Crossings

Crossings

Workshop Description

We are never at points of departure or arrival—we’re always in motion, making crossings. This class will explore the limitations of both visual and textual communications by tracing crossings between the two. The class will be generative and might (not) take you through the facilitators’ various preoccupations of pockets, creative reading, sketchbooks, and tree boughs. As we will be working with found language and sketch books, feel free to bring in your favorite texts and your sketch books, but it’s okay if you don’t! 

Instructors: Elizabeth Arzani & Jay Ponteri

Elizabeth Arzani is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Portland, Oregon. As a collector of sorts, her work assembles printmaking and ceramics with language and found ephemera. Guided by paradoxes and the homonyms whole and hole, fragments emphasize absence as presence, locating the unknown with site specificity. Arzani has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has been granted residencies at Kulturschapp; Walferdange, Luxembourg and New Harmony Clay Project; New Harmony, IN. Arzani has been the recipient of two Career Opportunity Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission with support from the Ford Family Foundation as well as two project grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. She has been a member of Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR) since 2023. Arzani holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. www.elizabetharzani.com |  Instagram: @elarzani | Email: elizabetharzani@gmail.com 

Jay Ponteri directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at PNCA. Somone Told Me was published by Widow+Orphan House in fall 2020. His memoir, Wedlocked, was published by Hawthorne Books, April 2013, and it received the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. His chapbook of short prose, Darkmouth Strikes Again, was published by Future Tense Books, summer 2014. His essay “Listen to this” was mentioned as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2010, and more recently, “On Navel Gazing” was mentioned as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2015. He has published prose in Knee-Jerk, Essay Daily, Ghost Proposal, Seattle Review, Salamander, and Forklift, Ohio, among others.

* Masks are required for all in-person events and workshops