Play like a child, create like a child, dream like a child.
Founder and Curator
Limei Lai
Painter, Muralist, Illustrator, Curator, Ceramicist
“Life is a tapestry, under the readable composition,
the organized colors, shapes, and texture, a tangled,
frayed, knotted forest of seemingly random threads
that tells you how to appreciate.”
Limei Lai
Portland-based artist, curator Limei Lai enjoys working with paint, fabric and clay. Her themes depict the fear of change, weakness and aging through generational stories. Her roots as Chinese, her ten years of work traveling and backpacking, and her current experience as an immigrant/single mom are combined in her art. Facing changes, fears and accepting vulnerabilities, differences can build stronger selves and a brighter world. She believes that art not only evokes issues and problems in society, it celebrates the beauty of this world in its entirety too.
Limei is the founder and curator of Playground Gallery and the vice-president of Oregon Chinese Artist Association. Her works were shown in Local 14 Art Show, Red E Cafe Gallery, Paragon Gallery, 511 Gallery, The Arts Center at Corvallis, Old Town Association Gallery, and Playground Gallery. Her murals are in north Portland and Chinatown.
Treasurer / Installation Manager
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Marty Trammell
Ceramicist
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"...much like music, pottery enabled me to engage creatively with a rich folk tradition while also giving me the opportunity for constant learning and growth in my technical knowledge and skill. I was also attracted to its potential for fostering a closer relationship between people and the food they eat. "
Designer Dept Chair
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Perry Chandler
Painter and Markmaker
His work for the past few years has revolved around his experience with brain trauma suffered in July 2019.
This experience has driven Perry to create work that explores the emotional complexities of Brain Fog, a symptom of that traumatic brain injury that he continued to recover from over the next few years.
These ideas have led Perry to create works where the color white is suggestive of a cloud that drifts through each scene as a major character throughout much of his work during this time most specifically on his paintings made on large raw canvases stretched directly to the wall creating an interaction between the canvas and the space the work exists in.
These clouds distort, enhance and disguise emotional and metaphorical elements within the surface.
The tropes used in his paintings tell a story of feeling unfocused and separate from reality. His use of color and the levels of noise are tied to emotional states of serotonin or a sinking feeling of sadness.
These marks are placed within a mental landscape seeking to explore images that contain elements that feel fleeting and temporary while the surface commands the attention of the room.
Editor - Tyler Young
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Tyler Young is a Portland based artist that received his BA in ceramics and jewelry and a minor in philosophy from San Diego State University in 2021. Tyler’s philosophical interest has led him to explore ideas related to individual existence and identity while also questioning material hierarchy in art. Specifically, his work questions the manner in which everyday objects reflect one’s individual identity. Likewise, his work takes an interdisciplinary approach combining varying craft mediums in order to confront the complexity in understanding one’s individual identity.
Editor - Julianna Paradis
Julianna Paradisi finds inspiration where science, humanity, and art converge, creating compelling images. She is an award winning artist with a focus on painting and writing. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries throughout the Pacific Northwest, and published nationally. She is an alumni of Pacific Northwest College of Art with a Certificate in Fine Arts.
Her paintings explore life from a narrative perspective, blurring the lines between abstraction and representation. She’s interested in the psychological landscape and how narratives impact individual and community interactions with the sentient world. In this way, the paintings hold space for conversation, and diverse thought.
Justin Tuttle
Justin works as an architectural designer and collage/sculpture artist, his passion can be found at the confluence of human psychology, design, art, clean-tech, and architecture.