SCALEHOUSE VOICES
Now in its sixth season, Scalehouse Voices is a series of talks with local and visiting artists and scholars, exploring ideas and techniques, practice and process, creativity and culture. We feature fresh voices, perspectives, and ideas of nationally and internationally acclaimed artists, designers, and scholars.
Past Voices Event:
Scalehouse and OSU-Cascades present, Heidi Schwegler, In Praise of Fragmentation
Things break.
Heidi Schwegler’s practice considers a landscape awash in fragments. Her work is an aesthetic investigation into the “culture of breakage” or “planned obsolescence” that our global economy relies upon. By recontextualizing broken things as the basis for new sculptural forms, her process blurs lines between the manufactured and crafted, the industrial and the handmade through traditional and experimental materials, found forms, and replicas re-made in glass, gold, porcelain, resin, and wood.
Please join us for an artist talk from the current exhibiting artist, Heidi Schwegler. Directly following the artist talk at OSU-Cascades, we will be hosting an exhibit opening at the Scalehouse Gallery from 6:30 - 8:00pm.
About Heidi Schwegler:
Heidi Schwegler explores a wide range of materials in the service of her subject matter. Drawn to the peripheral ruin, she deftly incorporates found objects with traditional craft and sculpture media. “When [an object] is no longer contextualized by function and ownership, the discarded thing's anonymity and ambiguity render it pervious to the imagination,” she says, approaching such things as a source of investigation. “I consider its formal qualities as raw material – but a very particular raw material that is both new and an indicator of past use, past value, and past purpose.”
Schwegler’s accolades include an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, Hallie Ford Fellowship and two MacDowell Colony Fellowships in the Visual Arts. She was artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Pilchuck, VCCA, Yaddo, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Bullseye Glass Company, among others. Notable exhibitions of her work include the 2018 Bellevue Art Museum Biennial, Portland2016: A Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Michelle Grabner and presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center; her 10-year retrospective, Botched Execution, at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, OR and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, NE. Schwegler holds a BFA from the University of Kansas and MFA from the University of Oregon. She divides her time between Portland, OR andresides full time in Yucca Valley, CA where she is the founding director of Yucca Valley Material Lab.
Her sculptural work is in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum currently on view in the Hoffman Galleries of the Northwest Art wing), the Crocker Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum.
