Laura Hughes: Almost Perfect

Exhibition Dates: February 15 - March 11, 2017

Designed to take advantage of the gallery’s unique architecture, Almost Perfect is a mixed media, site-based installation that changes throughout the day, studying potential singularities and collectivities experienced in the façade of surfaces. Populated by a variety of reflective material constituents exposed to shifting conditions of natural and artificial light, the gallery interior is treated as a receptacle for unstable moments. Suspended transparent mirrored surfaces contain and redirect varying degrees of illumination unfolding throughout the day, and are subjected to forms of activation through the movement of viewers.

The regulatory premises of how surfaces and objects are arranged as subject to their architectural framework is inherently explicit, and yet within that, visible potentials can be both relational and malleable. As light shifts, appearances project, refract, retreat, and reposition. These different points of contact form a participatory dialogue with gallery visitors and among the objects themselves.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Laura Hughes is a visual artist based in Portland, Oregon, who creates site-specific installations that investigate how light, form and space surround and shape one another in our perception. Directly responding to the given features of architectural space, she manipulates reflective materials and artificial or natural light to navigate dimensional relationships, intersecting planes, and shifting visibilities relative to surface, space and the movements of viewers.

Hughes’ work has been featured at Fortune Gallery (Portland, Ore.), the de Menil Gallery (Groton, Mass.), Littman Gallery (Portland, Ore.), The Art Gym (Marylhurst, Ore.), LxWxH (Seattle, Wash.), Disjecta (Portland, Ore.), White Box (Portland, Ore.), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, Wash.), Archer Gallery (Vancouver, Wash.), Gallery Homeland (Portland, Ore.), Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, Ore.), Ditch Projects (Springfield, Ore.), Appendix Project Space (Portland, Ore.), the Portland Building (Portland, Ore.), Atelier Gallery (Vancouver BC), the Art Gallery of Calgary (Calgary, AB) and the Banff Centre (Banff, AB).

Hughes has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She was a finalist for the 2013 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards from the Portland Art Museum, received a 2012 Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, and has been nominated for the Brink Award at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Hughes received an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, Ore.), and a BFA in Drawing with Distinction from the Alberta College of Art & Design (Calgary, AB). She is currently a professor of undergraduate and graduate studies and Chair of the Low-Residency MFA in Visual Studies program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.