Art Installation Docent - Sculpture, Immersive Sound, and Performance

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Seeking Volunteers Saturdays and Sundays, 3pm-7pm, from 8/20 through September 25th.

Volunteers will support AUAXART's "To the River" art installation, a project of the Charitable Partnership Fund. They will serve as hosts for visitors enjoying the visual and sound sculpture, pass out printed guides, and provide information about the art piece. On select evenings, the piece will be home to music and performing arts events.

To The River is a summer-long sculpture, sound art and music residency at Portland’s Zidell Yards. Created by a gathering of artists under the canopy of AUXART, the site opens to the public for six weeks on August 20th. The project site runs for 300 yards from the base of the Oregon Health Sciences University tram to the Willamette River across a former barge-building platform. The sculptural architecture is a matrix of waveforms constructed from long mill-salvaged wood ribs banded together with cast-off bicycle innertubes through which audiences journey to the river. The immersive walk is accompanied by wind activated sound production and culminates in a sculptural sound theater on the promontory overlooking the river. That elliptical seating setting is constructed from salvaged wood that is activated electronically to produce 16 channels of designed sound. The sculptural setting will play host to musical performance works throughout the residency’s public run.

The residency is focused on the way that the Willamette River and rivers in general connect us across geographies, time and ideas about difference through shared networks of sustenance. The work is inspired by the many devotional ways that people go to the river to meet, to cleanse their souls or to start anew. t sits in the acknowledgement that the site, which is now part of a superfund remediation after decades of warship breaking, was once an aquatic part of the river itself.