The Oregon Fringe Festival Announces This Year's Honorarium Recipients!
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| Each year, we award honoraria to artists whose creative work is boundary-breaking, unconventional, excites discussion, and explores different perspectives of a held position, principle, and/or belief. After very careful thought and consideration, this year’s selections include creative work from a very diverse group of artists. From a dramatic drawing performance, to tasteful folk music, a quasi-western psychedelic fantasy act, and a larger than life installation of a rabbit head, each recipient's creative work is so unique and different, providing an opportunity for distinct and exciting experiences. |
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Good Pain: The Art of Being Hurt, Michael Namkung
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Good Pain: The Art of Being Hurt incorporates poetry and storytelling, taking viewers on a journey through physical and emotional pain that culminates in a strenuous and dramatic performance of physical art-making that demonstrates the power of creative expression while revealing the most resilient parts of one's self.
Michael Namkung is an artist, poet, writer, meditation teacher, and father. He is also a multiple world champion athlete who has been inducted into the Ultimate Hall of Fame. Michael has received awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission, The Center for Cultural Innovation, the Tanne Foundation, and the James Rosenquist Artist Residency. He has exhibited and performed his creative work in galleries, museums, universities, and public spaces worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museu de Arte Contemporaneo Niteroi in Brazil, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and The Drawing Center in New York.
Good Pain: The Art of Being Hurt is generously sponsored by the Schneider Museum of Art. For more information about the museum, please click here. |
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Amplifier is a large-scale collaborative installation utilizing group manifestation as a tool to inspire our community to envision a bright future, open dialogue around what we can change in the present, and build faith in our mutual hopes for good. The installation will function as an inverted magnifying glass where we, the community, are the sun, and together our concentrated vision of the future will beam into the world around us.
Alex Brehmer is a mixed media installation artist based in Southern Oregon. Her work is large-scale and figurative, often featuring colorful creature designs and interactive elements that follow a larger narrative. Alex's sculptures have been an energetic focal point of many outlandish events across the Pacific Northwest. Her last installation, Mind Controlled Millie, was featured on Oregon Public Radio’s Think Out Loud in 2022, and was awarded the Oregon Fringe Festival’s Online Viewer's Choice Award. |
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Faraway Towns, Townsend's Solitaire
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Faraway Towns features a live acoustic set of original songs and covers with an emphasis on honest and raw vulnerability about melancholic loss, love, and renewal drenched in lush, tasteful, and technical arrangements. Placing a heavy focus on storytelling and stark honesty, Faraway Towns strives to create a safe space for viewers to feel and express emotions dealing with death, mental illness, and coming of age topics that otherwise are difficult to speak about.
Bobby Odle is a singer-songwriter and classically trained percussionist turned folk musician based in Seattle who performs under the moniker, Townsend’s Solitaire. While living in Ashland, faced with completing a Master’s Degree in Percussion Performance at Southern Oregon University in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, Townsend’s Solitaire turned his creative eye towards poetry and songwriting. Drawing heavy influence from artists like The Tallest Man on Earth, Adrianne Lenker, Bright Eyes, and Sufjan Stevens, Townsend’s Solitaire prioritizes and treasures genuineness above everything else. |
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Houndsville, Amanda Berlind
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Featuring country rock music, paper-mâché costumes, and a giant car shaped like a raccoon, Houndsville is a quasi-western psychedelic fantasy act about two friends who set out to save the blackened sprawl of the once great city of Houndsville. When a case of huckleberry fever begins to turn snouts blue across the valley of hounds, both set out to obtain an antidote, but encounter difficulties and distractions along the way as both taste the beginnings of romance and a life that could be for all of the citizens themselves.
Amanda Berlind is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland who is best known for her underground comic work, sound installations, and increasingly psychedelic fantasy art worlds. She received her Bachelors of Music in Music Theory and Composition from New York University and had the opportunity to study under Pulitzer-Prize winning Composer, Julia Wolfe. Amanda has received the Robert Hirsch Memorial Award, Etchings Fellowship Award in France, and the g.a.n.g. Scholarship at Gamesound Con. She also runs Magic Mango, a nonprofit that functions as an experimental art and sound performance space for artists living and working in Portland. |
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What the Funk?!, Mx. Pucks A'Plenty and
Rebecca Mmm Davis
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What the Funk!? is the story of the first inaugural What the Funk?! an All BIPOC Burlesque Festival that was held in Seattle, Washington in August of 2019. The film follows Founder and Producer, Kia Puckett, in this labor of love as they explore what it means to rewrite the rules of burlesque to build a supportive community of performers for both personal and professional development.
Mx. Pucks A’Plenty is #17 on the 21st Century Burlesque Magazine's Top 50 Most Influential Burlesque Industry Figures of 2021, as voted for by thousands of burlesque fans and peers worldwide. They are the Founder and Co-Producer of What the Funk?!, an All BIPOC Burlesque Festival. As a plus size queer femme of color and a vocal member of the kink scene, Mx. Pucks knows their politics, body, and sex are always potent and radical. In fact, they have an illustrious burlesque career as an international headliner at multiple festivals including the FIERCE! Queer Performing Arts Festival and Panama Burlesque Festival.
Rebecca Mmm Davis is the Co-Producer of What the Funk?!, an All BIPOC Burlesque Festival. She is also Sole Proprietor and Producer of her own production company, The Stay Up Late Show!, a theatrical producing body focused on stimulating seasoned artists to make new work while also exposing new artists to established audiences. Rebeca is also an accomplished stage and film actor and she has been emceeing and hosting events ever since middle school.
What the Funk!? is generously sponsored by the Oregon Center for the Arts and the Southern Oregon University Multicultural Resource Center. For more information about the Oregon Center for the Arts, please click here. For more information about the Southern Oregon University Multicultural Resource Center, please click here. |
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2023 Oregon Fringe Festival
Wednesday, April 26 - Sunday April 30
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