Join Pacific Sky Exhibitions for an opening night event on Saturday, February 21, from 5-8 p.m. to welcome sculptor Jess Perlitz’s project That Which is Set Before the Eyes, with a writing response by Philip Scher that creates new avenues of discourse around the visual material. The exhibition will run through March 20 at the gallery, located at 180 West 12th Avenue in downtown Eugene.

Directed by UO Department of Art Professor Jack Ryan, this is the third exhibition at Pacific Sky. The first, in October 2014,began a year-long program featuring both Pacific Northwest and international visual artists and writers with month-long collaborative programs at the gallery.

Pacific Sky Exhibitions was part of Ryan’s proposal for a 2014-2015 sabbatical.

“My intention was to program a year of interdisciplinary collaborations in an incredible 1963 Brutalist storefront that was made available to me by partnering with several small businesses who were also excited by this collision of art and text,” he says. “As an intermedia artist I am committed to media interdisplinarity and opportunities to put together discrete communities that share language.”

Ryan said he was “reluctant about how enthusiastic the writers might be [by the concept] but I was terribly mistaken—they've been overwhelmingly involved, enthusiastic, and driven.”

Perlitz is a Canadian-born sculptor whose work is focused on considering sculpture's use through examining participation, individual and collective agency, communication and the symbolic. Her oversized sculptural contribution in Pacific Sky’s main project room is “part Wizard of Oz, part monument,” bringing together her interests in “clowning, the idea of the Marxian character mask, and presentations of power.”

Perlitz received an MFA from Tyler School of Art (2009), a bachelor of arts from Bard College (2000) and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Based in Portland, Oregon, she is assistant professor of art and head of sculpture at Lewis and Clark College. Her exhibitions have included venues ranging from Socrates Sculpture Park to fields and playgrounds to galleries such as David Krut Projects and Cambridge Galleries. Her awards have included the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Franconia Open Studio Fellowship, and the Canadian Sculpture Centre. Forthcoming projects in 2015 will be at De Fabriek in the Netherlands and in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary.

Scher has been a contributing editor and writer for Cabinet Magazine as well as other arts publications including the Caribbean Journal of Criticism. He is a 2008-2009 recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He has taught in France and Barbados, as well as at George Washington University, University of Pennsylvania, and Drexel University, and currently serves as a professor in the UO Department of Anthropology. He has been invited to lecture in Paris, Berlin, Toronto, and New York, among other venues. Scher received his bachelor of arts from Brown University and his master of art and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Scher’s area of focus is the Caribbean, with primary research interests in the politics of heritage and cultural identity, popular and public culture, folklore, cultural studies and political economy. His latest work concerns the idea of culture as an economic resource, critical heritage studies, and the implications for anthropology of the copyright and legal protection of expressive culture and folklore as well as a study of World Heritage sites in the Caribbean.

More information on Perlitz and Scher is available at the Pacific Sky website and Facebook page.

Pacific Sky Exhibitions is a partnership with a suite of diverse professional practices interested in bringing artists and writers together for collaborative exhibitions. The group channels planned plans exhibitions as well as unexpected opportunities in the site created as flex space for exhibitions, workshops, and outreach.

Last month’s exhibition featured contributing writer Erin Moore, a UO assistant professor of architecture.  In May, Pacific Sky will be exhibiting work by Diedrick Brackens, visiting art professor at UO.

The gallery is open on the weekends by appointment.
 For images and additional information, please contact the gallery at jryan@uoregon.edu or (615) 294-5776.