Pure Abstraction: Brent Coughenour, Arianna Gazca, Matthew Nash
Tonight’s screening features three artists who abandon narrative and embrace pure visual expression. Let the layered textures and abstract forms wash over you! For Brent Coughenour’s part of the night, he will be doing live video manipulation.
Brent Coughenour is a media artist whose most recent work focuses on building audio-visual systems for live exploration of the boundaries of the perceptual system. He also makes work at the intersection of narrative form, documentary and essay. He has presented his work at a variety of festivals and venues throughout the U.S. and internationally, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads, Antimatter, Impakt, and Kasseler DokFest, and is distributed by Video Data Bank. He was a 2011 recipient of the Mary Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists.
Arianna Gazca is a multimedia artist that experiments with illustration, animation, and video. She makes work exploring emotional nuances and extremes through the lens of abstract imagery visualizing music and sound. She received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2016, winning the BFA Thesis Award from the Animated Arts department. Since then, she’s worked under Rose Bond in animating for the Turangalila Project for the Oregon Symphony in 2016, received the 2018 Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission and Oregon Community Foundation in partnership with NW Film Center, and has had her films screened in Punto y Raya Festival’s programs, the Melbourne International Animation Festival, PAMCUT’s Tomorrow Theater, and the University of Kentucky Singletary Center for the Arts 2025 Visual Music Festival, among others. She lives in Gresham and works in Portland.
Matthew Nash is a queer video artist, programmer and synth noise maker living in Portland. His work is a study of indeterminacy, audio visualization, algorithmic montage, landscapes and non-human life. One day, he hopes to make a movie his cat will enjoy.
