Presented by the Center for Art Research

Adam DeSorbo: Ablaze (With Destruction and Abundance)

March 1- May 19, 2024 CFAR billboard project at 510 Oak Street, Eugene, OR 97403

Ablaze (With Destruction and Abundance) depicts ochre-tinted maple leaves nailed to wood planks that have been strengthened through a traditional Japanese charring process known as the Yakisugi method. The burned boards and maple leaves allude to transitional states, both benign and seasonal, and the more destructive forces of increasing wildfire activity. The embedded relationship between preservation and destruction as it relates to the Anthropocene brings our paradoxical tendencies as a species into full relief. The image is activated through original text by the artist, making explicit the process of grieving a burning world. The interaction between the image and the text proposes an embrace of our ecological cracking, the necessity to witness, the urge to preserve, and the radical act of finding joy while existing in the cracks.

This CFAR billboard project is supported by the University of Oregon Department of ARt’s Center for Art Research in conjunction with the exhibition series Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.

Presented by the Center for Art Research

Sacrifice Zones – Jon Bellona and Ralph Pugay

Exhibition: April 5-21, 2024  510 Oak St, Eugene, OR 97403

Reception: Friday, April 5, from 5:30-7:30  p.m. Gallery hours: Friday-Sunday from noon-4:00 p.m.

This exhibition features artists playing with signifiers of theatricality, hysteria, and humor in contemporary conversation regarding the notion of “apocalypse”. What are the varying scales of apocalypse? And most importantly, what might come after?

Sacrifice Zones is part of the exhibition series Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, organized by curators-in-residence Ashley Stull Meyers and Aurora Tang and made possible by the University of Oregon Department of Art’s Center for Art Research and the Ford Family Foundation.

University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series   Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research 

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland based artist and survivor of gun violence. Through writing, studio work, and ritual performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. Hennessy constructs sculptures and installations with everyday domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, knotting, brushing, and braiding.  

For many years she served as a hospice volunteer and death doula working with families on home funerals, death vigils, and grief rituals. She has received awards from San Francisco Artadia, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Fleishhacker Foundation. Hennessy is on the advisory board of Recompose in Seattle and lectures nationally on aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead. 

Her work has been included in exhibitions at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, and Pt. 2 Gallery and is in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Crocker Art Museum. Her audio guides, meditations, and poems have been featured at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, and SOMArts Gallery. 

This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.  

Lectures are also live streamed and the videos are archived on YouTube.  

Presented by the Center for Art Research

Progress – Marcus Fischer and Lisa Ward

Exhibition: May 3– 19, 2024  510 Oak St, Eugene, OR 97403

Reception:  Friday, May 3 from 5:30-7:30  p.m. Gallery hours: Friday- Sunday from 12:00- 4:00 p.m.

This exhibition examines the varied definitions of “progress” in the ongoing effort to witness, tend to, and historicize human intervention in places often considered unleveraged.

Progess is part of the exhibition series Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, organized by curators-in-residence Ashley Stull Meyers and Aurora Tang and made possible by the University of Oregon Department of Art’s Center for Art Research and the Ford Family Foundation.

University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series   Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research 

Dionne Lee is a visual artist working in photography, collage, and video. Her work explores power and personal history in relation to the American landscape, and interrogates historical narratives that exist within photographic representations of land and place. 

Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Feria Material, Mexico City; Barbican Art Gallery, London; New Orleans Museum of Art; Aperture Foundation, New York; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. Lee was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation and a 2021–2023 Artist-in-Residence with Unseen California. 

Lectures are also live streamed and the videos are archived on YouTube.