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Utilizing the visual language of color calibration charts and contemporary stock photography, this image collage offers the viewer an amalgamation of references that could at first appear to be celebratory. Mashed together are depictions of beauty regiments, skin tone makeup charts, piles of foods and ethnic spices, sumptuous desserts, tropical vacation landscapes, pastoral farmlands, and community building moments of togetherness. On closer inspection, the frictions and ironies begin to surface, suggesting an anxious shift in contemporary politics masked by upbeat advertising language and colorful veneer.
Long interested in how visual displays can camouflage more complex realities, Syjuco purchased the majority of these images from commercial stock photography sites, juxtaposing them in a way that teases out conflicting meanings. Included is one large image she staged in her studio, as well as multiple color calibration charts that are meant to check for “correct color” — a fraught metaphor for our times.
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, The Getty Museum, SFMOMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. She is a Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley and lives in Oakland, California.
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
New work by Jack Baca.
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Map to location of Foyer Gallery in Lawrence Hall
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
1st Year MFA Exhibition featuring artwork by Shannon Clegg, Omar Khouri, Manda Vasquez and Sequoia Maria Rose Williams-Valenzuela.
Manda’s work “For Our Hearts Adorned” explores the metaphorical traces we leave behind in our absence. This work challenges the limitations of the physical body by using light to solidify the gestural, atmospheric, and fleeting movements of one’s energetic presence. This photographic series aims to highlight the eternal essence and memory of one’s soul.
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Omar’s piece “I Hope This Email Finds You Well.“ is a durational installation about the complex psychological torture an expat goes through when forced to observe a war happening in their home country from afar. In this specific instance, it is about the horrid and indiscriminate military action and invasion that Israeli Occupation Forces are perpetrating on Lebanon, as well as the attacks by the US and Israeli military on Iran.
A special thank you to my family, friends and all the innocent people around the world who have to endure this hell on our behalf.
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Sequoia’s work explores the intersections of access, movement, and borders, examining how external and internal boundaries produce tensions, narratives, and points of limited mobility that shape how bodies are experienced and perceived. Working through warp and weft, they locate the body within the woven cloth—held in tension, structure, and repetition—while materials and process anchor the work within layered geopolitical histories and contexts.
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Shannon’s work “To The Place” explores belonging under shifting conditions of home through migration. Using text drawn from personal postcards to places lived and left, she engraves language into paper through a durational process until it transforms into texture. This act attempts to stabilize what remains in flux, as home is continually re-formed through what is carried from one place to another.
6:00 p.m.
Filmlandia Screening Series presents: My Own Private Idaho (1991). Free and open to the public.
Directed by Gus Van Sant | 104 min | Rated R
Synopsis: Two best friends living on the streets of Portland as hustlers embark on a journey of self discovery and find their relationship stumbling along the way.
The Department of Cinema Studies and the University Film Society celebrate Oregon’s rich film heritage with a new screening series showcasing movies with a unique Oregon connection—from locally shot features to stories written or directed by Oregon filmmakers. Discover Oregon’s reel legacy on the big screen while connecting with the university film community.
Cosponsored by: Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Endowment; Department of Art; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of English; Department of History; Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Native American and Indigenous Studies; Folklore and Public Culture Program; School of Journalism and Communication; Art House Theater; DUX Present; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History; and Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities
4:00 p.m.
University of Oregon 2025-26 Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research
Cerny’s sculptures and work on paper start with the idea that “furniture” and “mother” are figures that secure a value (to others) for their potential to hold, display, or be absent-mindedly left with things. Putting form and color to work and entrusting no small part to contingency, these works behave as something like gestural understudies for a play about the day-to-day grinding weariness and joyful slapstick absurdity of human relationships—about trying to Work It Out…or not. The shelf, the rack, the hook, the slot, the vessel: all stand at the ready to be occupied temporarily, until something better comes along. These objects “hold,” literally and metaphorically. A pattern played out over and over in the work is one of holding as the creation of intimacy and belonging, for pleasure, and for self-preservation.
Dawn Cerny has had solo institutional exhibitions at The Frye Museum (2025); The Seattle Art Museum (2021); The Portland Art Museum (2017); and The Henry Art Gallery (2008 and 2017). Her sculptures, works on paper and collaborative projects have been exhibited in institutions and galleries across North America, including Micki Meng Gallery, San Francisco (2023); F Gallery, Houston (2022); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018); and MOCA, Los Angeles (2018). She is the recipient of two Washington State Artist Fellowships (2004 & 2017); the Betty Bowen Award (2020); the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship (2022) and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022). Cerny’s works on paper and sculptures are in public collections, including The Walker Art Gallery, SFMOMA, The Frye Art Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, The Portland Art Museum and The Seattle Art Museum. Dawn Cerny’s work has been written about in Bomb Magazine, KQED, Variable West, Artforum, the International Sculpture Center Blog, The Brooklyn Rail, The Stranger, and The Seattle Times
6:00 p.m.
Filmlandia Screening Series presents: Old Joy (2006). Free and open to the public.
Directed by Kelly Reichardt | 76 min | Unrated
Synopsis: Two old pals reunite for a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.
The Department of Cinema Studies and the University Film Society celebrate Oregon’s rich film heritage with a new screening series showcasing movies with a unique Oregon connection—from locally shot features to stories written or directed by Oregon filmmakers. Discover Oregon’s reel legacy on the big screen while connecting with the university film community.
Cosponsored by: Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Endowment; Department of Art; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of English; Department of History; Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Native American and Indigenous Studies; Folklore and Public Culture Program; School of Journalism and Communication; Art House Theater; DUX Present; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History; and Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities
4:00 p.m.
The Department of Cinema Studies invites UO students to: "Filmmaking Masterclass with Alexi Pappas and Laura Wagner."
Co-director Alexi Pappas and Producer Laura Wagner will offer insight into the creative and logistical challenges of making an independent feature in Tracktown–Eugene, OR. An unconventional coming-of-age film that blurs the line between fiction and lived athletic experience, Tracktown (2016) draws on Pappas’s dual identity as an elite Olympic runner and filmmaker.
Free and open to UO students.
About the Filmmakers
Alexi Pappas–Co-director, Co-writer: Alexi is a filmmaker and a professional athlete training for the 2016 Olympics in the 10,000 meters. Alexi completed her thesis in poetry at Dartmouth College where she graduated magna cum laude before running off to compete in the 2012 Olympic Track & Field Trials. In 2011 Alexi co-wrote the script for the award-winning feature film Tall as the Baobab Tree. Alexi was also a member of the Dog Day Players improv theatre troupe at Dartmouth and is a graduate of the UCB Theater improv program in New York City. She is the co-founder of Film Fatales Portland.
Laura Wagner–Producer: Laura, founder of Bay Bridge Productions, produces independent films and theatre projects. She is the recipient of the Sundance Institute’s Creative Producing Fellowship, the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Fellowship, and the IFP/Cannes Marche Du Film Producer’s Network Fellowship. She was nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for It Felt Like Love, the critically acclaimed feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Filmlandia Masterclass: A Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Series Special Event
Cosponsored by: Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Endowment; Department of Art; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of English; Department of History; Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Native American and Indigenous Studies; Folklore and Public Culture Program; School of Journalism and Communication; Art House Theater; DUX Present; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History; and Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities.
4:00 p.m.
Presented by the University of Oregon Center for Art Research
Join Salar Mameni for a reflection on war, genocide and the limits of critique.
Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke, 2023), which considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” Mameni proposes the term “Terracene” in order to think of the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. The book engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Mameni has published articles in Qui Parle, Catalyst, Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review and Canadian Art Journal, and has written for exhibition catalogues in Dubai, Sharjah and Istanbul. Mameni was the curator of “Snail Fever,” at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai that explored art as a pandemic bringing together artists from the region whose works consider the embodied, viral and contaminating nature of sonic and visual aesthetics.
Made possible by the Center for Environmental Futures, Oregon Humanities Center, and the Department of Art's Center for Art Research in conjunction with the Beyond Extraction symposium at the University of Oregon.
4:00 p.m.
University of Oregon 2025-26 Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research
This talk explores Alice Bucknell’s work through the lens of clipping: the moment in a video game when the player slips through a wall or falls beyond the map. Often treated as a technical error, clipping becomes a method for breaking open systems and exposing their ecological, political, and epistemic structures. Across projects such as The Alluvials (2023), Small Void (2025), and Earth Engine (both 2026), Bucknell uses gamespace as a site for speculative experimentation, blurring boundaries between humans and nonhuman, natural and synthetic intelligences, and self vs world. In this framework, play offers an affective encounter with the world that’s grounded in total feeling rather than totalized knowledge. Clipping the horizon means colliding with the limits of perception itself and tumbling sideways into a world that resists being mapped, modeled, or controlled.
Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relationships, and forms of knowledge. Bucknell is generally interested in the limits of scientific knowledge and systems thinking, the weird possibilities of play, and play as an embodied technology. They have exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Kunsthalle Praha (Prague), Ars Electronica (Linz), transmediale (Berlin), Arcade Seoul, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Singapore Art Museum and Serpentine Galleries (London). In 2025, their video game The Alluvials was acquired by SFMOMA, becoming the first video game in the museum's permanent collection. A 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award and a 2026 resident of La Becque Principal Residency Program in Switzerland, Bucknell teaches world
6:00–8:00 p.m.
This two-day event brings together leading artists and scholars who address and resist extractive violence, often from decolonial, anti-racist, and/or anti-capitalist perspectives, and who envision worlds and relations beyond extraction/extractivism.
Thursday: film screening and discussion; Friday: talks and panel discussions.
7:00 p.m.
Filmlandia Screening Series Presents: Screening of Tracktown (2016) and Q&A with Director Alexi Pappas and Producer Laura Wagner.
Free and open to the public.
Directed by Alexi Pappas and Jeremy Teicher | 88 min
Synopsis: A young, talented, and lonely long-distance runner twists her ankle as she prepares for the Olympic Trials and must do something she’s never done before: take a day off.
The Department of Cinema Studies and the University Film Society celebrate Oregon’s rich film heritage with a new screening series showcasing movies with a unique Oregon connection—from locally shot features to stories written or directed by Oregon filmmakers. Discover Oregon’s reel legacy on the big screen while connecting with the university film community.
A Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Series Special Event
Cosponsored by: Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker Endowment; Department of Art; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of English; Department of History; Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; Native American and Indigenous Studies; Folklore and Public Culture Program; School of Journalism and Communication; Art House Theater; DUX Present; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History; and Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities.
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
This two-day event brings together leading artists and scholars who address and resist extractive violence, often from decolonial, anti-racist, and/or anti-capitalist perspectives, and who envision worlds and relations beyond extraction/extractivism.
Thursday: film screening and discussion; Friday: talks and panel discussions.
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