Featuring Works by Jamin London Tinsel, JD Perkin, and Mike Vos
Thursday - Sunday | July 30th - August 29th
Jamin London Tinsel is a studio artist and high school art educator based in Portland, Oregon. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art Education with an emphasis in Sculpture from Colorado State University in 1999 and received an MFA in Ceramics from University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2007.
Jamin was the recipient of the 2025 Oregon Art Educator of the Year Award and is an active member of the Oregon Art Educators Association. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including Oxbow Center for the Arts in Michigan, Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, TICA Summer Institute at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana, Clay Kingdom in Berlin, Germany and an upcoming residency at Sou'wester Lodge in Seaview, Washington.
Her work has been exhibited at Maryhill Museum of Art and Southern Oregon University, as well as in galleries throughout Portland, Philadelphia, New York, and Berlin. Most recently, she presented a solo exhibition in 2025 at North View Gallery at PCC Sylvania in Portland, Oregon.
Home/Practice
At this point in my life, I’m thinking about the house as a metaphor for self. Like a person, a house accumulates evidence of experience: signs of care, neglect, aspiration, failure, comfort, and change. It shelters what is private and reveals aspects of who we are. I am interested in the tension between the interior life within us and the version of ourselves that becomes visible through spaces we inhabit.
My understanding of home was shaped by growing up between two very different households. As a child, I noticed the small details. My mother's towels were often worn and musty, while my father's were fluffy and carefully folded. Those towels became an early symbol of adulthood and the kind of life I imagined for myself. As an adult, I find myself reflecting on how my own home functions as a portrait of self. What do its imperfections reveal? What assumptions do others make when they encounter the evidence of family life: dirty dishes, unfolded laundry, or well-worn objects?
These questions have become central to my studio practice. Having worked in clay for decades, I continue to discover its history in the domestic sphere. I make art with it, but I also eat off of it. In this body of work, I use clay to construct forms associated with home—tables, towels, ladders, bubbles, nests, and fragments of architecture. These objects tell the story of the house, the self. They reveal the view from the inside.
Mike Vos is a photographer, visual artist and musician from Portland, OR.
Vos uses traditional and experimental 4x5 film techniques, multi-channel video, field recordings and instrumentation to craft complex narratives that advocate for the preservation of wild spaces. Vos interprets landscapes into ethereal and otherworldly dreamscapes to capture the awe and wonder that exists in nature.
His work is part of the permanent collections for the city of Portland, Oregon and Listasafn Árnesinga (LÁ Art Museum) in Hveragerði, Iceland. He has received support from grants through the Regional Arts & Culture Council, The Ford Family Foundation, The Puffin Foundation and the Oregon Arts Commission.
In 2024 Vos released his debut monograph ‘Somewhere in Another Place’ through Buckman Publishing. In 2025 & 2026 he was awarded a photography fellowship with the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology and helped develop a teaching program for over 5,000 K-8 students in rural areas across Oregon state.
Mike Vos is currently represented by LAURA VINCENT DESIGN & GALLERY in Portland, OR and El Palmar Galería in Mexico City, MX.
On the Brink of a Strange World
“I’m not a materialist or a deist or anything else. I’m a man who one day opened the window and discovered this crucial thing: Nature exists. I saw that the trees, the rivers and the stones are things that truly exist…”
- Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), 1914
These 4x5 film photographs were made over the course of several years all over the U.S. and Canada, and developed with the help of many artist residencies, individual artists and strangers I met in my travels. All of these images were created using in-camera exposures, meaning everything was done within the camera and nothing was altered or combined using the help of computers or any kind of post-process. This is an important part of my work, as it helps me to develop a deeper connection to the landscape and it forces me to work in tandem with my manual camera to capture the raw impression of a place. During the 3 years I created this series I visited some of the most isolated areas of North America, which was an exciting and sometimes dangerous experience, though I am grateful for every part of it.
These photos were made during a time when I was traveling and exploring the relationship between the natural and human-made landscapes, trying to find both the coalescence and conflict that is inherent therein. Though each image is part of a larger series, I wanted each of them to contain their own story as well, which is both independent yet connected to the larger whole. This is similar to the way I see our human relationship being connected to nature, tacitly but from a mental and physical distance.
Literature is a big part of my creative process, as it helps me to create visual narratives that are more relatable to our human experience. It is a great challenge to create ecocentric work that we as humans can connect with, as you may notice that there are no humans present in any of my works. Many of the ideas for my photographic work stem from publications within the movements of Magical Realism and Surrealism, though I now think of my images more like what Cuban author Alejo Carpentier referred to as Lo Real Maravilloso, or the ‘Marvelous Real’. Lo Real Maravilloso is something that is rooted in the commonplace and typical, but simultaneously unusual and bizarre. In the years I spent traveling to create this body of work I have witnessed and experienced things that are simultaneously ordinary, unusual and even border on the supernatural. I want to emphasize that literature has not encouraged me to explore an imagined world, it instead has helped me to explore the idea that there are other layers within or alongside our own.
As I create both exposures in-camera, there’s a chaotic element to what I create. I can guide various elements together as a composer in tandem with my camera, but there are always unpredictable phenomena. As this series evolved I began to think of this as a sort of cooperation with the environments I photograph. It took a patient and intentional interaction with the land even before I set up my camera, and occasionally I would opt to never hit the shutter, leaving that image and impression existing only in my head.
There are people who find solace in the profound silence of vast and open spaces, but there are many for which nature is merely an abstraction, something they struggle to relate to. My goal as an artist is to help facilitate a deeper, personal connection to wildlife for you, the viewer. I desire to capture not only the visual experience of seeing these places firsthand, but the emotional impact as well. These fragile, tenuous worlds are real places that I have seen, and places that my camera captured. They exist in our world and alongside us, and what that means for the present and future is up to you as an individual to consider.
