Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

PCC New Media Art Student Exhibition

North View Gallery

PCC New Media Art Student Exhibition

• Exhibition dates: July 9 – August 30, 2024
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm

This summer the North View Gallery is pleased to highlight new work by Portland Community College art students who made projects in two brand new courses recently added to our Art curriculum, Video Art and Intro to Animation.

Both new courses were designed by PCC faculty and video artist, David Torres II to introduce students to the fundamentals of film, video and animation. In both courses, students are encouraged to experiment with analog materials, including painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, while also learning new approaches to digital tools. Many of the students with work in this exhibition merged analog and digital methods in thoughtful and unconventional ways.

In both courses, students considers the historical evolution of time-based art, focusing on animation, film, video art, video games and even considering AI as a creative tool. Students in the Video Art class made videos that corresponded with sound pieces they had created as part of an earlier project. The prompt was to adapt their initial sound piece into a video piece, but that adaptation could happen using any tool and any format, as long as the end result was time-based and incorporated the original sound piece. Intro to Animation students were tasked with creating a short narrative, considering setting, character design and overall mood of the story. The animation approach students took was varied, some using digital tools, some creating hand-drawn animation cells and others building worlds using stop-motion.

The narrative or conceptual focus of each piece is likewise varied, with some students exploring the ways that their identities have been shaped by personal digital archives. Other students animated mysterious worlds, informed by film noir and populated by lone figures balancing violent day jobs with existential dread. One student invites viewers into the magical world of the Glimmerdark, which is equal parts childhood fever-dream and stop-motion psychedelic trip. Some students turned their cameras to the world around them, recording and editing scenes from their daily-life into meditative poetry and hyperkinetic collages of what it feels like to be a college-student today. We are excited to invite you to the North View Gallery to honor this new work by video art and animation students and consider the diversity of storytelling approaches represented by this collection of student art.

About the gallery

• Address: 12000 SW 49th Avenue, Portland, Oregon, 97219
• Hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm
• Directions: Follow signs to the bookstore and parking Lot 9. The gallery is located in the Communications and Technology (CT) building, adjacent to the bookstore, on the NE corner of the Sylvania Campus.