Let's Play: Group Exhibition

Let’s Play brings together regional and national artists whose work reflect on the pathos, angst, and exhilaration embedded in athletic competition and spectatorship. The exhibition spans painting, sculpture, photography, and video, an expansive curation only possible for a gallery with 45 years of experience and connections.

John Baldessari, Claes Oldenburg, M.K. Guth, and Jonas Wood find the humor and absurdity latent in sports culture. Guth’s practice is built on participation, drawing on fables and mythology to examine how people behave collectively, and athletic ritual gives her exactly that: a set of archetypal characters, repeated ceremonies, and stakes which feel both ancient and immediate. Wood treats sports the way he treats everything else in his life: as subject matter worthy of the same sustained, affectionate attention he gives domestic interiors, houseplants, and family portraits. His paintings are a personal record, and sports have always been part of it.

Paul Pfeiffer works at the opposite register. He resamples footage from live broadcasts and mass spectacle, stripping the image of its crowd, its context, its resolution, leaving the body suspended in an uncanny loop. Pfeiffer is interested in what sports images do to us: how they manufacture desire, invoke nationalism, and blur the line between entertainment and myth.

Derek Fordjour builds his paintings up from cardboard, newspaper, and pigment, layering collage into surfaces as dense and textured as the subjects they carry. His work is full of athletes and performers, people at the center of communal rituals, and his emotional range is equally wide: celebration and lamentation on the same canvas. A forthcoming 2027 Phaidon monograph speaks to the reach of a practice that has always been concerned with what it means to be seen.

Jeremy Okai Davis came to Portland in 2007 and has been painting here ever since, alongside work as a graphic designer and illustrator. His paintings attend closely to the physicality of athletic movement and to the historical figures who shaped sports culture, bringing a portraitist’s seriousness to subjects that don’t always receive it.

Modou Dieng Yacine + Amadeo Carvalho contribute collaborative works that bring two distinct sensibilities into contact. Dieng Yacine, born in Saint-Louis, Senegal and trained at the School of Fine Arts in Dakar and the San Francisco Art Institute, works with archival materials and domestic fabrics: cardboard, denim, burlap, and the layered histories embedded in each. Carvalho, born in Mindelo, Cape Verde and trained in Lisbon, works with color, light, and shadow in ways that give his compositions an immediate physical presence. Together their work holds the archival and the visceral in the same frame.