Converge 45 Opening Weekend
North View Mobile
Marcus Fischer: We Are the Confluence of Two Rivers Performance
Sunday, August 30 | 11:00 AM
Preparatory sketch for site specific performance, North View Gallery at PCC Sylvania, 2026. Photo by Marcus Fischer.
During the opening weekend of the 2026 Converge 45 Triennial, artist Marcus Fischer will debut the site specific performance We Are the Confluence of Two Rivers in a rock garden on the PCC Sylvania campus. In his work, Fischer creates, collects, and transforms sound into immersive, layered compositions that take the form of live performances and installations. The work connects two columns via looped audio tape, playing sounds connected to his personal history and creative community. Integrating specialized equipment from PCC’s endangered Music and Sonic Arts program, Fischer explores collective dreaming and the power of sound to connect people across distances.
This performance will inaugurate the North View Mobile, an impermanent version of the North View Gallery that will activate different locations on the Sylvania campus during a two year renovation of the gallery and the building in which it is located.
Performance preparation detail. Photo by Marcus Fisher.
About Here, To you, Now
Curated by Lumi Tan, the 2026 Converge 45 triennial Here, To you, Now centers on experiences that bring people together—here and now—while celebrating the meaningful temporary communities that form around art. Inspired by the writing of Portland literary icon Ursula K. Le Guin, the triennial features 28 artists and 17 new commissions that activate the city as a shared stage for discovery, dialogue, and connection.
Here, To you, Now opens across 16 venues citywide with a weekend of receptions, performances, screenings, and talks August 27–30, 2026. All exhibitions remain open through October 3, 2026, closing after that on a staggered schedule into mid December.
See the Converge 45 website for updates and more information.
Curatorial Statement
In her 1985 novel Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin created a rich fictional ethnography of the Kesh people living in a far future, whose way of living developed after they survived an ecological apocalypse in a distant past. In a further bend of time, a present-day anthropologist named Pandora has compiled a thorough guide to Kesh culture. She describes attributes of their language:
“The written word is there, for anyone, at any time. It is general and potentially eternal.
The spoken word is here, to you, now. It is ephemeral and irreproducible.”
Here she makes plain that impermanence is a condition of the present. Even if a spoken word is repeated, it cannot be the same. Its meaning arises in the specificity of who is being addressed, in the very moment, while we are together. Attentiveness is a shared responsibility. It brings us together as an audience and determines how a message may linger, dissipate, or repeat.
The artists of the 2026 Converge 45 triennial find value and resonance in the concept of impermanence, which drives their creation of new forms of communication and storytelling. In turn, we regard Converge 45’s audiences as temporary communities that come together to perceive these new forms, process their potential meanings, and consider how they are carried forth.
The phrase “temporary communities” typically denotes those formed after disasters. Refugee camps and climate disaster shelters predominate our preconceptions of these places but are amongst a multitude of environmental, political, and economic emergencies that uproot populations around the world. Considered transitional, these communities are meant to meet basic needs. Yet, temporary becomes permanent as much of the world never recovers from disruption or disaster. We understand that displacement, migration, and transience have become more common ways of existence as people only move from one unsustainable situation to the next. Within such impermanent spaces, ingenuity and generosity are employed for survival. What kinds of knowledge do these temporary communities hold, share, and inherit from site to site? How may they teach us to live in the constant instability of the present? How do contingencies affect communal investments in the future?
Through this exhibition, I propose that all mediums and approaches—from objects to performance—hold potential for expressions of impermanence. The artists of the Converge 45 citywide exhibition actively think about new methods of belonging and knowledge sharing, regeneration, inherited and embodied histories, and self-defined micro and macro communities. With them—together—we affirm the impermanence of knowledge, recognize ideas that are impossible to translate, accept the cyclical revelations of landscape, and adapt to the erosion and reshaping of our realities.
— Lumi Tan
Performance by Marcus Fisher at the Whitney Biennial, 2019. Photo by Filip Wolak.
About the Artist
Marcus Fisher (Filipino / Swiss, American) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon. He is a first-generation American artist that explores the possibilities of sound to convey ideas and information. Through the creation and transformation of sound, Fischer constructs immersive, layered compositions for live performances and exhibitions. Site-specific assemblages of exposed speakers, tape loops, and handmade objects are characteristic of his installations, often paired with melodies of restraint and tension. He contributed two sound works and two performances to the 2019 Whitney Biennial as the only artist from the Pacific Northwest region included in that installment. Fischer’s most recent solo exhibition “What Was Lost and What Remains” addressed themes of loss, generational trauma, and gun violence in the United States. Marcus has recorded and performed nationally and internationally as a solo artist and in collaborations with artists including Taylor Deupree, Eileen Myles, Aki Onda, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laura Ortman, Stephen Vitiello, Calexico and Raven Chacon. He has been honored as a Hallie Ford Fellow for the Visual Arts by The Ford Family Foundation and awarded residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Rauschenberg Residency, MacDowell, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and Headlands Center For the Arts. For more information visit the artist’s website.
