CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS - September 2009

Get Schooled

PNCA at First Thursday

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 30, 2009 at 10:30AM 2 Comments

Ryan Pierce’s “Comet” will be at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery

Even though the PNCA exhibit at the Portland Art Museum has closed (moment of silence), we still have the luck in October to see some great work from the college, as galleries across the city have teamed up to honor the college’s centennial by showing work from its current students and its notable alumni. Then again, you probably would have figured this out by the second gallery you went to.

Going out during the year, it’s striking how often the galleries across Portland are dominated by those with PNCA roots, be they faculty or student, the rest of the time. As great as it is that these galleries all worked together this month to show local talent, what’s even better is the commitment they show it for the other eleven months.

Anyway, here are a few shows to watch for.

You have to go across the river to see newly-minted PADA member Fourteen30’s one-time-only First Thursday event in support of the show from PNCA faculty member Nan Curtis, and recent PNCA MFA Nicolaii Dornstauder. It looks to me that the show won’t be a collaboration exactly, but it will feature both artists dealing with themes about survival, with Dornstauder working with leather, wood, and cardboard addressing the outdoors, and Curtis using her multimedia dexterity to focus on domesticity.

Back on the west side, Laura Russo will have a triptych of PNCA history featuring 19 different artists, moving throughout the college’s last century of output from early figures such as Louis Bunce and Manuel Izquierdo to living artists such as Lucinda Parker and Jay Backstrand.

Still hanging around is Hayley Barker’s Chimeras at Charles Hartman, using images of monsters to deal with our conception of the “Other.”

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery gets post-apocalyptic with vibrant large-scale acrylic paintings from PNCA faculty member Ryan Pierce. Another entry in the post-apocalyptic zeitgeist (The Road, The World Without Us, uh… Zombieland), Pierce uses the narrative structure of Holocaust novel The Painted Bird and takes a hopeful stance, as former industrial centers return to nature.

Finally, as a little intrigue, Indigo @ twelve’s (you know, that giant/garish condominium tower that popped up across the street from Powell’s that looks like something from the South Waterfront that got dropped off at the wrong address) PNCA Hybrid Gallery has a student exhibition named “Possible Progress in Body Relations.” After a call to PNCA, we’re still not sure exactly what it’s about, but it should be a fun surprise.

UPDATE: There’s a one-two PNCA punch just next door to Elizabeth Leach. PDX Contemporary’s PDX Across The Hall exhibition space and Pulliam Gallery partner to show work by Patrick Abbey, Derek Franklin, Anna Gray+Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Molly Vidor, Linda Hutchins, Paul Overbay, Yoshihiro Kitai, G. Lewis Clevenger, Kay French, Thomas Conway, Milton Wilson, George Johanson, and Raul Mendez. — L.

Add a Comment »

New Oregon Interview Series: Performance

three performer/directors talk state of the stage

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 29, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Linda Austin.

New Oregon Interview Series takes on performance in Portland this Wednesday, September 30 at 7 PM at Urban Grind East (2214 NE Oregon St). Host Nora Robertson talks with Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center (IFCC) creative director and actor/director Adrienne Flagg, Performance Works Northwest/Linda Austin Dance founder/director and dancer Linda Austin (pictured), and Portland Actors Conservatory founder/artistic director and actor Beth Harper.

Admission is $5.

Add a Comment »

Justin Parker at Heidi McBride

JP’s Apothecary is technical feat

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 29, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

JP’s Apothecary. Justin Parker. 2009. Heidi McBride Gallery.

Combining two Northwest signatures, beer and glass art, Justin Parker of Esque makes beer bottles do things they aren’t supposed to do in his sculpture, “JP’s Apothecary,” that I snapped recently at Heidi McBride Gallery. I am told that the makeup of glass used in the manufacture of beer bottles is not supposed to be able to stretch like this, that it ought to break.

I like its multiple-ness, its curvaceous forms, and the humble origins of its materials. Nothing like a little technical prowess to razzle-dazzle ‘em. I’m less wild about it’s mirror backing which makes it a bit busy.

If you are somehow not familiar with the work that Parker does with Andi Kovel at their design studio, Esque, please have a look. It’s stunning.

Add a Comment »

Around the Way

art links for your head

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 29, 2009 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

The Portland Art Museum launches a “community website” for its upcoming China Design Now exhibition that I am thinking will function like PICA’s TBA blog—populated by posts on CDN events from a selected group of bloggers, here including Core77’s Carl Alviani and John Jay among others—but with a twist. From PAM’s Beth Heinrich, I hear that you and I and he and she will be able to post related events and other notes on the site…a great leap forward in a barcamp-ish openness for PAM. I have always liked that PICA’s TBA blog functions as a kaleidoscope of perception and opinion regarding the experience of TBA performance and visual art. The China Design Now site, “collects events and conversation happening in Portland and elsewhere about design, fashion, and architecture in China today. It aims to deepen people’s understanding of these topics, and encourage broad dialog around them.” It’s also pulling tweets with hashtag #cdnpdx. Use it.

“You’ve got a friend in me.”
Before a concert at the Pittsburgh Creative & Performing Arts School for its students and the spouses of G-20 leaders, First Lady Michelle Obama said, "We believe strongly that the arts aren’t somehow an ’extra’ part of our national life, but instead we feel that the arts are at the heart of our national life. It is through our music, our literature, our art, drama and dance that we tell the story of our past and we express our hopes for the future. Our artists challenge our assumptions in ways that many cannot and do not. They expand our understandings, and push us to view our world in new and very unexpected ways…." As quoted on the LA Times blog Culturemonster.

Jeff Jahn writes home about his art trip to NYC on PORT.

Add a Comment »

Mary George at Rocksbox Tonight

Cult of Endorphin leader in PDX

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 26, 2009 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

Mary George at Rocksbox.

Looking for a natural high? Meet the high priestess of the Cult of the Endorphin, London artist and “high on life enthusiast” Mary George. Tonight, September 26, is a “Camouflage Party” opening for George at Rocksbox Fine Art (6540 N.Interstate at Portland Blvd. and Rosa Parks Way) from 7-11 PM with a performance by the artist at 9. Preview?

Add a Comment »

Review: MK Guth Terrain Change at Elizabeth Leach

Guth hits one out of the park at Leach

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 26, 2009 at 12:00PM 2 Comments

“Terrain Change,” MK Guth, 2009. Elizabeth Leach Gallery. installation view. photo: via elizabethleach.com

Crystal raindrops fall on cozied umbrellas in MK Guth’s installation, “Terrain Change,” at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (419 NW 9th). Dazzling groupings of extravagant crystal chandeliers dripping with sparkling teardrops hang from the ceiling of the main gallery. The most lovely is clear, subtly shaded with yellow, pink, and white bulbs, others include cobalt and smoke. Below, eight umbrellas of all sizes—from parasol to patio umbrella—lean on the ground covered stem to stern with careful patchworks of cast-off sweaters and jackets. Knit tubes limply trail from the handles. The structural wood pillars of the gallery also are covered in tubes of reclaimed knits.

This wrapping is a futile attempt, sweater ineffective against rain and making umbrella too, ineffective (now heavy and unwieldy) protection from a beautiful rain that on the ground, in the near future may offer all kinds of trouble both in its abundance and in its absence. What to do? In times of uncertainty, we protect, even if our efforts at protection (e.g. ensuring that the umbrella stays warm) are irrational. We look back to more secure times (even if our remembrance of them is a fantasy). We make meaning where we can. It can’t be an accident that the Guth’s umbrellas reflect the current DIY aesthetic. History will look back on this age of knitters as one in which the individual built meaning and a sense of security via traditional making.

Too, there is the play off the opulence above and the abject below. If we are to think hemispherically, the Northern is bringing global warming on us all while the Southern will bear the brunt of the pain and dislocation it is to bring on.

It is rare that art can make the political personal without putting too fine a point on it. Too often the both the powerful and the poignant can have the wind taken out of their sales by strident didacticism or overdetermination. In contrast, Guth’s “Terrain Change” succeeds by remaining just ambiguous enough (she employs sweater not rain slicker, after all) that one is given the necessary room to consider.

In the second gallery, Guth’s video, “Allegory of Possible Hopes and Fears- I Will See You on the Other Side” is projected. A man (David Eckard) imagines a fairy tale in which he, as woodsman finds a mermaid (Ruth Waddy) on a snow-covered lake. Rather than heroically carry her, he drags her home. The actors are mute, their interaction flat, unemotional. It is as if the man is so paralyzed or powerless, he can’t even imagine himself into conversation or meaningful connection. In context of the installation in the front gallery, “Allegory” says re: the human condition, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Add a Comment »

Review: Bobbi Woods at Fourteen30

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 22, 2009 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Bobbi Woods. Nothing/if it feels good. #5, 2009. Enamel on poster – 41 × 27 inches

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Bobbi Woods. Nothing/if it feels good. #5, 2009. Enamel on poster – 41 × 27 inches

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Bobbi Woods. As Long As #5, 2009. Enamel on poster – 36 × 24 inches

The folded fold: Does Louise Lawler Make Marilyn Monroe Cry, Andy Warhol? Ask Bobbi Woods. This Los Angeles artist falls in a long line of artists employing the strategy of folding the found back on itself. Her “Does Brian Kennon Make You Cry?” exemplifies this, appropriating a Lawler appropriation of a Warhol while making reference in the title to another LA artist she’s worked with employing a similar strategy.

But for the most part, Woods appropriations are handled in a less pleated fashion: pop images radically edited as in her current show at Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd). Works from Woods’ “As Long As” series feature an isolated image on a white ground: photograph of a mouth, a foot in a shiny platform shoe, a chrome chair frame. If one were to see only a reproduction of the works, one might wonder if each image were cut from a magazine or poster and affixed to white paper. Seeing the works up close one realizes that the image has been masked, the whole piece sprayed in white enamel, and the mask removed.

Floating world
Woods’ decontextualized (unlike collage which recontextualizes) images float literally as well as figuratively, but they never fall far from the tree of sensuous commercial image from which they were plucked. It’s partly because of the power of the image Woods chooses to isolate and partly because beneath the paint the rest of the piece is still there, and so there is an invitation to fill in blanks, to consider the rest of the story of the image, to see what isn’t there. Thus Woods’ not only appropriates the images made by the creators of her found commercial images, but appropriates as well their tried-n-true strategy of obscuring for purposes of titillation or at the very least, generating further interest. That she goes back to the newly-liberated 70s to find her images can be no accident.

Bobbi Woods. As Long As #5, 2009. Enamel on poster – 36 × 24 inches

Is it wrong that I love big, shiny trapezoids?
Ironically, it was not found image but a massive glossy black trapezoid that seduced me. Woods applies the powerful, graphic form to obscure image in her “Nothing/if it feels good” series Woods in producing multiple edits of the same film poster for the 70s erotic film Emmanuel, the tagline for which is “Nothing is wrong if it feels good.” In the first two pieces, the word “Nothing” hovers above a sliver view of a man’s head in silhouette…below is the familiar ratings letter X. In the last of the three, the trapezoid is flipped and words “if it feels good” are seen above a woman’s ecstatic face in profile. Taken together, the three pieces tell all (and I think it’s odd that they’d be sold individuall), but in case you didn’t get what’s going on Woods provides a framed Emmanuel poster, sans trapezoid and thus showing the two women and a man, on the opposite wall.

That the black form suggests the the bar across the face of girls wearing fashion "Don’t"s, call girl ads in family newspapers, and redacted portions of government texts released under the Freedom of Information Act, demonstrates the multiplicity of possible relationships in our visual culture between what is seen and what is obscured. But that black trapezoid is also a powerful shape, a kind of symbol for the power inherent in the creation of one’s own remixed experience of visual noise to which we’re daily subjected.

Back to Marilyn. Woods plays on slippery ground with the images that serve as foundation for her work. The standard issue post-feminist reclamation of image of the objectified female for both purposes of critique and empowerment is a well-worn if dubious path. But by employing an exaggerated version of framing/editing tools common to pop image makers (Photoshop, anyone?), Woods seems to be able have it both ways: creating powerful image with a little hide-and-seek while questioning both intent and means of her source images.

In an editing of another kind, the subject of the male gaze happens to be male. “Strip Search” is an editing down of what purports to be a vintage Bureau of Prisons training video on visual searches in a way that highlights or again isolates its erotic overtones. And if, in fact the “training video” source is vintage erotica rather than training vid, Woods again executes a neat double fold.

REVISED: Replaced actual title of “Brian Kennon” Marilyn Monroe piece with whatever wack title I accidentally gave it in first edit. : )

Add a Comment »

Ward Shelley Lecture

PNCA’s MFA in Visual Studies lecture program

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 22, 2009 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

Stability, Ward Shelley. Lawrimore Project

PNCA kicks off its lecture series for its MFA in Visual Studies Program, and you’re invited.

This Thursday, September 24, at 6:30 PM Brooklyn-based artist Ward Shelley, who recently did the incredible installation/performance Stability at Lawrimore Project in Seattle will give a talk in the Lab at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, (724 N.W. Davis).

In addition to these large-scale projects, Shelley also does paintings of art diagrams in the lineage of Ad Reinhardt’s “How to Look at Modern Art in America” as well as Alfred Barr, and George Maciunas.

From the press release: “Shelley also works with the collaborative artist group BBS and talented young artists such as Douglas Paulson and Alex Schweder, with whom he realized the monumental Flatland project at New York’s SculptureCenter in 2007. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.”

Grateful to PNCA and MCC for opening these lectures to the community. Autodidacts and art lovers rejoice.

Add a Comment »

Giving It Away

access to arts institutions is critical issue

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 22, 2009 at 01:00PM 3 Comments

“Arts and culture are not a luxury, they are part of this city’s DNA. It is why people want to live and work here, and seven out of 10 tourists say it is a reason for their visit.”

Does that sound familiar, Portland arts advocates? Sound like something Sam Adams might have said at a CAN meeting? Actually, it’s London’s mayor Boris Johnson.

It’s in context of a BBC story on Johnson recommending that in a recession London’s free arts institutions begin to be more aggressive about collecting donations. The story points to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, also technically free, but where the suggested donation of $20 for an adult is actively pursued as if it were an admission fee.

According to the story, Johnson frets that “free admission was leading some ‘cynical young people’ who visit the museums to conclude that what ’they’re seeing isn’t prized.’ He said charging might make them appreciate the exhibits more.”

I love that. First of all, how could they learn to “prize” it at all if they were barred by price from seeing it in the first place? And secondly, name an American arts institution that wouldn’t like to get more young people through its doors, even the cynical among them. Does anyone besides Johnson have to be reminded that those young people are future arts supporters and advocates, are future patrons?

I’ll never stop being grateful to Gordon D. Sondland and Katherine J. Durant for a major gift last year to the Portland Art Museum that made admission free for young people in Portland. The museum continues to work toward a goal of an endowment that will ensure regular “opportunities to visit without charge.” And we can all breath a sigh of relief that it looks like the Museum of Contemporary Craft’s commitment to free admission will remain intact (given its new PNCA partnership). Equity of access to culture is critical to growing support for institutions in all quarters.

I do agree with Johnson on the notion that, “arts and culture are not a luxury.” But that means that access for all should be something we’re all working toward.

Big thanks to Lisa Hoang for the heads up on the BBC story that got me thinking.

Add a Comment »

Review: Shine a Light

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 21, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

The Print Factory. Shine A Light at the Portland Art Museum.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

The Print Factory. Shine A Light at the Portland Art Museum.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Jonathan Sielaff and Christopher Doulgeris at Shine A Light at the Portland Art Museum.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

items ready to be silver plated by Portland Silver for Shine A Light at the Portland Art Museum.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Groove Nation Breakdance at Shine a Light.

Was the girl on her boyfriend’s shoulders waving her hands in front of the security camera in the lobby part of “Stranger Moments at the Museum” by Avalon Kalin and Cyrus Smith or just an exuberant visitor caught up in the freedom of the night?

Whatever was going on inside the Portland Art Museum on Saturday night for Shine a Light: A Night at the Museum, the most notable thing was that the doors were wide open with a continual flow of people in and out. The doors from the Jubitz Center into the Mark Building were even open (shocked!). The Museum—the building itself and all of its art—has been longing for this, an evening pulsing with people and sound and activity. I relish a quiet moment with my beloved Robert Irwin disc, but I can have that any day. This event demonstrated that the Museum is a living, breathing, thing (something that those of us not intimately involved with its workings forget); that both its blood and its raison d’etre are the people who built it, who guide it, who make it work, and who course through its galleries.

A partnership between the Museum (thanks to Christina Olsen) and the MFA program at PSU, Shine a Light liberally sprinkled, music, performance, lecture, object making, and more throughout the museum.

We arrived early and it was already hopping. We saw Katy Asher chatting with the extraordinary Doris Ennis, the 35 year volunteer at the Museum who selected two groupings of objects which Asher and Helen Reed bundled into a special self-guided tour that was wonderful. (If you missed it, see if you can still get a brochure from Katy.)

Jonathan Sielaff and Christopher Doulgeris at Shine A Light at the Portland Art Museum.

We headed to the second floor with our Doris Ennis guide in hand and heard the strains of a clarinet which we followed to the Native American galleries to find that the city’s most artful reed player, Jonathan Sielaff, was readying to play a duo with Hooliganship’s Christopher Doulgeris, a pleasant surprise. Together at dusk they played a brief, melancholy serenade for one of the transformation masks in the collection. While the performances throughout the night animated the galleries in magical ways, it was thanks to the smart choices of Ariana Jacob and the

Did Harrell Fletcher and crew figure out their technical difficulties in trying to grab photos from your cell phone to print out and hang on the wall in the photo gallery in the Jubitz Center? Did many folks give over an hour or so of their time to learn about pigments? Very interesting, but would love to engage that on a different, less social night. Was anyone else besides me mesmerized by Cyrus Smith’s projection in the Whitsell of feeds from the Museum’s security cameras. I had to be dragged out of there.

Groove Nation Breakdance at Shine a Light.

If some of the work was conceptually squishy considering that it came out of an MFA program, together they were a set of authentic, well-executed responses. I was suitably awed by the biggest ikebana you’ll ever see commissioned for the event by Eric Steen and Groove Nation Breakdance who seriously killed it (at the invitation of Varinthorn Christopher). More than one might have hoped, even there was smart correspondence between works in the Museum and the events/performances that animated the space.

I loved the printing press that Zach Springer built. He and his Print Factory partners were hard at work all night letting the assembled pull fun prints. I cared less for the arty beer. I’m not enough of a beer afficionado to grasp the nuances in what the hops water might propose in response to a work of art. If there’s a lover who’d like to school me and give me a reading of individual brew as related to works in the collection, I’m curious. As it was, I bypassed the lengthy line.

I liked Avalon Kalin and Laurel Kurtz’s idea of dowsing to capture a work’s aura more than the net result which was gelling the uplights around the sculpture to have the lighting manifest the “aura.” I’d met one of the gentlemen (Mike Downey and Tom Lauerman) who coached the dowsers years before and recalled his persuasive show-don’t-tell manner…he had a skeptic like me wire-in-hand before you knew it. But with the dowsing happening near the beer dispensary, I wouldn’t be surprised if results of energy detection with l-shaped lengths of wire might not have been skewed.

When we left we were captivated by the projection of the documentary on the making of the Teddy Roosevelt/Rough Rider statue in the SW Park Blocks onto the statue’s plinth. (Thank you NW Film Center.)

Thanks, in fact, to the Museum for embracing a new openness and to the PSU Social Practice MFA’ers for their projects. And while we can’t call the audience diverse, necessarily, I’m sure the Museum expanded its audience dramatically for the night. Here’s hoping the new visitors felt at home enough to return soon while the old guard embraces the new openness in future.

Add a Comment »

Shine A Light Tonight

don’t miss artists’ interventions at Portland Art Museum

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 18, 2009 at 02:00PM 3 Comments

Shine A Light: A Night at the Museum. Portland Art Museum.

Oh, what a night! Chris Doulgeris of Hooliganship and Honey Owens of Valet serenading art, Harrell Fletcher winkingly printing out and tacking up your cell phone snappies up on the wall, Cyrus Smith making video art with the museum’s security cameras, breakdancing, orienteering, plus E*Rock in the Sculpture Garden!?! I absolutely would not miss Shine a Light: A Night At The Museum at the Portland Art Museum tonight, September 19 from 6 PM to 12 AM.

Graduate students in Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice Program with the NW Film Center have created more than a dozen projects and interventions in response to the work in the Museum as well as to the institution itself. Some promise to be thought-provoking, some just good fun.

I love that Zach Springer has enlisted the help of Kansas City-based Print Factory to print fifty counterfeit tickets at the beginning of the event (that will be accepted as valid for the night!) drawing attention to ticket price as barrier for many, preventing engagement with the city’s Museum.

And while I think Fletcher’s project is a toss-off (what am I, The Woman With the Veil?), I like that Jason Zimmerman’s Portland Silver which will silver plate objects visitors bring to the museum and display them with the Museum’s silver collection raises interesting questions about what belongs in a museum and how objects get there. Who decides and how do those decisions get made?

I worry that some of the best, most thoughtful responses/interventions will be less noticeable. I love that Katy Asher and Helen Reed have worked with Doris Ennis, a woman who has volunteered at the museum for 35 years, mostly cataloging the permanent collection. Asher and Reed have created a Doris Ennis Collection tour with two sets of works selected by Ennis that will each be marked with a small plaque.

I also worry I won’t be able to get to it all. Constance Hockaday’s lecture and workshop, an incomplete history of pigments, is planned for 90 min. run time.

Be sure to pick up the program for the night so that you’ll not only be made aware of the many things happening throughout the museum (would you know that the oversized ikebana is Eric Steen’s project?), but also learn a little more about them. Or why wait? Here’s a pdf of the program/schedule.

This event could only be possible since Brian Ferriso became director of the Portland Art Museum and perhaps more importantly, since Christina Olsen became Director of Education and Public Programs.

I believe it’s so important to issue the invitation. And by this I mean two things. Let’s issue the invitation in as many ways as we can imagine to those who haven’t been to the Museum in some time or have never been at all. And secondly, let’s continue to invite new ways to look at, to consider, and to respond to the work in the Museum. (Olsen’s Artist Talks, part roving lecture, part salon, are another great example of this.) A project like Shine A Light has the potential to do both in spades.

In Jen Delos Reyes essay in the catalog for Shine A Light, she says she herself imagined doing a project somewhere between Francis Alys’ Sometimes Doing Somethign Poetic Can Become Political And Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2007) for which he carried a paint can with a hole in the bottom and Liam Gillick’s Dispersed Discussion Structure (2006) in which glitter and whiskey were painted on a gallery floor such that it would be tracked throughout the rest of the art center. She wanted to carry a bucket of glitter with a hole in the bottom through the Museum and leave behind a sparkling trail knowing that the glitter would disperse, even following participants into their cars and to their homes.

Reyes’ idea is a perfect metaphor for thoroughness, awareness, magic, and afterglow we can hope for from Shine A Light. See you there.

Add a Comment »

PARK Day at Tribute Gallery

one-day only parking spot park

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 18, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Today is PARK Day when artists, designers, and fun-lovers transform metered parking spots into mini-parks all over the world! The gentlemen in the above photo are in Wellington, NZ!

PARK Day was originally created by San Francisco art and design collective, Rebar in 2005 as a way of drawing attention to the way urban public space is used. In 2005, their website notes, “up to 70% of San Francisco’s downtown outdoor space is dedicated to the vehicle.”

Portland’s Brian T. Wilson and his new Tribute Gallery get in on the game with a spot at NW Broadway & NW Flanders from 9-5 today. I understand he needs a picnic blanket.

Add a Comment »

P.S. An Exhibition of Post Cards

Wish you were here!

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 15, 2009 at 09:30AM 0 Comments

Photo: Courtesy Em Space Book Arts Center

The postcard is one of the most flexible and ubiquitous forms of art. When traveling, the image on the postcard you send says as much about you feel and what you’re doing as the words you wrote on its flip side. Em Space Book Arts Center (407 SE Ivon St.) is taking the postcard to the gallery with its new show, P.S. An Exhibition of Postcards, which runs from September 19th (opening party from 6-9 PM) through Halloween, featuring more than forty local and regional artists all working in the familiar confined space of 3.5" by 5". The variety in techniques used alone for the postcards (letterpress, silkscreen, lithography, collage, and photography) will make checking it out worthwhile. Even better, this is a gallery showing where you almost have to take something home—no piece will cost over $5.

Add a Comment »

Pat Boas Today on Art Focus

Eva Lake chats with Portland artist

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 15, 2009 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

breathing, Pat Boas. From What Our Homes Can Tell Us. 2008-09.

Today on Art Focus at 11:30 AM on KBOO 90.7, host Eva Lake talks with Pat Boas, whose Record Record opened this past Sunday at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University.

“Record Record includes four series that comment in very quiet ways on the text and images in The New York Times and a new series of digital works What Our Homes Can Tell Us that captures language found in the artist’s home and places of importance to her extended family.”

Art Focus streams live on the web and is archived as podcast. Listen up!

Add a Comment »

Review: Jason Charles Rens’ Non-Jewelry at Nationale

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 15, 2009 at 07:30AM 0 Comments

Non-Necklace, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Non-Necklace, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Non-Chain, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Non-Choker, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Non-Necklace, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Non-Cuff, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

Jewelry may be decorative but it’s also traditionally been a means of both storing and displaying wealth. And it doesn’t have to be the crown jewels. To this day, the subtlest high-end jewelry is a signal of wealth to be read by those in the know.

The current show at NATIONALE (2730 E Burnside) asks the question is art no different than jewelry? A marker of a class that can afford non-essential goods? A display of taste that can only be cultivated by those with the time and resources to do so?

Portland artist Jason Charles Rens has created a series of wall-based sculptures, Non-Jewelry , with gem-shaped, oversized “beads” made of hydrocal, finished and strung on various kinds of thick rope as if Elizabeth Taylor went Flavor Flav. Some of the “non-necklaces” are flash, some are subtle (if not in scale), and the “non-choker” is gritty. All of this would have been good not great if Rens hadn’t blown up with his “non-chains,” moving two steps further than standard issue jewelry form to create a minimalist, jeweled rope web that feels nautical (yeah, buoy!).

Non-Chain, Jason Charles Rens. Photo: May Juliette Barruel.

There is much delicious in-betweenness in this series. The jewelry is made unprecious by its material—hydrocal (a white gypsum cement), humble rope, and equestrian hardware—and precious again as a work of art. It apes a wearable form but is made unwearable by scale. And the form of the individual jewel or bead is very cleverly somewhere between faceted gem and a stud you’d find on a black leather jacket.

All of it left me asking Where’s my Richard Burton?

Non-Jewelry is on display at NATIONALE (2730 E Burnside) through October 4.

And I’m looking forward to seeing the installation Rens is doing at the Cleaners at the Ace Hotel for the upcoming Content 09 independent fashion event, Sunday, October 18.

Add a Comment »

Patton Oswalt: Big Fan

Top comic plays sports obsessive, gives Q&A over at Cinema 21

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 14, 2009 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Patton Oswalt, appearing after a showing of his new movie Big Fan, summed up Portland well with a story about a guy waiting for the crosswalk while there were no cars and no people around. “It’s a beautiful city that someone desperately needs to set an ambition bomb off in,” he said.

Oswalt plays Paul, a parking garage attendant that spends his time at work listening to the Sports Dogg’s radio show. During his shift, he crafts hackneyed rants for the radio (calling people “bozos,” having a beef with an Eagles fan named Philadelphia Phil) for when he gets off work. He lives with his mom, and he commutes with his best friend Sal (played by the always great Kevin Corrigan) to Giants Stadium to watch games on TV from the parking lot. One night, he sees his favorite player (he has a shirtless poster of said player in his bedroom, and has vaguely erotic dreams about him) in Staten Island and decides to follow him in order to meet him. This eventually leads to the player beating him up in a mid-town Manhattan strip club. The rest of the movie is about how Paul deals with the consequences from the beating; physical (life-threatening concussion), social (family wants him to sue), and athletic (the Giants go on a losing streak).

What makes this movie work is the perfect pairing of director and actor with Robert Siegel and Patton Oswalt. The dark and obsessive tone of the movie is surprising (and oft-remarked) considering the pedigree of these two. Oswalt’s one of the top stand-up comics working today, and Siegel’s the former editor-in-chief of the Onion. Then again, it’s entirely expected coming off of Siegel’s previous script, The Wrestler.

Siegel, in his first go as a director, uses the same verité techniques that Darren Aronofsky used to portray Randy “The Ram” Robinson in order to portray Paul. He’s followed with a hand-held camera, which, according to Oswalt, was both a stylistic choice and a financial necessity. Both are shown almost completely free of judgment from the filmmaker, leaving the audience to decide their own feelings. The two characters are outsiders who fit perfectly in their fanatic niches that most of the general public doesn’t understand and genuinely love what they do, despite the physical and emotional harm that it does to them. Wow, after writing that sentence, Big Fan is more like The Wrestler than I even realized while in the theater.

That’s not meant to disparage the movie at all; despite a similarity in plot points, where Siegel hits his marks is in the details. Paul’s brother’s McMansion and hilariously bad commercial for his law firm. The Sports Dogg’s call-in show with PG-rated smack-talk trying desperately to sound like Jim Rome. The way Paul prepares his Coca-Cola. The slow-burning Taxi Driver-esque climax. At its best, Big Fan takes you into Paul’s world and makes you truly understand what it is to live and die with every game. For sports fans (like myself), it’s a semi-depressing mirror that leaves you thinking, “God, I hope I’m not like that.”

When Oswalt arrived in the theater, he was dressed in his best for a show later that night at the Newmark, a smart gray blazer and clear plastic large framed glasses, that made him vaguely look like a Miami Vice coke-dealer/snitch. First, he thanked the attendees for being the one audience the movie had all weekend and explained that he was there because there was literally no money for advertising the movie. He had to get the word out any way possible. He then spoke about how the movie came about, with Siegel using his newfound heat from The Wrestler to make Big Fan, a script he wrote in 2002 and then specifically choosing Oswalt as his lead (after some “big names” turned it down, according to Patton.) After getting through the movie hype, he spoke about his obsessions – comics, television, and film. He advocated Up for a nomination in the newly expanded Best Picture category, said that Friday Night Lights is the best show on TV, and told everyone about a pitch he made to DC Comics called Arkham’s Arsenal, featuring the villains of Batman in a Dirty Dozen role during World War II.

Here’s hoping that Oswalt gets some due recognition from his performance, and maybe even a chance to top Mickey Rourke’s virtuoso Best Actor acceptance speech at the Independent Spirit Awards from last year.

Big Fan is showing at Cinema 21 through Thursday.

Add a Comment »

Review: Echo Gap

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 12, 2009 at 08:00PM 1 Comments

For Echo Gap at Valentine’s this past Wednesday night, artist/curator Modou Dieng corralled a handful and a half of video pieces by Portland-based artists, displaying them primarily on notebook-sized Sony wall-mounted displays. Sound? One artist offered earphones, while the rest of the pieces were as mute, drowned out by the ambient music on the Valentine’s PA ranging from reggae on entrance to Fleetwood Mac “Rumors” on exit.

The best part of Sean Joseph Patrick Carney’s video, “I am actually seriously into metal,” a Seagrams 7-fueled backyard air band romp is really the opening credits with the underwear-clad figure squatting close to the camera to give us full torso view while a hand reaches through his legs to show the camera a notebook on which credits are handwritten. That and the figure crouched on the ground “playing keyboard” while the madmen cavort around him/her.

Posie Currin’s experiments optically with hand-painted film, found footage and digital images while Jeff Jahn locks into images of heavily moss-covered branches, asking the aggro-experimental soundtrack to do the lifting for “The Woods.”

David Eckard’s “TV/PA” uses video ironically to record three static poses by the naked Eckard, classically positioned as if on a stage amidst set flats painted draped fabric in black and white. (Couldn’t help thinking about tourists using video camcorders to shoot buildings…that don’t move…while some of my fellow viewers became antsy as Eckard held his pose.) He enters the stage, mounts a platform and raises a flat “piece of fabric” to strategically cover himself then holds the pose for some minutes. By inhabiting in flesh and blood this set made fake by its black and whiteness, itself a simulation of another environment as well as an imitation of a classic portrait or religious painting, Eckard multiply folds perceived and real in on themselves while challenging the expectations viewers bring to video rather than photo or painting.

And here was another chance to consider Kelly Rauer’s video from her Conversation series that she showed as well at the Manor of Art. Her hands are shown carefully forming the word “aggressive” letter by letter with a length of pink cord, then taking the string into her mouth, beginning at the end of the word and slowly unraveling/devouring it. Interesting that she engages a soft craft material (fiber typically being a feminine medium) in addressing what is most oft considered a masculine trait. Is she neutralizing the word or owning it? And with whom does the solitary actor have a “conversation” here?

Arnold Kemp’s looped piece juxtaposes two horrorshow sequences involving water doing things water doesn’t do, one in which it creates a penetrable vertical barrier and one in which it flows upward to flood the ceiling. Both scenes, too, involve humans interacting with water in unusual ways: one in darkness where water appears to be threat and one in light where it appears to be promise. A laden metaphor, water, but I have to say I am left wondering if these are obvious film references that I don’t get because I haven’t seen the films. Speaking of film appropriation, Hannah Piper Burns overlaying of a Rattatat song on footage from West Side Story forms her consideration:“if I were a man.” In Valentine’s, there was no sound, which is a shame because it’s cleverly synched. Less so is her interruption of the film with text on black screen with too-easy/vague questions “what is having/instead of being” “what kind of man would I be?” and an answer involving a slanted MJ reference and a rhyme ending in “tits.”

Finally, Stephen Slappe’s four-channel video, “Increasing In Significance” features a 360 degree panning camera at four locations in familiar if uninhabited PDX cityscape. In each, a figure (Slappe) enters the frame and approaches the camera. He walks with the camera, occasionally looking at it, and slowly as he walks, moves away from the camera. The farther away he gets, the faster he has to move (math!) until he is far away and running…until we don’t see him at all any more. I liked the technical goodness of the cameras all panning at the same speeds, I liked the empty locations animated only by a train or car until Slappe enters the frame. I appreciate the play “in (space) significance”=”insignificance” of the title and the question it carries—what is the significance of the individual in the metropolis/society?—but I’m mostly wild about the experiment as carried out.

Add a Comment »

Future Death Toll

at FalseFront Studio tonight

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 12, 2009 at 04:00PM 4 Comments

Future Death Toll

If HEALTH didn’t drill you a new earhole last night at the WORKS, it looks like you have another opportunity for an aggro-aural experience under an art auspices at FalseFront Studio (4518 NE 32nd) tonight at 8 PM. Artist collaborative Future Death Toll, recently relocated from Omaha, Neb., makes its Portland debut tonight with Suberbass: A Tragedy, featuring “modular synthesizers, projectors, a rotary phone” producing “harrowing, light-infused, sound-heavy dramatic acts that culminate in sonic collapse.”

Future Death Toll is audio, video, and technology-based performance art brought to you by Todd Robert Beaty, David Ian Griess and Edward G Sharp.

Add a Comment »

PNCA at 100 Exhibition at PAM Closing

see this important swath of PDX art history

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 12, 2009 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

To Move, To Breathe, To Speak, Michele Russo.

There is one more day for you to see PNCA at 100 at the Portland Art Museum. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the exhibition to the persistence of regional art historical memory. It’s crucial, even in our internationally interconnected time, to know our community and know it deep.

And this exhibition may sound like a window on a single institution, but PNCA, formerly the Museum Art School has benefited from the teaching of most of Portland’s major artists. It’s fitting not only at the centennial, but at this moment of PNCA’s surging ambitions and fortunes, that it’s former parent institution take a loving look at their long relationship that ended only in 1997.

For a then and now, why not see PNCA at 100 then run across to PNCA to see the current Faculty Biennial?

Add a Comment »

Review: The Crumb Trail

Pan Pan Theatre brings us the horror of Hansel & Gretel

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Sep 12, 2009 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

You know what’s grim?

German f-ing fairy tales.

Those Brothers Grimm were, oh well. Well named I guess.

I saw The Crumb Trail last night. The multimedia retelling of Hansel & Gretel was brought the TBA by an extremely stellar Irish company, Pan Pan Theater. To those of you that also saw this, I would be really interested to hear your thoughts. How did you feel? What did you walk away with?

The acting was terrific—hugely proficient craftsmen (and woman) able to rise effortlessly to the challenge of a huge range of material: singing, slapstick, butoh, hamlet, storytelling, mask work, scene work, childlike wonder, adult desire, kindness & cruelty… all sorts of stuff between.

The use of multimedia was applied with similar skill: live video, YouTube clips, mixed with low-tech projections of supertitles and overhead projectors, all mechanical elements visible onstage on long work tables. These elements of experimental theater have become the avant garde equivalent of the repertory’s proscenium and fourth wall.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Pan Pan uses their technical elements, including a breadmaker in which a loaf of bread is baked over the course of the play to brisk effect.

There is a visual wit to the show that made me laugh out loud several times. “The Hanging” is announced as a projected supertitle, and the actors enter and jump up to grab and hang on a bar over the stage. There is a burning suit, a cheap suit jacket on a hanger, hung from that the same bar, that’s lightly smoking.

But what I really walked out of the theater feeling, was the horror of the Hansel & Gretel. It’s a breathtakingly awful tale: a family in a small town is starving; the parents abandon their children in the nearby woods—out of selfless or selfish desperation, we don’t know.

The children find shelter with a crone who fattens them up, favoring the boy, and mistreating the girl. The siblings escape after the child, Gretel, murders the old woman. They flee the house while the crones screams from the oven go unanswered.

See, that’s a horrible story, isn’t it?

The Crumb Trail pulls on these myth strands to ask brutal questions about rivalry and sexuality in siblings, loyalty and love in parents, death, abuse, loneliness & lostness, and disappearing.

Am I being overly sensitive? Reading this wrong? Did someone else have a totally different take? Let me know what you thought, eh?

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater

Review: Oregon Painting Society

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 12, 2009 at 09:30AM 0 Comments

Oregon Painting Society. Stand by. When I have a photo of the performance at the WORKS, I’ll throw it up.

Oh, Oregon Painting Society.

Last night at the WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival there was Ennio Marricone whistling, Dick Dale guitar, synthy/circuit-bendy electronoise, and artful use of vocoder (I’m talking to you Birch Cooper) folded into a sci-fi primitive souffle. White pants, plant theremins, and petalled headpieces leavened the evening’s primarily dirge-like pace (with a heavy Nico vibe) as did moments in which OPS gathered ritually in a circle at the front of the stage, moving from a chant of, “A point in a circle. The earth as gameboard,” to “Why must I be a teenager in love?”

Oregon Painting Society is an arts collective that makes visual art and music/performance. They’ve twice done installations at Fontanelle Gallery with masks, brooms, and other magical objects constructed out of mundane materials.

I’ve been thinking a lot about OPS since their Fontanelle shows. One thing I find fascinating is that the words that their work requires have been so boxed up by a handful of sub-cultural trends in the last decade and a half, that they are almost unusable. OPS is exploring the primitive, the tribal, and the ritual via their visual art output (specifically the masks and brooms as objects of power), group practice, and performance respectively without falling prey to all of the easy, obvious, and frankly, boring trappings these words have come to embody more than a decade after ReSearch’s “Modern Primitive” issue, the first playa Burning Man, and the height of rave culture (in San Francisco at least), when in Portland particularly, many of the visual signifiers and vibe of these cultural nodes linger with a vengeance. So it’s pretty brilliant that OPS can make work that calls for these descriptors while having none of that. It’s glib, perhaps, but not too far off the mark to say that white pants signal something original is happening here.

Of course if we get out of the sub-culture realm and back into art history, OPS appears to be engaging in a re-exploration of the concerns of many artists in late 60’s, early 70’s—digging into the tribal/primitive in object and act—albeit without that era’s earnestness (fed by its own subcultural moment) that now looks quaint. If some of the OPS arsenal of sound dates to that era, it’s applied in a futuristic fashion with recurring motifs like the monotone computer-esque voice. In fact, in spite of some of the OPS photo-documentation with a 70’s vibe, the whole concern, really, is more sci-fi/speculative even than its sounds and means would suggest…the utopian and even quasi-mystical plot line minus the ominous, culturally critical overtones (and with a dose of winking/joyful just good fun).

I’ll admit there was a point or two last night at which I wanted to get up on the stage and shake somebody. And the fact that Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner didn’t really have as much space (physical, temporal, and mind) as one would have hoped was a major missed opportunity. Their dance was primarily a perimeter action, executed on the edges of OPS’s extensive stage set-up and out into the audience. Woolly Mammoth are up to taking the TBA WORKS stage next year on their own and would make a slammin’ evening of dance, as original as it would be great fun. Let’s make that happen.

Add a Comment »

Review: Micah Malone’s Sell Out at Worksound

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 11, 2009 at 05:00PM 1 Comments

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. the souvenir.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. installation view.

Large enough to feel architectural, the centerpiece of Micah Malone’s “Sell Out” at Worksound is a a flat-sided oval sculpture with an overhanging lip, tiled in wrinkled mylar.

I have to say it instantly called to mind the shape and scale of San Francisco’s public toilets, although Malone says that he means it as a generalized modern architectural form.

In the larger room there are photos of the surface of sculpture. In one grouping reds and blues create a kaleidoscopic effect in crinkled mylar extending to the edges of the image. In another set of two, if eyes are to be believed, the result is what looks like an impressionist picture of a studio with smokey colors and smudgy, painterly feel of reflection in smooth mylar.

There are three dispensers containing silver-painted forms that repeat the shape of the large sculpture, but here look more like pills cascading down plastic tubes that extend to the ceiling. And the words “Sell Out” are spelled out in light rope.

Sell Out, Micah Malone at Worksound. the souvenir.

The artist intends that the viewer take one of these little replicas of his larger sculpture as if it were a souvenir snow globe. And this is the crux of the show. I, of course, am always curious how a viewer learns how the artist intends for him or her to interact with the piece. Malone says that he left clues: the crumpled mylar pile on the floor a reference to Felix Gonzalez Torres candy pour giveaways. But if Gonzalez Torres’ pours began with the question of whether or not the visitor should take a candy (and then whether he should save it as artifact or consume it—was that artist’s intent?), they reached far deeper into the idea of what appeared to be a disappearing resource (candy) as a stand-in for our limited days, specifically under the shadow of AIDS which took both Gonzalez Torres’ lover and the artist himself.

Under Malone’s “Sell Out” banner, we’re clearly meant to consider the object in a more constrained sphere. This isn’t life and death, it’s just art and commerce (or the opposite thereof). Really this is a commentary on a prevalent M.O.: the artist makes installation or performance accompanied by related smaller, portable, and ultimately saleable pieces. The piece of scale makes the reputation. And the smaller pieces make a living for both gallerist and artist. Malone’s installation confounds commerce with a giveaway while seeming to embrace the notion, marquee-style, of making money making art.

Add a Comment »

Review: Small Metal Objects

Back to Back Theatre performs a secret delight in bustling Pioneer Square

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Sep 11, 2009 at 03:00PM 5 Comments

TBA volunteer checks that the audience headphones are working.

A confession: I’m show folk.

I got my degree by jumping out of a trunk in patchwork pants. Well, not LITERALLY. But there’s an awful lot of shuffle-off-to-buffalo in my constitutional makeup, and though I’m not proud of it (or, really very good), I will MOW YOU DOWN for a grab at the karaoke mic.

So, I know that my reptilian fear of audience participation makes no sense. But there you have it. I’m terrified of actors who will drag me to the stage and make me do stuff.

And I was worried. WORRIED about the paralytic specter of audience participation in Back to Back theater’s small metal objects performed at 12:30(ish) this afternoon in Pioneer Square.

Pioneer Square! Filled, on this gorgeous day, with a live band, a huge volunteer event—involving white tents and lots of earnest and unsuspecting do-gooders—and (little did they know), a TBA audience and a site specific performance given by a company of Australian actors who are “considered to have intellectual or developmental disabilities,” as described in the TBA book.

Dear heavens, what will become of us all?

The art audience sat on the semi-circle of steps in the Square, placed there carefully by a phalanx of TBA volunteers, and put on head phones.

It was hot. My neighbors fashioned hats, I worried about coming back to the office with an avant-art-burn.

It’s hot at 12:30 in Pioneer Square.

This guy came out to check that our headphones worked (pictured above). They did.

I needn’t have worried. Small metal objects unfolds a secret fiction—the story of a small-potatoes drug deal—and weaves it amid the hub-and-the-bub of high noon in Pioneer Square. And all of us—audience and unsuspecting civilians—were well taken care of with deliberate technical considerations and honest performances.

The audience headphones whispered the actor’s live dialogue and a musical underscore into to our ears. It’s an elegant solution to the problem of outdoor performance, where emotional nuance gets lost in the wind, and I get easily distracted by, “ooh, lookit! birds!” or whatever.

The headphones gave the audience immediate focus. We first heard dialogue, unattached to any visible actors.

Two men, friends, are talking. One is going to have surgery, and the other is worried. They talk about mundane things, and also emotional things, love is about holding on to the thing that is loved for as long as you can, explains one.

We can’t see them. As we’re waiting for the actors to appear, suddenly everyone that wanders through Pioneer Square looks to me like a person who might potentially be “considered to have intellectual or developmental disabilities.”

Point taken, Back to Back Theater.

And then, suddenly, they are revealed. Two short men, facing each other and standing close, speaking in private conversation. One man is bleach blond and rotund, the other boney and awkward, both in tracksuit type clothing. Both look a little…odd.

Though at this point it hardly matters, because we have already heard them whisper their feelings and friendship into our ears.

And the scene is set, and I am hooked. As the story unfolds, there is a deal—seems to be drug related—that is set to go down in Pioneer Square.

Two cops walk through the playing area and I tense for a moment, wondering if the dialogue might be misconstrued (it was not).

I would love to see it without the booths set up. Did anyone see small metal objects when the Square was less clogged with vending booths? What was it like?

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater

Non-Jewelry by Jason Charles Rens at Nationale

opening Saturday evening

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 11, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Non-Jewelry, Jason Charles Rens

I’m intrigued: Jason Charles Rens is thinking about “economy, duality, hierarchy, and decorative practices.” Jason Charles Rens is making wall-hung sculpture using the visual vocabulary of jewelry using rope, hydro-cal, two-part marine resin, equestrian hardware, paint, and casting techniques. Jason Charles Rens is showing Non-Jewelry at Nationale (2730 E Burnside) with an opening tomorrow night, Saturday, September 12 from 6-8 PM. See more of Ren’s work at his website and thanks to May Juliette Barruel of Nationale for the introduction to Rens’ work.

Add a Comment »

Oregon Painting Society + Woolly Mammoth Comes To Dinner

at The WORKS tonight!

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 11, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Oregon Painting Society

This post—with its wall-to-wall effusiveness about this show tonight—annoyingly disappeared. So maybe we’ll go with just the facts and hope the computer doesn’t again eat my homework.

Arts/music collective Oregon Painting Society performs with dance group Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner and Dragging an Ox Through Water tonight at 10:30 PM at The WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival.

Listen the interview Eva Lake did this with OPS and WMCTD on her Art Focus show on KBOO. Here’s a Q & A of sorts I did from long ago with Woolly. And on both websites there are enough videos to keep you busy until 10:30 PM.

See you tonight.

Add a Comment »

Review: Her’s A Queen and DEEP Aerobics

Neal Medlyn strips pop stardom naked

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 10, 2009 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Photo: Kenneth Aaron, Courtesy of PICA

Neal Medlyn and Pea Pod search for pure milky whiteness.

Within ten minutes, Neal Medlyn’s exploding candy g-string struck me in the chest. But honestly, how else would a mock Britney Spears tantrum end?

Medlyn, whose previous pop deconstructions include Kanye West in the collaboration “Why Won’t You Let Me Be Great!!!” and Prince in “Neal Medlyn’s Unpronounceable Symbol,” took on the image of arguably the most important female pop act of this past decade, Britney Spears, in “Her’s A Queen,” part one of his Britney/Hannah Montana epic (his words, not mine).

He began as Britney circa 2005 to 2008—insane, strung out, generally off-putting. Strutting around in a nightie, he cried out non-sequiturs such as, “Hello Sacramento!” “All I wanna do is drink beer and cause damage,” and another line that this family-friendly site can’t print (but can link to easily). Carmine Covelli, his drummer in other productions, pranced around the stage in inside-out shorts and a hat shaped like a bear acting out the part of paparazzi, snapping photographs that were displayed on a screen behind them. Then Medlyn launched into screaming rendition of Spears’ newest hit (and one of the least veiled double-entendres in pop history) “If U Seek Amy” over a new metal mix. As the song came to a close, Medlyn lifted up his nightie, exposing his candy thong, and ripped it off, causing candy shrapnel to pelt the audience, and then did a hand-stand to expose his penis as Medlyn demonstrated that most infamous aspect of the pop breakdown: the endless barrage of pantyless paparazzi photos. Basically, Medlyn did everything short of shaving his head and beating up an SUV with an umbrella in reenacting Britney’s breakdown.

After a wrestling match between Covelli and Medlyn, the show took on the surreal tone it would use for the rest of its duration; a fallen pop star version of Alice in Wonderland. Covelli, as a bear spirit guide/child of Medlyn named Pea Pod, aids in Medlyn’s journey to find purity, that great milk whiteness, a nostalgic time that probably never existed to begin with. Through this, they interlocked their bodies, and even had a purity ring ceremony with an audience-participation cuddle party. This is where the show somewhat stalled for me. If the point was to satirize the over-the-top Christian bent that pop music has recently taken and the sexual marketing of pop music through virginity (the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, Britney Spears’ early career), it was made well, as Medlyn illustrated the absurdity of the purity ring and the cuddle party expertly, but the joke overstayed its welcome and the point was long made before the performance moved on.

After this, though, the experience became much more hallucinatory, as Medlyn left Pea Pod, which caused Covelli to break into a fuzz-backed performance of Justin Timberlake’s Britney break up classic, “Cry Me A River,” a song which marked both severely damaged Britney’s viability as a pop star, and launched Timberlake to the SNL-hogging force of nature he is today. After this, Medlyn stabbed Pea Pod in the stomach, causing a stream of Bit o’ Honey candies to fall out (he’s a bear, you see, so his stomach would be filled with honey).

It got pretty hazy after that as Medlyn returned to Britney train wreck mode, doing “Gimme More” covered in rubber snakes in an homage to another famous Britney performance and eventually realizing his folly with Pea Pod which led to a raucous “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

Medlyn did an incredible job of analyzing depths of Britney’s pop star psyche that I doubt she ever even realizes she has. His Texan drawl even helped to add an air of authenticity to the proceedings, as it only seems right that a Southerner could portray Spears. Most importantly, though, did he do justice to Britney’s media-fueled rise to fame and subsequent downfall? Completely.

Following that performance was Miguel Gutierrez, who collaborated with Medlyn on the acclaimed Last Meadow, and his Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics aka DEEP Aerobics. This consisted of Gutierrez dressed as an Jazzercise-ready version of Dr. Frank N. Furter leading a group of TBA-goers in their eighties athletic apparel best in a series of body-movement activities, such as jumping around, self-fondling, and parades throughout the theater. Basically, if DEEP Aerobics were a class offered locally, it would be knock out kickball as Portland’s next great excrcise fad.

Add a Comment »

One Night Only: Echo Gap

video works from 9 Portland artists

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 09, 2009 at 12:00PM 1 Comments

Echo Gap. A Video Show curated by Modou Dieng.

Tonight is Echo Gap, a one-night show of video art by ten Portland-based artists curated by WorkSound’s Modou Dieng at Valentine’s (232 SW Ankeny) at 8:30 PM. Artists include Arnold Kemp, the new chair of PNCA’s MFA program, Jeff Jahn, critic and editor of PORT, PNCA professors David Eckard and Stephen Slappe who have work respectively in Call + Response at Museum of Contemporary Craft and PICA’s TBA:09 Festival right now, Kelly Rauer, who just did a very good installation at The Manor group show, plus Sari Carel, Posie Currin, Sean Carney, and Hannah Piper Burns.

In the context of the video work currently on display at The WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival, it will be interesting to see what Portland brings to the party. Looking forward to it.

Add a Comment »

This Ain’t No Chewing Gum

Kalup Linzy onstage at the Works

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 09, 2009 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA, photographed by Wayne Bund

Never underestimate the power of Labisha. Kalup Linzy, in a sundress and a dark wig, grabbed a hold of the audience at Washington High School and never let them go. There was standing room only for a half hour before the show even started, as everyone crowded in to see the artist who, judging by almost every piece of promotional material, is the de facto spokesman for this year’s festival.

He opened with “Sampled and LeftOva,” which sounded like a lost track from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Inner Visions days. Instead of the heavy auto-tune, record scratches, and vocal distortions of the recorded version, his live performance was boiled down to the lyrics and the often sad, hilarious, and poignant story he told.

This continued through the rest of the show, too. Linzy moved through soul and funk during the show, singing from the perspectives of his Conversations wit de Churen characters, and reverently sticking to the conventions of the genres he sang in. He sang a parody of Otis Redding, “Sitting on the Edge of My Couch,” about waiting for a man to come over and closed with a cover of Tina Turner’s version of “Proud Mary.” The music of the original songs sounded like something you’ve already heard in your childhood—each could just have easily been sung by Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, or Diana Ross (the double-entendre soaked lyrics from the perspective of a gay man would make quite a Whitney Houston performance).

Just as the Churen series is a loving twist on the conventions of a soap opera, portraying the raunchiness of real phone conversations, Linzy’s lyrics often cut to the chase where a normal R & B song would dance around the issue. Instead of using euphemisms to describe why a man is no good, Linzy just says what we’re all thinking: F*** you. Who asks “what’s love got to do with it?” They think what Linzy sings: “What an a-hole.”

While much of the vocal disguising and manipulation present in his videos and recorded work was stripped away live, some of it persisted in a voice modulator in pianist Ben Darwish’s mic. As Linzy would sing about a no-good trade, Darwish would come in as the male character in the song with a put-down speaking with a parodically masculine low voice. For the best number, “Chewing Gum,” which is sung from the perspective of several Churen characters as a conversation about a night out, Linzy invited audience members to come sing the refrain from the female character’s view, “This ain’t no chewing gum,” using the high-pitched modulation. The funny part about Linzy’s modulation is how normal it seems now. To an audience in 2002, maybe, it could distract a listener’s attention. Listen to the radio today, though: Black Eyed Peas and Kanye West are using the same voice distortion effects that Linzy’s been using for years, making them into integral parts of hit records. Linzy’s technique to parody mainstream music and separate himself from it has ironically become one of this decade’s defining sounds.

Through the voice changes, the costume changes, and the wig changes, Linzy had the goals of a true performer in mind. He simply wanted the people who came to the Works to have as good a time in the audience as he was having on stage. Rest easy, Mr. Linzy—we did.

Add a Comment »

Review: robbinschilds C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate exprience)

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 09, 2009 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

View Slideshow » Illustration:

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

View Slideshow » Illustration:

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

Today at 1 PM is the last day to see robbinschilds C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate exprience) at The WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival. Take a late lunch to see this duo’s performance which I am hoping will use various spaces in and around the Washington High School building, since the first of three performances they did took place in the room in which their piece of the same name created with A.L. Steiner is installed.

Let’s start with that installation. A carpeted geodesic dome is cut away to reveal a pile of television sets displaying video of a rainbow color-coded contemporary dance travelogue. The two dancers, Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins, dressed in bright monochrome perform movement sequences in a series of locations shot so beautifully that quarry, freeway, canal, parking lot, desert make equally cinematic backdrops for movement that is mechanical, mundane, joyful, but most often executed with a kind of flat, matter-of-factness (and yes, I know I’ve used that descriptor twice in two days). In blue, the dancers flop backward onto floating mattresses in a pool then flip over into the water while on another television they crawl out of the surf. In purple they lie prone on a great rock reaching across one another, retreating. In red, they meander slowly through a desert landscape or stand at the edge of a freeway performing an interlocking mechanical arm movement. In yellow they run hand-in-hand down a road. In white, they dance in a parking lot at night. In green, they curl of in the scoop of a tractor or walk across a downed tree in a forest. Sometimes two televisions at opposite ends of the pile show two blue segments simultaneously, so the pool and ocean segments might run concurrently. Sometimes, the monitors show simply a solid bright color, sometimes a windblasted rock or pile of junked cars absent dancers. Sometimes the footage is run backward or sped up. The result is a crazy quilt of American landscape and movement that responds directly to the warm rock or cold sand on which it is performed.

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

The juxtapositions of images on the different televisions are as interesting as the movement sequences in their environments. And the soundtrack by Kinski that ranges from rockin’ to atmospheric colors (!) our experience of each dance fragment because it loops at a different rate than the videos. A bouncy dance (hot pink) on a deserted highway reads as exuberant with a rocking song and hopeful/melancholy with a moodier track.

This installation is one of the best pieces at The WORKS and one of the more interesting examples of dance on film I’ve seen in that it succeeds at capturing site-responsive dance while creating a viewing experience that exceeds that of viewing document because of its multiple channel presentation.

The performance we saw in the space on Monday was much more contact improv-y and task based than the work shown in the videos. The dancers (aqua) began by slowly laying out all of the costumes in a rumpled rainbow across the floor in front of the installation. Contact improvisation? The dancers worked on the floor each responding the the touch or movement of the other. Task-based? One highlight was one dancer supporting the other as she traveled all the way around the classroom, walking on the chalkboard tray. It was thoughtful, connected dance that set a few rules then responded to its situation, including a room crowded with people who sometimes became part of the dance. It definitely made me want to see more, which is why I’m headed back to The WORKS today at 1 PM.

Add a Comment »

Review: Robert Boyd’s Conspiracy Theory

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 08, 2009 at 04:00PM 1 Comments

Conspiracy Theory, Robert Boyd. still.

Robert Boyd’s two-channel video work, Conspiracy Theory, collages found footage concerning conspiracy theories on AIDS, the New World Order, UFO’s and 9/11 set to a happy dance track. There are plenty of talking heads warning of secret master plans and predicting doom cut in with footage from sci-fi movies, the planes hitting the Twin Towers, and other newsreel-esque snippets.

Boyd’s work is currently on view at PNCA‘s Feldman Gallery for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival.

I was instantly reminded of Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America which deals with similar themes of conspiracy, fear, control, applied to a different topic: American imperialism in Central America. Baldwin’s 1991 film used found footage (more interesting found footage) to create a story of aliens taking refuge under the earth’s surface.

Brody’s aims are more limited, essentially offering a buffet menu mashup of conspiracy theories as delivered by their proponents and occasionally illustrated.

The big reveal comes in footage of Mario Savio, the 1960’s Berkeley activist, here sounding like a 1930’s labor organizer: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

The piece pivots on this (inspired) speech. Boyd is half criticizing the conspiracy kooks (“And that was the first time I was abducted by an alien.”) and half saying the kooks may be kooky but they’ve got one thing right: “forces” are controlling the “machine” and at least the kooks are doing something about it. Are you?

I haven’t been reading the interviews curator Kristan Kennedy has done with her artists before I write about their work. This time I did. Boyd isn’t interviewed, but submits a list of ten films, a list he calls “Conspiracy Countdown.” It is more than odd that Baldwin’s film doesn’t make this list which offers both documentary (I was tempted to put that in quotation marks") and feature film. Is it possible that Boyd is not aware of the film that seems to have directly inspired his own?

Add a Comment »

Review: Brody Condon’s Without Sun

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 08, 2009 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Without Sun, Brody Condon. 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA. Photo by CaroleZoom

“This is going to be the best video ever,” says one of the “actors” in Brody Condon’s video Without Sun, now on view at the WORKS at Washington High School for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival. “I wish it would stop ’cause I want to just watch it.”

The “it” he is referring to is his experience having taken an unnamed psychedelic drug and turned on the video camera. Brody Condon has edited together footage found on the Internet of “individuals on a psychedelic substance.” They roll on the ground or kneel flopped over a sofa or face the camera and fidget. They moan, they laugh, they talk in circles. Whatever else is going on, they are clearly experiencing a disconnection between mind and body.

In Sunday’s live performance of Without Sun at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College, Condon made the inspired choice of a further disconnection: actor Russell Edge performed the voice and dancer Linda Austin performed the movement from the video. The only prop was a white cube. There was no soundtrack. Edge stands behind Austin, his face is expressive as he yells, mutters, queries incoherently, and laughs maniacally. As she wove her arms and body through the movements Austin held her face expressionless: when Edge laughed, Austin’s body convulsed but her face remained placid. Both Edge and Austin were perfect choices here, Austin because she was able to keep “dance” out of this and matter-of-factly execute the movements, and Edge because he was able to capture this range of roles pretty brilliantly.

These layered disconnections between body and voice and even emotion and expression further exaggerate the user-initiated disconnect via psychedelics. At the same time, bringing an audience into the room with these stand-ins for the “actors” plays up the void between those who recorded and uploaded the original footage and the audiences they might have imagined for that footage of their highly personal experiences.

While viewing the video feels like partnering with the “actors” in their own self-initiated exploitation, viewing the performance made space for me to appreciate the pacing, humor, and sly juxtapositions of Condon’s editing.

Naming the piece for Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Condon is suggesting that his piece deals with travel, memory, perception. He presumably refers in a facile way to “trip,” but more interestingly to the desire to turn on the video in the first place to record the experience—to provide an objective, external version of events that the “actor” can compare with his or her interior version or memory. “I just want to watch it.” Consider the gaps between any subjective version of events and the events themselves made acute under these circumstances.

Best line of the piece: “’Cause my hair is cold so some are going to be like that.”

See Without Sun at the WORKS at Washington High School, SE 12th and Stark.

Add a Comment »

Between Us

TBA: Tyler Wallace & Nicole Dill at The Works

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Sep 07, 2009 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

I walked up to the WORKS this evening and settled onto a cold patch of sidewalk behind Washington High School to wait for newly BFA’ed PNCA graduates Nicole Dill and Tyler Wallace to drive up.

Today, the two woman drove around Portland, performing Between Us. They recorded the car trip with a live-broadcast webcam at betweenuslive.com. At 9:01 the little compact car pulled into the grass lot behind the WORKS building.

Their car trip, and the conversation inside, was now broadcast movie-screen size on the side of a large truck behind them.

The TBA description of Between Us tells us that these two young artists are interested in “interrogating the ways in which staying connected impacts the fluid dichotomies between private and public spaces, confidentiality and disclosure, voyeurism and exhibitionism.”

I mean, sure. I get that.

Wallace and Dill have captured those dichotomies by playing with scale: the small-screen grainy voyeurism of the webcam, the large-screen glamour of the projection, and the warmth of two figures illuminated in the glow of a front cab light.

But the best parts of this project, I thought, were found outside that conceptual explanation. It was the late-night-slumber-party, last-day-of-camp feeling brought on by the setting and the dialogue.

The audience drifted out across the lawn, a bit bundled against the newly chilly fall night and hushed in the dark, as if we’d all stayed up late to see a movie at the drive-in.

The dialogue between Dill and Wallace I found refreshingly guileless: kitchen-sink stories about middle school embarrassments, first kisses, grandparents, best friends … the types of stories, those partial secrets from our pasts, that seems to only get told in a surplus of time: on road trips, at slumber parties, around campfires.

We tell them to new friends and old, to lovers and strangers. There was something meditative and gentle in listening to Dill and Wallace tell theirs to us—not at all alone in the dark.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater

Review: locust’s Crushed

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 07, 2009 at 08:00PM 0 Comments

locust: crushed 09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA Photo by CaroleZoom.

The opening of locust’s crushed Monday evening at the WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival featured a video of a hopping locust crushed beneath the boot of a man…followed by two dancers on the floor jerking back and forth like…crushed locusts? This is the only movement in the piece that strays from the main movement vocabulary of a kind of show-hop, the equivalent of hip-hop with jazz hands, hip-hop as filtered through Paula Abdul and/or countless high school dance squads. It’s entertaining, energetic dance, often executed in unison. Danced ably by bodies that knew ballet before breakbeats, it’s less surprising than you’d think that the choreography includes petit battement downstairs while upstairs you might see the one-arm, crank-it-up-and-down or the Morris Day double-arm squawk.

Zeke Keeble does some fine beat-boxing, and choreographer Amy O’Neal clearly has an affinity for hip-hop, which is why segments like the dance-off that devolves into faux violence—one part Soul Train Line, one part West Side Story dance fight—are so troubling. Witness a contemporary b-boy “battle,” and there is good-natured posturing around the pit where the dancers throw down. The dancers are aware, as we are, that this posturing is a watered-down, play-acting version of the kind of violence that hip-hop has tried to replace with words (whether the braggadocio coming out of the dozens of Run-DMC or LL Cool J to didacticism of KRS-One or Chuck D) and dance: from the b-boying that lives on to crumping today (if you haven’t seen the film Rize, do it). In appropriating what was originally an urban black dance form and having the “battle” devolve into pantomimed violence (repeatedly), locust embarrassingly plays into common stereotypes of violent urban youth and comes off not only dissing a form they clearly appreciate, but the community it springs from as well.

Add a Comment »

Erased James Franco

An actor, a leather chair, a fern, and a prosthetic leg

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 07, 2009 at 02:00PM 4 Comments

James Franco answers another phone call in Erased James Franco.

There’s a phrase that popular TV chef Gordon Ramsay always uses on the British version of his show Kitchen Nightmares. He walks into some inn with a stone facade with a name like the Pusslewick Arms (you see, the title always has to have the suffix “-wick” and end in Arms) and sees a single chef working in a grease-stained kitchen, dropping individual serving bags of lamb in a boiling pot and plating it by scooping the skin off the top of some four-day-old gravy. Ramsay asks how much this restaurateur is charging for this dish of plastic lamb and days-old gravy. The response usually is a ridiculous amount, around £15 ($30 or so), to which Ramsay wipes his nose with his forearm, furrows his brow and incredulously asks this question: “Are you taking the piss?”

That was my response to Erased James Franco.

Honestly, I think Franco and director Carter’s (no other name; just Carter) main endeavor was to take the piss during this movie, much in the same way Rauschenberg did with his “Erased de Kooning.” Of course, a major difference between the works is Rauschenberg did his erasing on a work from arguably the greatest living artist at the time, while Carter works with James Franco, whose most critically acclaimed individual work was in an action pot comedy. It’s not that Franco is a bad actor (he’s actually quite good), it’s just that erasing him doesn’t quite have the same effect. If this work were done with, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, then you’d see something as off-putting and magnetic as Carter wanted this to be.

The movie itself has no narrative structure. It simply is Franco with a series of props: a red leather upholstered chair, a desk, a brass statue of a head (always turned away from the camera), balloons, a fern, a Franco-created painting, glasses of water, several telephones, and a prosthetic leg. Much of it consists of Franco answering the phones, listening to some barely audible lines, giving a grunt or sigh as a response, and then hanging up. As a seminar in acting through grunts, sighs, and facial expressions, it succeeded.

Then he would take this seminar to other daily activities such as drinking water. He would pick up a glass with a whole hand, then with only a few fingers, and then saddle-horn style spilling the water all over his face in the process. He would then show us the many ways one can eat crackers. I wondered to myself if he would also act out going to the bathroom. The next scene, he was sitting in the chair, looking at the camera, squirming, grunting, and breathing hard for a bit, and then let out a sigh of relief. My question was answered.

This work was an endurance test for the audience. More than 20 people walked out of the screening I attended, and you could see why. The four-minute sequence where Franco rotates a chair 360 degrees was like the Paul Rudd clean-up scene from Wet Hot American Summer but not played for laughs. The sequence where the camera follows Franco as he walks down a hall and through a doorway, then abruptly stops at a wall is repeated nine times. They were daring us to leave, it seemed. They acknowledged that they were making us watch a guy just walk into a wall over and over again. I stayed due to simple morbid curiosity and the hope that they would give us shirts on our way out of the theater with “I sat through Erased James Franco and all I got was this stupid shirt” written across the front.

Staying would pay off by the end, though. As Franco acted out parts as Rock Hudson and Julianne Moore from other movies, moving through the monologues and wrenching emotion from every word, it was a disconcerting effect—someone who has been so flat and inactive for the past hour suddenly feels and there’s no context as to why. The end is a culmination, as Franco finally stops giving the camera furtive glances with grunts, and he looks directly through the camera out at the audience and repeats the words, “I love you.”

At its most successful, Erased James Franco mined emotion from little to no context at all. At its worst, it was a guy sitting around showing us how to eat crackers.

Which brings me back to Chef Ramsay’s question. Were Franco and Carter taking the piss? I certainly hope they were. If the film was meant to mess with the audience and their expectations, forcing them to squirm in their seats as Franco holds a flashlight in his mouth as he writes on notebook paper for five minutes, and ask them how much nothing they are willing to sit through, it wildly succeeded. If they were actually serious about that, then Erased James Franco was one of the most self-indulgent works I’ve ever seen.

Add a Comment »

TBA at The Works: Weekend Overview

Posted by: Kaitlyn Evans on Sep 06, 2009 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Photo: Keri Miller

Waiting in line…

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

Waiting in line…

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

Outside Washington High School.

View Slideshow » Photo: Joshua Schield

“C.L.U.E.” exhibit by robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner.

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

“Movements” by Ethan Rose.

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

“Movements” by Ethan Rose.

The past couple of days have been filled to the brim with PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival. I have been reporting from primarily the Works, located in Southeast Portland’s old, abandoned, run-down, and downright awesome Washington High School.

First, on the location of the Works, I must say that it really is an inspired and clearly well-thought-out venue for this festival. For months and months I have driven by it and thought to myself what an interesting, spooky building it was—it’s always had an inexorable pull. Once inside the school it became even more clear to me that this was the kind of place I could learn in. The building has a sort of intriguing and complex nature to it. Simple classrooms were transformed into multilayered and multifunctional, thought-provoking art exhibits. Rooms somehow transformed into new rooms and other rooms, different sizes, different shapes, different moods.

Night No. 1 of TBA at the Works and night No. 2 offered completely different experiences and elicited nearly opposite responses from me. Night No. 1 was this amazing party and celebration—there were people literally everywhere. On night No. 1 I made my way around the first floor of installations and exhibits. What caught my eye more than anything else was the “C.L.U.E.” exhibit by robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner. Featuring a group of multisized television sets, set inside an almost tentlike geometric shell structure, this installation was not only visually striking, but also quite powerful. While some of the sets presented only singular and static colors, setting the mood and the tone, others played videos of robbinschilds, two movement artists from New York, moving within the space and environments in which they are set and creating a more interactive environment for the viewers.

(Note: Come see them tonight at TBA at the Works for a live performance! See you there at 10:30.)

The night ended with a performance by Gang Gang Dance, the experimental and divergent group from Brooklyn, NY. The school’s auditorium was an interesting place to hold such a show, adding a sort of “watching an art exhibit” element. Even though when it really comes down to it, that is what all music and art does to its audience, this was different than any performance I have ever seen. While the dancing hippies tended to occupy the front of the auditorium, the rest of us were either standing bobbing our heads trying to figure how one moves to this music, or sitting awe-inspired glued to our chairs. I suppose this is to be expected at an event that merges such varying age groups, but more than anything I saw it as a positive and interesting music viewing experience. Gang Gang Dance is really doing something different, something distinct and interesting, and doing it without any air of pretentiousness, which is very refreshing. By the end of the night everyone seemed to be in full-out dance and celebration mode, thankful that TBA had finally arrived.

Now, for night No. 2 of TBA at the Works I had a more personal, introspective experience. I began night No. 2 roaming around the first floor of exhibitions, as I had done the previous night. Once again, I was only particularly drawn to the “C.L.U.E.” exhibit by robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner; soon I was rushed into the auditorium to see Portland’s very own Explode Into Colors, featuring dancing and choreography by Jane Paik, aka Janet Pants, and the multimedia visual/audio presentation by Chris Hackett of Los Moustachios. It was certainly an interesting collaboration and one that I have a deep respect for. It is impressive when a band ventures outside of what they traditionally do and attempts to incorporate multilayered forms of artistic expression. Thus, no matter what my thoughts are on the end production of the piece, I thought that the concept and the intention were meaningful and creative.

There were, however, moments throughout this show when I was craving something more. So, I snuck out of my seat and decided to venture onto the second floor and check out what it had to offer. Happy that I did, because I came across a little gem—“Movements” by Ethan Rose. As described by PICA, this “sound installation consists of over one hundred altered music boxes, carefully timed and methodically displayed across the gallery walls. The tinkering creates a sensation of a shifting texture, housed in a visually stimulating acoustic environment.” The feeling of being inside this wonderland is hard to verbalize but, for me, brought me back to childhood with visions of perfectly beautiful dancing ballerinas. While there is a strong time-based element to this installation, it had a more authentic and more spontaneous feeling than anything else I saw. I was particularly glad to have had this experience on night No. 2, when TBA was less crowded and the Explode Into Colors show was happening, because having no one else around made this installation even more magical.

Add a Comment »

Micro Review: Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment

out of the comments/into the light

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 06, 2009 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

Our Editor-in-chief Randy Gragg wrote following micro review of The Shipment at PICA’s TBA:09 Festival in the comments on another Culturephile post. I decided to let it get some air in its own post:

Randy: FYI, Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment stands among my top 5, maybe #1, TBA experiences ever. This Pullman-raised, Korean playwright’s exploration of racial stereotypes was like watching the love-child of Michael Jordan and Bill T. Jones do triple lutzes through an Iraqi minefield for a backboard-shattering reverse dunk. Never have I laughed so hard while squirming so uncomfortably my own stews (or, appropos of Douglas Scott Streeter’s opening monologue, “poop pile”) of white, liberal self-denial. From the opening dance to to a shining acapella “spiritual” of modern black life to the final comedy of manners, it was as polished as anything I’ve ever seen at TBA and dangerous as a razor.

Interview with Young Jean Lee

Add a Comment »

TBA Night 2: Explode Into Colors, Janet Pants, and Chris Hackett

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 05, 2009 at 06:00PM 1 Comments

Photo: Julia Kepler

Now that was completely unexpected. Coming into this show, I knew little to nothing about the performers. I had listened to Explode Into Colors, liked the music, and decided that was the draw. According to PICA, Janet Pants was “punk rock in dance form” and Chris Hackett (who also goes by the handle of Los Moustachios) was a video wizard. Maybe he was able to conjure Super 8 from straw or something. Still, The Works called me.

I was happy I followed that call. The combination impressed. It could be a personal bias (toward film), but Hackett’s work absolutely stole the show. Using a series of animated vignettes, each one recalling a wisp of a memory, the films simply would not let the audience go, whether it was the story of tutoring a girl that was obsessed with horses, or Yellow Submarine‘s hand of God coming down to take someone on a journey through the cosmos. Often the issue with a collection of short films is the lack of persistence of a unifying theme; that wasn’t a problem here. Though each story was radically different than the last subject-wise, it was easy to tell it was all part of the same whole. The greatest shame about this piece is that it won’t be on again during TBA.

Janet Pants didn’t exactly recall punk rock in dance form, but definitely turned in solid work. When she adhered more to the narrative of the video, the entire enterprise succeeded, such as her entrance as the girl obsessed with horses, or a dreamlike dance after a story about taking down trees. When she started going off on her own tangents, it became tiring to watch. My friend (who is a dancer) thought her practice of doing the same move for over a minute straight was half-hearted modern dance.

Finally, Explode Into Colors was as good as I hoped it would be. The driving percussion (with two drummers!) impressed and made a great soundtrack for both the film and dancing, and the bass (Was it a bass? It was a six-string tuned low. Does that still make it a bass?) playing stole the show every time it came up. The best portion of the show was the dance after the Beatles God hand short, and the bassist stole that moment with her meandering bass lines.

Overall, the show was a success, and Hackett proved to be an artist I’ll watch for in the future.

Add a Comment »

Tonight: Ten Tiny Dances at WORKS

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 05, 2009 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Tonight at The WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 it’s local dance all-stars at Ten Tiny Dances. Ten (or so) 15-minute contemporary works performed on a 4′×4′ stage by the likes of Janet Pants, Wade Mansen, Fever Theatre, POV, Cydney Wilkes, Hot Little Hands, and other special guests, who we hear include (fave!) Kaj-Anne Pepper. See you tonight at 10:30 PM at Washington High School (531 SE 14th Ave).

Add a Comment »

The Aimless Wanderings of Runar Magnusson

Icelandic experimental ambient at WorkSound

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 05, 2009 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Runar Magnusson

Tonight at WorkSound (SE 8th & Alder), Rocksbox Fine Art Artist in Residence, the Copenhagen-based Runar Magnusson. “The Aimless Wandering of Runar Magnusson” promises often spare ambient soundscape with a vocabulary of electronic sound that tends to be from the friendlier end of the spectrum although I can’t make any promises. This date is the kick off of Magnusson’s US tour in support of his Options project on Hljóðaklettar. Also on the bill: Quiet Countries, Tanning, and Hello Loneliness. Doors at 9 PM, $6.

Apologies for having to send you to Myspace to hear a handbul of samples of Magnusson’s work.

Add a Comment »

Review: Meg Stuart/Philipp Gehmacher Maybe Forever

It just feels like forever

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 05, 2009 at 09:00AM 1 Comments

Maybe Forever, Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher.

She is alternately turned in on herself—her shoulders thrust forward, arms awkwardly crossing and wrapping—and reaching, often skyward.

He awkwardly moves as if compelled by forces outside of himself. He is jerked, he fumbles, he winces, he too reaches but as if he can’t fully extend.

Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher begin in semi-darkness on the ground. The gulls begin to cry over the wrecked bodies washed up on the stage as they roll toward and over each other and away again.

Lights reveal the backdrop: an oversized photo of fern, clover, and two dandelions that the wind is blowing to pieces. There is a low three-tiered platform stage right and an amp, mic, and guitar stage left. From here, Niko Hafkenscheid will sing the beautiful, melancholy songs like the “Maybe Forever” of the title which from moment one is ironic as its clear we’re seeing a slow unraveling.

Expressions flit across the dancers’ faces and they briefly move through familiar poses (like lying on their sides facing one another) as if to tell us we are watching the abridged version of every reaction to every moment that ever made these two happy and un-. And then there are waiting stillnesses.

When Maybe Forever is good, it is very good. The two slip again and again through embraces that are accidental, almost inadvertent, and fleeting. These sequences are thrilling for their glancing blows at intimacy. A moment when he slumps across her as she’s rigidly seated, is tragic. Another when lying on a too-narrow platform, they roll over and over as if trying to find a comfortable spot until she’s rolled off the “bed” altogether is funny/familiar until it is terribly sad.

She approaches a microphone and begins “Remember when I sent you that postcard and said, ‘I wish you were here?’ I take it back.” She punctuates a string of statements that she takes back with arm movements that have her tied up in knots.

He brings a microphone onto the stage but does not use it.

When finally at the end, he does, he struggles with the words. And when he speaks it’s too late. Not just for the imagined relationship (she is gone), but for all of us—the piece is too long perhaps by a third. When she approaches the mic for a second pretty standard-fare spoken word piece, or when Hafkenscheid picks up the guitar for yet another lovely song, the audience begins to shift in their seats.

Add a Comment »

Review: Miguel Guitierrez and the Powerful People Last Meadow

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 05, 2009 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Miguel Gutierrez and the Beautiful People

This is The One.

I’ll say up front that I’m not going to give you a play-by-play because You Must See Last Meadow by Miguel Guitierrez and the Powerful People (Michelle Boule and Tarek Halaby) at PICA’s TBA:09 Festival, and I don’t want to spoil its smart unfolding, full of surprises. Guitierrez and Co. quite simply kicked my *ss while keeping me delightfully on my toes.

Like bread dough kneaded back in on itself again and again, repeated sequences of dialogue and motion fold and refold as inaudible dialogue slowly resolves or in repetition becomes absurd and enigmatic pantomimed motions reveal themselves (e.g. a clapping motion revealed to be the simulation of knocking on a door). Cumulatively the sequences address alienation, gender, difficult relationships (familial and otherwise), honor…themes that are as fresh (like a wound) in 2009 as they were in the 1950s when the James Dean films from which they’re drawn (East of Eden and Rebel Without at Cause) were made.

Pearls on a string, the segments add up to both a heartbreaking/pessimistic view of the human condition and defiance in the face of same via an over-the-top, sweaty, non-stop dance-dance extravaganza that would kill lesser dancers. And these are rare, rare birds, extraordinary dancers who just so happen to also be captivating actors.

To illustrate the slow-reveal that occurs throughout, witness Michelle Boule instructing the others on a series of isolated, mundane movements they execute in unison. “Left thumb opens.” “Closes.” Slowly we understand that we are watching (in triplicate) a woman sitting up in bed, reacting to something we can’t see. “Face down.” “Cry.” They begin a fake cry. We laugh. The cry continues and becomes more real. We stop.

They return to this instructional device for the sensational climax with Boule exhorting the others to perform movements with names like “tits toss,” “tickle forearm,” “arbitrary gestures,” “explosion,” “Richard Nixon the Magician,” and “drama.” She berates them, she chides them, and they Work It. The names are as inventive as the movement here and throughout, witty and honest, and never predictable. From violent simulated sex to a face-framing hand gesture, movement is borrowed from the everyday but is bent into new forms and deployed in configurations that feel subversively new.

For all of its razor sharp, compelling execution, the piece is constructed to call into question our expectations of a theater experience. By toying with linearity and conventions like exits/entrances (there are no wings) and even costumes, by pretending to reveal process in rehearsal-like do-overs, Guitierrez never lets us become so absorbed in the performance that we forget that we’re watching a performance. Until he does and we’re all carried away. Without revealing too much about too much, I can say that at one point, the house lights go up, the trio stretch, leave the stage, drink water, make small talk as if the performance were over. It’s not. And when it’s not it is. You’ll see.

Kudos to Neal Medlyn for a score that is right on, from noise elements to dance track. I don’t know who to credit for this, but the stripped down unison performance of Madonna’s “Physical Attraction” slayed.

If you’re looking for a package wrapped up for you tidily, this isn’t going to be it. But if you want an exhilarating, shiny, brilliant Rubik’s cube with a big sweaty bow on top, you are going to love this show like you’ve never loved before.

In the one section of dialogue that does not seem to be drawn from Dean films, Guitierrez says, “America is a disaster. No holds barred. …No excuse. My dreams when I sleep are nothing. … So I dream when I am awake…that what I do is celebrated, that my performances get me sex….” No doubt, based on last night’s performance, not a problem.

See Last Meadow at the Winningstad Theater at PCPA tonight and tomorrow night at 6:30 PM or Monday, September 7 at 8:30. Then we’ll talk about it.

Add a Comment »

Review: Rose McCormick’s Grand Ronde

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 04, 2009 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Grand Ronde, Rose McCormick at NAAU. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Grand Ronde, Rose McCormick at NAAU. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Grand Ronde, Rose McCormick at NAAU. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Grand Ronde, Rose McCormick at NAAU. installation view.

I was knocked out by Rose McCormick’s Grand Ronde now on view at New American Art Union. Approaching the gallery’s wide open front, we first saw only white walls, a space apparently empty. And then we nearly stepped in it. We caught ourselves just at the edge of what first looked like a lacquered rectangle took up the entire gallery floor, stopping just two feet from the walls. Look again. It’s water.

McCormick has created a magnificent, shallow, glasslike pool of water in NAAU. Tucked into the front corner of the space near the doorway is a folded stack of wool blankets—haggard and patched—topped by a worn photo album. In the opposite rear corner, initially hidden from view by a quirk of the space (it is not a clean rectangle, but has recess in back at one side leading to other doors) there are vintage suitcases and a set of aluminum camping pans.

Grand Ronde, Rose McCormick at NAAU. installation view.

As Robert Irwin has intended in his similarly spare installations, one notices the shape of the space, the light, one’s relation to the scale of the space. I notice for the first time that the walls of the gallery are floated six inches above the floor. (And was that light fixture running the length of the gallery always there?)

A magic near-secret of Grand Ronde is one that perhaps you’ll only see on a sunny day at 2 PM. There is a small, old fan pointing toward a wall in the recess. It moves the air just enough to create ripples in the water that I couldn’t see on the surface of the water, but I could see when I stood very close to the back wall and saw the faintest reflection. It’s this kind of invitation to look closer and closer still that sticks with you for days. It’s the same kind of thing on a minor scale that Irwin experienced after exiting a sensory deprivation chamber.

Grand Ronde, Rose McCormick at NAAU. installation view.

Divine subtlety aside, what makes this more than an homage to work by Irwin and other minimalists is that photo album. I’m the last one to go looking for narrative in a piece, but introduce a photo album, even if its closed (elsewhere I explain why I didn’t flip through the album), and narrative is there. Because albums tell stories; they are memory holders and in context here with blanket and suitcase are record of journey. Like the fan tickling the water, what the album items represent ruffles the present around the edges. Grand Ronde asks us to take a minute to notice.

I will be curious to see how a project like this alters McCormick’s work in future. In past she’s done color-saturated, figurative painting from which this is a major departure.

Ambitious installations charge the imagination of artist and viewer alike. If this is a great step forward for McCormick, it’s also a kick in the pants/invitation to other artists/curators to occasionally think Big. Thanks Ruth Ann Brown and New American Art Union for the funds and fortitude to support work of this nature.

Add a Comment »

TBA: Night One

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 04, 2009 at 11:45AM 0 Comments

Photo: Robert Runyon

Gang Gang Dance closes the night with an on-stage dance party.

As I left the school and walked out to the front lawn, which by now was dotted with a few cartons’ worth of cigarette butts and empties of Hamm’s and Rainier, a thought went through my white-noise addled head: “That is how you start a festival.”

The original plan was to arrive around a quarter til, hopefully well before the rush of people for the concert showed up, leaving me some time to work my way through the high school to my heart’s content. Unfortunately a minor Oregon Ducks football misadventure kept me by the TV a bit longer than I would have preferred.

The place was a mess of ironic mustachioed and mulleted humanity by the time I hit the school at 10:15. You had to fan out for more than two blocks to even find a good spot to park a bike, and God help you if you dared bring a car. It’s understandable, though, and a bit reassuring to know the city will take an opportunity such as free access to TBA and run with it. Or you know, wait in line and shamble up the high school’s immaculately decorated front steps.

Photo: Robert Runyon

Once I worked my way to the school’s main hall, a long, three-person-wide line grabbed my attention. Logic dictated there had to be something good over there. When I made my way to the front, I realized they were waiting to buy $4 stubby bottles of Sessions. Move along time.

The few pieces I saw during my brief run through the school immediately impressed. Johanna Ketola’s The Walls of My Hall had an eerie and darkly funny air, as these images of people standing in a circle with a parrot in a black room meshed surprisingly well with the radio playing Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” The image of tens of bodies all laying down in what could have been an invisible apartment building (or morgue) gained levity with the accompaniment of Rick Rizzs breaking down the Mariners’ 7-4 victory against the Athletics.

Stephen Slappe’s Halloween costume ode We Are Legion was surprisingly upstaged by a 2’ by 2’ by 2’ Being John Malkovich-style hole in the wall in an accompanying room. Of course, nothing was in the hole, but that didn’t stop six people from checking it out during the three minutes I was in the room. If it was intentional on Slappe’s part to use a simple hole in the wall to draw viewers’ attention from the image of a kid dressed as Buzz Lightyear next to one dressed as a suicide bomber, I applaud him. If it wasn’t, the applause is still there, just a little half-hearted. I look forward to the progression of this piece throughout the show as more costumes are submitted.

Ethan Rose’s literal wall of sound installation Movements deserved much more than the two minutes I gave it, and will receive it later. With more than a hundred music boxes going at once, all of them minutely coordinated, this entrancing room is a great place to lose an hour. The sterile white room adorned only with cracks of wire ending in dots of music boxes would have fit well as the lair of a new Batman villain. (He could be called the Music Man, perhaps, and he would have a penchant for hypnotic music boxes and 50s-era showtunes.)

Photo: Robert Runyon

Jesse Hayward’s Forever Now and Then Again brings audience participation to new heights.

Forever and Now Again, an audience participation piece from Jesse Hayward will demand a visit every time I come back to Washington High School. Consisting of about a hundred painted wooden boxes of various sizes, it’s left to the audience to do what they please with the materials presented to them. When I arrived, there was a large “W” in the middle of the room and a tower so tall people had to stack on top of each other to stack boxes on top of it. My friend managed to topple the “W” by removing one teeny box. Jeers of “Jenga” immediately followed.

Still, the big attraction of the night was a performance from Gang Gang Dance, a band I knew absolutely nothing about coming in. They were an acquired yet rewarding taste. When they started playing, the audience had two disparate reactions. One group was repulsed, gripping the arms of their chairs as Lizzie Bougatsos in her ruffled Ghostface Killah t-shirt let out another high-pitched feline yowl. The other group was pulled in by an afro-beat drum tractor beam. To begin there were very few dancers; in the balcony, there were a couple contingents of hippie dance practitioners (slow hip-swaying, arms in the air, severe lack of daisy chains, etc.) and on the floor, there was a young man who danced during the entire show, removing pieces of clothing as he went along, moving his arms as if he were rhythmically swatting at mosquitoes. Their ranks were quickly filled out as hyperventilating clusters of dancers sprouted everywhere. Sounding like a low-rent DIY version of Bjork, they moved back and forth from dissonance to harmony, working the crowd up into a frenzy in the process, the peaks of either side being a smooth bass line with a great dance beat to what felt like a panic attack in musical form, with downstairs dancing dude’s mosquito swatting moves changing into a ninja defense against an attack from a legion of invisible bats. I worried that he was going to spontaneously combust. To finish the show, everyone was let on stage in a dance party encircling the band, lit by the dull green of the screen behind us.

Walking through the halls to leave the school, the consensus from everyone around me was unanimous – bring on TBA 09.

Add a Comment »

Look up and See the Lights!

TBA: more cool things to see while waiting in line.

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Sep 04, 2009 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Chalkboard announcement in the entry way at Washington High School.

If you are back around The Works on Saturday, Sept. 5, at about dusk, look up and see the light show.

I love this pride-of-place piece. It gives a focus point to a series of strong, smaller light installations throughout the building, and honors the formalism of the architecture—did anyone else read all the inspirational education quotes carved into stone entryways?

The big light show is only back one more time: this Saturday, Sept 5 starting at dusk. Definitely worth stargazing if you are waiting in line to see Ten Tiny Dances that evening.

Here’s Some Artist Scoop

Really Big Video, Inc. is the Lake Oswego based company who put together the four-and-a-half minute looped projections.

Patrick Harvey, the video projectionist who created the project, took pictures of the building, and used them to build progressive slide projections of colored and patterned light. He illuminates the columns above Washington High School’s front doors, sometimes the light holds static, sometimes it highlights the architecture and sometimes it moves in slow stars-in-the-night-sky patterns.

Stop and say hi to Patrick, he’s running the projections out of the back of a truck parked out front of the Work. Ah, the magic of the macbook.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater

Rubberband Installation at The Works

TBA: cool things to see while waiting in line.

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Sep 04, 2009 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

Gang Gang Dance was awesomely loud as the opener at The Works last night. TBA’s perpetual after party is at Washington High School this year. Don’t let decibel levels dictate what you see there. There are equally awesome, quieter art pieces to soak up— and its definitely worth a few return visits for me.

Who Made This?

Stretched taut up the high school stairs is this whimsical installation that makes smart use of the humble, vaguely school-marmish rubberband. The bright rubber, and knotted home-grown-ness felt perfectly suited the stubbornly local feel of last night’s party. I love an installation that makes the vibe visible—in this case, the energetic anticipation of the people in line—waiting to get in, hearing the thump of music, and the rumble of a crowd.

Totally great. I’ll check around for an artist. But drop a note if you already know!

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater

First Friday September

visual art openings: Eastside represent

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 04, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Nothing/if it feels good. #5, Bobbi Woods. 2009.

Top choice for First Friday is the reception for Bobbi Woods and her recently opened solo show at Fourteen30 (1430 SE 3rd).

Rose McCormick’s Grand Ronde at New American Art Union opened last week, and if you haven’t already, you must see it. I am having trouble confirming that the gallery will be open this evening…will update when I know.

And at Gallery HOMELAND, Further More by Dan Anderson, Chris Held + Brian Pietrowski of Von Tundra opens. An earlier installation by this hybrid design/art crew at Valentines was striking. Will be interesting to see what they do with the expansive space at HOMELAND.

Add a Comment »

TBA Opening Night

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 04, 2009 at 06:00AM 3 Comments

lit up like a Christmas tree: Washington High for TBA:09

View Slideshow » Illustration:

lit up like a Christmas tree: Washington High for TBA:09

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Washington High exterior with PJ Harvey’s Really Big Video projection

View Slideshow » Illustration:

locker installation at Washington High School TBA:09

View Slideshow » Illustration:

National Park, Fawn Krieger. installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Fawn Krieger and Arnold Kemp in National Park

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Movements, Ethan Rose. Installation view.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

installation by Blair Saxon Hill and Teryl Saxon Hill

Washington High School was lit up last night as if it were prom for the kick-off of PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival (TBA:09).

PJ Harvey (I thought he was kidding about his name) altered the facade of the high school with projected video that both played off the architecture, running static in just one of the windows or creating starry skies between the illuminated columns. A delightful surprise. Typically Harvey does this kind of video work for clients like Nike and the Trailblazers. Here he was able to play.

Inside we got our first taste of the visual art component of TBA:09, No Such Place, curated by Kristan Kennedy, which I’m happy to see foregrounded as festival opener this year. It’s the strongest visual art showing the festival has ever seen. Classrooms on two floors of the building have become theaters for the video works and galleries for installations. And there was art in the halls as well. Blair Saxon Hill and Teryl Saxon Hill used found items to create a great, Joseph Cornell-like installation in one glass-front cabinet while elsewhere, there were anonymous interventions like the open lockers stuffed with file folders and a cloud made of cards from the library card catalog in the Lounge.

The halls and rooms were pulsing with people—families, seniors, scads of young people, arts heavy hitters, festival artists, and lots of familiar faces—moving in and out of the galleries, chatting in groups in the halls.

Among the works I am longing to return to see more of even now are Johanna Ketola’s “The Walls of My Hall,” a multi-channel video installation spilling through three smallish rooms which features figures isolated against a black ground. One dances, many are still, standing, seated, prone. Melancholy and beautiful, I’ll be revisiting this soon.

Another is robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner’s “C.L.U.E.” A stack of televisions is situated in a carpeted geodesic dome with one side removed. Some show a solid bright color, others natural environments like a stone face, and on others two dancers in bright monochrome dance by the side of a freeway, in the middle of a desert, in a pool. It was my favorite piece in the show.

Movements, Ethan Rose. Installation view.

Ethan Rose’s “Movements” stopped visitors in their tracks as they listened to the dozens of music box works affixed to the white walls intermittently and delicately sounding. There was a mixture of wonder, of puzzling out what they were hearing, and a good dose of “how did he do that?” We found Rose in a hallway on another floor taking it all in.

Fawn Krieger and Arnold Kemp in National Park

Kids stacked foam “rocks” into cairns in Fawn Krieger’s “National Park” while the “bear” looked on and Krieger lounged on and took snapshots while chatting with PNCA’s Arnold Kemp. I just wanted to curl up in the cave and sing, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” After watching Krieger’s process via her journal, I was shocked to see how much of this felt and foam environment had been paved with concrete or tarred. And perhaps this is just the right reaction to a piece that calls into question how we might just love natural spaces to death simply by visiting them or making them visitable.

Elsewhere, kids of all ages played with Jesse Hayward’s “Forever Now and Then Again,” movable boxes of many sizes that were precariously stacked on and between two shoulder-high boxes when I visited. It’s easy to forget that each box is six paintings screwed together. Unfortunately, a lot of the boxes were out of reach for the shorter participants, but here too, it will be fun to see the room change as time goes on.

In the only Oakland moment (Gertrude Stein infamously said about Oakland "There isnt’ any there there) Peter Coffin’s untitled piece in an unlabeled room featured a lonely and very sweet attendant who waits until you ask “What’s this about?” (Not “Can I have a circle?” or “Can you draw a circle around my friend?”) He fishes chalk out of his pocket, draws a chalk circle around you on the floor, says, “It’s about you.” Cringe. It may be more interesting later in the exhibition when the ten or so circles already on the floor multiply as a record of just how many visitors a.) find the piece and b.) care to play the game.

If there were production bumps along the way, they were forgiven. The sound for robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner’s “C.L.U.E.” was not working, but I agreed with artist/poet/educator Bethany Ides who said that she liked it plenty without the sound. Being herded out of the building at 9:30 although gallery hours were supposed to be 8-10 was awkward. We stood outside for maybe an hour before we were able to make our way slowly back in to be carded (ha ha). But not before a nameless band did a one minute show on the field outside. Gang Gang Dance prima donna’d by not showing up for a sound check until 9:40 for a 10 show and then they didn’t take the stage until well after 11. We didn’t care, and neither did the shining faces tilted toward the stage in the sweet old high school auditorium.

A few tips. The entrance faces West. So stairs on SE Stark are the way in. Oh and bring a sandwich. There’s a cool vending machine stocked with Fuban snacks, but the only food we found (in spite of plenty of liquid sustenance) was outside…a vegan taco cart.

Add a Comment »

First Thursday September

Harmonic convergence or overload

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 03, 2009 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

If you see nothing else tonight, go to Elizabeth Leach Gallery (417 NW 9th) to see MK Guth’s Terrain Change, a grand and poetic installation that’s just right for right now, single channel video, and stills. Former chair of PNCA’s MFA program, Guth has a national reputation and has had work in the Whitney Biennial.

See Robert Boyd’s Conspiracy Theory in the Feldman Gallery and work by Brian Lund in the Project Space at PNCA (1241 NW Johnson), curated by Mack McFarland for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival while in the main commons, the you’ll find the Faculty Biennial. Take a photo of yourself in Modou Dieng’s “Photo Booth” and send it to the artist.

At Charles Hartman Fine Art (134 NW 8th) Hayley Barker’s maddeningly beautiful Chimeras opens.

At Fontanelle Gallery (205 SW Pine) see Real Life and Other Myths, sculpture and paintings by Coral Silverman, see especially, her book-based sculptures which I love.

And at Igloo (325 NW 6th #102), see Chris Lael Larson’s intriguing Photos and Photo Animations.

Add a Comment »

TBA:09 Opens Tonight

opening night festivities FREE

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 03, 2009 at 10:00AM 2 Comments

Tonight is the opening of PICA’s TBA:09 Festival at The WORKS at Washington High School (531 SE 14th) (map) with a reception for the visual artists from 8-10 PM and a Gang Gang Dance party to follow, and it’s all free!

Things you can do between now and then:

Watch Gang Gang Dance videos instead of working. GGD is going to be working it tonight at The Works at Washington High for a free opening night show.

Get ready to join the Legion. Collect a few photos of you and yours in Halloween costume. Artist Stephen Slappe wants them for his web-based work, We Are Legion, featuring a scrolling legion of the costumed with your choice of soundtracks. You can submit your photos on the site or bring them The Works at Washington High School to be scanned.

Check out PICA’s channel on YouTube. And bookmark PICA’s flickr…there are going to be a ton of Festival photos there in the coming days.

Become a fan of PICA on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, get your pass or tickets, or become a member!

Read Fawn Krieger’s National Park journal. The artist has been in town for a month, building her installation, “National Park.” Get a sneak peak into her process.

Read PNCA Feldman Gallery curator/artist Mack McFarland’s interview with Brian Lund whose works on paper featuring a coded representation of both scenes from the movie Wall Street and Depression-era Busby Berkeley musicals (sometimes overlaid) is on view at PNCA now.

Listen to an excerpt from Ethan Rose‘s album Oaks, created using sounds recorded at Portland’s Oaks Park Skating Rink. This year for TBA, Rose has an installation at The Works at Washington High called “Movements” and is doing a performance, Forever, with Laura Gibson and Ryan Jeffery at PDX Contemporary Art next week.

Advanced: Read Hakim Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Then view the photo set by Oregon Painting Society of their project(s) named after the Bey text. OPS performs at The Works next Friday, September 11.

See you tonight!

LATE BREAKING ADDITION: Here’s a link to reading/resources related to TBA:09 Festival artists. ♥ Multcolib ♥. And thanks to @P_I_C_A for tweeting the link!!

Add a Comment »

Team Culturephile TBA Edition

we’re ready, are you?

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 03, 2009 at 07:00AM 3 Comments

P is for ’phile

Team Culturephile expands for PICA‘s TBA:09 Festival. If you see us around, say hello. Tell us what knocked your socks off, what puzzled you, what made you cringe or want to dance. We’ll be writing here and you can follow us on twitter. I’m @lisaradon.

In addition to Robert Runyon, whom you already met (follow Robert at @runyon), you’ll be seeing Alexis Rehrmann, Interactive Managing Editor for portlandmonthlymag.com and seattlemet.com and portlandmonthlymag.com intern, Keri Miller.

In an earlier chapter in her life, Alexis Rehrmann was a theater director and performer, way-low-budget producer/admin type in New York. She’s worked at BAM, Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, Drama Dept., NYC Fringe Festival, and created an agit prop performance piece with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association to argue for unions in sweatshops.

“I’m really excited for TBA this year. And particularly interested in cross-media performance, non-traditional creation processes and community practice work. I long for things with big heart and the intellectual, formalist rigor to wield it. While my potential for appreciating snoot factor is high (and well-earned, if I do say so myself) it does not preclude a passion for the potential of the great American Musical.

If you need me, I’ll be at the bar; talking in long sentences and emphatic hand gestures." Or you can follow her on twitter: @alexisrehrmann.

portlandmonthlymag.com’s Keri Miller

Keri Miller works on Portlandmonthlymag.com’s Eat and Drink section, and also writes frequently for the Portland Plated blog, focusing on Portland’s food culture.

Lewis & Clark grad (communications), Miller is a California expatriate who’s spent time in London studying the fine arts.

When not at Monthly, Miller’s likely out hearing music, which is why you’ll find her most nights at the WORKS.

Add a Comment »

Portland Art Museum Launches Multimedia

PAM posts videos of Artist Talks, lectures, and more

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 02, 2009 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

TJ Norris’ Artist Talk at Portland Art Museum

This is good good good. The Portland Art Museum has launched a multimedia section on its website collecting video of artist talks (highlights), lectures, and more. I think all the time about ways that our experiences with art and the conversations surrounding it can move back and forth between the real and online worlds.

I also think a lot about documentation and its value, and this week am thinking that when there is too much going on to see it all, good documentation means I can still experience in some way a program that I missed. I can have my cake and eat it too!

Artist Talks are excerpts from this fantastic series featuring Portland artists like TJ Norris, Pat Boas, and Michael Knutson talking about work in the museum. You could view Boas’s video before you see her upcoming exhibition, Record Record at Marylhurst’s Art Gym. Or check out what Norris thinks about Duchamp’s “Boite-en-Valise” and one of Sol Lewitt’s Open Cubes after you see the two shows he’s curated that are currently on view, Grid and SQFT (in the window of Blackfish Gallery).

Lectures and other talks now has the Adam Gopnik lecture “Museum, Children, and Meaning.” And this hour-long video captures one aspect of what’s so great about this: I wasn’t able to attend that lecture, but sat in on a great small-group discussion with Gopnik on the same topic the next day. Now I can go back and hear the lecture as well.

And finally, Conversations about Works of Art features short videos of “curators, educators and others” talking about work in the museum’s permanent collection that “amazes, puzzles, and challenges them.”

What’s more, the video isn’t a one-way transmission, because the museum has opened up them up to your comments.

Kudos to Christina Olsen, the museum’s Director of Education and Public Programs, for making this happen via a Kress Foundation grant and a visit from Smarthistory, a project designed to use informal conversation and multimedia to teach art history. The Portland Art Museum is, in fact, Smarthistory’s first museum partner. Beyond “teaching” per se, this effort is a great leap forward in creating new ways for us to engage works in the museum.

We have this technology to make this possible. It’s not rocket science. And Smarthistory shows it won’t break the bank. Here’s hoping the museum continues to grow this offering.

Add a Comment »

Let’s Do This: PICA’s TBA:09 Festival

10 day art+performance festival begins Thursday

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 01, 2009 at 12:00PM 4 Comments

robbinschilds. photo: A.L. Steiner

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Linda Hutchins TBA Schedule

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Lisa Radon’s TBA Schedule…sort of

Working out my schedule for PICA‘s TBA* Festival is always a challenge. I feel like I’m coordinating a military campaign. Ten days of time-based visual art, of contemporary dance and experimental theater, not to mention salons, lectures, chats, and late-night fun at the WORKS. Too much to see, talk about, to do…it’s bound to be overload in a very good way.

Portland-based artist Linda Hutchins is clearly a lot more organized than I am. Here’s her TBA schedule:

Linda Hutchins TBA Schedule

The primary conflict I found was being able to see Younger (Ethan Rose, Laura Gibson, and Ryan Jeffery) at PDX Contemporary Art at the same time (Sunday, Sept. 6 at 6:30 PM) as Linda Austin dances in Brody Condon’s piece at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College. Hutchins’ solution? As Condon is a 15 minute piece, hit that first and then run to PDX Contemporary…Younger is 210 minutes.

The result of weeks of studying, dogearing, scribbling in my TBA schedule, a summary of my game plan looks more like this:

Lisa Radon’s TBA Schedule…sort of

And this is the cleaned up analog version which has now been input in digital form to my Google calendar (making it sound more organized than it is). My hot pinks are must see’s: Meg Stuart & Philipp Gehmacher, locust, robbinschilds (I hear they’re building a geodesic dome!!!), and the Melody Owen-curated video evening Circles & Spinning Wheels, plus Younger, Stephen Slappe’s “We are Legion” and Fawn Krieger’s “National Park” at Washington High and Brian Lund at PNCA‘s Feldman Gallery. Finally, you’ll kick yourself if you don’t see Oregon Painting Society with Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner at the WORKS.

Russ Gage, QDoc film festival producer and TBA box office manager, is looking forward to Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People which I’m seeing Friday evening.

Artist and PNCA Feldman Gallery curator Mack McFarland can’t wait to see The Shipment.

What are you going to see?

See you Thursday night at the WORKS at the former Washington High School in SE at 8 PM for the opening of the visual art works ON SIGHT and then at 10:30, Gang Gang Dance!

I’m tweeting the Festival at @lisaradon if you’re into that kind of thing.

*NOTE: We’ve been chanting “TBA” along with the rest of the initiates, but just quickly, for those who don’t know, every year the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) produces a Time-Based Art Festival. Time-based art to distinguish from static art-on-the-wall includes contemporary dance, experimental theater, film, and visual art. It happens at theaters and venues all over town for just 10 short days.

Add a Comment »

TBA:09 on Art Talk on KBOO

special edition of the weekly art radio show

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 01, 2009 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

The Oregon Painting Society

Eva Lake hands the reins of her Art Talk radio show on KBOO to Sean Ongley for the day for a special preview of PICA’s TBA:09 Festival. He’ll be talking with Kristan Kennedy, Erin Boberg, Cathy Edwards, and Mike Daisey, with a special interview piece on the Works featuring Fawn Krieger and Jesse Hayward. And finally—can’t wait for this—he’ll be interviewing the Oregon Painting Society.

Add a Comment »