Contemporary presentations of time-based art frequently overpromise a profound radicalness that never seems to come to fruition on the screen or stage. Vows made in exhibition texts and show notes are often unachievable due to institutional, monetary, and praxis-based contradictions. Familiar restraints keep artists within the confines of the canon and the boundaries of the ivory tower. In other words, substantial descriptors such as “transgressive” fall short when the artworks fail to actually challenge orthodox modes of making and experiencing time-based art. 

I was thrilled to find out this wasn’t the case with Videotones’ Outside Inside World. Co-presented by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) for the 2024 edition of PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival, the exhibition lives up to the group’s commitment to presenting “discordant, mysterious, and deeply affecting” music and video art through composite means. As the exhibition text explains, this results in the festival format being beautifully nudged beyond its temporal limits. Through a balance of both collaborative durational experiments with fixed, yet abstracted objects, Videotones renounces expectations of finality and immediacy, as well as singular authorship, espousing new modes of intentional co-creation. Videotones’ theoretical and aesthetic infringements should be understood as arising from a long history of radical disabled artistry and praxis. 

Stretching across the entirety of TBA’s run, September 5th – September 22nd, 2024, Outside Inside World is an assemblage of programming and presentations. It opened with a public jam session on Thursday, September 5th and will conclude with Good Dang Weekend, a bingo night-dance party fundraiser for Elbow Room on September 22nd at PICA. These artworks are made by Videotones, a non-hierarchical neurodiverse digital media collective that prioritizes experimentation. The artist group includes intellectually and developmentally disabled adults, caretakers, and their community members. 

PNCA’s Center for Contemporary Art & Culture gallery houses the exhibition, which showcases video works, music videos, sculptures, and drawings from the collective’s archive. Two workshop-style stations flank either side of the gallery; a greenscreen for producing and responding to the works on the left and a desk for ideating on the right. Paper, pens, masking tape, and a prompt worksheet invite audience participation for the exhibition’s center-piece video work, Untitled (2024). Upon entering the gallery, it became apparent that collective authorship is eminent for these artists. 

Unfurling over the course of the exhibition, so its content will remain in a constant state of flux, Untitled is and will be the sum of the collective’s utilization of the gallery as a workshop with visitor participation. When I first visited the show, the video consisted of sweeping shots of the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture gallery empty with a still image of an artist holding up a line drawing on white paper. Yellow subtitles read: “Good morning to everyone except my friends.” The footage dramatically zooms in and out, showcasing the floor, lighting, and glass double-doors. As more still images, popular Homer Simpson gifs, and brief, yet poetic sentences popped in and out of the screen, I considered how the work would change over time and who would enact that change. I visited the gallery another day and a scan of dinosaur drawing danced silently across the screen before glitching ever so slightly. 

What does it mean to present art that refuses traditional ideas of completion and singular artistry? I’d have to wait and see, and that’s what’s exciting about this work. By proposing rigorous community participation, there is a cycle of making and unmaking of the same piece by an uncounted number of artists. Untitled interferes with what critical disability scholars Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez call “the prestige of the individual.”[1] Mills and Sanchez connect the Western world’s obsession with singularly authored art to ableist-capitalist-white supremacist notions of productivity and creativity. The video’s ceaselessness—augmented visually with footage of the blank gallery, waiting to be filled by you, me, us, them—democratizes video as a medium and method, brushing against the grain of traditional production and presentation etiquette. 

Although the exhibition is largely equipoised, rejecting a singularizing viewing of individual works in exchange for concurrent experiences of placing artworks in conversation with other artworks and their audience, there are stationary aspects to the showcase. 

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Complete with comfortable seating—a rare occurrence in any contemporary art experience—a flat screen displaying Videotones TV: Episode One (2024) recalls the haptics of channel surfing. The featured music videos, shorts, and performances are programmed like a block of television with bumpers and commercials, the only difference is this “station” warmly embraces non-linear story-telling and experimental editing. Videotones artist, M. Omar’s music video for “Love Happy” was especially energizing. Existing on the R&B continuum, “Love Happy” is a proclamation of desire and admiration.The artist wears a bright orange KN95 mask and dances languidly in front of an animated pastoral backdrop. Though their mouth is obscured by a respirator, creating a gap between the singer and the song, the performance is embodied. Amidst an abundance of glitch and distortion, this straightforward music video is a welcomed balm, and unironically transgressive in its honesty and passion. I caught myself singing “Love Happy” while walking to the bus stop the next morning. 

Mayyybe I’m a Star!!! by Elemeater Morton and Aspen DeViller is similarly infectious. Here we see Morton washing her paintbrushes, applying paint to her canvas, and calmly swaying in front of an image of her work while looking directly into the camera. The artist’s process is foregrounded in this piece, giving viewers a glimpse behind “the curtain.” There is a fruitful dialogue happening between Mayyybe I’m a Star!!! and the suite of mixed media sculptures also by Elmeater Morton that are featured in this video-focused showcase. Arranged collectively on a white pedestal, works like A Jacket (2024), A Wall (2024), and Fly Swatter (2024) are dually representational in form and acute abstractions that play second fiddle to Morton’s process. The artist’s mark-making, visible in the wiry marker line work and layered use of recycled paper, is nearly vibrational. Whereas the majority of the exhibition seemingly exists in the world that Videotones is actively building, these objects punctuate the fantasy of the surrounding videoworks and feel like a tether to Earth. 

Nearing the end of my visit I was reminded of the collaboration prompt worksheet Videotones provides upon entry. The questions “where should we go?” and “a real space? an imagined space?” rang loudly in my head as I stepped back to attempt to see the exhibition in full and understand where this show took me. From the center of the gallery, the connective tissue between the pieces is evident; a serious investment in play and the unknown joins the artworks together. 

At the locus of the collective’s web of creation, Videotones’ unpredictable, ever-evolving approach to media making transforms a passive audience into a legion of co-conspirators. The collective’s insistence upon the public being ready and willing to fully participate in this process is an invigorating revision to the video art status quo. As Outside Inside World continues to be made and unmade through community production—requiring the level of criticality to slow down, to ask and answer questions—I am eager to return again to visit the new worlds Videtones are building. 

[1] Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (New York: New York University Press, 2023).

Outside Inside World will be on view at PNCA’s 511 Gallery (511 NW Broadway) through October 5th. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm.