From London to Tokyo to New York, internationally acclaimed visual artist Shantell Martin is expanding conventional definitions of drawing and animation to transform visual experience in the design, fashion and music industries. Martin has collaborated with celebrity photographers and brands alike; her notable work includes a project with celebrity photographer Nigel Barker, the transformation of the New York custom denim store 3×1 into a Martin inspired wonderland, and a screening in Dell's 2011 experiential pop up workspace. In February 2012, she was one of four artists commissioned by Nike iD to make a piece of work and a limited edition shoe to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Nike Cortez. She also creates murals in a range of contexts – from the private homes of celebrities to the faces of models and friends.

ARNOLD J. KEMP is an artist, curator and writer. He is also the Chair of the Master in Fine Arts in Visual Studies Program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He's received awards from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Printed Matter, Art Matters, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts, and Artadia Fund for Art. His works are in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Kemp's poetry and prose has appeared in CALLALOO, THREE RIVERS POETRY JOURNAL, AGNI REVIEW, MIRAGE #4 PERIOD(ICAL), RIVER STYX, NOCTURNES, and ART JOURNAL. In 2005 and 2007 SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC commissioned two of his plays/performances for the SAN FRANCISCO POETS THEATER.

Avantika Bawa is an artist, curator, and academic. Her drawings and site- specific installations transform the act of drawing into sculptural gestures that react formally and also conceptually to architectural spaces and their history. This process emerges due, in part, to her relationship to the legacy of Minimalism and its emphasis upon reductive form, modularity and literal scale.

She has an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India (1995). She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008), Vermont Studio Center, VT, Milepost 5, Portland, OR, Jentel Artist Residency Program, WY and most recently the MacDowell Colony, NH.

Note worthy exhibits include; solos at Suyama Space, Seattle, WA, The Columbus Museum, Columbus GA; Saltworks Gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Lalit Kala Academy and Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India; Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, India; Disjecta and Portland State University, Portland, OR. She was part of the South by East Biennial in Boca Raton, FL; and juried group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, GA, The Drawing Center and Smack Mellon, NY and SAVAC, Canada. Her work has been reviewed in international publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Art Papers, Art Lies, Art India, Art Asia Pacific, The Oregonian, and The Times of India amongst others.

Bawa's curatorial work began with a hotel room show during the Art in Chicago fair (98') and has grown through her studio and gallery, aquaspace – a laboratory for new and multi media art. In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain - Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture, a peer reviewed online journal (www.drainmag.com).

She is currently Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University Vancouver, WA. Once upon a time she taught at Clark College and was a happy penguin.

Amjad Faur received his M.F.A from the University of Oregon in 2005. He has been working for over a decade with large format (8x10 inch) photography and it continues to be the means by which he conceptualizes, associates and produces his work. Amjad has spent a great deal of time in Italy as well as the Middle East. The collective histories of these particular regions have come to inform and inhabit his work.

Amjad currently lives in Olympia, WA with his wife, Laila as well as their little cat and giant dog. He teaches at Evergreen State College.

Mike Rathbun received his MFA in sculpture from the University of Minnesota. He has taught sculpture at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon since 2005. He has been a recipient of multiple grants and fellowships including Pollock-Krasner, The Bush Fellowship, Virginia Groot foundation Grant. He has had solo exhibitions nationally including venues in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, LA, and Seattle. Most recently a monumental site specific installation at the Boise Art Museum that was funded by grants from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation Grant and The National Endowment for the Arts.

Born in Indiana, Ann Christenson holds a BA (1964) and an MFA (1983) from UC Berkeley. Working in the "Cal Pot Shop" during the early sixties and watching Peter Voulkos' performance demonstrations helped shape her ideas about clay. In the mid sixties she and Sue Newman started a ceramic studio in NYC where she worked until 1971. Returning to California she again helped form a group ceramic studio where she worked until returning to graduate study in 1979. She is currently a Professor Emeritus of Fine Art at Washington State University where she taught and coordinated the ceramic area.

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Garrick Imatani is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores connections between the physical and cultural within movement, landscapes, and history. In addition to public works, Imatani has exhibited his work in venues such as Art in General (NYC), Asian American Arts Centre (NYC), and Institute for Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art (Portland, ME). He is the recipient of grants from the Maine Arts Commission and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and BA in Art Studio with Honors from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon where he is as an Assistant Professor of Art at Lewis & Clark College.

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To call Minnesota artist Margaret Wall-Romana a painter of visionary botanical art is too clinical for her results, and too modest for her aspirations. She is a painter of exquisitely detailed flowers and vines, leaves and grasses, with an occasional fallen feather or crumpled bird woven into blowsy bouquets of roots and twigs that seem to drift through space. Sheer veils of soft color --apricot, creamy ivory, ice blue-- flutter behind her blossoms and sometimes frame distant vistas of low mountains, mossy meadows, limpid seas. A graduate of the University of California, Davis, with an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, Wall-Romana has work in collections from London to Manhattan to San Francisco.

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Jeffry Mitchell was born in Seattle, WA in 1956. He received his MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Mitchell has been nominated for numerous national awards, and was a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2009. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections including the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Philadelphia Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, will host Mitchell's first retrospective in the Spring of 2012.

Paula Rebsom was born and raised in Southwestern North Dakota. Her art practice pulls heavily from her close upbringing with nature and the wild, from her hunting adventures and exploration of the open prairie with her father, and the eventual shift from rural to urban living as an adult. Similar to how contemporary society experiences nature: through mediated experiences, her work forces viewers to navigate between real and staged environments. Paula Rebsom received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon in 2006 and is currently adjunct faculty in the Department of Art and Interior Design at Marylhurst University.

Through his painting and print work, Stephen Hayes translates, viscerally, the physical and emotional experience of places of nature. Hayes has received Individual Artist Fellowships from WESTAF and the Oregon Arts Commission. He is a 2011 recipient of the Hallie Ford Fellowship for Individual Artists. He is represented in Portland by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery and his work can be found in numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the United States and abroad.

Gerit Grimm was born, and grew up in Halle, German Democratic Republic. In 2002, she was awarded the German DAAD Government Grant to complete her MA at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. She received her MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2004. She has been an Artist-in-residence at McColl Center, Bemis Center, Kohler Arts & Industry Program and Archie Bray Foundation. Grimm now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Joshua Berger is a founder and creative director of Plazm. Recognized by numerous design publications and award shows, he received the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Bookfair for his collaboration with John C Jay on the book Soul of the Game, and the Gold Medal at Portland Design Festival for XXX: The Power of Sex in Contemporary Design. He was recently a finalist for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum.

Brenda Grell is an artist who works in digital design and new media using a feminist's ideology, a hacker's mentality, and a child's curiosity. Exploring the ingrained cultural norms of human and animal relationships, and uncanny and visceral reactions to them, her videos have screened in alternative and guerilla settings presented by such entities as the Pacific Film Archive, UCLA Hammer Museum, and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and in film, art and technology festivals ranging from HUMP #3 AMATEUR & LOCALLY PRODUCED PORN FESTIVAL in Seattle, to the Conflux Festival's WE AR (Augmented Reality) IN MOMA show in New York. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught for such institutions as the Massachusetts College of Art, Sarah Lawrence College, NW Film Center, and Washington State University Vancouver.

Scott Murase is a second-generation artist and designer who learned the art and craft of place making while collaborating for more than a decade alongside Robert Murase, an internationally acclaimed landscape architect. He apprenticed under various stone craftsmen in Kyoto, Japan where he was born and raised. He was recently selected as the designer for Jimi Hendrix Park in Seattle. Current work includes the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center Plaza in Orlando and Devon Energy Headquarters Entry Plaza Sculpture in Oklahoma City. For Clark College, he is currently working on a site-specific stone sculpture installation as part of the Royce Pollard Japanese Friendship Garden, to be completed in summer 2011.

Avantika Bawa is an artist curator, and academic. She has an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India (1995). She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008) the Vermont Studio Center, VT (2009) and Milepost 5, Portland, OR (2010).

Bawa has exhibited nationally and internationally in exhibitions such as the South by East Biennial in Boca Raton, FL; solos at Saltworks gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Lalit Kala Academy in New Delhi, India; Portland State University, Portland, OR; and juried group shows at the Drawing Center and Smack Mellon, NY and SAVAC, Canada. Her Mumbai solo debut, Mathesis:dub,dub,dub, opened at Gallery Maskara this past November.

Storm Tharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon. He attended Cornell University and received a BFA from the College of Architecture, Art and Urban Planning. Upon graduation in 1992, he moved to Portland, Oregon where he presently resides. Tharp's work is representational – by both figurative and conceptual means and expressed through a variety of media. In the spring of 2010, Tharp was selected for The Whitney Biennial: 2010, in which new portrait works were created. His work has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Saatchi Gallery, The Portland Art Museum, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and Reed College.

One of the Northwest's most revered painters, James Lavadour lives on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Northeastern Oregon. His rich and complex paintings of the Oregon landscape combine loose, gestural strokes with bold colors and slashes of energy, exuding primal vigor and spiritual power. His works are included in the collections of the Bank of America (San Francisco, CA), the Microsoft Corporation (Redland, WA), the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington DC) to name but a few.

Wendy Red Star was born in Billings, Montana just outside of the Crow Indian reservation where she was raised.  She grew up in a multicultural family.  Her mother is of Irish descent, her father is a full-blood Crow Indian and her older sister is Korean. Wendy studied sculpture at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, and went on to earn her MFA in sculpture at UCLA.

Wendy Red Star's work explores the intersection between life on the Crow Indian reservation and the world outside of that environment.  She thinks of herself as a Crow Indian cultural archivist, speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.

Bonnie Fortune is an artist, writer, and educator based in Chicago. Her project-based work explores issues surrounding the environment, health, technology, and aging. She has exhibited in such diverse locals as Chicago, Mexico City, Aberdeen and Nashville, TN. Fortune will also be leading a workshop at Clark in addition to her lecture.

Karl Burkheimer is an Associate Professor and Department Head of the wood program at Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon. He has taught internationally in Qatar, Turkey, and Africa. These unique and rich experiences resonate strong influences over his current work in sculpture.

Alison Owen is the Clark Art Talks Artist- in- Residence for Spring Term 2010. She will be lecturing, leading workshops, and creating an installation for a solo exhibition in the Archer Gallery.

Alison Owen makes site-responsive paintings and installations that alter the environment in subtly invasive ways. She focuses on the peripheral, using delicate materials and colors to create works that reward sustained investigation and attention. Owen has exhibited extensively across the US and is participating in the id11 artist residency in Delft, the Netherlands in 2009.

Mike Bray is a video and installation artist from Chicago, Illinois. His work examines artifice within the construction of cinematic space. Over the past year,he has exhibited in the Guys Doing Guy Things at the Art Gym in Marylhurst, Oregon; Summer Show at Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, Oregon; and in Nashville Tennessee’s Fugitive Projects Traveling Video Show.

Aili Schmeltz is a Los Angeles based sculptor and installation artist who has exhibited widely nationally. She has recently been awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and residency fellowships at Takt Kunstprojektraum in Berlin as well as the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. Schmeltz will also be leading a workshop at Clark and her artwork will be in the Archer Gallery February 16th-March 15th.

Isaac Layman’s photographs are hyper-real, psychologically charged visions of the spaces and objects found in his Seattle home. His most recent solo show in 2008 garnered reviews in Art in America and Artweek. Layman was the Betty Bowen Award winner of the Seattle Art Museum in 2008. He is represented by Lawrimore Project. Layman’s artwork will be on display in the Archer Gallery January 12th-February 6th.

Ben received his BFA from Oregon State University and MFA from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He has exhibited recently in Portland, San Francisco, and Michigan and was included in the 2006 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. Ben currently teaches Sculpture and Design in Portland, Oregon.

Chas Bowie writes about contemporary art and photography. He is an art critic for the Oregonian and a contributor to numerous art and culture publications. Bowie currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art and his artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally.

Sentimental, humorous yet sorrowful, haunting, the paintings of Chris Knight read as fragments of larger stories sewn together in uncanny montages. Chris Knight is the recipient of the 2007 WK Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. He currently teaches drawing and painting at Oregon College of Art and Craft and Portland Community College.

Kartz Ucci’s installation art has been exhibited internationally at venues in Soeul, Limossal, Basel, Toronto and Montreal. Ucci is currently an Assistant Professor in Digital Arts at the University of Oregon in Eugene. TILT Export: kartz ucci runs September 21-October 30, 2009 at the PCC Rock Creek Helzer Gallery.