Lee Kelly | If Trees Could Walk

October 3 - November 2, 2019

First Thursday Reception: October 3, 6 - 8 pm

Stephen Hayes: In The Hour Before: This Land… 

In 2018, Stephen Hayes was awarded the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in support of the ongoing project titled In The Hour Before. The new exhibition In The Hour Before: This Land... continues the haunting series of paintings that depict locations across America that have been imprinted with the tragedies of gun violence. Hayes portrays specific sites of traumatic events through quietly captivating imagery that is mysterious, familiar and transcendent. 

Hayes’s lush palettes and virtuosic brush stokes intentionally entangle beauty with despair Straightforward titles like Aurora, IL 2-16-19, omit disturbing details while underscoring the increasingly commonplace incidents that have transformed neighborhood parks, schools, sidewalks and intersections into memorials and monuments.

Hayes’s powerful works require contemplation long after sensationalistic narratives fade from the perpetual news cycle. The series mirrors our humanitarian discordance, while the artist’s act of painting assures the events are not erased from collective memory. 

Stephen Hayes has shown his work locally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), Northwest Museum of Art and Culture (Spokane, WA), American Culture Center (Sapporo and Nagoya, Japan), and The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). He has had several commissions for public art projects in the region, and his works can be found in the collections of Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR), New York Public Library (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum’s Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts (Portland, OR), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), and Randall Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel (Portland, OR), as well as numerous private and public collections. In 2013 Hayes was the subject of a 30 year career retrospective at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR), which included a fully illustrated catalogue. In recognition of his accomplished career and dedicated studio art practice, Hayes was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.