The interplay between music and visual art is well documented in art history. Wassily Kandinsky and James McNeill Whistler both borrowed terms from music to title their paintings. Compositions, nocturnes, and symphonies all seemed appropriate terms to describe their painting process and product. Henri Matisse’s illustrated book Jazz is made from prints from his cut-out work in the 1940s. The title underscores the notion of improvisation. 

On the flipside, John Cage’s infamous 1952 composition 4’33’’ in which he sat at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing to highlight the ambient noise of the hall, was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 White Painting, a series of canvases covered with white house paint. The blank surfaces reflected the colors from around the room, shadows from passer-bys, and even dust motes. Sergei Rachmoninoff’s Isle of the Dead was inspired by a reproduction of Arnold Bocklin’s painting of the same name. 

Though I can think of multiple examples in which music has inspired visual art or vice versa, I’m having a much harder time coming up with an example that is in line with the Oregon Origins Project’s latest undertaking VI: The Birth of Cascadia. Unlike the examples listed above, in which one field inspired the other, this iteration of the project instead introduces a third prong – geology – from which both music and visual art are inspired. It seems to be an isosceles triangle concept, with geology at the apex and music and visual arts at the other two vertices.

The musical composition, by composer and Oregon Origins Project director Matthew Packwood, will be performed at Beaverton’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts on June 21st and 22nd. Each of the movements in Matthew Packwood’s musical composition is paired with the work of a visual artist — there are ten movements, so accordingly ten featured artists. This story focuses on the visual art, by ten Oregon-based artists, on view at Stelo Arts through July 12 and which will also be projected behind the orchestra at the performance at The Reser. (Read Brett Campbell’s ArtsWatch preview of the musical performance and a conversation with Packwood.). 

Defining the project and choosing visual artists

Geologist Ian Madin gave the project its conceptual shape by choosing what Packwood calls the “greatest hits of Oregon geology.” This winnowing process was severe. Packwood acknowledged “there’s probably 50 [events] that geologists would debate over.” Madin’s choices were dictated by geological significance, but also, at least in part, also by what could be witnessed in the landscape. The “list” had the geological event and a site in Oregon at which something of the event could be witnessed. A key part of the process was having Packwood, as the composer, and each visual artist doing a site visit with Madin in order to engage, understand, and be inspired by the landscape. 

The artists for the project were selected by Packwood after consultation with curator Stephanie Snyder, and visual artists Nan Curtis and Juniper Harrower. Packwood was looking for artists who “seemed to be engaged with place in a way that I responded to, because I’m creating this work too, right? So once we had our list of artists, I gave Sara [Siestreem] and Jim [Lavadour] the list and gave them the chance to choose first.”

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Both Siestreem and Lavadour’s artistic practices engage deeply with the land, so it’s understandable that both artists chose geological events with ties to their ancestral homes. “Sara picked movement 3,” Packwood explained. “Basically, it’s about when the ocean is depositing sediment on the coast.” This tracks as Siestreem is Hanis Coos and much of her work engages with the Pacific coast. In contrast, “Jim Lavadour picked an event that is the most dramatic of the events, perhaps not surprising given how dramatic his work is,” Packwood said. “But it’s also related to the land of the Umatilla and Walla Walla peoples, where he is from. It’s when the hotspot…a plume of magma that was traveling underneath Oregon for quite some time…was finally set free. It covered two-thirds of Oregon and some of Washington and Idaho with a mile-thick basalt flow…. His work is all about fire and energy.”

Siestreem and Lavadour contributed previous work that, because of the nature of their practices, fit with Oregon Origins Project’s theme and their chosen movements. It does seem notable, however, that two of the more prominent artists in the show did not participate in the full site visit process. Their work and Packwood’s compositions were conceived entirely separately. 

All of the other work in the show was created in response to the artists’ site visits with Packwood and Madin to specific locations in Oregon, primarily in the summer months of 2024. Packwood composed the music only after having visited the sites, and though in his words, he “compose[s] very fast,” and he was often sending the artists samples of his work while they were still making and working, there was a sense of shared process. 

Artist interviews

I interviewed three of the artists — Christine Bourdette, Amanda Triplett, and Juniper Harrower — in a preview of the exhibition and all spoke enthusiastically about the collaborative process. The extent to which the sites revealed the geologic inspiration, though, seems to have been a more varied affair.  

Bourdette and Packwood both recalled that their site visit — to a quarry in the Coast Range — was not especially forthcoming in terms of inspiration. The geological event was “The Birth of Cascadia,” in which, in the words of the brochure, “a plume of hot rock (hotspot) arises west of Oregon, building a gigantic volcanic island which collides with the continent and shifts the subduction zone to the west (56-49 million years ago).” Unsurprisingly, a site visit for a subduction event that started at the bottom of the ocean isn’t an easy find, but Madin guided the two to a quarry in the Coast Range where they could see a thick layer of basalt. 

Bourdette’s composition references the chronology of the subduction event with three photogravures set horizontally that can be read left to right: the first is the welling up of the lava, the second when the lava and the older plate collided, and then the collision “result” being subsumed into the Coast Range. The photogravures are collaged onto a delicately dappled lithograph with small cutouts and metal leaf. The full composition manages to evoke both millions of years of sediment and strata, along with the unpredictability of the process. 

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Much of Bourdette’s work engages with geology. She and Michael Boonstra, another artist in this show, had a 2023 exhibition, Altered Terrain, in the gallery at the Reser. In a review by Prudence Roberts for ArtsWatch, Bourdette spoke of geology as a way to understand the upheavals of the contemporary world: “a sense of surviving instability through instability.” When we spoke, Bourdette mused that she departs from natural forms but that they become abstract in her work, that the “layering and strata, just like the idea of time, dissolve” and that this makes sense because “time, especially deep time, is such an ungraspable thing.”

It seems that since the quarry required more interpretive contemplation, and perhaps because they were, in Packwood’s estimation “the most ‘simpatico’ workwise,” Bourdette and Packwood corresponded while they were working — sending clips and ideas back and forth, trying to “make sense of the “Birth of Cascadia” subduction event. Whereas with most of the artists, Packwood was “ahead” in the process and had music to send while the artists were still thinking through their work, with Bourdette, Packwood’s composition was shaped by conversations with the visual artist. 

I can’t help but wonder if the affinity between Bourdette and Packwood was further encouraged by the similarities between music composition and printmaking. One of the things that Packwood emphasized several times in our conversation was the extent to which he was creating a score for a performance but that the performance itself was the finished work. Of all of the visual arts processes, printmaking is the one that bears the most similarity to this in that the artist creates a matrix or a template but there is space between what is planned and the “finished product” of the print. Both the composer and the printmaker both have to cede more control of the finished product than is typical in many other forms of art. 

Textile artist Amanda Triplett described how listening to Packwood’s music changed her approach to her work. Triplett’s geological assignment was the Missoula Floods; the trio had visited the Gorge, where Madin pointed out “the way water was moving through the rock and created spirals and drilled holes into the cliff,” recounted Triplett. When Packwood sent over his music, she found that it started with “a stillness, a musical stillness, and then it breaks into chaos.” Initially Triplett had thought that her work would take the shape of a sort of conceptual map of the landscape shaped by the flood. Textile work inspired by landforms is familiar in Triplett’s practice: Friderike Heuer wrote about Triplett’s work with the Exquisite Gorge project for ArtsWatch in 2022. Hearing Packwood’s music changed her approach to instead focus on a particular moment:

“There’s an Icelandic word, “jökulaups” … but it’s the moment that the water bursts from the glacial dam,” Triplett said “This is where I thought the story was at — it doesn’t occur in Oregon, it’s in Montana — but if you think about just this massive amount of water, erupting forth from this glacial dam, finding this path through Oregon and then out into the Pacific Ocean. It was 100 meters of water — just a straight wall of water. I was fascinated by that, the liminal space of the ice bursting — the right before, then the moment where it’s erupting.”

Triplett’s work is tightly twisted and wound amalgamation of blue-hued fabrics, conveying a tension appropriate to this moment. Though Triplett often works with recycled materials, here, in a nod to her “assignment,” she instead uses ice-dyed fabric, which entails sprinkling dye onto fabric and then using melting ice to allow the dye to sink in. Beads sewn into the fabric reference the detritus that the flood picked up on its way to the Pacific. “There are still rocks on Oregon beaches that were carried by the Missoula floods,” she explained.

Juniper Harrower’s geological “assignment” is the last in the timeline of ten and focuses on the geologically contested Anthropocene era. Her assigned site —  Mima mounds in The Dalles — seems to have been a sort of negotiation, one that acknowledges both the geological record and human intervention. The Mima mounds are small hills made of sand, silt, and pebbles, described somewhat perplexingly by the Washington Geological Survey as “soil pimples.” The mounds were plowed over and flattened in order to facilitate agriculture – a clear example of humans upending a geologic formation. It isn’t subduction or a flood, but a notable shift nonetheless. 

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Harrower describes her process as: “deeply research based. I build a visual library and think about all the imagery that comes up from there around these ideas. I think about fires and other big ways that humans are impacting the earth — farming, road building, urbanization, development. I started to look at all of the ways these forms and shapes take place. Mima mounds…they got plowed over when we started planting all the agricultural fields. And then of course, timber and logging and trees. I started working some of these references, in an abstracted way, into the work.”

Circular forms dominate Harrower’s composition, smallest at the upper-right corner and progressing leftward. The reference is intended to be slippery though. Whereas for Triplett, imagining the geological event was central to the work she produced, for Harrower the Mima mounds seem to have been ultimately tangential, lending a compositional framework but not necessarily the impetus for the work. In our conversation, Harrower seemed more interested in the pigments she ground from charcoals found in local fires and gemstones and how she sees the composition as a whole suggesting a birth. Given that the title for installment six of the project is The Birth of Cascadia — this seems entirely appropriate. 

Exhibition Installation at Stelo

Both Packwood and Stelo director Shir Grisanti say that it isn’t important that viewers understand the geologic event or the specific site location visited. Stelo contracted Marcelo Fontana for exhibition design and the preference to keep the viewer’s attention on the art is evident throughout. There aren’t explanations of any of the process of the show in the gallery. As Grisanti explains “the priority was how can we serve the art best, not the story. So the story’s important, but the art’s more important.” 

The works aren’t hung according to geographic chronology — and actually this would be difficult, anyway, because many of the events overlap. There is an overview of the project and map with pins at the entrance to give a sense of where the different site visits were, but viewers interested in the more nitty-gritty project specifics will need to have familiarity from elsewhere. The gallery booklet provides some information with an identification of the geologic event and a written statement from each artist but some statements are more clearly tied to the thrust of the Oregon Origins Project than others. 

There are opportunities planned for viewers to engage with the geological “story” more thoroughly.  Madin will offer an expanded talk at Stelo on the evening of Tuesday, July 1, in addition to speaking at the musical performance at The Reser. The geology “apex” of the triangle will have its due focus for interested parties. 

The visual art vertex is strong. The exhibition at Stelo is well worth a visit. The works manage to distill incomprehensibly massive timelines and events into intimate works worthy of contemplation. I understand exhibition designer Fontana’s investment in privileging the visual art over the story of its making or its geological inspiration. Many viewers will have the “visceral” reaction to the art that Grisanti is seeking for the gallery. I imagine the musical vertex (the performance at The Reser) will be equally well executed. I do wish that more of the intersections between the prongs of the project were addressed in the gallery, as this seems foundational to what animates the project. 

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The part that I find most compelling is the “middle” of the triangle — the space of collaboration and the varied conversations generated by the geologic record and understanding how a composer and different visual artists will absorb and distill the same inspiration. Bourdette and Triplett’s works stand out as especially shaped by the project’s triangular collaborative intentions while others seem to be more accurately described as parallel creations. Maybe, and I suppose it seems appropriate to the geological framework, each pair forms its own unique shape.

Oregon Origins Project VI: The Birth of Cascadia continues through Saturday, July 12 at Stelo, 412 Northwest 8th Avenue Portland. The gallery is located at 412 NW 8th Ave and is open Thursday through Saturday from noon – 5 p.m. The concert, with projections, happens June 21-22 at Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 S.W. Crescent St. Beaverton.Tickets and information here.

*** A previous version of this article used the word vertice as the singular for vertices instead of the correct vertex. Thanks to Ian Madin for catching her geometry term error.