The Open Space Residency is designed for emerging artists seeking a nurturing environment to explore and experiment with their new work. It serves as a dedicated space where artists can physically engage and test their creative endeavors. Shaking the Tree provides artists with an open platform to share the fruits of their labor and showcase the work they have produced. Given the existing imbalances within our industry, we will prioritize applications from BIPOC art-makers, while also encouraging everyone to apply.

Our Visual Arts Residency is on open call to visual artists, photographers, film makers, fashion designers, graphic artists, textile artists, and more. Through this residency, artists’ work will be featured in our tiny (98 sq ft) Inside the Box gallery for a duration of 5 weeks. Artists are encouraged to think creatively about how they will display their work within the confines of the space. 
​The Residency has a rolling deadline.

application form

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2026 Visual Arts Residents:

​Jennifer Viviano

​Jennifer Viviano is an artist, designer, thinker, and mother. She is a multi-discipline visual artist
integrating thinking, reading, and contemplation with making. Her practice, which she thinks of
as drawing, utilizes both surface and form, paper and porcelain, image and object. Her affinity
for objects as well as the social and conceptual relationships that are built around them, drive
her interest not only in art but in the ecosystem of cultural life. These braided systems allow
her to approach her greatest questions: Where do we come from? Who—and what—are we
related to? How do we construct a self? How do we think about each other, about thinking,
about consciousness? How do we live with the world? Her work is abstract and idea-based, and
she tends to develop a concept with multiple pieces that could stand alone but are often
conceived of as a family of works.
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In addition to her studio practice, she is the managing director of X Gallery, an art services firm
born from a dedication to keeping art and its story in circulation, recognizing that objects have
a life cycle that proceed from an artist’s studio and might make many journeys from there. The
basis of her studio practice is amassing collections, making multiples, and addressing what we
can’t see—is a perfect metaphor for X Gallery, where she is responsible for what she calls “the
secret life of art.” This work of preservation and storytelling is the humble work of storage and
documentation, the often intensely personal work of engaging with artists and their families,
and the complex interdisciplinary work of displaying, donating, selling, and managing artwork
to ensure that the legacy of an artist is carried forward. Prior to this role, she operated a
graphic design studio for many years, leaving that to care for her child, then back to school to
develop a studio practice. Her undergraduate degree is from Willamette University, and she
holds an MFA in Applied Craft and Design from PNCA and OCAC.

Re-Membering

I had a dream about a memory, and it changed me. The truth or fact of the memory did
not change but how I live now changed. It makes me wonder about what we are
remembering, about how we remember.
Like how the unbidden figment of a dream will insert itself into one’s day with wonder
and unresolve. What are we bearing in mind? Or imagining? Is a dream a device for
remembering? Are there tools for memory—objects (mementos) we can use to cue the
body to return us to a place or time or thought—to warn against forgetting?
What does it mean to remember—to re-member. It might be ritual. An act of reverence
meant to both observe (commemorate) and to alter us. To come together. To collect
(recollect) parts and integrate them into some sort of whole.
To think of memory as both reality and imagination might nudge us closer to the layers
and iterations of impression (palimpsest) that we carry. Memory like time is not an
arrow. Not fixed and not in the past. Recursive. Its meaning—the meaning we make of
it, variable. It could mean to see something that has past, again, in a different way. We
may imagine something new from it. It might change how we live now.
​~Jennifer Viviano

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2025 Visual Arts Residents:

​Tim Wagoner

Honor Thy Mothers

Honor Thy Mothers pays homage to the women before us who have carried handcraft, passing stories along through stitches. The pieces explore the tension and interaction between handmade and manmade, natural fiber that will eventually decompose and permanent plastics that remain forever. They live in simple chaos and complex order. In these accelerated time have we lost the appreciation for the slowness in creating? 

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2024 Visual Arts Residents:

​Clifton Holznagel

So Below

So Below is an experiment in analog intelligence. They are an advocate for truth, an oracle of the collective. A dreamer striving to understand the unknowable. They question what is possible, what They trust in, what They have experienced and where Their faith lies. 

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Briana Ratterman Trevithick

Trapped

This collage series explores the intricate relationship between humanity, femininity, and nature, examining the profound imbalance within our species. Digging into themes of the Madonna/Whore complex, race, wildness, entrapment and control, these pieces respond to the ever-pervasive Eurocentric male gaze and underscore the interconnectedness of patriarchal oppression, both in its dichotomous and reductionist view of women and its disregard for nature.

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Joshua (Josh) Sin

Joshua (Josh) Sin (he/him) is a Canadian artist and designer living in Portland, Oregon. He centers his practice around design fiction and world-building using discarded textiles and character design to explore middle culture. The in-between identity in being physically neither “East” nor “West, the bridge between past, and future, and the craft of deconstruction and reconstruction.

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