"My images aim to be twenty-first century relics with roots in the vernacular past. In both content and execution, their purpose is to chronicle the imperfections and impermanence of daily existence, affirming that at its core, life is disorderly, unpredictable, absurd, sometimes disturbing, yet always interesting, and to paraphrase Gabriel Garcia Márquez, also the best thing ever invented—even as we seem to frequently do our very best to test the limits of this idea to the point of extinction.” When artist Peter B. Leighton was nine years old, he saw the science fiction film The Amazing Colossal Man for the first time. It is an unforgettable Cold War parable, featuring a US soldier who is accidentally exposed to nuclear radiation and subsequently morphs into a 60-foot madman before being destroyed by the US Military. Leighton notes this film’s unmistakeable effect on shaping his worldview of embracing the humor and absurdity of life in spite of its tragedies. This outlook also permeates the artist’s inventive series, Man Lives Through Plutonium Blast. For this body of work, Leighton digitally pieces together analog snapshots to create imaginary vernacular photographs of the twentieth century experience, complete with “monochrome men fallen from grace, ambivalent women standing on the cusp of empowerment and reinvention, and feral, free-range children born to run, all with the enduring threat of an end of the world as they know it circling high overhead.” Peter B. Leighton is an artist currently living and working in Tumbaco, Ecuador. In the 1970s he served as an assistant to photographer Tom Wright, who was a key figure in documenting the emerging rock scenes in 1960s Great Britain and the United States. Since the 1980s, Leighton has focused his attention on digital imaging as a viable process for fine printmaking, while also serving as a corporate e-strategist for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers, and operating a fine arts digital imprint, Penny Prints Press, in Austin, Texas. This is Leighton's first exhibition of Man Lives Through Plutonium Blast. First Thursday Opening Reception April 7, 6:00–9:00 PM Artist Talks: Peter B. Leighton: Thursday, April 7, 5:00 PM Amanda Harman: Saturday, April 9, 3:00 PM

Portland Women in Art Lecture Series presents Ellen Lesperance on, "The Strong, Star-Bright Companions." The lecture is to take place at the Moriarty Arts Humanities Building on the Portland Community College Cascade Campus. Ellen Lesperance’s work pays tribute to direct action campaigns and feminist activism. Lesperance's paintings are based on knit garments worn by women involved in protests, sit-ins, demonstrations, and civil disobedience. She meticulously paints the patterns of these “knitted messages,” that function much like other forms of creative direct action such as picket signs, banners, street theater, body painting, and costumes. Pattern, shape, and symmetry emerge in the artist's highly detailed compositions that merge abstraction with figuration. By translating and transforming such source material into something abstract and universal, the works speak to participation and protest as being not radical, but essential and personal. They also create a political lineage, capturing the potential of past events to inspire future action through translated and coded symbols. Ellen Lesperance’s work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the Seattle Art Museum, the Drawing Center, New York, and in the People's Biennial (traveling). Lesperance’s work is represented in the following public collections: the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Art and Design; the Portland Art Museum; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and at the Kadist Art Foundation. Lesperance has been honored with the northwest regional Betty Bowen Award, a Ford Family Fellowship in the Arts, the 2015 Individual Artists RACC Fellowship, an Art Matters! Grant, a Robert Rauschenberg "Artist-as-Activist" Travel Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She received her MFA from Rutgers University in 1999 and has received residencies at the Skowhegan School; the MacDowell Colony; the Djerassi Foundation; and the Atlantic Center. Her work has been featured in AnOther, Art in America, ArtUS, Art Monthly, Cura, GARAGE, Guernica, Intercourse, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Oregonian, and Tema Celeste.