Walls Within
Six muralists in one gallery, curated with Portland Street Art Alliance.
Street art comes inside. Walls Within is a mural exhibit at Hopscotch Portland, curated with Portland Street Art Alliance: six muralists, one gallery, each wall painted on site. David Rice sets a softly lit portrait beside a towering orange zigzag drape. Francisco Morales paints a boxer, a bull and a horseman under the heading No Tienes Dinero, in the register of an ad poster. The Earwig builds crisp wildstyle letters in purple, green and chrome. Winston the Whale runs rainbow lines across white like a transit map. Jennifer Mercede crowds a cream wall with contour-line faces in sunglasses and headscarves. Oliver Casillas perches a vulture over a desert of saguaro, all on hot pink. Take them one at a time, and get close.
The gallery.
About the artists
David Rice paints like an Old Master who grew up on comic books. His portraits, animals and still lifes carry Vermeer's light, soft and exact, then drop into bold geometric fields, patterned drapes and slabs of flat color.
Francisco Morales is a Chicano illustrator, designer and muralist who takes the visual language of advertising and turns it around.
The Earwig is a Portland graffiti writer, illustrator and muralist known for sharp, crisp wildstyle letters built on decades of practice. Where most wildstyle reads as speed, The Earwig's reads as precision: unconventional letterforms, crisp edges and conceptual characters.
Winston the Whale works in pure color. Crisp lines, rounded edges, flat saturated fields: prismatic mouths, starry-eyed bats, grids, squiggles, vines and butterflies, with a 1960s, Scandinavian-folk and Memphis-design accent.
Jennifer Mercede describes her work as “street art meets toddler art meets fine art,” and she means all three. She paints fast and loose in acrylic, markers and crayons, chasing a flow state, with bright color knocked against dark muted tones, lots of circles and words tucked into the paint.
Oliver Casillas paints murals about what holds people together. Born in Guadalajara in 1995, he studied art there and at a university in Namur, Belgium, and now works in Oregon.
