Brenda Mallory, New Release, 16mm film and varnish, 2015

Materials and Marks

• Dates: April 13 – May 12, 2026
• Artist talk and gallery reception: Thursday, April 23, 11am – 12 noon
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm

The Helzer Gallery is thrilled to present Materials and Marks, an exhibition of artwork by nationally recognized artist Brenda Mallory. This exhibition is an opportunity to view a variety of the artist’s mixed media sculptures, some spanning back 20 years.

There is an element of slow delight as one spends time discovering each of these artworks. Mallory uses a variety of materials, including cloth, fibers, beeswax, and found objects but, in each work, something old becomes something new. In Firehose Experiment # 10, Bioform #10, a firehose, retired from its long battles, becomes a black butterfly-like shape with too many wings. The black linen fabric looks old and itself almost burned. The firehose reminds us of our so far futile efforts to keep up with climate change and forest fires. In its transformation into something new, it asks us to hold on to a hope for change.

In New Release, 16mm photographic film is transformed into a shiny colony of twenty variously sized and shaped horn-like vessels grouped on the floor, each adorned with differently colored bands. They seem to be in a state of flux, multiplying and growing. This colony-like structure is also present in Raison d’etre, a sculpture made of groupings of used hexagonal gun shell casings, rubber, and wax, and Interactions, a grouping of tiny pink flesh-like clam shells made of waxed fabric and hinges. One is reminded of both survival and the need for reproduction, and also the dangers of setting ideas and inventions into motion.

Mallory uses a repeated motif of taking apart and reassembling parts using rough wire, stitching, or nuts and bolts. She learned this practice of joinery by watching her father, a farmer who used bailing wire to fix most everything on their farm in 1960’s Oklahoma- where she grew up as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. The seams and joints in Mallory’s work are left as evidence of change – something old fixed together to make something new work, no matter how tenuously. The works become metaphors for adaptation. The idea of adaptation is deeply engrained in Mallory’s heritage. The Cherokee were made to move to Oklahoma and use their knowledge of a different land to adapt to a new land. However, the idea of disruption and adaptation applies to all of us, whether in our family, our workplace, our community, our environment or our nation. Mallory is speaking to these larger issues, where she offers a hope for transformation.

Brenda Mallory lives in Portland, Oregon but grew up in Oklahoma and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She holds a BA in Linguistics & English from UCLA and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a recipient of the The Hallie Ford Fellowship, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Native Art Fellowship, the Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship in Visual Art and the Ucross Native Fellowship. She has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, Ford Family Foundation, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Artist residencies include Ucross, Anderson Ranch, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Glean, Bullseye Glass, and the Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency at Sitka Center for the Arts. Mallory has exhibited widely, including a recent travelling solo exhibition, The North Star Changes, which was exhibited in 2023 at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona and again in 2025 at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon. She is represented by Marinaro Gallery in New York, NY, Russo Lee Gallery in Portland, OR, and Crows Shadow (Print Editions).

Sentinel (Sightlines),
ceramic, 2025, 24″ x 24″ x 8″

MATERIA ANIMA

• Dates: November 24, 2025 – March 6, 2026
• Opening reception: Friday, January 16, 5-7pm
• Artist talk: Tuesday, January 20, 11am-12 noon
• Gallery hours:
  • Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
  • Saturdays by appointment (free parking)

We have a long human history with clay. This sticky, malleable material can be found in the fertile soils to which humans migrated and therefore had access. Clay allowed us to store food, water, and fuel. It gave us tools for preparing and cooking food, bricks for construction, and clay tablets for recordkeeping. It was an essential material to almost every civilization. We have evidence of some cultures where ceramic vessels were used for ritualistic purposes, ways of advocating for invisible needs, and it is these historic vessels that interest Marjorie Dial, particularly their function as related to life, death, meaning, safety, and agency.

Aramaic Spell Bowl,
ceramic, 5th or 6th century

Summoning I/II,
Intaglio collagraph print, 2024, 43″ x 31″

One of the notable examples of ritualistic ceramic vessels are the Aramaic Spell Bowls of the 6th and 7th Century AD Mesopotamia. These bowls had spells or prayers written in concentric lettering around the borders of the vessel, with an image of the “problem” at the center of the bowl. They were placed in different parts of the home (often buried under the threshold) to ward off danger, bring fortune, protect, or resolve problems. Their placement gave them power. The collagraph intaglio prints on the walls of this exhibition, titled Summoning, are responses to Aramaic spell bowls that Dial made by carving plates on a potter’s wheel. Dial’s prints have the images floating in and out of the picture plane across the gallery, summoning their power and purpose, reminding us of the invisible traits we share as living beings for such basic needs as meaning, safety, and agency. They are imprints, ghosts, images of our continued connection to history and the formerly living. They are invocations of our shared humanity.

The title of this exhibition, MATERIA ANIMA, is based on the Latin philosophical concept meaning “life force in matter”.  Jane Bennett, who wrote the 2011 book Vibrant Matter on art and materiality, calls this “thing power”. Dial works with a lexicon of vessel forms: transmitters, receivers, warnings, and storage vessels. The transmitter sculptures in this exhibition, variously sized antennae-shaped vessels topped with bowls of molten glass and gemstones, occupy corners, form clusters, and are all placed directly on the floor without a pedestal, as if connected to the earth by a current. A series of three “Sentinels”, black monitor screen-like forms with aggressively pulled and dragged clay, are arranged at the entrance, inviting the viewer into a kind of center of power. Dial has also shared a grouping of five large storage vessels titled Provisions. The vessels are made from bands of clay borrowed from off-cuts from other vessels, and patched together seams out, like an inside-out dress shirt. In the arrangement, Dial is evoking hoards, or caches of vessels discovered in archeological sites, which were made up of containers of fuel, grain, water, wine, seeds, honey, and everything that was needed to survive. Symmetrically opposite to Provisions, Dial has placed Dreadnaught, a black, unyielding battleship form evoking a void. Thus, life and death occupy opposite ends of the gallery.

The clearing (Transmitter I),
ceramic, 2019, 26″ x 8″ x 8″

Summer provisions II,
ceramic, 2023, 18″ x 12″ x 12″

We are all, in different ways, experiencing feelings of helplessness, fear, anxiety, lack of provisions, unknown futures. This is an exhibition about things that stay the same. Human needs for unseen things. Our need for understanding death, understanding life, and having protection, safety, and agency. Petra Sairanen, Helzer Gallery Director

About the artist

Marjorie Dial found art later in life after having a family. She took her first class in ceramics at PCC Rock Creek, then earned an MFA Degree at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts in 2019. She holds a BA from Yale University (1994). Dial is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice includes sculpture, print-making, and writing. She develops bodies of work through space-specific interactions, research, and frenetic making. Her interests lie in the capacity for work to shift meanings, engage in storytelling, and attune to information outside of conscious awareness. In 2018, Dial founded an artist residency in North Carolina called Township10. This project focuses on the intimacy, intensity, and transformational qualities of studio life.

Her work has been shown in exhibitions, at venues including Eutectic Gallery, Portland, OR; Front of House, Portland, OR; Ash Street Project Gallery, Portland, OR; T Project Gallery, Portland, OR, and Hoffman Gallery, Portland, OR. Dial received the MFA Award of Distinction at OCAC, was invited to attend the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSULB as a Resident Artist in 2019, and is represented by .

All work is courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art.

Dede Lucia, Submerged, Oil on Canvas, 60″ x 48″, 2019

Dates: September 15 – November 14, 2025

• Artist talk and gallery reception: November 6, 1-2pm
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 9am-4pm
• All events are free and open to the public.

Artists

• Mark Andres
• Ben Buswell
• Donna Cole
• Michael Fujita
• Una Kim
• Colin Kippen
• Chris Knight
• Dede Lucia
• Michael Edward McGovern
• Petra Sairanen
• Marie Sivak
• Phyllis Trowbridge

Dates: May 5 – June 7, 2025

• Award Ceremony with Juror Jess Nickel: May 29, 5 – 7pm
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 9am – 4pm
• All events are free and open to the public

The Helzer Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Art Out Loud: 24/25 PCC Art Student Exhibition. This is ˿����Ƶ’s 5th Annual college-wide art student exhibition featuring student art made across the PCC District. The show takes place in each of our PCC Art Galleries: The Helzer Gallery at Rock Creek, The Northview Gallery at Sylvania, and the Paragon at Cascade.

All art students were asked to select a PCC gallery, then each gallery worked with a juror, who chose the student work to be displayed in that gallery. Guest juror Jess Nickel, selected art for the Helzer Gallery, Sheyam Ghieth selected art for the Paragon Gallery and Jamin London Tinsel selected art for the North View Gallery. Each gallery will also host a reception featuring a conversation with their juror and awards announcements.

During a time when the arts and humanities are facing unprecedented challenges, the arts at ˿����Ƶ are also experiencing cuts that will inevitably impact the access to art that our students currently have. But PCC students are passionate and resilient. They have spent this past year making art that speaks openly about their struggles, fears, joys and even the beauty that they still find in the world around them. Art Out Loud amplifies the diverse voices of PCC students and honors their commitment to education and their deep engagement with the arts.

All of the work submitted to the Helzer Gallery will be on display throughout the central Mall area of Building 3 at the Rock Creek Campus. Our juror, Jess Nickel, selected works to be displayed within the Helzer Gallery and will be selecting five artworks to receive a Juror’s Choice Award and one to receive a Best in Show Award. Please come to the awards ceremony to celebrate the amazing artwork, hear some comments and observations from art faculty and juror Jess Nickel, and prize winner announcements. We will also be distributing a People’s Choice Award, selected by the public.

Funding for awards was generously provided by HARTS (The Humanities and Arts Initiative) along with the Art Student Supplies Fund through the I Heart Art project and the Associated Students of ˿����Ƶ (ASPCC).

About the guest juror

Jess Nickel is an independent curator, writer and arts manager based in Portland, Oregon. She received a BA in Fine Art focusing on painting, and a BA in Literature from the University of Oregon in 2009 and began her career in the arts as an artist. During a year-long artist residency in 2010 at Engage Studios in Galway, Ireland she found her artistic practice in curating, organizing pop-up shows of fellow residents in vacant spaces. A career in arts administration followed, with directorship positions at Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center, Upfor Gallery, Converge 45 and public art collective Site Specific. Nickel founded SATOR projects, a roving exhibition program with the mission to seed arts into fallow spaces in the community through exhibitions, public programs and events. She has organized sixteen exhibitions over the past four years, with more to come! She currently works for Saatchi Art with the art advisory team, and as a coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission Percent for Public Art program.

A Life in Art and Teaching

• Dates: March 5 – April 25, 2025
• Reception and Celebration of Life: April 5, noon – 3pm
• Gallery hours:
  • Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
  • Saturdays by appointment

This is a memorial exhibition for PCC instructor Mylan Rakich III, who passed away suddenly on August 5, 2024. Mylan was hired at PCC Rock Creek in 2001 by Dick Helzer, another beloved Rock Creek sculpture instructor, for whom this gallery is named. Mylan was born in Rome, NY on April 18, 1968. He earned a BFA in sculpture and drawing from SUNY Purchase in 1992, an MFA in Sculpture from Portland State University in 2000, and a 2-year Certificate in Welding Technology from ˿����Ƶ in 2009. Mylan taught sculpture, drawing and design courses at PCC Rock Creek, Hillsboro, Sylvania, and Newberg campuses from 2001-2024. He also held faculty positions at Clackamas Community College, and the University of Portland. Mylan exhibited work nationally, and was represented by Butters Gallery in Portland, OR. He is best known for his large steel sculptures which can be found in many private and public collections, including Wisconsin and Georgia, and locally at PCC Rock Creek and Cascade campuses, Clackamas Community College, and Kershaw and Associates. In addition to his sculptural work, Mylan also completed many artistic commissions and collaborations around Oregon, including work for the Hyatt Centric, Hillsboro elementary school, and Blue Moon Photography in North Portland, where Mylan lived. He is survived by his widow Ariane, his sons Ben and Jefferson, and his father Mylan Rakich Jr.

Special thanks to everyone who helped with this exhibition, especially Ariane Rakich, Mark Andres, Aren Lawler, Mark Smith, and the PCC Art Club.

Appreciation of Mylan Rakich III (1968-2024)

by Mark Andres

I could always count on Mylan to teach me something. When he had his students draw from a still life using only electric tape and an exact-o knife, I was impressed. The drawings were handsome and modern in feeling, with clear, sculptural planes in space. And then came that assignment when he had his students draw a giant ear on a sheet of 24×18 paper. “What’s with the big ears?” people would ask. “Have you ever really looked at an ear?” Mylan answered. “They are so weird!” I ate lunch under that display of ear drawings for two weeks, until they looked like slugs, shells, eels, caves, wings. So what if I lost my appetite; I had learned another new thing from Mylan.

We were colleagues for 20 years. I adored his positive energy, his openness to grow and develop both as an educator and as an artist. He inspired his students and he inspired me. He helped make Rock Creek a fun place for visual inquiry and positive energy. I loved his willingness to just say yes, his deep conviction that this ridiculous, humiliating and often thankless life in art was the only one that made sense.

Mylan’s sculpture also taught me things. A love of materials runs all through his work in wood, plaster and concrete, but it is in steel that he truly shines. Those constructions— vertical, elegant, weightless, delicate, are gestural metaphors for a body dancing, singing, stretching, vibrating like a harp, joyfully alive. The forces of lightness and weight. When he once explained to me that his first name was the same as my favorite Czech novelist, I recalled a passage from Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that could have been his artist statement:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Mylan could make solid steel feel weightless and make a tiny piece of cardboard supporting a plaster spike feel like it weighed a ton. It was the magic of art. It was a refusal to reduce things to any simple dichotomy and let the energies in those forms embody their contradictions for each viewer.

Mylan’s final lesson to me in contradictions came last August. We were up at the University of Portland planning an exhibition for the Buckley Gallery. We could get pretty animated when we talked and had to watch our language around the priests who occasionally walked by us. When we parted, Mylan said, “next time we get together we’re going to hang out longer and swear more!”

But when I saw him again only three days later, he was brain dead in his hospital bed. His wife, Ariane, invited me to touch his powerful arm, still warm, for the last time. That touch made me feel I was crossing a threshold. His family and colleagues gathered around the bed, some shattered, some numb, as we followed it gliding down the corridor past the hospital staff, all of whom had left their stations to stand on either side of the corridor to pay respect as his body was wheeled away to the operating room, where his organs would be harvested. Watching the elevator doors close on my friend I wondered how it is one can be heavy and then light, how one can be here and not here, how we know our friend is gone and still feel they are around? I felt both outside those elevator doors and inside that elevator. Ariane told me someone would receive his eyes. Those were good eyes, I thought. They saw a lot.

Sometimes the art life does seem like a wild, misguided, confusing, humiliating, and quintessentially impractical yet exultant dream of life. We artists do not know the impact our teaching or our artwork has on people. It is impossible to know, and maybe that is as it should be. But Mylan had a big impact on me. I know Mylan is gone, but I can still touch him in his work. His spirit shines all over this exhibition, and you will find it also whenever you stop to experience his art on the campus where he taught for so many years and where many of us learned from him.

Anna Fidler, 7 Spirit Houses, Gouache and Flasche of paper, 192″ x 72″, 2022

The Pointing Path

• Dates: January 6 – February 27, 2025
• Artist talk and gallery reception: January 30, 11am – noon
• Gallery hours:
  • Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
  • Saturdays by appointment

The Helzer Gallery is pleased to announce The Pointing Path, a new exhibition of paintings by Anna Fidler. Fidler’s artwork explores and manifests the ways the artist visualizes spiritual realities. In The Pointing Path, Fidler shares with us three colossal colorful gouache and Flashe works on paper, along with four smaller dimensional paintings made of meticulously cut out and stacked pieces of paper.

Two of the large works have symmetrical compositions and emit a sense of balance and order. 7 Spirit Houses depicts tall stacked architectural forms, each with distinct geometric shapes and color palettes, while Exhalation Sanctuary reads like a portal to a landscape flanked by the sun and moon. As the title suggests, the artist describes this work as “the place where spirits go to relax.” Ceremony of Sharpening is an asymmetrical composition depicting three disjointed landscapes interrupted by large red forms. In Fidler’s words, this painting is about the ways in which the spirit world comes in and out of focus for those who are tuned into it.

The four cut-out paintings are no less impressive for their comparative size. These “Figurative Energy Portraits” depict well known historical figures such as Anthony and Cleopatra, or friends of the artist, as in “The Séance”. Each figure is constructed of paper silhouettes, cut out and stacked. These layers become more diminutive as they rise revealing slivers of color along the edges. In “The Séance” each figure is connected to another through chains of tiny dots which weave through the air above like interconnected thoughts or feelings. Like the large paintings, the backgrounds of these glow with flat deep color that has a sense of both absorbing and emitting energy and light.

Fidler describes herself an intuitive artist.  To the non-artist, it is important to distinguish between instinct and intuition. All beings come into the world with instinct, which mainly serves to keep them alive. An artist is not born with intuition, rather it is something developed through years of education and practice in a medium. Because of this, an artist like Anna Fidler has an ingrained understanding of her paints, color theory, composition, shape, and scale. She knows her medium so well that the creative act has become intuitive. Sometimes intuition guides the artist one step at a time. Sometimes works manifest as completed visions which only need to be made real. In pursuing spiritual ideas in her work, Fidler can rely on her intuition to guide her visual choices.

Art has long been used to manifest the spiritual. Some have argued that cave paintings were made by shamans to bring fortune in hunts and speak to the spirits of the past. From stained glass windows to murals and illuminated manuscripts, evidence of the spiritual in art also exists in ancient churches and temples around the world. In Modernism, artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and Mark Rothko held abstraction as the purest form of connection to the spiritual realm. In 2018 the world was introduced to the art of Hilma af Klint, whose large-scale paintings were made at the turn of the 19^th century. She worked in response to spirits she communed with who ordered her to make work for a future temple.

Like those who came before her, Anna Fidler’s practiced creative intuition allows entrance to avenues to expressing the unseen: the felt, the known and the connections between. By trusting her intuition Fidler gives form to things we may understand without knowing why.

About the artist

Anna Fidler (b. 1973, Traverse City, Michigan) lives in Corvallis, Oregon where she teaches studio art at Oregon State University. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in 1995 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in studio art from Portland State University in 2005. Fidler has had solo exhibitions at The Boise Art Museum, APEX at The Portland Art Museum, Johansson Projects in Oakland, Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Oregon, Disjecta, Portland, Oregon, and has been widely exhibited at such venues as The Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science, and Art, The University of Southern California, The Tacoma Art Museum and The Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Washington Post, The Oregonian and The San Francisco Chronicle. Grants and awards include an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, a Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant, and residencies at Painting’s Edge in Idyllwild, California and The Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Her work is held in the collections of The Portland Art Museum, The Boise Art Museum, Portland Portable Works Collection and Seattle Portable Works Collection. Fidler is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland, California.

Heather Lee Birdsong, Hopeful Things in Dark Places No. 2, Flashe paint, charcoal, glow-in-the-dark pigment, gum arabic, acrylic on translucent polypropylene, Original dimensions 38″ x 25″, 2024

The Need for Kindness

• Dates: September 19 – October 23, 2024
• Artist talk and gallery reception: October 15, 11am – 1pm
• Gallery hours:
  • Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
  • Saturdays by appointment (free parking)

My paintings and prints arise from efforts to understand “home” as a physical place, separate from and alongside “home” as a feeling of belonging. Scenes coalesce from places often no longer accessible to me—such as places I once lived, left behind through expired leases or estrangement—and closely observed landscapes. The geometric figures inhabiting these scenes represent people, abstracted into how someone feels in my mind, rather than what they look like.

Perhaps because buildings seem transient to me, I locate my sense of place in the landscapes around them more than in their architecture. The temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest that I now call home, and the desert of the American Southwest where I grew up, feature prominently, and often get mixed together. Whether a particular plant is native, introduced, or invasive is both allegorical and illustrative of human-caused environmental change.

The history of American landscape painting is largely one of erasure—illusions of pastoral harmony or untouched wilderness. Landscape, in my life and my work, is something that exists between buildings, outside windows, along managed trails, in fairy tales, shaped around or for human activity (and in the American west, often violent histories). I deliberately interrupt illusionistic space with flatness: silhouettes, hard-edged geometric figures, opaque paints (primarily gouache and Flashe), and sharp shadows that draw attention to the artificiality of drawn perspective.

The long shadow (and the underlying violence of the western United States) takes on particular prominence and meaning in National Sacrifice Area. The title was Corbin Harney’s term for the Nevada Test Site, where my grandfather worked on nuclear bomb development. Harney was a Newe spiritual healer who established the anti-nuclear Shundahai Network, and I participated in their protest activities in the early 2000’s. Nuclear bombardment caused irreparable harm to the Nevada desert—land that has never legally belonged to the government, per the Treaty of Ruby Valley—and a trillion tons of irradiated groundwater seeps inexorably, albeit slowly, toward increasingly dry towns and cities.

In the Hopeful Things in Dark Places series, I paint on both sides of a translucent sheet of synthetic paper. The haze of this material is like the distance created by imperfect memory or dissociation. The architecture, which is entirely painted on the backside of the sheet, are rooms recreated from memory of the house I lived in as an adolescent. The archways are portals to Forest Park, which abutted an apartment I lived in until the pandemic began. Those scenes, created with a mix of charcoal powder and Blue Lit pigment, glow in the dark, in homage to the late artist Julie Green.

I often derive titles from literary sources, including: poems by Joanne de Longchamps, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, as well as fairy tales.

About the artist

Heather Lee Birdsong (b. 1984 in Spring Valley, Nevada) is an artist based in Portland, Oregon since 2005. She serves on the Northwest Art Council committee at the Portland Art Museum and is a member of Carnation Contemporary, an artist-run, non-commercial exhibition space. In addition to her fine art practice, she works as a freelance graphic designer, editor, and arts administrator. Collections housing her artwork include the Visual Chronicle of Portland, Oregon; Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College; Albert Solheim Library, Pacific Northwest College of Art; and Southern Graphics Council International. Birdsong is recipient of project and professional development grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (2023, 2022, 2014) and was an artist-in-residence in Print Arts Northwest’s Emerging Printmakers Program (2012). She holds a BFA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (2011). She was gallery manager at UPFOR from 2013 to 2020, and communications designer at Chambers@916 from 2010 to 2013.