Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Shana Palmer | Full Circle

Posted by Christine Weber

• Exhibition Dates: September 15 – October 23, 2025
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, Saturdays by appointment
• First Thursday Performances featuring Wild Strawberries, Francisco Botello, Stars without Make Up and Shana Palmer performing with The Tenses: Thursday, October 2, 4:00 – 8:00 p.m.
• Closing Reception with performances from Music and Sonic Arts students: Thursday, October 23, 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Full Circle: The Harmonic Sum of Current and Light, is an immersive environment of sculpture, sound and light by the artist Shana Palmer. The exhibition foregrounds the importance of interconnection and the impact we have on each other and our world. Circular forms are evoked throughout the gallery, via the multi-channel sound encircling the space, a harmonic sundial and a series of code-drawn radiating spheres that evoke portals or apertures. The work in Full Circle also resonates with the lineage of women who have used voids or tunnels as sculptural language. The artist is informed by Barbara Hepworth, who described holes as a way of liberating mass into connection and Nancy Holt, whose Sun Tunnels frame constellations and serve as intermediaries between human presence and the cosmos.

Throughout this installation, Palmer employs the cosmos as material for poetic storytelling. Inspired by the Pythagorean idea that celestial bodies create music when they move, the artist immerses visitors in a composition written by the sky itself, via a dial that reads the sun’s shifting light and translates that light into data and sound. Many works in the show evoke resonance between the material and the dematerial. Further, the influence of variable light on sounds in the gallery underscores the idea that everything is interconnected. 

In Full Circle, Palmer invites embodied engagement, translating the cosmic to an intimate human scale. Touch-capacitive bronze sculptures, modeled after the hands of the Venus de’Medici, activate an evolving sonic drone and audio-reactive visuals when visitors touch them. For the artist, this activation further evokes our interdependence. The art relies on an intimate act of sonic co-creation. 

The works in this exhibition are hybrid gestures, part poetry and part science. They give auditory and visual form to the often hidden relationships, orbits and vibrations in our environment. The gallery becomes a contemplative space rewarding patience with microshifts in color and tone. Full Circle is not a closed circle but an ever-evolving spiral. The artist hopes that in our polarized world, this opportunity to touch, feel, see and listen becomes an invitation to hold each other in solidarity. In Palmer’s work, the void is not empty, but a space filled with light and potential. 

This exhibition was made possible by generous support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. 

Additionally, this work could not have been realized without the equipment, knowledge, ingenuity and collaborative community of the Music and Sonic Arts Program at PCC. This visionary program is marked for closure in the next two years, making this exhibition an important opportunity to better understand the powerful experimentation and collaborations between staff, faculty and students that the program fosters. 

 

All events are free and open to the public. 

 

 

About the Artist:

Shana Palmer is a multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges sculpture, sound, and interactive media to create immersive environments that invite participation and attunement. Drawing from her background in painting, performance, and sonic arts, she combines hand-built forms with creative coding, analog video, and music synthesis to explore cycles of connection and repair.

Her installations often incorporate tactile and responsive elements, such as touch-capacitive or light-reactive sensors that transform light and sound into generative visuals shaped by the presence and actions of viewers. Spiritualism is central to her process and visual language, rooted in a deep engagement with nature. Through close encounters with plants, rocks, minerals, and bodies of water, she nourishes this connection, and the resulting works take on an animistic quality, presenting the body, materials, and even code as forms of “sacred” terrain.

Palmer’s practice examines how sensory experience can serve as both a site of beauty and a tool for reckoning with personal and collective histories. Her experimentation moves fluidly between collaboration and computational feedback, shifting from analog to digital, from 3D printing to ancient practices like bronze casting. Recent works integrate sculptural objects with sound-responsive systems, transforming spaces into living compositions of light, resonance, and shadow.

Her projects have been presented in regional and international exhibitions, often in partnership with musicians, coders, makerspaces, and craftspeople. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she also supports the Music and Sonic Arts program at Portland Community College.