September: Orange
September: Orange
Artist: Julia Oldham
When: January 5 to 24, 2026
Where: Ray Theater
Viewing Hours:
- Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Closed Sundays
- During scheduled events at PRAx
Parking: Don't have a campus parking pass but want to visit visual arts exhibitions at PRAx? Ask the Box Office for a pay code upon arrival, on us!
Currents represents the inaugural and annual arts-science-humanities visual arts takeover in PRAx. See other related exhibitions:
- Lightboxes: Wandering Trees │January 5 to 24, 2026
- Arts Corridor: Threshold 32ºF │January 5 to February 7, 2026)
- Stirek Gallery: Currents: Experiments in Art-Science Collaboration │January 22 to March 5, 2026
- Join us for the Opening Celebration of Currents: Experiments in Art-Science Collaboration at PRAx on January 22, 2026.
What do a contemporary artist and forester have in common when it comes to color theory?
What are the visible conditions when a landscape turns purple?
What season is it when chartreuse is a dominant color in a landscape's palette?
Julia Oldham began her project September: Orange with a visit to a forest research site east of the Cascades, where she climbed a 180-foot tower in a dry ponderosa forest.
This tower, designated US-Me4, is equipped with sensors that collect data on the exchange of gases between the atmosphere and the forest ecosystem as well as imagers like cameras that capture vegetation seasonal dynamics remotely. Oldham utilized PhenoCam images from similar towers across the region to create time-lapse portraits of 24 Northwest landscapes.
Inspired by scientists’ use of color data, specifically “canopy greenness,” to understand forest condition, she compiled animated landscape palettes representing the 10 most common colors found in the PhenoCam image at any given time.
September: Orange is the result of a year-long research project by Oldham in collaboration with Dr. Christopher Still, Professor of Forest Ecosystem Science at Oregon State University, as part of their partnership through the 2024 PRAx Collaborative Faculty Fellowship and the fluxART residency, and thanks to image data from the PhenoCam Network.
About Julia Oldham
Julia Oldham (b. 1979, Frederick, Maryland) is an artist living and working in Eugene, Oregon. Using a range of media, from animation to graphic storytelling, she creates narrative works that explore scientific history and speculative futures. Recent work includes Fallout Dogs (2019), an experimental documentary about the stray dogs of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone; Terra (2020), a three-channel science fiction video installation about a post climate disaster future in which the few remaining humans are cared for by AI “Stewards”; and Dendrostalkers (2022), a hybrid live action and animated film about trees that have evolved to exist in higher dimensions.
Oldham’s work has been shown widely, including exhibitions and screenings at the Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, NY; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA; The Drawing Center in New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of Art in the Bronx, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
She has been supported by Artadia, the Fund for Art and Dialogue; NYC Urban Field Station; Artist in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of Art; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; the Oregon Arts Commission; The Ford Family Foundation; and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice, and has been featured on the NPR shows “State of Wonder” on OPB and “Inquiry” on WICN.
September: Orange was created using images provided by the PhenoCam network, with support from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, the Northeastern States Research Cooperative, and the USA National Phenology Network. fluxART is made possible through the FLUXNET Community Coordination Project supported by the National Science Foundation’s Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations program (NSF AccelNet Award 2113978).