SHIELA LAUFER & CHARLIE SALAS-HUMARA // Things I Have Seen and Don’t Remember

On view January 22–February 28, 2021
Opening reception (with RSVP) Sunday, January 31, 2021 // 1–4 p.m.

What first comes to mind when encountering the image of a portal? An escape, perhaps? Or an entrance, a path, a sign? How about a moment? In Things I Have Seen and Don’t Remember, new two-dimensional works by Sheila Laufer and Charlie Salas-Humara read as portals within the gallery space. They offer viewers moments of tandem solace in an otherwise indecipherable landscape of the everyday.

Salas-Humara creates his paintings as representations of the “in between spaces” of the world at view. Placing equal emphasis on the negative and on the active elements of his canvases, he questions how much we see when observing an object and how much we see when attempting to see through it. Rough outlines, isolated letters, smudged shapes and symbols have us tugging at an understanding of works with such titles as Riford Road or Calumet. In his own words, Salas-Humara is building the “alleys, hidden tufts of foliage, and clandestine doorways” of his childhood in such a manner that the many layers of lines, colors, and transformations contort as much as they reveal about his alternate world.

Laufer’s ink monotypes on paper similarly compliment Salas-Humara’s acrylic and oil stick paintings in their intuitive indirectness. The ten works on view are quiet, subdued, and soft, yet brimming with symbolism and loosely hidden intricacies. These rapid monotypes bear a more overt resemblance to the comforting and unreserved mundanity of life—a window, a wrought iron fence, a tall decorative gate, all recontextualized here in pastel hues. For Laufer, these symbols act as the grammar that brings the image and its history up to the surface. What if these visual portals could be imagined as still frames capturing a specific moment in time? They would narrate a scene that is at once elusive, yet also more evocative, a more all-encompassing flood of feeling and memory.

Like the seemingly quiet and introspective time of winter, which unequivocally begs us to slow down, these works ask of us the same—to think, to imagine, to be still, to be.

Shiela Christine Laufer is a painter and printmaker living in Portland, OR. Her work is influenced by American folk art and the rural landscape of Pennsylvania where she grew up.

Charlie Salas-Humara is a painter and musician living in Portland, OR. Self taught, he began working with acrylic, oil, charcoal, and collage as a mean of expressing his love of dance and music through art. Salas-Humara has shown his visual work in Portland, OR, Los Angeles, and New York.

PRESS & MORE
VizArts Monthly: Invigorate With Art, Lindsay Costello, Oregon Artswatch, February 2, 2021

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