Description Emily Counts’ work explores the transformative, unstable, and energetic properties of our world, while presenting a landscape or object that physically manifests an individual or shared psyche. These settings infer mutability, and can be threatening, explosive, sexual, or supernatural. Geometric and organic forms are combined to create sculpture and installation that evoke geological formations and their capacity to shift. Motifs such as plants and lava are paired with figuration to establish a symbolic vocabulary that addresses themes of metamorphosis, mythology, identity, and the psychology of space.
Identity constructs and the formation of self are concepts that Counts approaches through the use of self-portraits, which are repeatedly featured and express the multi-faceted, fluid nature of personality. They serve to catalog the autobiographical and idealized components of identity, and are often depicted as deities, central to an invented cosmology that references stories of creation and the afterlife. This installation, in particular, explores levels of self-destruction - cellular psychic, and environmental - and the connections between them. www.emilycounts.com
About the curator Golden Rule is a social experiment in creativity and commerce (and craziness) masquerading as a carefully curated shop/gallery. Golden Rule does something unheard of each month by creating a completely new store/installation/gallery, it’s a place of possibility where anything and anyone can happen. www.goldenruleportland.com
Exhibition Description The IN(ter)DEPENDENCE exhibition points to the emergence, in and around Portland over the last 5 years, of small, independently operated, and self-funded cultural hubs. These creative centers have sprung from garages, sheds, old store fronts, unusual gallery situations, above creeks, and within vacant retail spaces. The cross section of these centers represented in IN(ter)DEPENDENCE have introduced exciting new levels of refinement, fresh inspiration, and consistency into the familiar DIY sensibility the Northwest is known for.
Each space or curator participating was asked to nominate an artist or collaborative group to represent them in them in the IN(ter)DEPENDENCE exhibition.
