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July 17 - August 31, 2019

Preview Reception: July 17, 2019, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

First Thursday Reception: August 1, 2019, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Artist Talk: Pat Boas
August 27, 2019, 5:30-7:30 pm
Talk at 6:15 pm

Pat Boas’ recent abstract paintings and prints combine elements of theoretical discourse and studio experimentation. The exhibition title Memo, which references a series of paintings by Stuart Davis (1894-1964), demonstrates her dedication to research and affinity for the history of art. While intrigued and inspired by Davis’ work, Boas was also interested in the implications of the word memo–a note to the future about the past.

Boas began the series by making collages in her studio with the act of removing text from highly saturated color ads in art, design and fashion magazines. The resulting cut-outs of repeating lines and torn shapes from bright expanses of color allowed Boas to move imagery around through stacking and layering and became studies for the paintings and prints included in the exhibition. The new works explore the constructed nature of binaries by considering dialectics while resisting referential exactitude. Her exuberant curvilinear formations harmonize with vivid accumulations of opaque and translucent hues and find concordant expression of line and color.

In fall 2018, Boas began working in residence at Watershed Center for Fine Art Publishing and Research at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and the resulting prints on view in the gallery highlight her artmaking process and material considerations. The work appears freshly activated, momentarily fixed in space or energetically transitional. Combinations of woodcut, digital and screen printing processes enliven each print with distinctive textures, line characteristics and nuanced dimensionality.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery has been exhibiting Pat Boas' work since 2010 and has represented her since 2015. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, PDX Contemporary, the Art Gym and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, in Portland, Oregon. Nationally her work has been exhibited at the Hallie Ford Museum (Salem, OR), the Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe, NM), the Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), the Salt Lake Art Center (Salt Lake, UT), the Nicolaysen Museum (Casper, WY),  the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH). She is a 2017 Hallie Ford Visual Arts Fellow. Select honors, fellowships, grants and residencies include the Bonnie Bronson Fund, Caldera Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, The Ford Family Foundation, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon College of Arts and Craft, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Portland Art Museum, and Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council. Reviews of Boas’ work have appeared in Art in America and Art Papers. She is a professor in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University. The work in Memo was produced in support by a 2018 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship.