Press Release

Who has it worse: Sisyphus or the boulder?
Do they clock out and make small talk like Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog?
a perfection in the unseen
like an unreleased pilot
a lost album
Something broke and never put it back together, died and came back wrong. Teased back into place as a new example of what can’t ever really be known. Set a few years back as Portland first smoldered and then burned under a pile of overflowing contradictions, but not a dramatization, more a period piece set too soon, with too small of a jump, a hint of the grand in creation through vulnerability. If pushed too far too fast a vulnerability imposed can lead to a sublimation, grappling for what should have been as it drifts off into the atmosphere, a strange perfection in what never will be. The lost work from Take Care splayed out in a haphazard crime scene photo, strewn, damaged and left primarily to the imagination, gives way for memorializing and eventually to Aftercare. Enjoy it for what it could have been and for what it is now, a jumping off point for a new body, an occasion to mend.
—Chase Allgood, 2023

There’s no rush. They have aftercare.
overheard at the grocery store

Helen’s Costume is pleased to present Aftercare: New painting by Taravat Talepasand and Terry Powers. For Helen’s previous exhibitions HC curator and director Steve Brown has paired artists from different states/countries to channel a fresh current of art through Portland. Usually artists who have never met. For this exhibition the social seeps into this sanctuary for the plastic arts. Talepasnd and Powers have known each other for years and have exhibited together before. Aftercare is the first time they have each made work with the intention of it interacting with each other, going so far as to create collaborative canvases.

This is Taravat’s first series of new paintings made since her 2022 exhibition Take Care was canceled due to a break-in vandalism party where work was destroyed. She continues her fierce commitment to the Woman Life Freedom -
زن زندگی آزادی movement with a series of new sticker paintings that reference album covers and a banned Iranian feminist magazine. The stickers are comfort shields, bandaids even, honoring a personal yet relatable self.

Terry Powers’ observational paintings pull the viewer away from their screen to a meditative state, an awareness of light and air. Like Talepasnd he loses himself in the tradition of painting and channels the eternal. These paintings were started at his home in Utah and driven to Oregon to be finished in dialogue with Talepasand.

The stickers are real, The light is real. Everything is painting.

—Petra Poffenberger, 2023

Aftercare is broght to you in part by the generous support of Converge 45.