Opening

First Friday, June 1
6pm-11pm

]]> http://launchpadgallery.org/boz-schurr_ila-kriegh/feed/ 0 http://launchpadgallery.org/surprise/ http://launchpadgallery.org/surprise/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 17:25:40 +0000 Nick http://launchpadgallery.org/?p=3791 When I went to Launch Pad Sara had a surprise for me: a white mini portable laptop. Now I can work on the blog wherever.  Coming closer to graduation, the biggest question is, what am I learning? At school I’m preparing for my future.  At Launch Pad I’m learning how to fit into the work world, and learning the business and preparation part of the art world and the life of working at an art gallery.

When I got to Launch Pad I entered with enthusiasm. I was exited to see what my surprise was, and yes it was nice. Me and Sara went over the to do list for someone who comes in to ‘art sit,’ the term we use referring to watching the gallery and waiting for viewers to come in and look at the art and possibly buy a piece. That’s where I come in.  The first thing I would do is to turn on the lights, sweep, move furniture, and make the art space clean for the viewers. Then I place the open sign outside on the sidewalk and wait for people to come in and make them feel welcome.  If they are interested in buying a piece of art, I would take down their information on the buyers sheet; their name and contact info, the title and artist’s name, the price, and how they are paying.  That information then goes in to an online collectors form.

After we discussed this, Sara asked me to come help her hang a painting in the bathroom that has just been leaning up against the wall.  Normally we would measure the wall and painting before we hang up art but this wasn’t for the art show, so it didn’t matter how or where it was placed on the wall.  We did have to put D-rings and wire on the back. D-rings are a type of hardware that srews onto the back of a frame, with a loop to attach wire. We screwed two parallel to each other about one fourth of the way from the top of the painting on both sides. Then we took  a long piece of wire and bent it in half to double up because this was a bigger piece the size and shape of a door. We looped the wire through the D-rings on each side & secured it so that the wire was nice & tight across the back. Most of the paintings we get the artists already have this done but it is a useful skill to know.

Sara & I chatted and then she left and I covered her shift for her. Only one nice lady came in and I introduced myself and said to her that if she was interested in buying a piece that I could help her. She smiled, said thank you and then I told her about the next art show and gave her the propaganda.  She said thank you again, and she looked around, but she didn’t buy anything.

I went to the river on saturday, with two of my friends Rachael and Jared. We managed to get chased by bumble-bee, laugh out loud!

I went to A+G and I learned how to tie a tie. I’m Glad the sun decided to come out to  say hello, and the rain decided to go away tell another day. Oregon’s weather is so bipolar. I went to Worksound, on Alder. I met with a girl named Jamie and I asked her some Q’s  came up with today. I loved the building, I liked that there was different rooms to walk through. On one wall they had Black stripes on a white wall the wall like a jail birds uniform looks like, in a pattern that Zigzags. That one of the artists painted on for her part of the of the show May 4th at Worksound.

Opening Reception

First Friday, May 4th
6pm – 12am

with music by
Boo Frog

Out of the Odessa heat Nathan arrived in the Pacific Northwest.
Driving a Ford Pickup, spending time at the Lab, burning up a piano, sharpening thorns and pouring stems,
Orosco puts his hands in the mix.

He talks of Foundries going Cold, the Process of Doing, Long Hours and Dedication.
His work can be looked at as examples of metamorphosis, scientific process and movement.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

“As a landscape, as a journey, as an identity, West Texas is a long way from the Pacific Northwest. When I first met Nathan Orosco, that cut across the territory was raw and recent, and it showed in his work. It was angry. It was concrete, rebar and grainy video: materials shaped into metaphors for displacement and migration. Anxiety. Pollution. Maybe a little yearning.

Nathan Orosco was born and raised in Odessa, Texas. He is third-generation Mexican-American, tap-rooted to the hardpan and the greasy stink of pump jacks and tank farms. Growing up, he worked in his father’s repair shop, a laborer who fixed and painted the big rigs that service the oil fields. To be a laborer is to perform the most minor of alchemies. An oilman might accomplish the modern equivalent of turning lead to gold, but all a laborer manages is to turn sweat and strain into an overhauled truck engine, or a welded section of pipe, or a trench cut cleanly into red caliche clay.

Nathan is still a laborer. He is still an alchemist. The perfectly flat horizon of the Permian Basin has been replaced by a wrinkled and river-laced topography. His walk to the studio is lined with cedar and rhododendrons, rather than limestone and concrete block.

In his earlier work, materials were substitutions. Similes and ciphers. A red mound of West Texas earth, equivalent to the weight of Nathan’s body, was shaped by his labor to its new place. The flat floor of the gallery became the flat horizon of the Permian landscape.

In this new work, materials are a means of transformation, as in a phosphorescent substance, storing energy in one form and re-emitting it later, visible and illuminating.

Bronze and glass unify disparate elements, forming a whole radically different from their constituent parts. Nathan remakes organic materials and ephemeral phenomena to last a million years.”

- David Drake

My work is a response to my landscape, culture and social political anxieties. There are forms in my work that are directly related to the landscapes I’ve lived in. It contains the nostalgia of where I was raised, the home/memory, and the foreign identity/culture of my present place. Considering a landscape is not always my intentional format during the beginning stages of making, but something that is always an influence. The influence of form can be urban, rural, desolate, lush, or may appear representational/obvious, like the flat land of the southwest landscape with its never-ending horizontal line, or the more industrial forms and lines of factories that disrupt the plane, or the collapsing bricks of the neighborhood alley. The choice of the materials is relative with the subject matter. This provides a connection between my making process and the metaphors that are contained in the work. Phosphorescent is a reaction to the exposures of my current outer world and the ways in which it has influenced my subconscious thought. It is an attempt, through the processes of sculpture, to deal with the most basic of human emotions; anxiety, comfort, pain, danger, demise, love and identity. While making this work, I have continuously thought about the aspect of coping and its relationship to the process of making.

-Nathan Orosco

www.nathanorosco.net

After, I went to Newspace an art gallery for photography, I talked with them for a little bit about, how and what things work for them, and they were familiar with the launch pad in fact one of the guys i talked to knew Ben. After I was done talking I walked around and looked at the photography. It was my first art gallery I visited so I didn’t learn much I didn’t know what I was doing so I think if I came up with a list of questions that would benefit me more than just going in and winging it.

It’s been fun setting up for the art shows, and meeting all the local artists. The last show was pretty awesome. I made Ben’s Famous Beans and Rice- I have to say it was better than my mom’s more traditional beans and rice, laugh out loud. It’s been nerve racking but it’s a learning experience for sure. I never thought I would be here doing something to support what I love, the arts. My friends are proud of me, and so is my house, the staff will be attending the upcoming art show. Everyone I tell assumes my art will be in the art show but I humbly inform them I’m only setting up for the art shows as of right now… but I do hope to have my own art show in the near future.

But right now I’m just starting off, the countdown to something great! I can feel it. So my job will be to travel around Portland to seek out other art galleries and coffee shops that display art and check out what they’re doing. We want to see what’s happening in the art community around us, reconnect, discover emerging and innovative artists and galleries, as well as to highlight those already established.