Pacific Northwest College of Art    Portland, OR

Between Us

Late on a cool, clear Portland night, a renegade group of artists took to the streets.

They piled into a white van with a generator, space heaters and four projectors. Some folks followed in their cars.

Their goal: to find the perfect location to show a series of large-scale films created in their PNCA Video Art and Installation class. The popular class centers on a rich dialogue of creative practice, meshed with technical skill and a large dose of collaboration and experimentation.

This group effort was the brainchild of their instructor, Linda Kliewer, a video artist and audio technicians Bobby Jones and Tyler Matta.

Their quest lead them to set up four works at three locations just north of the PNCA campus in the Pearl District. Each work was dynamic in its setting, activating both the films and the space beyond the standard “white wall” of installation space.

“I think it is amazing how many students are interested in video and are trying to figure out how to apply video to their work,” said Kliewer. “I try to give students a lot of freedom in terms of subject matter and the scope of the work. They base their projects in their own work and their path and any research that they’re doing at the time.”

One of the student videos, Between Us, by Nicole Dill and Tyler Wallace, was a compelling and candid video shot live in a car parked in a vacant lot, then simultaneously projected behind the car on an adjacent building.

What followed the guerilla class project was a quick trajectory from a student work to a featured piece in an international performance arts festival—_Between Us_ was later picked up by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and shown during the 2009 Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival.

For the TBA:09 mobile performance, Dill and Wallace drove around Portland in a car equipped with video cameras and microphones. They transmitted live video and audio feeds from inside the car to an outdoor-based video installation,. The piece examined the lines between private and public spaces, confidentiality and disclosure, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

“We were interested in the idea that it Between Us posted questions about public vs. private space, that it had multiplicity of locals (street, screen, web), that the improvised conversation was both banal and addictive to watch and that the work was durational,” said Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Program Director, PICA. “Despite the chill and the pace of the piece, people soaked up the conversation, they seemed to be enjoying the guilty pleasure of being voyeurs.”

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