Portland no. 5: Heléna Dupre Thompson
Thanks for visiting our series “Portland” where we celebrate the local photography community in Portland, Oregon. I’ve really enjoyed living in such a vibrate photo arts city for 20 years, and feel it’s time to specifically promote our locals in this column.
FROM THE EDITOR
Ironically, I met this Portland artist online during the Click! Photo Festival online reviews this past fall. In hindsight, it seems silly that we were meeting online for a portfolio exploration instead of in-person since we both live in the same city, but such is the world we live in now. At any rate, I’m happy to have met Heléna Dupre Thompson and have since spent some quality time with her numerous bodies of work. As many of our readers already know, I’m a fan of abstract photography. But truthfully for many people, it’s one of the harder styles of photography to digest and place. So maybe for this series context is everything? Although I never considered myself a skater, I did skate growing up and had many friends who I’d consider real skaters (I spent more time on the BMX bike and track). Skate culture was always very influential on me and when I first saw these markings I immediately recognized the source material. Of course, it probably also helped that I identified with the series title. This work is not just about capturing texture and color, it represents a culture and a lifestyle. As Heléna mentions, it represents a sacred space. I love that she has elevated this meditative concept to another level with her photo series and has made it even more accessible to the non-skater viewer.
Important Links
Lenscratch Interview by Aline Smithson
One Eighty Compulsion
skid, scrape, glide, careen, and collide 🛹
A “One Eighty” is a term used in skateboarding where you spin on the skateboard one hundred and eighty degrees to face the opposite direction. As a young teenager, my after-school time was spent obsessively perfecting One Eighties, Three Sixties, Handstands, and Slalom Maneuvers, in the parking lots of nearby factories. Although I am no longer a skater, I’m still very drawn to skateboarding and the environment where skateboarding occurs. These places become a sacred space for physical expression, communal support, and in my eyes, a type of meditation.
While exploring skateboarding locations in Portland Oregon, I noticed how the surfaces of these environments become a canvas of mark-making. These canvases are the byproducts left behind as skateboarders skid, scrape, glide, careen and collide on concrete landscapes. They hold the history and essence of skateboarding and its culture.
In this five-year ongoing study, I’m redirecting my own passion for skateboarding. I’m examining it not from the deck of a skateboard but from the perspective beneath the wheels. One Eighty Compulsion focuses on minute surface areas, containing complex imagery, generated through the actions of skaters in their pursuit of adrenalin, satisfaction, and release. These discrete manifestations that I photograph, are artifacts of the tension, action, and passion that is infused in the paint-covered concrete when it meets with the impulses, energy, and force of the skaters.
The subjects of these photographs lack significance in the grand scale of their origin but take on a new life and meaning when fully exposed. This work intends to portray the essence of this culture and its history in an image that stands unbound from a practical understanding of its origin.
Heléna Dupre Thompson is a visual artist and musician based in Portland, OR. Her visual work challenges ideas of beauty through archeology, mark-making, history, and the detritus of contemporary civilization. It centers around the spectacles that manifest when human-made objects and materials transform as a result of time, action, and forces of nature. Sometimes apocalyptic and sometimes optimistic, her images reflect the mood or state of the environment they are taken from.
Heléna’s upbringing in an industrial area of Providence R.I., and career as a firefighter have had a great influence on her work and her way of seeing. She spent her early years mostly focusing on music and touring the United States and Europe.
In 2002, she founded Purest Spiritual Pigs; an umbrella project that involves collaboration in multiple genres: music, performance art, visual art, and time-based art. In 2014 she retired from the Minneapolis Fire Department to pursue art full time.
She was an original resident artist at AS220 (community art center) and has returned intermittently for projects and residencies. In 2016 she founded Surveillant, a multidisciplinary event that involved thirty artists and occupied three AS220 buildings. Surveillant is now an annual event for AS220 during the PVD Art Fest.
Her work has shown throughout the US and internationally.