Art

Disjecta Announces the Portland2014 Biennial Curator

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:15:00 -0700

Portland2014 Biennial Curator Amanda Hunt

Disjecta just announced the curator for the Portland2014 Biennial: Amanda Hunt. She hails from Los Angeles, where she is a curator at the contemporary space LAXART, but she has experience across the U.S. (and the Atlantic), having worked at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as having played a role in Los Angeles: Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, co-produced by LAXART and the Getty Research Institute, and Made in L.A. 2012, the first Los Angeles biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART.

Perhaps the most notable (and exciting) factor for the Portland Biennial, though, is that she’s the first set of eyes from outside the region to oversee the exhibition, hopefully bringing a national and even international context to bear on the Portland landscape and further pushing us into, at least, the West Coast conversation.

“I intend to use the biennial to make art in Oregon more visible and accessible across the US,” says Hunt. “And I am grateful for the opportunity to work with Disjecta on a large-scale, yet local and flexible biennial. As a Los Angeles-based curator, I look forward to engaging the creative ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest—and to developing lasting relationships within the Portland community. I hope to activate sites familiar and unknown and generate excitement by offering my perspective to this important exhibition.”

Meet the Curators: Amanda Hunt and Summer Guthery
923 NW Flanders (next to PDX Contemporary Art)
May 18 at 6:30

Hunt will join the new curator-in-residence, Summer Guthery, for a presentation and Q&A on Saturday, May 18. Guthery is also currently programming at LAXART (although she lives in New York), which means it's gonna be a whole lot of sunshine in NoPo. Read our introductory interview with Guthery.

For more on Portland arts and culture, sign up for our weekly On The Town newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feed, and follow us on Twitter @aarondavidscott. Visit our Arts & Entertainment Calendar for our editors’ event picks.

First Thursday: May Picks

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:16:00 -0700

Augen Gallery
Romare Bearden: Prints
Jim Niedhardt: Luxe
A giant of contemporary art, Bearden is best known as a collagist—the New York Times called him the nation’s foremost. But with one collaged exception, Augen compiles a series of his lesser-celebrated prints, most from 1979. And they are lovely. Some depict scenes from the rural South in muted earthen tones and rough lines. But the highlights are the three from his Odyssey Suite, which portray famous scenes from the fated epic with brilliant hues that favor the primary colors. Sexuality seeps from the nubile sirens while Ulysses writhes tied to the mast of his ship in Siren’s Song, animal magnetism bristles in the fur of the man pigs in Cerce into Swine, and destruction dances like the geometric flames in The Fall of Troy.

Niedhardt’s pigment prints on rag give painterly texture to empty jewelry display cases, grave and mournful portraits of the fleeting emptiness of wealth.

Blue Sky Gallery
Lucas Foglia: A Natural Order
Tamara Staples: The Magnificent Chicken
Foglia traveled the rural South to photograph individuals and families living off the grid. His subjects range from back-to-the-earthers in animal skins and teepees (one delightfully ironic shot depicts the inside of a thatch hut with a straw bed and a stack of National Geographics next to it) to fundamentalist, camo-wearing, anti-government types (one of my favorites being a young, homeschooled girl, her head hanging in exhaustion as she writes on a chalkboard filled by phrases like “New World Order” and “The end is near”). Foglia captures a world far from our northwest city life with incredible intimacy and honesty, creating a rather intense voyeuristic viewing experience (no doubt furthered by his favor for nudity). But while the trappings might be foreign, the emotion is poignantly human.

People might be diverse, but chickens are downright sweeping in their variety. Staple’s show collects a series of portraits of prize-winning show birds in front of cloth backdrops. It’s so easy to personify the chicken, imbuing disco funk on the Bearded Buff Frizzle Polish Bantam Hen, who’s afro is so thick it hides his eyes, or stately nobility on the Self Blue Belgian Bearded D’anvers Cockerel, who puffs out his chest and utterly lacks for a neck. But while some of the fowl manage to transcend their chickenhood in Staple’s photos, such as the Lemon Blue Modern Game Bantam Pullet, whose grace is deserving of Balanchine, others seem stuck as one trick chix. This show will no doubt be a Portland hit.

And make sure you poke your head into the Nines gallery at the back of Blue Sky, where completely coincidentally, Renee Zangara’s Ruralization show includes large abstract impressionist paintings of, you guessed it, chickens (and other barnyard denizens).

Elizabeth Leach
Jaq Chartier: Ultra Marine
Claire Cowie: Unreliable Source
Both Seattle artists at Leach this month are displaying work that’s in transition from their previous shows. Revealing that no one medium can contain her, Cowie has added fantastical monster masks and photos to her increasingly surreal body of work. Her pen and watercolor pieces feel like twisted Day-glo, Edward Gorey–tinged adult fairy tales, where people and animals blend parts and livein houses suspended from trees. Her wall of cast urethane fingers is truly creepy (and wonderful), each finger pasty white and drained of blood, some with green mold under the nails or still oozing cuts. And while her masks are intriguing, the photographs of her family wearing them on the couch or at the beach feel amateur and out of place.

In a meditation on the ocean and climate change, Charier’s paintings have traded their light backgrounds for dark, and the once patterned and orderly bleeding color shapes are now curled and organic, feeling less like DNA electrophoreses and more like iridescent corral plants. But the incredibly flat, almost photograph beauty of the work remains.

PDX Contemporary
Cynthia Lahti: Elsewhere
Lahti’s new works, created during her residency last year at Berlin’s Zentrum für Keramik [Center for Ceramics], incorporate paper and archival images as sculptural components of her surrealist ceramics, dwelling particularly on circus themes. A full review to come next week.

Butters Gallery
Ted Katz: Questions
Longtime Portland painter Katz begins his small works with drawings before journeying into exquisitely colored abstractions of mixed media and water-based paint. Collected in an exhibition fittingly titled Questions, his meticulous paintings are enchantingly mysterious in a way that defies their small size.

The Japanese Garden
Isamu Noguchi: We Are the Landscape of All We Know
There are few modern artists who can match the scope, size, and significance of Isamu Noguchi’s oeuvre. Working across mediums and movements, he bridged East and West, contemporary and traditional, in sculptures, ceramics, gardens, architecture, and set, furniture, and lighting designs. His massive public sculptures ring the globe, from Los Angeles to Jerusalem; his iconic designs for Herman Miller are still sold in stores; and all of his creations shape the spaces they inhabit with the purity and meaning of a Zen garden. “Everything is sculpture,” he once said. “Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.”

As part of its yearlong 50th anniversary, the Japanese Garden’s exhibition will feature 22 pieces spanning Noguchi’s long career. It will be the only US exhibition of his art outside his Long Island City museum this year. It opens tomorrow.

Portland Art Museum
Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
This must see exhibit by the significant photographer (and Portland native) Weems closes this month. Make sure to see it by May 19, and read our profile of her from the magazine if you want to learn more.

Breaking News: Meet Disjecta's New Curator-In-Residence

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:02:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Summer Guthery

Disjecta's new curator-in-residence, Summer Guthery

Disjecta is just about to announce the selection of its second curator-in-residence, who will take over the reins of the Warhol Foundation–funded project from Josephine Zarkovich. The new face is Summer Guthery, an independent curator and writer based in New York City (although she has been in Los Angeles since February to program a series of events at LAXART).

Guthery comes from Bard College’s Curatorial Studies program (the cross-coastal frenemy of Zarkovitch’s California College of the Arts’ Curatorial Practice program) and has worked with Artists Space, School of Visual Art, New York, and the Hessel Museum, among others. She is also going to play a role in the upcoming Performa, New York’s performance biennial, where she was a fellow in 2009. But we wanted to go beyond the resume with a quick introductory interview covering where she's coming from and where she wants to take the season, not to mention her small-world connection to Yale Union's curator Robert Snowden. Guthery, along with the incoming curator of the Portland2014 Biennial, will do a presentation and Q&A at 923 NW Flanders (next to PDX Contemporary) on May 18 as a full intro to the community.

Ladies and gentlemen of Portland, Summer Guthery:

Culturephile: Give us a quick intro: what drew you to curating?
Guthery: I have been working loosely in the field since I was about 20. My background is in writing and philosophy, but what I have always enjoyed more than anything was spending time in artist studios. I like seeing the process, ideas still in flux, the context. I put together independent shows in the small town I am from then I moved to London after school and did the same in raw spaces there before moving to New York nine years ago. In New York, I have primarily been an independent curator and went to graduate school at Bard CCS. This Fall I am beginning to work with Performa, the NY performance biennial, programming performances throughout the city the entire month of November. Some of what I am doing there will ideally tie back into my work with Disjecta.

Image: Courtesy Summer Guthery

The dramatic view from the balcony of the office that housed Guthery's and Snowden's 'Chrysler Series.'

It’s admittedly reductive, but share the one or two biggest milestones in your journey as a curator?
The project that has meant the most to me was The Chrysler Series, a one-year program that I did with Robert Snowden, who is now curator at Yale Union. The series was a program of single evening performances, readings, and screenings that took place for a small audience in a borrowed office on an upper floor of the Chrysler Building. The setup for each evening is simple—I borrow a friend’s fathers’ office, moving all of the rolling chairs, conference phones, and fake plants down the hall, to host around fifty invited guests chosen by the artist. There was not a clear A-to-B relationship in the programming, but it could be divided into contemporary performance, readings, and screenings; and re-presentation of past artistic, ideological, and philosophical dialogues that seem to have been relegated to history too quickly. It was a luxurious space to work in, as visitors seemed to spend more time looking more closely than in other exhibition contexts. I liked how the entire process was slowed down. A good friend, Linda Norden, gave us the incredible compliment that it was “like stepping into a still warm brain.” A lot of my ideas constellate around what was done there.

Tell us a little about your interests and practice as a curator?
My interests are wide-ranging, but what draws me to work is an artistic intelligence—a way of commenting or being curious that is open-ended and does not have to follow all of the rules. How to work is an important question. I enjoy being in an artists' studio talking about ideas that are in the work or circulating around it. All of my best projects have started here. I am interested in work that does not solve itself—when there is an element of being unfinished.

What are you most excited about in the art world right now?
I am interested in small- and medium-sized projects that work with large-scale integrity. Anthony Huberman's the Artist Institute in New York. Chris Fitzpatrick's Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium. Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania. White Flags in St. Louis. Cleopatra's in Brooklyn. Locally Yale Union. All are writing honest questions on how work can be presented in a way that keeps its essence.

Introductory presentation by Guthery and the curator of the Portland 2014 Biennial
923 NW Flanders (next to PDX Contemporary Art)
May 18 at 6:30

The emphasis of the curator-in-residence program is to place regional ideas in dialogue with international contemporary art practice. How will you do this?
This is one of the most important considerations in the programming I am thinking through. My practice could be described as less populist and more community-oriented, which does make this residency an interesting challenge. Since receiving the fellowship, I have made two trips to Portland to begin to meet artists, visit the schools, meet other curators and writers, and, of course, get to know Bryan Suereth [Disjecta's executive director] and his team. In the larger region, I just visited Vancouver and soon am going to Seattle. As I get a sense of what people are doing and thinking about locally, I plan to draw out connections with art practice elsewhere.

PICA's “New Arrangements”

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:14:00 -0700

Michihiro Kosuge, "Bones." Photo by Aaron Johanson.

A 70-year-old sculptor raised in post-World War II Japan who has refined himself into a regional fixture by channeling Oregon’s calmer spirit into stone. A 36-year-old upstart from New York who incorporates cast-offs from fine interior and craft furniture buildouts into his sculptural critiques of commercialism. At first glance, Michihiro Kosuge and Ned Colclough would seem an odd couple. But to the keen eye of Kristan Kennedy, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s visual art curator, they are a perfect pairing for the exhibition titled New Arrangements that opens with a reception on March 16.

"I wanted to bring them together because they have a lot to express,” says Kennedy. “Both are dealing with this very formal aspect of positive and negative space—what creates it and what is the contained or expansive energy of a sculpture—in a very different way." And both are inspired by their homes and the complex themes they naturally incite. “It's not so much East versus West, but New York paired with a [Northwest] regional sensibility,” she adds.

Kosuge was born in Tokyo and grew up playing in the wreckage of World War II—he has vivid memories of fishing out of a bomb crater while staring at Mt. Fuji—before moving to America to earn an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. The quiet image of an established artist, he’s lived in Oregon for decades, shown across the West Coast, and was the longtime companion of gallerist Laura Russo until her death in 2010. His work is derived from this context, resonating the calm meditative qualities of Oregon through his varying textures of rough and polished stone-work. New Arrangements will include a variety of his work drawn from over 10 years.

Ned Colclough, "Street Dance." Courtesy Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

Colclough, on the other hand, is from the crowded, frenetic bustle of New York's streets. With a BFA from the NYSCC School of Art and Design, he does fancy interior and craft furniture buildouts and then uses the remains, as well as materials gathered from places like stone yards and hardware stores, to create minimalist work that’s steeped in the history of scultpure, to say nothing of the big apple's commercialism.

The two produce work that is physically at odds, but overlaps on a mysterious, more sub-conscious level, which New Arrangements will attempt to express. “The objects have a very different presence,” says Kennedy. “You have this heavy thing that Michi's doing that suddenly becomes light and has movement in his hands, and you have this light, flim-flam material [from Colclough] that is of a cast-away situation in our modern day world like melamine and scraps of wood and twine and home decor items that are elevated to the status of fine art and sculpture."

Yet for Kennedy, the pieces share a fragility—they're capable of disappearing from a single push. In Kosuge's case, this is true because his pieces require and instill such silent reflection. This reductive sensibility, this stripping away, is also apparent in Colclough's work, which is about refining the unrefined so it becomes serene and stoic, despite being about complex and even aggressive things.

New Arrangements
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
Thru May 11
Tue–Fri 11am–6pm; Sat 11am–4pm

Kosuge also recognizes similarities between his and Colclough’s evolution as artists. “Ned was talking about Brancusi and Noguchi and recognized how important those artist are,” says Kosuge. “He has a certain aspect of them in mind, and I went through the same period of being inspired by them as well…Maybe our pieces will be in conversation with each other.”

If that conversation goes as planned, it will create a quiet, elusive magic mined from the talent of these two gifted artists. Suspend expectation at the door.

For more on Portland arts and culture, sign up for our weekly On The Town newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feed, and follow us on Twitter @PoMoArt. Visit our Arts & Entertainment Calendar for our editors’ event picks.

Critical Art Ensemble Likes Helicopters, Hazmat Suits, and Beer

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:24:00 -0700

Consisting of five multivalent artists, thinkers, renegades, and rabble rousers, the Critical Art Ensemble works at the fiery intersection of technology, art, political activism, and critical theory. They hurl bombs at many of the things Western culture holds dear with a flair for the unpredictable and the provocative. In the case of their Portland art extravaganza, they’ll be tackling inequitable resources distribution and the acceptable forms of sacrifice in our society with an exhibition, talks, and a beer-fueled block party.

"Time after time, Critical Art Ensemble has surprised, delighted, and annoyed countless viewers, activists, and those who champion the status quo,” says the show's curator, Portland artist Mack McFarland. “From my first encounter with their work, the book Electronic Civil Disobedience & Other Unpopular Ideas, to my latest, the event A Public Misery Message: A Temporary Monument to Global Inequality, I too am surprised, delighted, and annoyed—and in that is CAE's power, and the reason to bring them to Portland. "

Public Misery Message, in Kassel, Germany, involved creating a building–sized bar graph that illustrated America’s wealth disparity. Each centimeter represented $100, which in the end required a helicopter to fly over 700 feet into the air to represent the top one percent. On the day of the show, a red carpet directed the 50 people who had bought tickets for a ride to the helicopter, while the 99 percent entered a raffle to win a free flight. Other works have used things like molecular biology to test for contaminations in the supposedly safe international food supply, leading participants through manipulating transgenic bacteria, and a multimedia event that critiqued America’s policy on HIV.

Formed in 1987, the ensemble has been at the forefront of the emerging bioart movement, in no small part due to the fact that the FBI charged one of the founders, Steve Kurtz, with bioterrorism in a highly publicized case. Of the prosecution, the New York Times wrote: “They have transformed Mr. Kurtz into an unlikely art world martyr-hero and shone a spotlight on an emerging art movement that blurs the lines between art and science—especially the science of genetics and biotechnology—and also the lines between art and activism.”

Although CAE has shown at the likes of the Whitney and New Museum in New York City, the group doesn’t differentiate between work in the street and in the gallery, and they’ll be in both in Portland. Here’s a rundown of the events:

Acceptable Losses
March 13–June 2
CAE will is creating a public exhibition at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery and Project Space designed to explore the range of human sacrifices that are acceptable—or not—in our society.
The ensemble will present on opening night, this Wednesday, at 6:30 with a reception following.

Critical Art Ensemble: A Conversation about Art & Politics
March 14 at 7pm, 5th Avenue Cinema
Presented by Portland State University and Lewis and Clark College, CAE will present an overview of their practice and the socio-economic issues they address in their work.

Keep Hope Alive Block Party
March 16, noon–5pm
While a small minority might possess most of the world’s wealth, CAE is throwing a block party to remind us that we still have enough to keep our heads up, including “sustenance (soup kitchen open all afternoon); delirium (forty-ounce bottles of Miller High Life for those of age, and Big Gulps of Mountain Dew for under-agers); and hope (raffle tickets offering big cash prizes, so that for a lucky few, economic mobility will not only be downward).”

Brian Holmes Lecture
March 15 at 6:30pm
Brian Holmes is a cultural critic as well as a member of the Technopolitics group and the Compass Group, which explores the “Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.” Holmes’ talk will focus on the contributions of the Critical Art Ensemble and their unflinching theoretical confrontation with the global scale of “pancapitalism.”

March First Thursday Picks

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:13:00 -0800

It’s a gorgeous day. Head out to see some art. Here’re our picks:

Blue Sky Gallery
Arthur Tress: Selections from San Francisco 1964, Dream Collector, and Theater of the Mind
Vadim Gushchin: Inventory of a Private Library

Photographer Arthur Tress’s first subjects were the surrealist carnies and dilapidated structures of Coney Island, where he grew up. After transitioning to straight documentary work exploring the high costs of pollution on the city’s poorer edges, he shifted into a magical realist style that seemingly combined the surrealism of his youth with the urban decay of his later work. Drawn from three exhibitions, the work on display at Blue Sky depict the likes of a half-groom/half-bride standing in a demolished church, a legless boy with roots for hands sprouting out of the sidewalk, and a delicate pauper of a boy emerging from a ramshackle rooftop in a dried up bay, a ferry grounded in the background. Tress's works are in major collections around the world, and the exhibition Arthur Tress San Francisco 1964, which is excerpted at Blue Sky, recently debuted at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Tress will give a talk on Saturday, March 9 at 2pm.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Joseph Park: Morphic Fields
Amanda Wojick: The Hawthornes

This month, Leach pairs two young but respected NW artists—they’ve both exhibited at the Portland Art Museum—whose shows marry the modern and the organic with bright blasts of color.

Using historic photographs as reference points, Joseph Park’s chronological series of oil paintings displays the seven year development of a style he calls "prismism." He masks buildings and people with neo-cubist structures that shimmer like oil slicks, looking like some force field cast by Lex Luther encasing the building or person at hand. Some of his brush strokes billow organically, while others rigidly adhere to the refractions of his prisms. His technical skill is so exact that the paintings, with their bright candy colors and glossy varnish, feel almost like they’re done with computer aided design—and a hardy dose of psychedelics.

Many of Amanda Wojick’s previous works have dealt with her sense of intransigence, but a number of years teaching at the University of Oregon has grounded her in a house between two mighty Hawthorne trees. The newfound permanence is seen here in 12 welded steel sculptures—delicate abstract works that speckle spare frames with torch cut blossom silhouettes, each painted a bright color in an autobody shop. Their form grafts together the organic and the modern, while their grid layout recalls minimalism but also a fruit tree grove, where your view of the whole shifts as you move through the room and peer between and through their branches and blossoms.

Froelick Gallery
Ritsuko Ozeki: Scene
Miles Cleveland Goodwin: A Long Road Home

Ritsuko Ozeki was working on this show when the tsunami hit Japan in 2011. Finding herself unable to make art for a time, she pressed restart on her practice, returning to basic line work that evolved into simple landscapes and dolls (some hauntingly separated at their joints). But the most powerful work is her series of empty picture frames, from small to large and simple to ornate. Originally printed in gold and silver, Ozeki reprinted them in black, so that they encase and display the ongoing sorrow and emptiness that remains in place of all the faces lost. What should be a wall of family portraits is instead a wall of loss. “Our life has gradually returned to 'normal', and memories from the time are starting to fade,” she says in the show statement. “But the void which sunk deep into our skin does not fade so easily.”

Ozeki and Goodwin will give an exhibition tour and discussion on Saturday, March 9th at 11am.

Laura Russo Gallery
Gregory Grenon: The Glass Opera
Michael Paul Miller: The Present End

Aptly titled, the works in well-known NW painter Gregory Grenon’s The Glass Opera depict a series of women with so much mood and often pathos that there’s a little opera in each. And of course, in Grenon’s personal technique, they are painted with oil on the reverse side of glass, so that they are always looking at the viewer through a window of glass. Sometimes they meet our gaze (some more defiantly than others), sometimes they look away, but always they seem to have a story to tell in their simple but evocative colors and lines that we can only begin to glimpse.

Grenon will give a talk on Saturday, March 16 at 11am.

Friday and the Weekend:

Disjecta
Chris Fraser: In Passing

Chris Fraser’s site-specific project closes this weekend, so let’s cut to the chase: if you haven’t seen it, you need to load the family in the car, grab your Max pass, or hop on your rain-slicked bicycle and peddle your winter-light-craving self up to Disjecta—double time. This is one of those rare shows capable of generating sheer and utter joy across demographics, from stodgy art veteran to those who find art inaccessible and pretentious to seven year olds.

In Passing is an immersive experience that's like walking into a giant light spectrometer or physic's famous Young's slit experiment. It's a seemingly simple installation that transforms light into an exquisitely exact but interactive playground of color and shadow, where the colors becomes as tangible as paint, and the work reacts to you at every turn....

You can read our full review of In Passing here. Fraser will be giving a talk on Saturday at 6pm followed by a reception from 7–10pm.

And the wild card (or wild cake, as the case may be):

The Pancakes & Booze Art Show
Urban Studio
March 8, 8pm–1am

Claiming to be the largest pop-up art show in the country, Los Angeles’s Pancakes & Booze brings together three things many hold dear regardless of city: pancakes, liquor, and underground and emerging artists. With works by over 75 such Portland art makers and an all-you-can-eat pancake bar, this event promises to at least be filling (I ended up stuffed to the brim by the number of exclamation points in their press release alone). For a look at some of the art, check out the event’s Facebook page.

Review: Chris Fraser's "In Passing" at Disjecta

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:02:00 -0800

Chris Fraser’s In Passing closes this weekend, so let’s cut to the chase: if you haven’t seen it, you need to load the family in the car, grab your Max pass, or hop on your rain-slicked bicycle and peddle your winter-light-craving self up to Disjecta—double time. This is one of those rare shows capable of generating sheer and utter joy across demographics, from stodgy art veteran to those who find art inaccessible and pretentious to seven year olds.

The site-specific project by the Bay Area-artist is an immersive experience that's like walking into a giant light spectrometer or physic's famous Young's slit experiment. It's a seemingly simple installation that transforms light into an exquisitely exact but interactive playground of color and shadow, where the colors becomes as tangible as paint, and the work reacts to you at every turn.

The installation can be broken into two interacting spaces. In Disjecta’s large, warehouse gallery hang three pendant light fixtures at chest level: one red, one green, one blue. Left alone, the colors blend. They only becomes exact and defined in relationship to the bodies moving through the space, causing your shadows to skirt and fly across walls—converging, diverging, and most stunningly, multiplying and overlapping in different colors.

The second component is a hallway built around three edges of the room. As you move through the darkened first leg of the hall, five horizontal planed slits cut into its inner wall (marvels of drywall work in themselves) diffract and isolate the main room’s three colors of light so that they shine through at different angles, creating precise lines so vivid that they seem to be applied with glow-in-the-dark tape.

The uniform matte white of the hallway creates the illusory effect of a soft haze at the first corner that grows around the bend into an overwhelming disbelief that there’s not a fog machine. The haze obscures the second hall’s planes and angles, transforming it into a strangely indeterminate space, a fuzzy void, where the only definition, the only angles, and the only hint that you're in a room at all are the strips of light shining through a single diagonal slit.

In Passing
Disjecta
Fri–Sun noon-5
Thru March 10

Then you turn the final corner to the third leg, where whole chunks have been cut out of the wall, creating a fascinating play on modernist Color Field paintings as the light shines in from the main room. The different placement of the lights create strictly defined blocks of color in an amazing range of hues, like a luminescent Barnett Newman painting, although their borders shiver slightly, overlapping each other, as the pendant lights sway.

Fraser’s installation recalls the light art of Light and Space artists like James Turrell (not to mention the more contemporary work of Olafur Eliasson). But whereas their installations tend to be solemn, sublime spaces meant to be overpower the viewer like a spiritual epiphany, In Passing is at heart an interactive experience that truly comes to life only with people moving through the room. In the second hall, the black silhouette of a person provides an incredible contrast to the hazy indeterminate space. In the third hall, the color blocks flicker, dance, change color, and disappear as people move about in the big room, blocking and shadowing the various lights. And then, of course, the main room is a paradise of possibilities for a shadow-puppet show, so pack props and bring companions.

In any other exhibition titled In Passing, the name would seem to reference the temporal impermanence of the work (and certainly that’s relevant here: it requires but the flick of a switch to disappear), but in Fraser’s project, it’s a celebration of the verb. There’s an incredible pleasure to be experienced, and art to be made, in passing through this installation. It's one of the best shows to ever fill Disjecta, and likely one of the best to brighten Portland all year. Don’t miss out.

February First Thursday Picks

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:56:00 -0800

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
Portland Art Museum

I just got a first glance at the major touring retrospective of Portland native Weems’s seminal body of work, and the exhibition is complex and exquisite. I spent hours on the phone talking with Weems for our story (read our profile and watch a slideshow of her work here), and I can’t stress enough her warmth, intelligence, and breadth of experience. This is a woman who moved from Northeast Portland to San Francisco at age 17 as a single mother and went on to become a leader in postmodern contemporary photography. Go.

Arnold J. Kemp: When Will My Love Be Right
PDX Contemporary Art

In his first local solo show since winning a Guggenheim Fellowship last year, artist of many hats Arnold Kemp asks the question, "Art can change the world, but can art change the art world?" The show is named for a 1980s song Robert Winters and Fall wrote during a period when gospel and R&B were transforming into secular funk, and it addresses issues of doubt and human intimacy in a place where it might not be possible. Exploring similar themes of pathos and humor, the works themselves range from an expanded series of the “aluminums” (photographs of simple faces sculpted in aluminum foil) that Kemp exhibited last year as part of Disjecta’s biennial to handmade shoots and belts with poetic buckles stating words like “Shy” (Kemps grandfathers were a shoemaker and a tailor).

Robert Rauschenberg: Multiples
Fred Sandback: Selected Prints
Judy Cooke: Subtext, Paintings 2011-2012
Elizabeth Leach Gallery

A giant of modern American art, neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg playfully questioned the demarcation of art and non-art. He is probably best known for his “Combines,” pieces that blur the line between painting and sculpture and incorporate found objects such as clothing and street trash. This exhibition looks at Rauschenberg’s lesser-known work in printmaking.

As a complement to an exhibition of minimalist Fred Sandback’s sculptures at the Lumber Room also opening in February, Leach will display a selection of his prints that emulate the conceptual sculptures made of yarn, cord, and wire that made him famous. Of course, there will be a further complement in Leach’s own space in the form of works by Judy Cooke. A rigorous painter now in her 70s, Cooke plays with lines and grids on top of creamy coats of paint layered onto (or in some cases scraped off) angular pieces of wood, creating incredibly warm works of abstraction.

Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders
Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

With a Nikon and a Triumph motorcycle, Danny Lyon joined the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club from 1963 to 1967, documenting a way of life frighteningly foreign to most Americans at the time. The resulting book in 1968, The Bikeriders, lit the American psyche with the roar of motorcycle counterculture, laying the tracks for the classic film Easy Rider, and, of course, launching Lyon’s career as a voice for a rebellious new generation.

Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows
Blue Sky Gallery

While Lyons grew up and eventually roamed the Chicago highway from the back of his bike, nanny Vivian Maier (born in 1926) combed the Chicago streets, taking some 100,000 snapshots in the 1950s and 60s that thoroughly capture a city and a culture. She was entirely unknown until a historian discovered more than 100,000 photographs by her in 2007 (tragically, photos she had lost when she couldn’t continue to pay for a storage locker) that quickly gained national attention.

Richard Cahan, co-author of the recently published Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, will discuss the life and work of Vivian Maier on Sunday, February 10, at 2 pm. Collection owner, Jeffrey Goldstein, will also be present.

Harrison Freeman: Both Sides Now
Ampersand

Ampersand Gallery's focus on the old, the strange, and the nearly forgotten is the perfect space for Harrison Freeman's Portland debut. The now Portland–based artist's work has been featured in multiple national publications, but this his first local solo show, where his personal demons and artistic heart are fully on display. Much of Freeman's work is fueled by his collection of old photographs from a flea-market in Berlin. Searching through the stacks, he picked the creepiest, strangest ones and zeroed in on those characteristics for his paintings. The result is a horrifyingly amusing, yet beautiful stream of zombified creature-people that will fry your mind (if not eat it).
—Sam Coggeshall

Breaking: Calligram Foundation Gives PICA $600,000

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 09:28:00 -0800

Exhibition Piece 88, nature plays the instrument and the instrument plays nature, Allie Furlotti.

A couple weeks ago, we introduced readers to the faces behind the mysterious Calligram Foundation, which audaciously gave $110,000 to five oil painters last year to fund a year of painting, no strings attached. At that time, Calligram’s president, Allie Furlotti, and executive director, Satya Byock, told us they were finalizing the details for their next project but weren’t ready to announce it publicly. We hinted at it in a round up of awards, but now Culturephile is delighted to be the first to share the news that Calligram is giving $600,000 to the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) over the next three years to create the Calligram Fund for New Work and to further endow the brand new Precipice Fund.

“The scale and timing of this is really extraordinary,” Artistic Director Angela Mattox told Culturephile in the PICA office. “A grant of this scale is rare even in the national field, and it can take years to go through a process with a foundation and then still not get the grant. So in the second meeting [with Calligram], when it became clear that the funding would come through, tears started welling up across the table. I’m getting verklempt talking about it now, because it just doesn’t happen.”

The award commits $50,000 per year to the recently announced Precipice Fund, a re-granting initiative that was established with an award from the Warhol Foundation for $75,000 per year to provide grants to hard-to-fund informal and experimental visual arts projects and collectives. Calligram’s remaining $150,000 a year will support PICA’s core programming, with a primary focus on commissioning and presenting new artistic works from local and national artists across disciplines.

“This takes us into a new era of supporting new work,” says Mattox—a state all the more remarkable for the struggle that arts organizations are having across the country in carving out resources for new works. “We’re really resourceful and great at making things work with very little, but the commitment they’ve made allows us to have greater imagination and planning—to dream further out”

The award comes at an exciting period of growth for PICA. The institute made a strategic decision in 2011 to increase its visibility and impact outside of its Time-Based Art Festival. It undertook a three-year capacity building initiative that included moving from a corner of the Wieden+Kennedy building to its own space on SW 10th Avenue, expanding its year-round programming, and hiring a full time artistic director (previously TBA had been programmed by a rotating part-time director who lived elsewhere). The expansion was funded by a consortium of local foundations whose contributions are winding down. (The last time PICA got a grant of the scale of Calligram’s was from the Doris Duke Foundation in 2000.)

Into this void steps Calligram with what amounts to the nonprofit Golden Ticket: an award that supports core programs as opposed to specific new projects or capacity building, and does so without the tight requirements and proscriptions that generally restrict how awards of all sizes are spent. The only thing Furlotti and Byock asked the PICA staff to do was dream.

Allie Furlotti in "Cold Feet" from "The Funeral" (2009).

“Every time I would apply for a grant, the process is awful,” said Furlotti, a performance artist herself, in our previous interview (she was unavailable for comment for this article because she became a mother over the weekend—a more cosmic symbolism we can’t imagine). “I thought, if you get money directly to the artists and let them do whatever they want with it, that’s real freedom.”

Attracted to PICA’s commitment to contemporary programming and broad community reach, she and Byock first sat down with Executive Director Victoria Frey and the curatorial staff after last September's TBA. The word ‘symbiosis’ got tossed around a lot as the two groups realized their missions aligned. PICA submitted a proposal in late November that Calligram accepted several weeks later, and the gift became effective at the start of 2013 (truly a head-spinning speed in the world of foundations).

“Calligram was established to help passionate and dedicated artists create new work with limited barriers, and also to show art and stimulate reactions and participation from viewers,” says Byock, emphasizing Calligram’s commitment to building relationships instead of bureaucracies and red tape. “These are areas in which PICA excels.”

Unlike the Precipice Fund, which is a panel-reviewed process open to any application that meets its criteria, the Calligram Fund for New Work will be at the curatorial discretion of the PICA staff. Mattox isn’t ready to announce any of the artists or projects that will be funded by the award, but she does say that it will allow the institute to commission larger projects that take several years to complete, to further engage national artists in the local ecosystem with artist residencies, to strengthen the mentoring and professional development roles the staff often unofficially play for artists, and to greatly expand the institute’s community outreach and engagement programs. Both PICA and Calligram stress that the money will go towards building long-term relationship with artists and the local community. In fact, between Precipice and Calligram, PICA is hiring a new fulltime outreach coordinator, Roya Amirsoleymani.

“What Calligram is doing is exhibiting a kind of philanthropic leadership that I’m not seeing in the country,” says Mattox. “There’s no, ‘this is how things have to be done in the foundation world.’ They’re creating their own parameters, and that’s just so refreshing.”

While some, including this blog, cited the Medici patronage model when talking about Calligram’s direct support of artists last year, Byock says that she and Furlotti are more drawn to the model set by famed writer Gertrude Stein. “Her philanthropy was combined with her life; there was not a stark, impersonal separation between them,” says Byock. “Her relationships, her social gatherings, her art, her direct support to artists, and the works they created, these things all intermingled and enriched one another. And there is no question that she supported artists whose influence and work now enrich us all.”

While Stein is no doubt an ambitious model to aspire to, it can be certain that Calligram’s gift has given PICA a small respite from the constant fundraising cycle that plagues nonprofits, and with it the stability to dream a little, and to focus on those artists who might, one day, enrich us all.

PICA Announces a New Granting Initiative: the Precipice Fund

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:07:00 -0800

Photo by Mitchell Snyder

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts announced today a major new granting program for unincorporated visual art collectives, alternative spaces, and collaborative projects called the Precipice Fund. Supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which funds four similar initiatives around the country, the Precipice Fund will award $75,000 annually in grants ranging from $500 to $5,000, and signals a major investment in local artists.

“What’s different is the program will really support emerging, experimental, contemporary, artist-driven practice,” PICA’s Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy told Culturephile. “There’s not a mandate for it to be super diverse or go across a lot of forms. It’s really about driving contemporary practice forward.”

Unlike RACC and many other local granting bodies, which fund either formal nonprofits or individual artists, the Precipice Fund will support informal collectives and alternative projects, which can range in form from websites to events to publications to gallery spaces (we can think of a few garages and fishing boats that very well would qualify), although they “must have a public presence, intersect with diverse audiences, and contribute to the vitality of contemporary art practice.”

“This has been a niche of funding that has not been represented in Portland,” says Kennedy. “There’s not the financial or legal security that [the projects] are going to be sound. This is giving seed money to projects that aren’t supposed to be here forever, they’re not supposed to be the next PICA, but they should be supported now while they’re doing good work in community.”

PICA has long supported such artists informally by lending equipment, advice, and exposure, but to become a granting organization signals a new step in the organization’s evolution—one it ultimately decided aligned with its mission and its current growth into new permanent offices and year-round programming. “After 17 years, we wanted to have a more engaged role in supporting artists in the community,” says Kennedy. “We were interested in having something vital and direct in terms of money.”

PICA joins four other organizations who oversee similar re-granting programs with the Warhol Foundation: Southern Exposure in San Francisco; Charlotte Street Foundation and Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO; Threewalls and Gallery 400 in Chicago; and Diverse Works, Aurora Picture Show, and Project Row Houses in Houston.

Full application details and granting guidelines will be available April 1, with the first round of awards being decided in the fall. The selection panel, consisting of local and national artists and curators, will operate independently of PICA’s staff and visual-art programming, and the award recipients must present their funded projects outside of PICA. The Warhol Foundation has committed to two years of funding, with the potential for extension (Southern Exposure has been running since 2007).

The announcement of the Precipice Fund comes on the heels of the unannounced decision by the Warhol Foundation to give PICA $150,000 over two years to support the organization’s cross-disciplinary visual art programming. Both of which are the culmination of a relationship between the two organizations that has been a decade in the making, and has since incorporated other local organizations (including YU’s recent announcement about receiving a $60,000 grant).

“The investment Warhol is making in region shows not only its long term commitment to PICA, but it shows they’re taking notice here,” says Kennedy. “They’ve been coming to Portland for 10 years because of TBA and seeing other groups. For a long time we’ve been the singular organization funded, but now PNCA, YU, Cinema Project—now you can see they’re making a commitment.