August 7 – September 13, 2014
Michelle Acuff
The White Box at the University of Oregon in Portland is pleased to present the immiscible edges, a solo exhibition of work by Michelle Acuff, artist and Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College. the immiscible edges is on display at White Box UO from August 8 – September 13, 2014.
Artist Statement:
“Art making is always a strategy for materializing knowledge, a way of constructing meaning from the world. These works speak to the tangled web of relations—aesthetic, ecologic, and material—that define the period in geologic and human history now known as the Anthropocene. The images and objects assembled here frame the fantasy, nostalgia and denial that characterize this precarious relationship with the planet and its inhabitants. As the industrial and commercial domination of the world grows ever more robust, human agents trigger the collapse of familiar categories, landscapes and frameworks. We catapult and hurl. The miscible edges of everything loosen.”
Michelle Acuff hails from the Midwest where she received her B.A. in Art from Augustana College, and her M.A. and M.F.A. in Sculpture and Intermedia from The University of Iowa. In recent years Professor Acuff has exhibited her work nationally in group and solo exhibitions across the country at venues such as The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Washington & Jefferson College, Bellevue College, the Pendleton Art Center, AIR Gallery, and the Attleboro Museum of Art. Professor Acuff has been the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and has been awarded fellowships at many artist residencies throughout the United States including the Jentel Foundation, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Playa and the Brush Creek Foundation. In 2012 she was a resident at the VCCA’s Moulin Au Nef program in Auvillar, France. Acuff’s work is multi-media in nature, marrying ersatz images and industrially produced commercial objects with organic and hand-made sculptural elements. Her materials range widely from neon to porcelain, steel to Styrofoam, articulating a very tenuous connection to the natural world, and the precariousness of the environmental and social realities we face.
