Body on Me
Cameron Clayborn, .Compost Cooperative, and Vishal Jugdeo
On View: October 18 – December 20, 2025
Gallery Hours: Thursdays 5:00 – 8:00 PM, Fridays 12:00 – 6:00 PM, Saturdays 12:00 – 4:00 PM*
* The gallery will be closed on Thursday, Nov. 27
* On Thursday, Dec. 4, the Precipice Fund Award Ceremony will take place in PICA's Annex during gallery hours
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 18, 4:00 – 6:00 PM with a performance by Cameron Clayborn at 5:30 PM
Vishal Jugdeo, Body on Me, installation view, 2025 | Photo: Mario Gallucci
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is thrilled to announce Body on Me, a group exhibition with work by Cameron Clayborn, .Compost Cooperative (Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton), and Vishal Jugdeo, curated by Kristan Kennedy, PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art. Taking the human body and its many negotiations as its conceptual starting point, the presentation features media-based works that cross photography, installation, video, and video game technology and design. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigate digitally-mediated imagery of the natural world and human form in conversation with technological interventions. Body on Me will open with a performance by Clayborn on October 18, and will remain on view through December 20, 2025.
To live inside a body is to enter into paradox. The body is a shell and a soul, an archive and an accident. It is where we encounter the world and where the world marks us. At times it is obedient, carrying us without question; at other times it turns, betrays, collapses. Illness enters like a storm, reshaping what it means to be alive. Healing is unruly, immeasurable—found in gestures of care, in collective endurance, in practices that exceed medicine’s reach.
The body is never singular. To live inside of it is to live in transformation. At its smallest scale, it is already a collaboration: life nested inside life, mitochondria passed down through maternal lines, traces of ancient symbiosis living within us still. At its largest, the body is porous, extending into screens and machines, avatars and games, land and love. Here, embodiment takes on other registers—glitching, multiplying, improvising new ways of being, new forms and new freedoms.
As always, there is the question of value: who is protected, who is exposed, whose lives are deemed worthy of mourning. The body becomes a site of politics as much as flesh, carrying histories of precarity and survival, shaping what it means to live in a world that does not fully value humanity.
Body on Me gathers these tensions—the intimacy and estrangement of embodiment, the grief of what the body can no longer hold, the wonder of what it still makes possible. The works within move between the cellular and the cosmic, the personal and the systemic, asking what it means to inhabit a body that is fragile, inventive, and unending.
To live inside a body is to dwell inside mystery—an inheritance, a burden, a gift, a question. A dream of being otherwise.