Presented by Mazey Moon
Breathe With Me
This piece is a layered, mixed-media collage that is mounted on a thick matboard. The first layer is made with paint markers, with lines that were then traced around with other colors and patterns. This element is a reference to the fallacy of man-made borders of states on stolen land in America. I was heavily inspired by the experience of watching the election map updating as it filled in, and the deep history of drawing borders to support the system of white supremacy above all else. The next layer is a semi-transparent gel medium that obscures the lines underneath, that follows some of the shapes of the lines but forms new paths in some areas. I was thinking of the land itself holding higher priority over the lines that have been drawn, and a rejection of the colonial borders that were decided with little regard for where the land moves and flows. The gel medium forms peaks and valleys that mirror a topographical map, and there is a short poem that I placed on the surface. The words are what I hold dear, and what was supporting me through the election updates; love, another human, and anything grounding feels like the top priority at this time. I formed the poem on transparent paper that I contoured around the surface texture, so that it created a deeper relationship between the top two layers. The idea of borders and lines were left out of that relationship, separating the land-body connection from the flat and abstract idea of borders.
Linnea Cat Strahura
Bio: I am a queer and nonbinary, Japanese and Polish, chronically ill artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. My work centralizes around text and image, and I use the combination of these two elements to create connection with my community in a multitude of ways. I started my calligraphy work in Japan where my grandmother grew up, and continued my art practice to pursue illustration, bookbinding, and virtual reality environments. Textural lettering and mutual aid organizations are now my driving force, and I am hoping to focus on blending technology and art to keep expanding this work.
Mazey Moon
Bio: Mazey Moon was born in Salem, Oregon in 1991 where she grew up in an agricultural area with her large and diverse family. Her mother, Kim, was adopted from Korea in 1954 to a family in Oklahoma. After Kim’s adopted mother passed away in Florida while Kim was enrolled at Florida State, she went to California where she met Mazey’s Father, Joe (Alias). Joe is and always will be an outlaw. From serving time for stealing farm equipment to building a compound made of secondhand or repurposed materials in his backyard, his disregard for government imposed law and abundant creative force influences Mazey’s work, still. Mazey had a small area in her father’s perpetual construction site where she would (unsuccessfully) try to build robots out of scraps that she would find playing in what her family called, “the junkyard”. With four kids in a family, it’s hard to get a word in. Mazey found music to be a source of comfort in many ways when she was very young. She had trouble reading as a child but picked up reading music as if it were her first language. She quickly developed an ability to play many instruments.
Mazey currently resided in Portland, Oregon where she arrived in 2009 to go to the Oregon Culinary Institute where she graduated with an associates degree in restaurant management and a diploma in baking & pastry. Mazey was featured on an episode of the Cooking Channel’s show Unique Sweets on their Portland centered episode titled Sweetlandia in 2015. After struggling with harassment in the kitchen environment, Mazey left the restaurant industry and took a gig working for Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols as his family’s private chef. This exposed Mazey to an international world of creatives and motivated her to enroll in PNCA’s undergraduate program to pursue her passion to create.
Mazey makes sculptural work based on the experience she has in her body as a cyborg and will be graduating from PNCA in the spring of 2021 with a BFA in Sculpture with a minor in Art & Ecology. Mazey spends most of her time recording music and sculpting.