James Allen
In Northwest Bound, James Allen continues his focus on the excavations of books, this time with a Pacific Northwest theme. The anchor for the show is a large altered set of bound Oregon Journal newspapers from May 1914. These new works, like the original newspaper, trace cultural, political and natural shifts in our region. It is so far the largest work the artist has created. Allen will also present a series of collages he created from the leftover scraps.
James Allen was born in 1977 in Illinois. He earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000. Currently, he lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Allen's artwork is included in Art Made From Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed published by Chronicle books. His work was exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum in The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book in 2009. His Book Excavations can be found in Public collections at UCLA, Johns Hopkins University, Ringling College of Art and Design, University of Puget Sound, University of Colorado Boulder, Baylor University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He's also exhibited across the country in New York, Seattle, Chicago, Milwaukee, Portland, Miami, and San Francisco.
Join us Saturday, May 13 for artist talks with James Allen and Amory Abbott. They will be discussing the work in their current shows, which are on view through May 27.
James Allen is a Portland-based artist who uses books as a medium to create illustrative sculptural works. The artist finds thick volumes with subject matter ranging from botanical and historical reference books to comic anthologies, carving into these pages and selectively isolating fragments of the content.