Nan Curtis &
Nicolaii Dornstauder
October 1–31, 2009
In celebration of 100 YEARS OF ART + DESIGN at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Fourteen30 Contemporary showcases the work of recent PNCA MFA graduate Nicolaii Dornstauder, and long-time PNCA faculty member Nan Curtis.
Portland, Oregon-based artists Nicolaii Dornstauder and Nan Curtis each engage in deeply conceptual practices that trace and re-trace the established boundaries of their artistic preoccupations with a fetishistic pitch. Working with wood, leather, and cardboard, Dornstauder is unswervingly focused on the great outdoors—as both wilderness and playground—and man’s ostensible expulsion from it. Curtis, whose work adopts whichever media best suits her idea, has long mined domesticity and the convoluted dynamics of family to confer meaning on the morass of subjective experience. As different as their bodies of work are, they run parallel as explorations of survival. Whether in the wilds or the badlands of the mind, both artists negotiate the experience of relating to the world around us and forging an autonomous existence there. But the losses their work hopes to upstage—the rupture of Edenic harmony with nature, the headlong rush of generations—persevere in spite of the extravagantly contrarian objects they produce.
– John Motley
Nicolaii Dornstauder
October 1–31, 2009
In celebration of 100 YEARS OF ART + DESIGN at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Fourteen30 Contemporary showcases the work of recent PNCA MFA graduate Nicolaii Dornstauder, and long-time PNCA faculty member Nan Curtis.
Portland, Oregon-based artists Nicolaii Dornstauder and Nan Curtis each engage in deeply conceptual practices that trace and re-trace the established boundaries of their artistic preoccupations with a fetishistic pitch. Working with wood, leather, and cardboard, Dornstauder is unswervingly focused on the great outdoors—as both wilderness and playground—and man’s ostensible expulsion from it. Curtis, whose work adopts whichever media best suits her idea, has long mined domesticity and the convoluted dynamics of family to confer meaning on the morass of subjective experience. As different as their bodies of work are, they run parallel as explorations of survival. Whether in the wilds or the badlands of the mind, both artists negotiate the experience of relating to the world around us and forging an autonomous existence there. But the losses their work hopes to upstage—the rupture of Edenic harmony with nature, the headlong rush of generations—persevere in spite of the extravagantly contrarian objects they produce.
– John Motley