eliot park + laura medina:  Horns of the rock alter + documenting pieces of a fragmented history

Eliot Park is an artist/maker in Portland, Oregon. After his grandmother converted her entire family to Christianity, Eliot Park’s parents immigrated to America and started a wholesale store in northeast Philadelphia. These facts infused in him aspects of consumerism, labor, spirituality, and duty which plague him with contradiction and gastrointestinal anxiety. Using his experience as a furniture maker, Eliot makes objects to deconstruct the world where we know exactly how much to pay for heritage, humanity, and heaven.

Laura Medina is a multidisciplinary artist from Bogota, Colombia. She bases her practice around uprooting and migration as a response to extensive cultural, socio-political, and historical research. She currently resides in Portland, OR where she is completing her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

One To One

Two restrooms, both alike in value and spatial integrity; each hosting two very different exhibits.

In art, it is often said that you can grant no greater respect to the artist than ample space.

Why do one show in a restroom, when you can do twice the shows with twice the size?

Laura Medina’s work is both warm and wide open; a collection of delicate drawings, elegant and durable textiles and booming animation and sound, all of which confront you as soon as you open the door.  This mesmerizing brew of multimedia transport you through the rich lands of Colombia, throwing the doors open through a portal of history that sings of the stolen secrets and pride of a people and a place...one that leads directly to the processes and choices in making of the artist herself.

Eliot Park takes his impressive experience and background in furniture-making to head-spinning heights with horns of a rock alter, by redirecting the plumbing of the faucet into the urinal, at once, a clever call-back of Duchamp-ian proportions but also, more quietly, a commentary on the arbitrary nature of the functionality of materials and space in the Worlds that we build around ourselves...one which is only truly defined by its own temporality.  The fragile but corporeal repetition of uncolored ceramics and the carefully-intersecting wooden objects speak of the banal alters we construct throughout our daily existence, over and over again.

-Melanie Stevens

why have one bathroom, when you can have two?

nat turner project came back from winter break hungry and with a vengeance. up to this point our previous three shows had all been located in what used to the men’s bathroom.  and now in the new year (jan 2017) we were ready to get bigger and do more for artists of color. nat turner project expanded into the second, formerly women’s bathroom with this double exhibit, which also officially made both restrooms gender neutral, which still is a lasting legacy of nat turner project today.

eliot park installed in one bathroom and laura medina in the other, and the double opening reception was amazing, so much love and support for these beautiful artists and amazing installations. eliot park using ceramic pieces diverted the plumbing from the faucet to the urinal and laura medina filled the space with video and objects reflective of her colombian heritage.

by maximiliano