EARTHBOUND

Kyle Adam Kalev Peets & Matthew Earl Williams

November 4—26, 2023

Opening Reception

Saturday, November 4, 5-8 pm

Open Hours

Sat-Sun 12-5pm
drop in or by appointment 

Email Info@carnationcontemporary.com
to schedule a visit

Exhibition Statement

Kyle Adam Kalev Peets and Matthew Earl Williams’s Earthbound observes the changing relationships of place and landscape using the “image” as a metaphorical representation of thought and feeling.


KP - This body of work begins with thinking of landscape as a process not a thing. The prints were made by translating the musical concept of polyphony (multiple melodies played at once) into visual terms. The multiple voices of polyphony challenge the western obsession with the individual — especially as it’s enforced by the single authoritative lens of the camera. Layering and repetition are used to create disorienting rhythms to shake up the logical thinking patterns of the viewer. At once spiritual and political, these images of the American West pivot away from the historical use of landscape photography in the colonization process. They ask us to  go back to the origins of the word respect, which means, “to look again,” and to make room for another kind of relationship with the landscape and the more than human world.


MW - These images are a teleological investigation into reconnecting to “sacred" lands in the digital age, an era explicitly designed to keep Indigenous peoples out. As a Native American who is white passing, I’m made up of both colonizers and the colonized. A contradiction, figuring out belonging in this world, while maybe not even wanting it. Pushing back against this notion while also having its truth affirmed, the photographs present fluctuations between stages of grief. A result of the survivor's guilt that I’m confronted with each time I see my reflection in a darkened viewing screen. The work is a "ceremony" in the name of decolonization. It encapsulates both love and grief just like a traditional Round Dance. Only this time it's happening in a fractured world of the digital and physical space.

Artist

Kyle Adam Kalev Peets is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator who has exhibited his work nationally and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO) as well as group exhibitions like, Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). His work was published in the periodical SPRTS by Endless Editions (New York, NY), archived in the Watson Library Special Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, Manhattan, Artists’ Books. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa as well as a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts from the Iowa Center for The Book. Kyle currently teaches Print and Book Arts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.



Matthew Earl Williams is an artist, educator, and enrolled tribal member of The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. His work is shown internationally with recent cities including Rome, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, New York, Denver, Portland, and Phoenix.

M. Earl received a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography and a Masters of Arts in Studio Art from the University of Iowa. He also received a BFA in Photography at the University of Oregon. Currently he resides in his ancestral homelands, the Oregon Willamette Valley, where he is the Multimedia Specialist for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.