Dana Lynn Louis
For the month of February, the gallery is excited to feature Weave by the multi-disciplinary artist Dana Lynn Louis. This exhibition has been in process for the last two years and is a combination of Louis’s work abroad at ‘Thread’—an artist’s residency in Senegal, West Africa—and Gather:Make:Shelter, a citywide creative collaborative in Portland, OR. Both projects aim to enrich the lives of those in their community through creative practice and artistic pursuits with a focus on collaboration, engagement, skill-building, and connection. According to the artist, “All of this work is related as I weave together life and work, which is a direct response to the energetic ties between all of us, thus lessening the miles between us conceptually and physically. It is increasingly important to me that all of my work, no matter its form, moves towards light, weaving us together and creating levity and beauty along the way.”
Dana Lynn Louis received her MFA from Ohio State University and came to Portland in 1988 as an artist-in-residence at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts. For two decades she has maintained a rigorous studio practice that engages architectural space, glass, light, and shadow among numerous other materials. The results fluctuate between intimate domestic-scaled pieces, interdisciplinary performance collaborations, and large-scale public works that energize and alter one’s experience of their environment. Louis’s work is influenced by her travels, her many collaborative experiences as an artist, and also by her practice and study of yoga. Her work explores the connective layers in all of these experiences. More recently, Louis received a Career Opportunity Grant from The Ford Family Foundation for a six-week residency at Thread in Senegal, West Africa and is the Founding Director of Gather:Make:Shelter in Portland, OR. Her work has been reviewed by publications such as Sculpture Magazine, Artweek, and the German periodical Glashaus, among others. Louis’s work is in the public collections of the Portland Art Museum and Regional Arts & Culture Council.
The large fabric sculptures and wall hangings of Dana Lynn Louis now on exhibit at the Russo Lee Gallery are contemplative, intricate and lovely. The title of her new exhibition is “Weave,” and it is, according to Louis, a direct result of her experiences the past two years working with people experiencing poverty and homelessness in Portland, along with the villages in Africa where she has lived and worked.
The preview materials for Dana Lynn Louis’ work, showing this month at Russo Lee, didn’t seem especially promising to me. There was a lot of gray, and I’m feeling pretty done with gray. The work caught my attention, though, even when I was just walking by the gallery and peering in the windows as the show was being hung on Wednesday afternoon (and it was raining).
Dana Lynn Louis is a multidisciplinary artist well-known for her thoughtful sculptural works and larger-scale, immersive installations that engage architectural spaces, including several notable public commissions in Portland and throughout the Northwest.