Lisa Jarrett

Lisa Jarrett is an artist and educator. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State. University’s School of Art + Design. She is co-founder and co-director of KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR, and the artists collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and lenses. She exists and makes socially engaged work within the African Diaspora. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions.

Meditate on the Blank Space Below

Acrylic, Vinyl

Diptych (40”H x 36”W per panel)

2017

Brief Statement about the work featured in the exhibition

Meditate on the Blank Space Below is an experimental essay created for Takahiro Yamamoto’s performance project, Direct Path to Detour, as part of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) TBA:17. It is presented here as a diptych and also appears in Yamamoto’s book Direct Path to Detour which features the essay in a different format. Meditate is one of a number of works where I attempt to use a litany to organize otherwise unruly content. In my studio-based practice my objects often consider Racecraft (the process of producing race as a product of racism), how meaning is constructed, and how ideologies are reproduced over time. They highlight my own agency as author while asking viewers to consider their own roles in present-day race relations.