Rainmaker Artist Residency is pleased to announce "Third Space" -- a two­ person exhibition featuring the work of Portland­based artists and Rainmaker residents Bukola Koiki and Kathryn Yancey.

In "Third Space", Koiki and Yancey seek out and investigate hybrid spaces as locations of shifting physical and cultural realities. Through video, sculpture, and performance, the artists examine the often blurred and intangible locations, selves, and identities that constitute their lived, daily experiences.

Mining personal, physical and material based cultural memories, Koiki seeks to explore the immigrant experience of cultural displacement and dislocation by attempting to imbibe through repetition, the Yoruba female rite of passage of tying a gele (a head tie worn for special occasions) and documenting her own repeated attempts to claim a piece of her culture that she was unable to to learn at the feet of her mother, so to speak. Furthering this exploration of dislocation is the use of surrogate versions of the original textiles, made in Tyvek and canvas using experimental techniques in dyeing and image transfer.

Intuitively reacting to urban and domestic spaces, Yancey uses video to explore the formal elements of painting and sculpture. In an attempt to connect inner and outer, virtual and physical, organic and synthetic, Yancey presents digital, time­-based media as sculptural form.
About the artists: 

Bukola Koiki was born in Lagos, Nigeria and came to study art in the United States as a teen through a series of events involving a secondary school classmate and the American Visa Lottery Program. She received her MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art in May 2015. Her work explores cultural hybridity and cultural dislocation through the lens of memory, language, rituals, and rites of passage, using a variety of mediums. She has exhibited her work in galleries in Portland OR, Morristown, NJ and Gatlinburg, Tennessee and her work has been featured in Surface Design Journal and online in Art21 Magazine and Art Practical. She lives and works in Portland,OR.www.bukolakoiki.com/

Kathryn Yancey generates video, sound and installation work through a multi­disciplinary practice that explores the materiality of the poetic voice. She received an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.www.katieyancey.net/