Two light artists create captivating installations at the Bush House Museum
The Bush House Museum welcomes artists Kathryn Cellerini Moore and Pamela Hadley for the exhibition Past is Prologue. Each artist has created sight-specific light art that interacts with the historic environment of the Bush House. This space-altering art separates expectations by standing in the past while producing a formative experience. The interplay of contemporary technology expands the notion of what is at home in a historic house.
The exhibit will be available for viewing from November 19, 2022, through January 28, 2023. There will be a reception at Bush House Museum on Friday, December 9, 2022, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are available at no charge at the Bush Barn Art Center and they are required to tour the Museum.
Museum will be closed Christmas and New Years weekends, then reopen for tours on Wednesday, January 10, 2024.
Pamela Hadley is a light- and time-based artist living in Portland, OR whose work seeks to engage people in direct relationships with themselves and the world. Hadley’s work has been widely exhibited across the U.S. and in South Korea. She has participated in artist residencies as both an artist-in-residence and a review panel member and has work in several private collections. Hadley earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design.
This work isn’t trying to sell you anything. It just asks you to look and feel and to be actively aware of the processes by which we look and feel. And maybe we can keep trying to do that after we’ve left the gallery.
Kathryn Cellerini Moore has a question: How can the process of making and experiencing art reveal pathways toward positive stewardship for our planet and beyond?
Cellerini Moore is a self-proclaimed nerd whose interdisciplinary work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She reuses and recycles media to create immersive experiences for people to reflect on our collective, multifaceted potential as just one species among many. To do this, Cellerini Moore points to the invisible or unnoticed wonders that surround us every day, and offers viewers space to be curious and ask what is possible.
When asked to build work in response to the architecture at Bush House Museum, Cellerini Moore was immediately struck by the house’s elaborate interior design including dense and dark wallpapers, tiled floors, dark wooden furniture and floors, multi-layered molding at the base and top of the walls and ceiling, the gold gilded frames everywhere, and the numerous reflective glass surfaces in the house. Cellerini Moore also learned that when the house was built in the 1870’s, it was ahead of its time technologically speaking, incorporating electricity early on as well as flushing toilets. Cellerini Moore’s clear, minimalist glass and plexiglass structures are intended to heighten the viewer’s awareness of being surrounded by endless patterns and motifs. Cellerini Moore also lets the digital technology, including media players, projectors, tripods, and cords, be visible in the exhibition with the intent to draw parallels between the house’s historic technological advancements and contemporary tech.
The majority of the digital footage presented is microscope videography. Finding themselves pregnant at the beginning of the COVID pandemic meant spending a great deal of time at home. As a result, Cellerini Moore began to explore her domestic space through the lens of a microscope, viewing daily items using a tool to help us see beyond our innate human capabilities. Salt, water, ice, fermented food, feathers, moss and tree roots are just some of the items filmed and incorporated into the videos. Gold v.2, for example, which eclipses a disk on the hallway wall, was created in direct response to the opulent gold frames found everywhere in Bush House Museum. Cellerini Moore diluted and filmed gold paint under the microscope in an effort to offer the viewer a
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