Today we’re looking back at our Fan Mail series to reconsider the work of artist Wendy Given, who “uses the component parts of a visual language used for telling folkloric tales that are, as the artist says, ‘inspired by narrative literature from all over the world.’” Given recently had work in an exhibition at the Autzen Gallery at Portland State University, and in April 2016[…..]

For today’s installment of our Best of 2014 series, we have a selection from executive director Patricia Maloney, who writes, “Reading A. Will Brown’s twice-monthly ‘Fan Mail’ series over the past year, one gets a distinct sense of how much fun he has in making his selections and thinking about the work. The opening sentences are often the giveaway: an introduction to the artist by way[…..]

Mythos: fantasy, fiction, legend, saga, parable, fable, narrative, invention, fabrication, yarn. The conceptual distance between myth and the concrete manifestations of mythology is a potentially endless—yet meaningfully orderable—list of synonyms. But with each word the gap shrinks, as mental images of processes and then objects emerge, even if just as puns. Wendy Given is bridging the gaps between the abstract idea of a mythos and[…..]