“Explosion Bed (Cancer),” felted wool blanket atop hoarded food. This 2018 piece is part of Claire and Tesar Freeman’s “Dirge” installation, on display at COCC till April 8.

Claire and Tesar Freeman are the Bay Area-based artists behind “Dirge,” a new installation on exhibit now at Central Oregon Community College’s Pence Gallery. The artists grew up in Oregon and met at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and previously lived in Bend.

Beginning this week with a 4:30 p.m. Wednesday reception, the show will remain on display through April 8.

According to Bill Cravis, associate professor of art at COCC, the two juried COCC’s Annual Spring Student Art Exhibition in 2020, and COCC has a tradition of inviting the jurors to exhibit their own work the following year. The COVID-19 pandemic, as you may have guessed, delayed that from happening till now.

“Claire and Tesar have a collaborative practice that seems to embrace, and showcase, their individual strengths,” Cravis told GO! “Working collaboratively enables them to tackle ambitious projects and installations that would be far more difficult if each chose to work alone.”

The Freemans took time out from their installation work to answer questions about “Dirge” via email, their preference for providing shared responses:

GO: How long have you two been collaborating?

Freemans: We met as students, and we’ve been collaborating more or less since then, approximately 15 years. We come up with our work through conversation, generally over long periods of time, and eventually just start chipping away at something when there feels like there is a semblance of agreement on what it would be, each just doing whatever they feel like doing on a piece until it works itself out or just gets set aside to never be finished.

GO: Can you elaborate on the way “Dirge,” as it says in the artists’ statement, “documents (your) personal grief as it overlaps, blurs and conflates with ongoing environmental and societal disaster”?

Freemans: “Dirge” is a collection of discrete objects and installations that perform together as a fragmented memoir, chronicling our experience of the deaths of two of our loved ones in close succession, and the ongoing process of grieving and how we’ve come to see all of our grief collectively. … For us, grief is really the experience of remembering what you’ve lost, why it was so profoundly special, and how such an immense thing that you only knew so fleetingly can be changed so utterly so expediently. Circumstantially, one of our loved ones died the same day the Eagle Creek Fire was devastating the Columbia River Gorge, and the grief we were feeling about losing this person just spilled out into the community where everyone we saw was grieving and worrying about a place that so many Oregonians have cherished over their lives. Ash was falling from the sky in Portland, and we knew nothing would ever be the same again. The work in the show has been made in parallel between these highly private and personal experiences and the broader experience of what has been happening in our communities and in the news.

GO: Can you describe what visitors will see?

Freemans: The show is sequenced chronologically and includes a series of discrete wall works that roughly borrow the forms of memorials, architectural drawings and landscapes. The floor sculptures are a series of beds that are made of needle felted blankets featuring a forest fire, a house succumbed to flood waters, and an unnamed massive explosion.

GO: What role can art play in times of crises and our current social and political moment?

Freemans: For us, experiencing and making art is a way of learning about our world and empathizing with the experiences of others. Everyone in this world is affected by an unending list of anthropogenic disasters that are all intertwined and yet each too complicated to fully understand. We look to artists to help us understand these instances that are otherwise impossible to comprehend. Experiencing and making art is a social mechanism for one to take time to think and feel about something. Not everyone will connect with every piece of art, but we’ve both had moments when a piece of art has fundamentally changed our understanding of the world. Even if we are attempting this and not accomplishing it, it still feels worth the effort.

GO! What do you hope people will take away from “Dirge”?

Freemans: We know that for us it was hard to talk about our experience of grieving and the loss we’ve experienced. Everyone experiences grief differently and it can be all encompassing and confusing, but the way it is commonly communicated in public, for us, feels constrained and cliched. It’s often mostly left unspoken. A “Dirge” is this attempt to speak the unspeakable.

What: “Dirge,” an exhibition by artists Tesar and Claire Freeman

When: Displays through April 8. The gallery is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Thursday, and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Fridays.

Where: Pence Pinckney Gallery, Central Oregon Community College, 2600 NW College Way, Bend

Cost: Free

Contact: wcravis@cocc.edu or 541-383-7513