Purchased this spring by the Portland Art Museum for its permanent collection, Portland mixed-media artist Malia Jensen’s remarkable installation Nearer Nature: Worth Your Salt now plays continuously. Two synced screens have been divided into eight discrete perspectives displaying the same footage so slightly separated by starting time that the barely observed figures on one screen appear to echo on the next. For the piece, Jensen fashioned salt licks into pieces that form a human body (a foot, a pair of breasts, a pile of doughnuts representing a stomach), then placed those sculptures across the state and surveilled them with motion-sensitive trail cameras to capture Oregon fauna confronting the art.
