Art Spark is pleased to feature print making studios Atelier Meridian and Flight 64!

The event will include : Letter pressing, pulling screens on different materials, and coming up with abstract and comedic ways to print iconic Portland imagery. Flight 64 will also be celebrating their 10th Anniversary in the PDX community!

Atelier Meridian is a working print studio and artist community in Portland's Lower Albina neighborhood. It is an art studio with 24 hour access to the presses for members and goodwill to artists and the curious who drop in.

Founded in 2003, Flight 64 is a member-run non-profit print studio in the Alberta Arts District. It provides artist the tools they need to develop their work, there are facilities for screenprint, etching, relief and lithography, as well as a community of artists.



An evening of printmaking with Atelier Meridian and Flight 64 | Art Spark
July 18th | 5-7 PM
Vendetta | 14306 N Williams Ave, Portland, OR 97217

Lucy Skaer @ Yale Union


Lucy Skaer's new sculptures commissioned by Yale Union are not loud talkers. They are however overly informed. Put simply, they are lithographic limestone extracted from Iowa in April.

For 370 million years this limestone was considered nothing but rocks. In 1903 Clement Webster, a mining engineer, discovered the lithographic qualities of the stone. All of a sudden the stone had value and the area where the pieces were excavated was made into Lithograph City. For twenty years the slabs were quarried, however when metal printing plate technology developed the quarries closed, and the entire town had folded. The site is marked by rows of telegraph poles tracing what is now a cow pasture.

The terra cotta and lithographic limestone are laden with history and technological significance. They are materials that imply a certain kind of use, able to print checks and deeds, designating value. Today however, quarries mine the stone for its non-lithographic properties. They crush the stone into material for road-building or concrete production, and ignore the flat slabs suitable for printing.



Lucy Skaer
Opening Reception | July 19th | 7-9 PM
July 19 - September 12, 2013
Yale Union | 800 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR 97214

the Sketchbook Project Summer Tour


The Sketchbook Project is a global, crowd-sourced art project and traveling exhibition of thousands of sketchbooks housed at Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. Having recently moved to Portland by way of Brooklyn this is a place I hold close to my heart. It is an amazing house of inspiration and the best place to kill time. There are nearly 28,000 sketchbooks from people all over the world. Once you get your free library card you are able to search through the sketchbook database and look at any book that is on location.

I cannot tell you how pumped I got when I saw that the traveling exhibition would be in my new city (at the Jupiter Hotel) from July 19-21, 2013.

The Sketchbook Project Mobile Library will be driven across the United States and Canada by husband and wife Steven and Sara Peterman, the founder of the project and manager of Brooklyn Art Library respectively. The tour will take them to over 30 cities and they will cover 18,000 miles on the road. They'll be meeting Sketchbook Project participants all along the way to collect and share their stories for an upcoming book.

The Sketchbook Project summer tour
July 19 - 21, 2013
July 19 | 4-8 PM
July 20 | 2-8 PM
July 21 | 12-6 PM
The Jupiter Hotel | 800 E Burnside St, Portland Or 97214

Event Horizon: living on the edge is both memorial and social commentary on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that occurred in 2010.


In the Black gallery within Place is Liz Harris' Event Horizon: living on the edge. By investigating the relationships between environment, consumerism, and energy production, Harris has created a physical representation of her concern for the current state of the world. This object attempts to bridge the gap of conceptual ideas into reality through the scale, texture and color of ceramic forms.

Also in Black gallery is Tim Combs' Mask Tape Project

Before the 1980s, masking tape was often used to silence students who spoke out of turn. It was seen as an acceptable educational tool to teach students how to respond appropriately while learning. The rules that delineate our rigid behavior patterns are created, not natural. This project discusses how the ways in which learning and education are presented influence what we believe learning can be. Combs is a Portland artist who spends his time using art to have conversations about social construction, facilitating creative reclamation through non-profit work and community organizing and teaching.

& then in the White gallery, Felicity Fenton's Internal Server Error , previously mentioned will still be on view along with Gabrijel Savic Ra's Freedom: Godot Has Finally Arrived.

In a virtual plane of thoughts the idea of unrestricted freedom is possible, but that's not the case in the formulation of thoughts into words or feelings. Virtual freedom, like Godot, doesn't exist, but it makes us be alert for a chance that somehow does exist. It's a question of hope and faith, not reality. The exhibition is a part of a larger project about freedom. Gabrijel Savic Ra is a multimedia artist, poet and theoretician. As a poet and art theoretician he has published two books of poetry and was featured in various collections of poetry and art magazines.

Event Horizon: living on the edge | Liz Harris | Black gallery
Mask Tape Project | Tim Combs | Black gallery
Freedom: Godot Has Finally Arrived | Gabrijel Savic Ra | White gallery
Black gallery | July 20 - September 7, 2013
White gallery | July 20 - August 3, 2013
Opening Reception | July 20 | 5-9 PM
Place | 700 SW 5th Ave Portland, OR 97204