TO THE RIVER

To The River is a summer-long sculpture, sound art and music residency at Portland’s Zidell Yards. Created by a gathering of artists under the canopy of AUXART, the site opens to the public for six weeks on August 20th. The project site runs for 300 yards from the base of the Oregon Health Sciences University tram to the Willamette River across a former barge-building platform. The sculptural architecture is a matrix of waveforms constructed from long mill-salvaged wood ribs banded together with cast-off bicycle innertubes through which audiences journey to the river. The immersive walk is accompanied by wind activated sound production and culminates in a sculptural sound theater on the promontory overlooking the river. That elliptical seating setting is constructed from salvaged wood that is activated electronically to produce 16 channels of designed sound. The sculptural setting will play host to musical performance works throughout the residency’s public run.

Musical performances and collaborations included artists:

Machado Mijiga and Dario LaPoma | August 20
Robin Bacior Band | August 25
Freddy Vilches Ensemble | September 1
Nancy Ives and the Portland Cello Project | September 9
Jose Medeles and Nathan Trueb | September 17
Christopher Whyte | September 24

The residency is focused on the way that the Willamette River and rivers in general connect us across geographies, time and ideas about difference through shared networks of sustenance. The work is inspired by the many devotional ways that people go to the river to meet, to cleanse their souls or to start anew. It sits in the acknowledgment that the site was once an aquatic part of the river itself, before decades of industrial uses, including ship dismantling and barge construction, and remediation by the Zidell Family as part of the Oregon DEQ Voluntary Cleanup program.

AUXART is a program of the Charitable Partnership Fund, an Oregon public charity. EIN 931267966