Videotones
Portland, OR
Outside Inside World
Co-presented with PNCA
Exhibition Dates: August 26 – October 5, 2024
Gallery Hours: Monday – Saturday, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
TBA:24 Opening Night Open Access Jam: September 5 at 5:00 PM
Access notes: The outdoor jam session accompanying the exhibition opening will feature loud and likely dissonant music. PNCA is an ADA accessible building.
DESCRIPTION
Videotones is a neurodiverse digital media collective that employs homegrown, collaborative editing practices, exploits the hidden potential for accessibility in cheap consumer technologies, and adheres to a vision of filmmaking that privileges improvisational experimentation and nonlinear play over predetermined outcomes to make their idiosyncratic brand of music and video art. Since its inception in 2018, the project has yielded three full-length albums of experimental music as well as countless short video works. In the Videotones universe, authorship is dispersed—each project born out of a process of equal participation and nonhierarchical decision making, resulting in work that is discordant, polyvocal, awkward, hilarious, mysterious, fragmented, joyful, and deeply affecting.
Equal parts survey exhibition and emergent experiment, Outside Inside World activates PNCA’s 511 Gallery as a showcase for works from the Videotones archive as well as a site for making and sharing new work. True to the Videotones ethos, the space will take on multiple roles—film set, recording studio, improv theater, rec room, and exhibition space—which will change unpredictably from day to day. This living exhibition will be augmented by a series of public events, including an open-access jam session, workshops, and the premiere of Videotones TV, a DIY variety show made for public access television.
Since 2020, Videotones has been sustained under the auspices of Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of artmaking. Outside Inside World will culminate with a bingo night and dance party fundraiser to benefit Elbow Room.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Joel Stotesbery is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Over the past decade, he has explored a process of making abstract video diaries he calls Videotones. This process eventually merged with his role as a caregiver in Portland’s intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) community, and was incorporated into an ongoing collaboration with a group of neurodivergent artists. Today, Videotones is a loose collective of artists working out of Elbow Room, a nonprofit art studio and gallery space Joel helped found in 2020 that is dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They meet online and in-person to create hybrid works encompassing abstract video collage, narrative shorts, animation, electronic music, and sound design.
Andy Louie is a multimedia artist from Portland, OR. He uses digital drawing software and traditional drawing materials to capture what he sees in the world. Recurring subjects include people, animals, and environments. His videos, animations, and digital art have been exhibited at Gallery 114, Portland; Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College, Portland; 1122, Portland; and the Hollywood Theatre at Portland International Airport, Oregon. He has been a central collaborator in Videotones since its inception in 2018.
Endale Abraham's off-kilter, often surreal drawings are distinguished by their soft touch, attention to detail, sinuous line work, and hybrid subjects. He has been honing his rendering skills for many years, and has developed a talent for capturing wonky and humorous likenesses, which he often endows with farcical or mocking handwritten names. Boldly taking on new subject matter with focused goofiness and versatility, Endale captures perspective space, charming details, and striking contours with his signature linework and style. In his work with the Videotones collective, Endale’s curiosity and quietly absurdist humor are able to shine. His meandering curiosity and quietly absurdist humor have become vital ingredients of Videotone’s leftfield digital stew.
Mohamed Omar was born in Somalia and moved to Portland, OR when he was five years old. By his own account, his work is rooted in a deep concern for color:
“I get inspired by the colors of the sky, bright sunsets, primary colors, bold colors. I really wanted to use certain greens, so I painted the Statue of Liberty. I think of colors and different shapes, sometimes words. When I’m out in the community, I feel OK and special and I see different things like cars, trucks, and bricks. When I see paintings like yellow, black, red, and blue, and red cars, I choose those colors. Or the sunset. And I like different colors.”
While his early paintings exhibit a meditative simplicity, over time he has been drawn increasingly towards figurative gestures and has developed a playful, expressive style all his own. In his loosely rendered scenes, quilt-like images of cartoon characters and jungle cats are cobbled together from discrete blocks of color. He augments his patchwork scenery with words whose rainbow lettering resembles train car graffiti and refrigerator magnets in equal measure. Like the bright sunsets he reveres, his works invite you to bask in their warmth. In addition to his work as a visual artist, Mo is a member of the audiovisual collective Videotones and records music under the name M. Omar. His debut album Mo’s World was released on cassette via Cityland Tapes in 2023.
Chanel Conklin has a deep interest in pop culture and current events that she merges with images from her personal life, altering and distorting them through the use of digital collage, sculpture, and video. In her work, figures from current events, horror movies, pop music, the New Testament, and her own life are recast in an epic and surreal struggle between the forces of good and evil. In 2023, she published Love Chanel, a full color art book showcasing her prolific collage practice. Chanel is a longstanding collaborator in Videotones, where her horror-inflected provocations add a lurid edge to every project she works on.
Jamond Williams brings his works on canvas and paper to life with fluid lines and breathtaking color palettes. Portals, faces, and ghostlike creatures that collide, layer, and intersect are recurring images in his work. Dots, grids, and squiggles create visual staccatos that bounce along his landscapes and bring an astoundingly bright rhythm to his scenes. He regularly uses familiar line patterns and repetition to achieve his effects, but just when you think you have become acquainted with his aesthetic, he mystifies you with a new and brilliant cacophony of vibrant color, composition, and character. Jamond is often compelled to draw windows, covering entire canvases with layers of portals, each providing a fractured glimpse into one of his surreal and magical worlds. In addition to his 2D work, Jamond has made forays into video, performance, sound design, and music as a member of the Videotones collective. His first album, Flat on the Sides, was released on cassette by Cityland Tapes in 2023.
SPONSORSHIP
The current iteration of Videotones is sustained by Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.