Portland Review welcomes past contributors Martha Grover, Shayla Lawson, and Kevin Sampsell to share their work at Blackfish Gallery on February 23rd, 5-7pm. Join us for an evening of prose, poetry, and art, and to preorder your copy of Portland Review’s 2018 issue. Past issues and contributor works will also be available for purchase. For updates and to RSVP, please click here.
- Martha Grover is an author, poet, artist, and writing coach living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of One More for the People (Perfect Day Publishing) and The End of My Career (Perfect Day Publishing). The End of My Career was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards in creative nonfiction in 2017.
- Shayla Lawson‘s work has appeared in print & online at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, Salon, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, and MiPOesias. She is the author of A Speed Education in Human Being, PANTONE and I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean. She works on The Tenderness Project.
- Kevin Sampsell is an editor (Portland Noir and other books), publisher (Future Tense Books), bookstore employee (Powell’s Books), collage artist, and author (the short story collection Creamy Bullets; the memoir, A Common Pornography; the novel, This Is Between Us from Tin House, November 2013). His stories and essays have appeared in publications and websites such as Salon, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Best Sex Writing 2012, and Best American Essays 2013.
About Blackfish Gallery:
Blackfish Gallery is located in downtown Portland. The current art exhibition is Kanetaka Ikeda: Parts of the Cosmic Tree. Sculptor Kanetaka Ikeda unveils the latest iteration of his Cosmic Tree, a subject that sprang from a vivid, cosmological dream experienced thirty years ago. “Imagine invisible lines of gravity and dark matter as branches and trunks of a cosmic tree,” Ikeda suggests.
Seattle painter, poet, journalist Alan Lau brings a new series of mixed media works on rice paper. “Quiet Days,” notes Lau, “is an unofficial record of solitude and the shaping of memory when the heat of summer swooned and fell into the chill of autumn’s rain.”
Christy Wyckoff’s oil paintings and woven paper pieces traverse similar territory in radically different ways, utilizing a flattened pictorial space and a reduced color palette to explore an interwoven field of branches and limbs in the natural world.
Monica Mitchell creates sculptural installations composed of found objects, discarded clothing, shoes, household industrial materials and duct tape. Through tactile materials and color, these installations convey a sense of order and chaos. They are explorations of ideas about mythology, gender roles, masquerade and consumerism.