Alanna Risse

This here is a post about my residency at the Sou’Wester in Seaview Washington in January 2019.

I just spend two and a half years busting my ass with VergePDX. I was curating art at the Red Fox, Akemi Salon, Flickerbox, Inc., and both of the Joinery locations in SE and SW Portland, Oregon. It was a fantastic experience and I loved it, but last summer I ran into health issues and the stress that Verge was putting me under at the time was too much. So I decided to put Verge on hold and found new peeps to take over curation at each location. The kingdom was divided and I decided to hang onto Verge for future tricks up my sleeve. That was hard to split things up. It was like giving my pets away. It still stings sometimes.

Anyhow, around the holidays, I was finally feeling better and was able to take some deep breathes and look around. Turns out I was pouring so much of myself into Verge and my day job, that I had pretty much stopped making art. This is a very bad thing, art has been very important to me. So I thought, I’ve always wanted to do the Sou’Wester artist residency, let’s apply. I can get some solid jump start art making time. Lo and behold, they accepted my application and I packed up my art supplies, my guitar, and my dog, and headed to Seaview Washington for six fruitful days of art making, beach walks, and napping. I also drank a fair bit of vodka.

Many years ago I started a series about chairs. I love chairs. They have so much personality. I feel like our energy rubs off on them and we leave a piece of ourselves embedded in our favorite chairs for all times. That’s why when I see a chair on the side of the road, I feel both sad for the abandonment of what must have been a special chair, and a sense of possibility. That energy has a chance to go somewhere else in the universe and stir things up. Maybe it will get to be someone else’s favorite chair for a while, or maybe it’ll get ground up into bits and each tiny bit of energy stored will get released back into the world.

It all started with this messy little watercolor sketch from August 2005:

This is my husband’s old chair. We struggled with getting rid of this damn thing for years. We loved it but honestly it was really uncomfortable and one of the wheels was broken and unfixable. We finally let it go into the universe by leaving it on the San Francisco sidewalk but I felt like I needed to capture it’s essence. Here’s my attempt:

I quite like it. I did a series in 2005, all in pastel. Here are some of them:

I’ve missed working on that series, and since living in Portland, I’ve taken maybe hundreds of photos of chairs that have been left out on the sidewalk. Some of them really awesome. I guess it’s my way of capturing something I love and want, but don’t actually want to take into my home, because, stuff. Am I right? Too much of it.

Anyhow. I revived that series and you can see it here.

More later. I’m tired.