Portland, OR - Since 1974, Bullseye Glass Company has invited artists, designers, and architects into their Southeast Portland factory and studio for residencies, allowing them to explore new avenues of glass research, pursue work that isn’t possible in their own studios, and to approach kiln-glass for the first time. The group exhibition In Residence: Portland presents the work of four recent residents.
Ben Buswell is a Portland-based artist whose works span diverse media. Using small, repetitive physical processes such as tearing, melting, and scratching, Buswell transforms ceramic, metal, resins, and photography into complex sculptures and installations. During his residency, Buswell focused on the use of glass powder, slowing building layers of lightly fused grains of glass to create intricate surfaces and imagery.
Ben Buswell received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BFA from Oregon State University. Buswell is a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts and a two-time recipient of the Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation. In addition to three solo exhibitions at Upfor in Portland, notable solo exhibitions were held at Samuel Freeman in Los Angeles, CoCA Seattle, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Oregon, and TILT Gallery and Project Space in Portland. His work was included in Portland2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, and The Oregon Biennial 2006 at the Portland Art Museum, and is included in public collections at Portland Community College, Rock Creek, and the Collaborative Life Sciences Building at Oregon Health & Science University. Buswell received a 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. He is represented by Upfor, Portland, Oregon.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins began her residency shortly after completing a large-scale stained glass installation for Portland2016: A Biennial of Contemporary Art. Known for her use of everyday objects in mixed media assemblages, Hutchins’ work builds on inherent emotional and narrative content of a material or object, creating playful and surprising provocations. Hutchins’ residency coincided with the political upheaval that followed the 2016 presidential election. This cultural climate is present in her glass works as song lyrics, resistance symbols, and phrases pulled from protest signs weave their way throughout.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art & Design, Ohio; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; The Hepworth Wakefield, United Kingdom; MSU Broad, Michigan; and ICA Boston. Significant group exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Her work has been incorporated into public collections including MoMA, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; The Hammer Museum at UCLA; The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum. Hutchins holds a BA in art history from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchins is included in the recent publication, Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art, published by Phaidon. She is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.
Sibylle Peretti’s sometimes haunting glass work examines the often discordant relationship between human beings and nature, creating tableaux featuring children in fantastical or dreamlike situations. While in residence, Peretti expanded the scale of her work and experimented with specialty colors and glass that might serve the diaphanous universes that the children and animals in her work inhabit.
Heidi Schwegler is a mixed-media artist known for the use of seemingly meaningless objects in emotionally-charged sculptures. By transforming commonplace materials, such as plastic, concrete, insects, or over-chewed gum into precious metals, wax, and glass, Schwegler upends or emphasizes the use, or misuse, of the original object, lending absurd detritus a pathos that speaks to our own mortality, our collective gerascophobia.
Heidi Schwegler is the founder of the Yucca Valley Material Lab, a platform for making and thinking. Recent exhibition venues include WBG London Projects, United Kingdom; Asphodel, New York; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Portland Art Museum. Schwegler is a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Reviews of Schwegler’s work have appeared in Art in America, Daily Serving, ARTnews, Modern Painters, and the Huffington Post. She is represented by Upfor, Portland, Oregon.