Portland | Studio Visit with Christine Bourdette

Join ArtTable’s Northwest Chapter for a special studio visit with Portland-based artist, Christine Bourdette. We will get to tour her studio and learn more about her inspiration and process. From there, join us afterwards for conversation and a no-host summer cocktail at the Emerald Line.

Admission:

• ArtTable Members – $10
• Member Guests/Non-Members – $15

Please note that space is limited.

Not a member? Join today!

Please review the below before registering:

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About the artist

Christine Bourdette is a Portland, Oregon-based visual artist who maintains studio and public art practices. Her studio work includes sculpture, drawing, prints, and installation. Over the course of her career she has cultivated a three-dimensional vocabulary incorporating a wide repertoire of materials and a dedication to craft. She has simultaneously built an expansive drawing practice that feeds and is fed by her sculptor’s sensibilities. Bourdette’s work has commented on social, political, or simply human predicaments, often seasoned with compassion and humor. 

Geologic features and fracturing earth, the land as an uneasy topography, informs her recent work. She views the accretions, erosion, and metamorphosis of Earth throughout geologic time as inversely analogous to our relatively compacted experience as human beings. The cumulative distortions, upheavals, erratic shifting of terrain, seem to her as metaphors for this era we inhabit, for a sense of surviving instability through instability. Though they reflect qualities of landforms, she considers her works to occupy a zone between representation and abstraction; it utilizes the transformation and synthesis of materials imagery, and ideas, essentially aestheticizing the residue of earthly fragility and decomposition and, in turn, the potential for regeneration.

Bourdette earned her BA from Lewis and Clark College where she studied art and languages. She was the first recipient of the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, and has received a Visual Artist Fellowship from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and a Golden Spot award from The Ford Family Foundation. She has held residencies at Playa, Caldera, the Ucross Foundation, and the Tamarind Institute.

Bourdette has exhibited in the United States and France, including solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (Portland, OR), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Portland, OR), The Tyler Museum of Art (Tyler, TX), Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, WA), Klein Gallery (Chicago, IL), The Alexandria Museum, (Alexandria, LA), and Galerie L’Aire du Verseau (Paris, France). Her sculpture and drawings are in many public and private collections nationwide. Bourdette has also completed public art commissions in Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, Arizona, and Florida. Her art has been featured in Sculpture magazine and reviewed in Art in America, Artweek, and Visions Quarterly. She frequently collaborates on visual design for performance, dance, and film, including the animated short film, Bunnyheads, with filmmaker Jim Blashfield. She is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

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Images: Christine Bourdette, Simmer, 2021; graphite, water-soluble pigment and pigment-based ink on paper; Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery / Christine Bourdette, Shift, 2021; vellum and pigment based ink; Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery

This program is generously supported by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation has been a leader in providing grants enabling emerging and established artists to focus on their work. Funding helps artists to create new work, acquire art supplies, rent studio space, and prepare exhibitions. The Foundation also provides grants to organizations that directly engage with artists, such as artist residency programs. Please visit www.pkf.org for more information.