Today I finished a mixed media piece for the upcoming First Thursday show ‘Made Resilient’. The show is a benefit for Architecture for Humanity which is an awesome organization focused on sustainable design that is participatory, community oriented and beneficial and empowering to various communities and populations. They specialize in areas of disaster reconstruction, active spaces, community resilience and educational spaces. The theme of the show is a visual artistic exploration of what makes the city of Portland resilient in the face of change, after a disaster, as a community or collection of communities and neighborhoods. Resiliency is a systems term. If a system or community is resilient it has the ability to recover readily from disturbance, illness, disaster, adversity. It has the ability to return to it’s original form. In my piece I saw the incredible creativity, innovation, sharing of ideas and information, collaboration and knowledge as being the keys to Portland’s resiliency. I represented this with lines of code, human brain axons and dendrites, old maps of Portland streets, a spiraling atom and overall design and visual elements indicating flow, exchange and movement of information and ideas. For more information on this show which will be up at Gallery 135 for this month and week’s First Thursday art walk and for two weeks after that please see the upcoming shows link on my website or click here: http://lotussoulstudios.com/upcoming/ 