One of the first words that comes to mind when I think about our Portland neighborhood is resourcefulness. We make the most out of everything we’ve got, and when we don’t have a use for something anymore, we find someone who might! Whether its furniture hanging out on the sidewalk or machinery rusting under a tarp, we see the past and potential in everything we touch.
Bringing these feelings and many more to canvas is painter, musician, and Portlander Dean Thomas who starting soon will be the subject of Portland Museum’s rotating arts exhibition! Come see over twenty large-scale paintings featuring invented landscapes populated with the items we just can’t leave behind, composed from and within the tapestry of our Portland neighborhood.
We will be hosting an opening reception from 5PM to 8PM on Friday, February 13th with free refreshments and a chance to meet the artist, so we hope to see you here at 2308 Portland Ave.!
In Residuals: Interiors and Exteriors by Dean Thomas viewers are invited into spaces constructed around mysterious remnants of heavy industry and domestic mundanity. This “residual anthropomorphism,” as described by the artist, visually explores the past and purpose of individual objects, arranging them into storage units and salvage yards to assert their eventual reuse.
“When someone built this stuff, they built it with the intention of providing a service that would somehow help humans,” said Thomas in an interview with Portland Museum, “they sort of created a spirit in that machinery, and now it’s sitting there going ‘are you ever going to use me again?’ It still has value.”
Thomas was raised in Louisville’s Valley Station, and has lived for periods in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles. He has resided in the Portland neighborhood, within walking distance from Portland Museum, for the past eight years. While the painted scenes of Residuals are majorly inventions of the artist, they are recognizable reflections of Portland’s richly storied, hard living landscapes, with many of the objects depicted first discovered on the neighborhood’s sidewalks and undeveloped lots. “I’ve been fascinated with Portland since I was a teenager,” recalled Thomas, “I would just drive around, wanting to get into Neligan Hall.”
Thomas’s interest in the potential that makes us set-aside, and the short distance between the in-waiting and the discarded, resonates in unique registers when displayed in the long overlooked, ever-reviving Portland. What does the treatment of these items express about the treatment of our neighbors?
For more information visit our website here:
https://portlandky.org/exhibitions/dean-thomas/
