Yesterday I posted a write-up of the Templeton Building's Portland2010 exhibits. In that write-up I focus a good bit on Oregon Painting Society's Hexenhouse, and "the crash" to Jenene Nagy's Tidal. Just now I got an e-mail from Jason Traeger of Oregon Painting Society, not only informing me of an artist talk OPS is giving tonight (7 pm at the Templeton Building, along with Jenene Nagy and Damien Gilley) but also passing along an artist statement for Hexenhouse, which I had asked for a few days ago. The artist statement was just too good not to post, and it clears up a lot of what seemed random before (a strange foggy room with blinky lights and ambient sounds?). Go, artist statement, clarify the details!

HexenHouse Statement:

Mildred is a witch. Just a regular witch trying to live a regular witch life. Problem is, the inside of her house has a tendency to turn into a black hole.
HEXENHOUSE!

With Hexenhouse we present our most expansive and immersive environment yet. Hexenhouse is a house. It's also a game room, a garden, a jungle, an ocean under the stars and a metaphysical Hawaiian chill zone.

After checking into your hotel at Waikiki beach, you decide to sit down and enjoy a nice, light beer. As you rest in the warm sun, the squirrely tones of slack-key guitar seem to be slowly slipping away from you, and you begin to notice a distinctively fractal-like pattern amongst the palm leaves.
HEXENHOUSE!

The vast space of the Templeton building gives us a chance to explore the collage-like collision of style which is integral to our group practice on a larger scale than ever before. We've united the pastoral, earthy atmosphere of our early work, the dark retro-futurist aesthetic of our recent shows, with our passion for domestic design.

The bone-chilling clowns square off against the dead-in-the-eyes inbreds in a mannered competition of grace and form.
HEXENHOUSE!

With Hexenhouse we continue to work with interactive electronic musical technology, but this time the interface is the room itself. The question is: are you playing Hexenhouse, or is Hexenhouse playing you?
HEXENHOUSE!

For directions to the Templeton Building, see my write-up from yesterday, paragraph two.