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Photo by Robert Krueger

Apartment 320 : a photographic reconstruction
a temporary installation
August 29 – September 30, 2005

The Regional Arts & Culture Council presents the installation, Apartment 320: a photographic reconstruction, by the team of Paul, Daniel and Kathryn Kramer Waters and Rick Keating, in the Portland Building lobby installation Space, August 29-September 30, 2005. The Portland Building, located at 1120 SW 5 th Avenue, is open to the public from 7am - 6pm, Monday through Friday.

Did you ever think you would get a chance to walk into the living room of a third floor unit from the recently demolished Civic Apartments on 19 th and West Burnside? That’s exactly what you’ll be able to do in the lobby of the Portland Building during the month of September. The team of Paul Waters, Kathryn Kramer Waters, Daniel Kramer Waters and Rick Keating has depicted a full size photo replica of one room at the Civic Apartments.

The Civic was a wedge-shaped, low income apartment block built in 1945. It offered housing to thousands of Portland’s poorest citizens, providing low-rent shelter to immigrants, the elderly, the working poor, and single parents with small children. It was a humble, homely structure, a simple facade without detail save gray awnings marking undistinguished entries.

For many years, Paul Waters’ interest grew in the Civic Apartments as he walked daily past the building on his way to work at SRG Architects, Inc. Over time, his interest in the structure intensified. Upon learning of the building’s impending destruction, he was determined to document it from both architectural and social viewpoints.

He and his team began recording the place in a series of digital collages. By customizing a tripod, they developed a method for photographing an apartment one square at a time. They lay grids across floors as archeologists do – dividing them into sections by laying crisscrossing lines of string from one end of a room to the other. The squares were then “pasted back together” to recreate a room.

Paul Waters is a senior associate with SRG Partnership, Inc. His projects include the University of California Davis Medical Center, the University of Oregon Museum of Art and the Agricultural Biotechnology Facility at the University of Idaho. Kathryn Kramer Waters earned her MFA in Design and Playwriting at the California Institute of the Arts and is a freelance artist, writer and design consultant. She has taught various art classes in the Portland Public Schools since 1991. Exhibitions of her prints include Print Arts Northwest, Waterstone Gallery, Northwest Regional Print Biennial, Blackfish Gallery and Graystone Gallery. Rick Keating has a B.A. in photography from Montana State University. He is the owner of RK Productions and specializes in architecture photography. He has exhibited his work at the A.I.A. Gallery, Boise State University, and numerous venues in Montana. His photos have been published in Metropolis, Oregon Home, Architecture, Portrait of Portland and Big Sky Journal, among others. Daniel Kramer Waters is currently a sophomore at Lincoln High School where he is a member of the Speech and Debate Club. He also has taken classes in improvisation and video activism.

Background

Through vision, leadership and service the Regional Arts & Culture Council works to integrate arts and culture in all aspects of community life.
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