Events listed occur throughout the month are free and open to all visitors unless otherwise specified.
SATURDAY 03.07.26
Erinn Kathryn + M. Earl Williams: A Land That Remembers | Carnation Contemporary
A Land That Remembers assembles two distinct approaches to how landscapes endure over time. Erinn Kathryn engages material, labor, and deep temporal presence while M. Earl Williams centers relational sovereignty and continuity through story, image, and technology. Both practices witness the persistence of land beyond the constraints imposed by colonial systems, and their inherent ability to hold, transform, and endure. Kathryn’s installation, Echo of the Oak, evokes a quiet, lasting presence of what is both gone and still here, accentuating the tragic, enduring connection between the living world and an obsessive need to commodify. It eulogizes the memory of lost landscapes a half-millennium old, that thrived long before the colonialist drive and yearning for bigger/better/greater/more that leveled savannah woodlands of slow-growth hardwoods in pursuit of agriculture, industry, expansion, and possession. These landscapes were not empty nor passive; they were tended, known, cooperative, and alive. Her reassembled vertical bodies stand as afterimages; for things we may have not seen ourselves, but the land remembers, still. Williams’s work, Ghost Dance in the Machine, draws on the Ghost Dance as both a historical movement and a living framework for imagining Indigenous futures. The Ghost Dance carried visions of renewal, resistance, and continuance at a moment of profound disruption. In the digital era, those visions resonate again as Indigenous people navigate virtual worlds, algorithms, and complex identities. Through digital media, Williams explores how Indigenous knowledge systems adapt, persist, and reassert sovereignty within our contemporary world where the lines between real and virtual experiences are blurring. These virtual landscapes created by Williams are not about escape or fantasy, but more a continuation of presence, memory, and relationality into the futures that are already unfolding. Erinn Kathryn (she/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, mixed media, painting, and installation. She collects, hordes, and augments found materials of all kinds, ranging from mass produced goods like postcards and blister packs, to natural materials like bones and lichen, to literal street-side garbage. By re-contextualizing existing objects, Erinn reframes long-held perspectives and examines intersections between the ‘natural’ and ‘constructed’ within which we exist. Her work has been presented at NW Marine Artworks (Portland; 2025) Helzer Gallery and Paragon Gallery at Portland Community College (Portland; 2023, 2021), Multnomah Arts Center (Portland; 2014), Alaska House Art Gallery (Fairbanks, AK; 2013), Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR; 2012). Her chapbook of “constructed poems” from one existing text, In The Frail, was published by Buckman Journal in 2024. Erinn hails from Central Pennsylvania. She received her M.A. in Teaching Visual Art from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Erinn is a member of Carnation Contemporary and Borderline Art Salon, both in Portland, OR. She has been teaching youth and adults in painting, printmaking, book arts, and 2D mixed media for more than a decade. M. Earl Williams is an artist, educator, and enrolled tribal member of The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. M. Earl received a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography and a Masters of Arts in Studio Art from the University of Iowa. His work is shown internationally with recent cities including Rome, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, New York, Denver, Portland, and Phoenix. Currently he resides in his ancestral homelands, the Oregon Willamette Valley, where he is the Digital Communications Manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. His work explores how we make meaning out of the world around us and how we create significance to our existence as humans. The photographs, videos, durational performances, and installations ask questions like; what is our purpose in the environments that surround us? What is our imminent future if we continue down our technological path towards a more digitized world? What happened to the ideas of the myth and the miracle? The work never expects the viewer to find true answers but instead is more invested in “the why” and “the what”.
5 PM – 8 PM @ 8371 N Interstate Ave Portland, OR