely empty space, which is not very common in beautiful cathedrals and famous places throughout Europe. I was really taken aback by that emptiness and the juxtaposition in tourism and everyday life. Over here with this piece entitled Empty Waters, this piece is really important to me. It's on the posters you might have noticed, and it really very clearly outlines the show. It's literally an empty space with a few sailboats there. I am absolutely obsessed with any photographs I'm inspired by artwork that really shows how tiny we as people are and how vast nature is. And I felt that that was successful in that this is a massive, massive uninhabited island off the coast of Croatia. And there are just some tiny sailboats, possibly fishing boats there at the bottom of the cliffs. And it made me feel so small and yet like I'd finally gotten one of those images I'd wanted to for a really long time. This beautiful piece is one of our collaborative work. It's entitled Heartbeat by artist Sam Murphy, created in 2020, this last year. She says on the piece, the piece is a collection of hearts connected by tangled strings. The hearts are that of various species, human and non, as I think the connections we need during this time are more than human. The piece originated as the connection I've had with pets during this hard time, but it's moved into the complication of our relationships during this time and the inherent loneliness we all feel. This piece is entitled The Steps of Sanctuary and depicts out in the streets of Croatia some of the churches and apartment buildings that are hundreds of years old and very close together. I was astonished to see the emptiness in the streets as well as the churches and the absolute lack of tourism happening. And so I felt and saw the effects of the everyday life and the tourist trade, which is the major industry in this town. I felt that the light was really gorgeous and the streets and the apartments and where everybody lived was really dark and looked very dank and I felt that that really spoke to the time that they were living through, the time that we were all living through and wanted to depict part of the beautiful part and the light part. So we see that here. This piece is entitled The Empty Courthouse and initially I was drawn to it because of the beautiful and intricate façade even with some of the aging and signs of time passing as you can see here with the column. I was drawn to this on a grander scale because of the political unrest and the social justice projects that were occurring in the United States right at the time that I was seeing this building and felt like I couldn't do a lot except from afar. This building originally served as both a courthouse and a jailhouse and so it really made me think of the things that were going on in my own country and what I could do to help, even from far away. This piece is entitled Dappled Light and shows some of the Prague cafe scene or lack thereof over the summer. This line of tables and chairs would stretch on for what seemed like miles but was probably several blocks, all of which were empty and the boxes of flowers and plants were overgrowing, becoming over-tangled continuing to grow with the summer rain and the sun but really with no human interaction. The light was really beautiful coming through the trees and this effect happened for blocks stretching onward and seemed like a really eerie scene, kind of where you enter the twilight zone and so I felt like it was important to depict that this is a very typical European setup. A cafe, people are there all the time, all over the entire continent and here it's a complete juxtaposition of that social aspect of many people's lives. This piece is entitled Afternoon Feeding and features one of my favorite little furry friends here and some of the most beautiful steps I came across during shooting this collection. Now this follows back to the other photo of the cat that we've already covered about the Dubrovnik Croatian cats that run free and are fed by locals. This is an example of one of those very feedings where a local man had come up with a backpack and deposited the little food in front of the cat and he knew he was going to be there, he knew what time and he knew exactly where and it felt very appointment based and silly and whimsical to me. Not just that but the steps were absolutely gorgeous and it seemed idyllic and storybook in a way. It seems like that just doesn't happen in my everyday life and felt like something important to depict. This piece is called Pea for Pestilence and it's more of an apathetic view on the COVID-19 pandemic in general from an artistic standpoint. This alleyway is the entrance to many people's homes and stretches on for several blocks, winding around and going around the old city steps of Dubrovnik. And all of it was completely empty, everyone's decorations and shoes and personal effects were all brought inside and it just looked completely abandoned like an old medieval castle. Despite that everybody still lived there and they were all hiding inside it reminded me reading about old times in medieval plague or different sicknesses where a pestilence would be about and no one would be on the streets and so I compared it here in Pea's for Pestilence. This piece is entitled Closed Shudders and goes back to those original roots and the manifestation of this collection which is my obsession with nature and the overtake and the stillness of the pandemic overall. I was really fascinated by this tree and all of the surrounding garden becoming really unruly and overtaking the old seashore cottages and old buildings. The paint was chipping, the rocks were crumbling and all of the shutters were closed. It was difficult to discern whether they had been abandoned for years or people were hiding inside. This is another one of our wonderful collaborator pieces entitled Piss Snapkin by artist Jasper Gaffney. It's a mixed media piece and a soft sculpture entirely made by the artist. And they say about it, lately my ability to create has been massively stunted in conjunction with losing access to the studios I generally think of as home, the uncertainty of facing the world and myself in this current pandemic has shaken my frail and mental state. As I'm sure many have, I too fell into a downward fall. Being someone with psychosis, this can be a dangerous implication and so I felt compelled to return to my roots as an artist and ground myself in the simple process of making to make no concept, no strings attached. I wanted to lean back into humor, the uncanny, what drew me in so far to this abstract spiral that my work has taken. I wanted to put my absolute lack of coherent thought and mania into a little weird clown man because it would take forever and occupy me and try to connect with my love for miniatures and process of heavy sculpture. This clown is formed from polymer and paper clays, painted with fabrics, tool and old pair of pants, a wooden dowel yarn and wool. I created him from scratch. Everything is hand sewn. I even ripped up wool roving and acrylic yarn to form his stuffing. The only machine I used was a jigsaw to cut up the dowel that forms the arms of the figure, something I wouldn't regularly consider. Spending a large amount of time with each individual element and watching them all come together has been a rewarding experience and I truly felt the same excitement for making it that I did in high school, something that has since been replaced with apathy in most cases. The sound of the piece within this clown I've lovingly dubbed with the help of my partner, Piss Knappkin, was my allowance to put some abstract thought into this piece and make it as consistent with my existing work as possible. The making of this piece felt like a self-portrait in the face of changes the early days of shutdown brought and the mind state of being unstable and fearful, unsure of the future. This piece is entitled My Village Friends and is one of the ones that's closest to my heart of the collection. This is taken right outside the village that I live in outside of Stuttgart, Germany when I stay in Western Europe and there's this farm just down the street from my home where just dozens and dozens of cats live and nobody really knows how they got there they come and go as they please it's a very comical place to be. Some of them have made friends with me especially over the quarantine and lockdown period where I really didn't see many other people or many other beings other than these guys. This one is one of my favorites who is quite a model and often poses for my images but I felt that I wanted to include her because she was such an integral part of my lockdown period. This piece is entitled Den die Toten reiten schnell which translates from the German for the dead travel fast which is something I took directly from Bram Stoker's Dracula in terms of pestilence and the death and the really dramatic aspects of this last year kind of put into a piece. It felt remiss not to include that so many people were dying was really upsetting and sad and people were losing family members and people that they loved and I felt that the best way to do that was to depict something that I also felt beautiful even though it was really upsetting and really sad and so I came across this graveyard which was really really gorgeous and had graves hundreds of years back into the fifteen and sixteen hundreds but also up to the current year where I presumed that many COVID victims of illness that had passed away in recent months were also being buried and so it was a very poignant kind of moment to reflect on that but also to notice the beauty of that area of the graves of the plants and of the people coming to mourn and to pay tribute to the family members they had lost. This piece is entitled Meditation One and is by a collaborator named Josh Harriet. It is constructed of acrylic on fabric bandanas and the artist says about the piece Meditation One is a reflection on my thought processes of goodness and purity. The piece asks you to think about what necessarily determines if someone is good or bad. More than anything, Meditation One functions as an inner dialogue made public. I would definitely consider my work as a refreshed take on vent art. I wanted to dig deep, find something ugly and pull it back to the surface. I was inspired by Alt and DIY culture which is why I opted for acrylic on cloth rather than silk screen or block print. Meditation One is part of a future series of para flags to be hung in interior spaces, usual or unusual. The main point is to convey some sort of message about simplicity and the things we tend to overlook in life. I was inspired by modern poets like Ruby Cower as well as conceptual artists like Jenny Holzer. The DIY quality of the piece is instrumental in the interpretation of the bandanas as well as echoing queer, punk and DIY culture. Being non-binary and especially being queer during this pandemic is an underrepresented area that has a lot of potential for conceptual exploration. There's something so intricate in the relationship between minority groups and the restrictions they already face in modern day. Compared to the restrictions that COVID has put on us, with this piece especially, there's a juxtaposition akin to those restrictions where the process is tedious and time consuming despite the finished work appearing minimal. This piece is entitled The Left Behind and is by another collaborator named Libby Scutt. It is 35mm black and white film and the artist says about the piece. These pictures taken in a diptych style were taken in response to the social aspect of the pandemic. Though this work, through this work I hope to tell the stories of the people pictured. The first photograph tells the story of Brian Finch pictured here. A homeless man and hopeful artist. On our walk home with a friend I stopped and said hi to him and he played me a song entitled Girl with the Dry Eyes about his wife who had recently passed. He strummed his guitar with an old gift card and sang with pain. When he ended he thanked us for listening to his story and bid us a good day. His longing and hope is something I wish to encapsulate in this work. The second picture tells the story of a society longing for an end of the terror. Equipped with hand-painted signs the community in Portland gathered to plead their case on the day of Breonna Taylor's trial. There is anger and betrayal against the system. A community risking their lives to stand for what they believe in. In the styptic I hope to show that the COVID-19 virus has affected the people of Portland spreading not only disease but hurt and visible pain. As part of this exhibition I hope my piece shows an intimate view of the turmoil lurking under the facade of the idyllic artist town. This piece entitled The Hottest Seats in Town explores a very popular square in Prague that is usually filled to the brim with families on Saturdays and Sundays of the week. These very intricate metalworked benches were hewn with the thought that people would come out and spend time with their families and their children in their days and times off. This area of the town is usually packed like sardines. It is so full and so busy and I didn't realize this until after I had visited and taken these photos and looked into the space and how busy and lively it usually is. Music concerts occur here, festivals and different local events. But during this time it was completely empty. People weren't even really out taking walks or sitting on the benches socially distanced. They were inside or not in this area at all and I found that really eerie and the comparison to be very strange and unsettling. And so these beautiful seats which luckily as they were empty I was able to get photos of their empty for possibly the first time since they were placed there in the city and it offers a unique look into that part of the town that hopefully won't look like this for much longer. This piece is entitled Swans Near King Charles, Mother of Ten and with that title a little bit more goes into it. Of course this depicts swans but the King Charles refers to the Pragueish bridge here in the background. A very famous and historically important bridge that is packed with tourists. Even during the pandemic it was possibly one of the busiest places that I had seen and therefore pretty much stayed clear of it. What was so amazing about the swans coming ashore is that typically they float around the harbor and the river but they don't come ashore so often as tourists bother them and even local people. And what was really amazing is that this mother and her mate who's not pictured had ten offspring from this year and were all up and down the banks with some local muskrats as well which was really odd to see. I thought that it was so beautiful that they were coming further and further inshore and didn't feel like they were going to be harmed or bothered and so it was a really unique look into a little bit of nature that normally would be offshore and more difficult to access and see but we were treated to being able to experience because of something that is typically seen as really bad, the pandemic but this overtake of nature and literally coming ashore of these creatures was a really unique and beautiful poetic experience. This piece entitled The Empty Harbor of Praha or Prague shows from a museum a small cottage museum outward towards the harbor and upward towards the castle in the center of the city. In my look book I write about this a little bit and when I say, what I say includes The Empty Harbor of Praha July 2020 laying perhaps ever at its loneliest since the last plague epidemic to hit Prague in 1713. Even at that time boats of those who could not go ashore would likely have stayed in the harbor to do what work they could only now do the once thriving trade towns waters lay completely empty. This piece somewhat of a finale of the collection entitled Nuns and Conversation and depicts perhaps the most people so far in the collection as I really avoided people for safety reasons and most cities were pretty empty when I visited them. This is on the King Charles bridge which can be seen in the background of the photo Mother of Ten with the swan back a couple pieces. This piece depicts two nuns walking in really wild and involved conversations. They were angrily and really passionately gesturing and it was something really interesting to see that interaction was something that I had been starved of for several months not really seeing any people and here you can see possibly the most people that I had seen in months and maybe you have too. This was at the end of the first wave of COVID and of course we've had more waves since but at the time it was very uplifting as we thought this might be coming to a close that communities were coming back together and socialization would come back into play. Even now that this virus hasn't quite subsided and we're still working towards health and a better future, this moment when we reach it again and for good is a very inspiring one for me.