An exhibit featuring “The Kitchen Counter Collective” by Jesse Hayward will be presented at Linfield College. The exhibition runs now through May 1 in the gallery in the James F. Miller Fine Arts Center. An opening reception will be held Wednesday, March 31, at 6 p.m. in the gallery.
Whether it is with painted toothpicks that participants stab into an amorphous armature or with several hundred painted boxes the participants stack and re-stack throughout the run of the show, Hayward creates installations that are intended for direct audience manipulation. Utilizing repetition and ritual, he builds and paints objects in his studio that are then re-imagined through a collaborative, installation practice, articulating a space wherein boundaries are blurred. The sculptural commingles with the painterly, the co-active with the drawn. The resulting works exist in diminished hybridization, with multiple genres collapsing parasitically one upon the other. Rhythms of color and form soften and obscure their own structural underpinning, foreshadowing the instability and immateriality of all future outcomes.
Born in 1973, Hayward earned a BFA from Pomona College in 1995 after first studying art at Phillips AcademyAndover. Hayward went on to receive his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, Calif., and at PDX Contemporary Art and The Jupiter Art Fair in Portland. In 2006, Hayward’s work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was short listed for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Award and exhibited a collaborative installation at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2009 Time Based Art Festival.
The Linfield exhibit is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. To reach the gallery from 99W, turn east on Keck Drive at the McMinnville Market Center in south McMinnville. Turn right at the first street onto Library Court. The art gallery is located in the second building on the left, Building B. Parking is available on the street and in the lot west of Nicholson Library. For a campus map, go to http://www.linfield.edu/admission/campus-map.php. (The Miller Fine Arts Center is #56.) For more information call 503-883-2804 or visit www.linfield.edu/art/gallery.php.