Touch Art
Art is an essential part of the human experience, which means that artists are essential workers, and vital to the well being of our community. The Touch Art event is a celebration of some of the many talented Portland artists working to build our shared consciousness through reflection, reaction, and interpretation, across a wide variety of mediums, and an opportunity to build community and connect to other humans through a love of art and culture.
Join us Thursday, September 24th for a grand party, with art, music, food, and a community of artists and art-lovers from across the region.
Watershed PDX 5040 SE Milwaukie • Thursday, 9/24 • 5pm -10pm • FREE
The Touch Art event is the collective effort of several art groups and curators coming together to shine a light on some of the artists that make our city great. For our contribution, 4ARTSAKE enlisted the efforts of curators Ellen Blazich, Ro Hebert, Riley Parker, & Zach Werbalowsky.
• PARTICIPATING ARTISTS •
Tyler Bingham
My work is about change, human connection, and the passage of time. Utilizing acrylic paint, and colored pencils, on a variety of surfaces. I paint people from live observation in my studio, and have painted a mirror study self portrait every month since 2022. I also paint abstract work to share the things from my innermost world often into bright, energetic, and blossoming images.
David Jandron
My paintings explore the messy space between chaos and clarity. Built instinctively through layers of figures, faces, color, text and marks, the work pulls from memory, relationships and lived experience, often finding humor and beauty in things that aren’t particularly beautiful.
Megan Chin
small is all is a body of work by artist Megan Chin grounded in the principle “small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Worlds, Shaping Change. Drawing from the natural world as an abundant model for inspiration, Chin explores how complexity and interconnectedness emerge from seemingly simple elements. Through experimentation with materials and process, the work highlights how nature’s small wonders—like a tree stump, a snail’s shell, or the branching of roots—reveal dynamic systems that sustain life. In doing so, small is all invites viewers to reconsider scale, value, and the potential for transformation.
Olivia Harwood
Olivia Harwood’s mystical, maximalist scenarios have been inspired by memories of childhood, personal experiences and monstrous feminine. Harwood’s work harnesses her anger and frustration, but also her fondness and love. It intertwines girlhood memories with current headlines and allows her to cope however she needs to.
With influence from feminist surrealism, her natural and material surroundings, and pop culture, Harwood creates a complex and loaded scenes. She empowers herself by painting her body in exposed positions, revealing and depicting experiences through a warped, surreal lens.
Lloyd Daylight
Angel Face Revisited features abstract interpretations of spiritual visions. The work is both accessible and somehow unreachable, taking up space in the edges of perception, trying to take the unknown and make it something nameable.
Sabrina Copeland
I am interested in dual states; in the states of recession and approach; I am interested in empty space; in the weight of absence; I am interested in the human form; in the undefined masses.
I deconstruct folk-narratives to reveal dissonance as complex dualities are strewn between what is deeply human and what is domesticated.
Ellen Blazich
Ellen Blazich makes paintings with colorful compositions that ride the line between abstraction and familiar forms. Often horizonless, they are both spacious and claustrophobic, whimsical and familiar, playful and dark.
Colin Keating
Through collage, I seek to hijack the received images of mass media into social critique, an opportunity for reflection, or just plain silliness. I believe less is more, and only use the smallest number of elements for a piece — a maximalist I am not. Text is also an important part of my work, an opportunity to tease out new meanings from the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated text and image.
Ro Hebert
Ro Hebert utilizes a variety of mediums, including oil, pencil, watercolor, and sculpture, to explore the concept of self as it relates to the body. Just as personality can be adapted and reconstructed, the body too can change and be rebuilt, just as it can be nurtured, loved, and respected as it is. Her work explores identity, choice, presence, and many other complex ideas around what it means to be a person, and what it means to live in your own skin.
Jess O’Farrell
As a queer person, I see the devotion that people in my community have for one another and the subsequent need to dismantle the heteronormative world’s binary system. The conflicts between tradition and defiance, spirituality and queerness are central to my work. Through traditional printmaking techniques, I appropriate the imagery and aesthetics of the Catholic Church to imbue the work with the aura that the church holds. I seek to actively sanctify queerness by redefining and recontextualizing divine aesthetics, not just by critiquing religion, but by inserting it into new spaces of spirituality.
Riley Michael Parker
My comic work is an exploration of the medium as a whole, pulling in a variety of styles within a single work to tell a story that changes frequently in tone and intention. I lean on the history of comics and time-tested techniques to draw the reader into a sense of comfort and familiarity, and then subvert expectations through dialogue and deep character study, taking the art form into new and uncharted territories.
Spencer Winans
Spencer makes figurative, abstract, occasionally narrative-based medium and large paintings working primarily in oil. His work is often intimate, surreal, or both, tapping into very human emotions but without explicitly declaring his intentions, allowing the viewer to take the work and make it their own.
Phoebe Mol
Phoebe Mol is a multidisciplinary artist, cartoonist, and arts educator based in Portland. The work is full of complex shapes resembling things found in nature, but pushing into uncanny spaces that go beyond simple tangible reality and into the realm of ideas and language.
Gunville's artworks are made from repurposed electronic cables, pressed against paper, making a mark with ink or paint. These marks come together to create larger landscapes, representing our changing ecologies.
Claire Gunville
Lily O’Donnell
“Stupid Comics from a Dumb Life” is a celebration of novelty and unpredictability in the life of a young artist. Pulling from her own true-life experiences, Lily tells stories about being alive and happy in a world filled with weird people, creepy bosses, and the good friends that help make things a little easier day-to-day.
Jil Wierenga
This process-driven series utilizes strict parameters and generative play to explore multidimensional forms in a 2D format.
Terrence Hughes
I tend to work geometric images by exploiting the positive/ negative aspect of shapes to create a dualistc illusion. Sometimes my paintings reveal recognizable icons or symbols that morph into alternate symbols. This dualistc illusion challenges the viewers perception by refusing the locus of a center.
Erin Tanner
Erin Tanner is a poet and comic artist who makes tender, comedic pieces that mix elements of fantasy and the real world to create a unique space that is all his own.
Kayla Carlson
Kayla is influenced by landscapes, dreams and fantasies, memories and nostalgia, mythology, metaphysics, magical realism, songwriting and poetry as tools for self-discovery, and aim to express the feelings and experiences these elements evoke through her visual art.
Paul Aguilar
Aguilar uses a combination of layering, collaging techniques, and textured acrylics to create complex imagery that pulls the eye, and demands to be investigated.
Dillon Witt
Witt is an artist that explores a wide range of mediums, and subject matter. For this show he is presenting figurative paintings which make use of exaggeration or other abstract elements to synthesize sensuousness and cerebrality.