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harrell fletcher

Born in Santa Maria, California 1967
Lives and works in Portland, Oregon
Studied at San Francisco Art Institute (B.F.A., 1990) and California College of Arts and Crafts, (M.F.A., 1994)

For over ten years Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on interdisciplinary, site-specific projects exploring the dynamics of social spaces and communities. Along with this work he has developed a series of more personal and idiosyncratic pieces that take various forms - drawings, prints, writings, events, videos, and sculptural objects. Fletcher has created exhibitions at Gallery HERE in Oakland, New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, The McBean Project Space, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, and The de Young Museum in San Francisco, Alleged Gallery in New York City, COCA in Seattle, WA; and PICA, in Portland, Oregon.

MAPS: I went on a walk everyday while I was at Tamarind. I always started on the main street there by the university, and when someone asked me for change I gave them some and then I had them draw me a map of their day -- the places they had been that led them to the spot where we met. I then would draw a map of my day too. We put the maps together in various ways. It's just another way of making something more visible that is very normal and common place but is also usually unseen.

The REAL ESTATE print is a case of what I call "everyday abstraction" that exists in the world all of the time, but we are so used to giving names to things, recognizing things, that we sometimes can't see how abstract everything really is. So this is a physical representation of a pre-existing abstract set of shapes. I took an Albuquerque real estate ad and covered up all of the foliage in the picture with a light green color. It makes some really nice weird shapes, doesn't it?

SILVER GIRL: This is sort of a negative space version of the real estate abstraction. I took a snapshot that I found in Albuquerque and using the existing composition and proportions of the original image I isolated out some key aspects I was interested in - the sitting girl, her reflection in a mirror, and a strange lamp - and got rid of everything else by covering it with silver....Its a kind of process of cleaning things up so that you can see them better, very satisfying in that way.

Selected Public Art Projects and Public Collections
Berkeley Art Museum, California
City of Fairfield, California
De Young Museum, San Francisco
New Museum, New York
Portland Regional Art and Culture Council, Oregon
San Francisco Art Commission
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
University of Minnesota
Washington State Art Commission


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Last updated: 4/3/09