Openings

Larry Cwik – “Totems”

March 1 – 31, 2012
Artist Reception: First Thursday, March 1, 2012, 6 – 8 pm

Steven Goldman Gallery
Art Institute of Portland
1122 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209
503 228-6528
Gallery Hours: Monday through Friday from 9 – 5 pm; Saturday from 9 am – 2 pm

Large 54 x 26 inch photographic works from the Totem series by Portland artist and photographer Larry Cwik will be exhibited from March 1 – 31, 2012 at the Steven Goldman Gallery of the Art Institute of Portland, in Portland’s Pearl District. Admission is free and open to the public. This will be the first large-scale exhibit of Cwik’s work from this series in Portland. Other large-scale exhibits of the Totem works have been at Galeria 57, Madrid, the Rose Center for the Arts, Lower Columbia College, Longview, Washington, and Angst Gallery, Vancouver, Washington. The Totem works are all triptychs of stacked selenium-toned photographs.

Cwik states the following about works in the Totem series: “After working for 15+ years in both single image photography and in Super 8 film, I visited and was profoundly inspired by the beauty and power of the Totem Poles of the first peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast. The poles inspired me to begin arranging my photographic images in a stacked manner to allude to a story or theme. Some use symbols or archetypes. The arrangement is intuitive, from my subconscious, like the individual images themselves. Many Totem Poles refer to transformation and all have correspondences between images. I similarly share correspondences in works in the Totem series and often hint at transformations in many of the works.” In 2008 Cwik visited Alert Bay, British Columbia, a historic center of Totem Pole construction, for research on the project.

Cwik’s 2012 exhibits include “Asia 2011″ at Gallery 5 of Milepost 5, Portland. His work was also included in “Outside Notions of Antarctica” at Under the Bed Gallery, McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and the “Second International Contemporary Art Exhibit,” Gallery Systema, Osaka, Japan, both in 2012. Cwik has shown his work since 1983 in exhibits in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia and is represented in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, Bank of America, and other collections. He has received numerous awards including a Portland Photographers Forum Award. His work has been published in Northwest Magazine, Impulse Magazine, La Fotografia, Barcelona, and was featured in 2011 in La Lettre de la Photographie, Paris.