Art from All Angles

Next on our artist features, Ian Wieczorek! Ian's a ceramic artist and found object sculptor. Read below to see how he's managed to turn a mouse infestation into an exploration in creative process, and ask him about it on Saturday!

Tell us about yourself and what you make.
"I’m currently a part of the Emerging Artist Program at the Ash Street Project in south East Portland. I graduated from Sierra Nevada College in 2016 with a Bachelors of Fine Art and a minor in Business Management. I make sculptures that reference single use plastic containers, purposely using specific mixed media elements such as to-go containers and styrofoam to reference toxic products that are sold to us as accessories to our daily desires. I create biomorphic forms from the containers that I find interesting and complex. I like to give the viewer a new perspective of looking at an egg carton or looking at the tray that holds the frozen pot stickers. For me, It’s that shocking moment when I realize how complex a small plastic container really is."

"How does community play a role in your creative practice?"
At the Ash Street Project we host community lunches from 12-1pm Tuesday-Friday. This is a time to stop making, take out the headphones, put away your phone and have lunch with people. When I’m focused on a project, I tend to skip lunch and just graze on snacks all day. Having a planned hour to stop everything and come back to the world is great. And often visitors come in to do the same as well. We just chat about our days or upcoming art shows in town, or past art shows we saw. It keeps the day fresh because you never know who will come for lunch that day.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve drawn inspiration from?
"Oh man. We had a mouse colony take over our house one spring. Ended up catching 53 mice… It felt wrong to kill them and throwing them in the trash. So I decided to use them in some of my sculptures. I dipped some in slip and made casts of their bodies, poured glazes over others and incased their bodies in glass. I even placed some on platters and fired them. The cool thing I discovered was even though their flesh burned away, the bones stayed intact and were incased in glass. So you were able to see the tail and the spine very well. Through this, I discovered that there are many ceramic artists that have gone through this phase of firing carcasses with their ceramic pieces. "

We've got such amazing artists participating in the show, we just had to feature some of them and give y'all a little taste of what you're going to see at the show. We'll be releasing these over the next week, so keep your eyes on this space.

First up - meet Nastasia Govozda!

Tell us about yourself and what you make.

"My name is Nastasia, I am an artist from Russia. Mostly, I like to create with my hands, art, tattoos, my own sketchbooks. My art is always changing, transforming. I do what I am inspired to do. At the moment, I am taken by painting on glass and using recycled fabric scraps as backgrounds. I think I am intrigued by this medium because I don't see the result until I flip the glass once I've finished, so it's never what I expect and it keeps me excited, always."

How does community play a role in your creative practice?

"I have a very supportive community around me, as I choose my community, so I feel I get to express myself in whatever ways I'd like to. I am pretty comfortable with myself, so I like to spread it to people, perhaps they can feel a little more comfortable with themselves too."

What’s the strangest thing you’ve drawn inspiration from?

"The most recent, strangest thing I've drawn inspiration from would be the one and only Hitachi Wand. I'll add menstruation and body hair too. None of these really get talked about, that's what's strange."

Check out Nastasia’s work online through her Instagram (), and see more of her pieces at the Mission Theater on March 16th!

Hey everybody ~ submission deadline is MIDNIGHT TONIGHT! If you've been thinking about showing your art, finding new connections in the creative communities, or getting a chance to partner up with some of the raddest non-profit organizations in town, send your work in now!

Go to artfromallangles.com/submissions to see all details.

Sometimes art is gritty.

Here we are filming a special intro piece for the festival. We used a skateboard ontop of a cart to get this shot.

If you have a gritty film or artwork, we want to see it!
Submit today: https://artfromallangles.com/submissions

We're not bots! Meet the team: Jeremy, Hannah, Sam, and Jill. Bunch of kooks on a couch.

Jeremy is the head of the festival and is working really hard to make it a great night.

Hannah is a co-producer and does the outreach thing.

Sam is also a co-producer and is Jeremy's devil's advocate anchor and emotional support.

Jill's the designer and writing this. Dope.