That human=breath vessel at the base of it is at the base of Jill Campoli’s VESSEL at her Little Field exhibition space which doesn’t say nearly enough about this two-channel video installation. VESSEL had the power to project itself from a side alley onto the hum of a Last Thursday via a giant mouth hovering above the space, breathing in and blowing out, drawing viewers into the alley and out of the fray. And it had the power that only something very quiet has with its stillness that is not stillness, the body doing nothing but what it does dumbly: breathe.
Campoli busted out of the vessel of the diminuitive, hundred-year-old garage that is Little Field with an improvised circular screen on the roof of the garage for the projection of the mouth while in the dark space itself, video of a male torso visibly inhaling and exhaling was projected on a floor-to-ceiling tube giving the flat projection a bit of dimensionality. The viewer was faced with the choice to stand well back to be able to see both projections, putting great distance between viewer and piece, or to approach the body at human scale and lose sight of the whole. VESSEL is the first work I’ve seen of Campoli’s, and I’m curious to see more.
REVISED: Jill’s surname now spelled correctly thanks to the ultimate fact-checker…her mom! Thanks Mom!
Jason Doizé’s Hikikomori at FalseFront is poignant narrative captured in an elegantly minimalist installation. On a wall text, one of Japan’s young shut-ins or hikikomori explains that years of torment by fellow students drove him to seek refuge in his room. The outside world is represented by white paper leaves blown into corners of the room, the hikikomori’s space behind a wall by a a white blanket folded on a low palette, votives, and a set of earphones on a high shelf playing the sounds of Japanese game shows. Bridging these monochromatic elements are three rows of dozens of identical drawings on yellow lined paper of outlines of potential boxes (cut here, score here, fold). The boxes are a smart stroke, their cool geometry providing the distance that prevents pathos from descending into bathos. The work makes a delicate balance between implicating the viewer in the hikikomori’s plight via the wall text and inviting consideration of the very few folds it would take to join him.
Benjamin Young. Material Affair. Appendix Project Space. 2009.
One can’t look at Benjamin Young’s work for his solo show “Material Affair” at Appendix Project Space and not think that this is what might have resulted had Carl Andre lightened up a little. Young, too, deals with straightforward, working class materials: steel rods, chunks and slabs of wood, black rubber bungee cords, clamps. Of these, Young makes unfussy compositions, using at most three materials together. The fanciest Young gets is in joining lengths of steel rod with jute cord into an improvised trestle, and even here, Young is not being clever but utilitarian in a Swiss Family Robinson kind-of way that feels sincerely experimental…what would happen if and how can I? Otherwise, things are more or less let alone to be what they are: the crosscut slab of tree is made weightless hanging from a rafter via bungee cords, the three weathered lengths of wood stacked on end are bridged with an orange cord anchored with cantilevered clamps. It’s this last, in particular, that seems like a whimsical Andre. And on the wall, the roads not taken, welding sticks in a quiver, an exploded lightweight bungee cord, and a piece of netting hung by a thread.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 29, 2009 at 10:00AM0 Comments
Hikikomori. Jason Doizé.
Some very intriguing shows this Last Thursday up in the Great North East.
One thing I discovered when I am alone with one of them, they couldn’t bully me. They couldn’t even keep eye contact. But if they are in groups of 2 or more, they do whatever they want. They’re such cowards. I am still wondering though, why are people cruel? -Ykurosawa
Jason Doizé’s Hikikomori, an exhibition based on the phenomenon of the same name of young shut-ins in Japan, is at False Front (4518 NE 32nd) with an opening reception October 29 6-10 PM.
Doizé says, “To what degree do we open our ‘little home boxes’ we inhabit and allow others in? Maybe the idea of shutting-in isn’t foreign at all. Maybe in the end we’re all hikikomori.”
Material Affair a solo exhibition of work by Benjamin Young, is at Appendix Project Space (south alley between 26th and 27th Avenues on NE Alberta) opening Thursday, October 29 at 6-11 PM.
“In collaboration with collected materials, Young sculpturally explores the tension, process, and ecology of synthesized form.”
And at Little Field Gallery (north alley between 28th and 29th off NE Alberta) is VESSEL an installation by Little Field founder Jill Campoli opening Thursday, October 29 from 7-10 PM.
“Vessel explores the transitioning history and function of a physical space. "
“So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenter’s hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.” – William Goyen ‘House of Breath’
we talk arts institutions and new and social media this Friday
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 27, 2009 at 01:00PM5 Comments
Just at reminder that this Friday, 4-6 PM at the Gerding Theater at the Armory, I’m hosting a roundtable on the ways Portland arts institutions are using, will be using, and imagine using new and social media to amplify their exhibitions, shows, and programs. There is new energy in this direction in the last year or so on the part of a number of institutions that will be represented at the table.
I wrote about 10,000 Invitations: A Roundtable on Arts Institutions and New/Social Mediabefore, about some of the thinking that went into it. The event is part of The New Communicators unconference starting tomorrow. Other arts-related New Communicators events include “Art is War: Reinventing the Art Sales System with New Media” on Friday 7-9 PM at the Art Institute. All New Communicator events are free. You may but need not RSVP to attend.
Here’s a summary of 10,000 Invitations and a list of the participants:
Good minds from Portland arts institutions share the ways they’re using new and social media to engage audiences.
The Portland Art Museum creates conversational videos about works in the collection, creates a community website for its China Design Now exhibition, and tweets as M.C. Escher. Portland Center Stage creates show preview videos that go viral and uses Twitter in innovative ways. The Museum of Contemporary Craft creates video and podcast and invites audience response. PICA integrates Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube into its TBA Festival blog.
In education, programming, and marketing, we’ll talk about what’s worked and what’s on the horizon as the landscape continues to change with new tools and new challenges all the time.
Participants include:
Christina Olsen, PhD
Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum
Beth Heinrich
Director of Marketing & Public Relations, Portland Art Museum
Cynthia Fuhrman
Marketing and Communications Director, Portland Center Stage
Patrick Leonard
Public Relations, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Rebecca Burrell, Public Relations and Marketing Specialist, Museum of Contemporary Craft
Namita Gupta-Wiggers, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft
Kenneth Goldsmith is tonight’s guest lecturer for PSU’s Monday Night Lecture Series at 7:30 PM at Shattuck Hall Annex (1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198) at PSU.
Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry is primarily of a durational nature. If we’re interested in the area of crossover in the Venn Diagram of art and poem, Goldsmith is There.
He’s also the man we have to thank (as founding editor) for ubuweb, that luscious, ever-growing, massive archive of avant-garde and experimental sound, poem, film and more. And for that he is my hero.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007.
Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. A book of critical essays, “Uncreative Writing,” is forthcoming from Columbia University Press, as is an anthology from Northwestern University Press co-edited with Craig Dworkin, “Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.”
Pat Boas. May 20, 2008, Obama Expected to Hit Milestone in Today’s Votes (detail).
Gouache. from Little People series.
Portland artist Pat Boas takes selective readings of the world, processing received information such as front page news or signage through filters that result in, for example, some of the remarkable drawings in her current one-woman exhibition, Record Record at Marylhurst’s Art Gym. Her readings are experiment, expose, illumination.
I’m partial to the work that is more procedural, in particular, her series here that uses as source material pages from the New York Times that become a critical editing of the edited, of, “all the news that’s fit to print,” when by “fit” we mean, what exactly? By isolating certain typographic or photographic elements, her drawings get at questions like this in very elegant ways.
For “All the Heads on the Front Pages of the New York Times,” Boas traces, on a single sheet of vellum the silhouette outline of all of the heads that appear on the front page of the Times for a month. These are ghost crowds of the news-makers, the victims, the heroes, the bystanders. Similarly, for her “NYT Little People” series, she does finely wrought gouache paintings of only the non-famous figures that appear on the cover of the Times. The figures float in isolation on a white ground, holding their places in the invisible layout on which the paintings are based. She titles these pieces with a headline from that day. Both of these series raise questions about who is newsworthy and what the structures are that determine their newsworthiness, and in fact the rules are that dictate what makes anything worth reporting for the Times.
“A3” jarringly isolates incidences of the ad for Tiffany’s jewelry and the international news photos (of disaster, war, death) beside it that shared that page of the Times for many years. “If that’s all there is my friend, then let’s keep dancing,” you can hear Peggy Lee sing. This series is the best example of perfect-pitch political work that says what needs to be said sans sledgehammer.
In contrast to those works that foreground the people on the front page of the Times, “Alphabet (NYT 01/01/01)” isolates the letters of the alphabet that appear in the type on the page (one drawing per letter displayed in calendar form) via solvent transfer. The pieces are beautiful, as if letters were randomly shot through screen and stencil at the paper. It’s as if the practice of recording these letters might reveal a secret and it does: the layout of the page foregrounded with the image areas left blank, and of course, the codebreaker’s cheat, the letter frequencies in the English language: etaoin shrdlu.
Boas’ more current work, her 2007-2009 series “What Our Homes Can Tell Us” suffers in that its methods are more ad hoc. The artist tiles lyric phraselets from photos she’s shot in her home and on her travels of words she finds on signs, packaging, book spines, &c. Because the artist subjectively shuffles the words, these are best seen as micro-poems rather than the mystical readings of a medium as Boas asserts. Higgledy-piggledy framing of the individual words might be deliberate, emphasizing their found nature, but it thwarts any visual rhythm that could create structure. So we’re left with whether Boas’ phrases resonate as phrases.
I’m glad curator Terri Hopkins honed in on this info-related work of Boas’. An exhilarating show overall.
Bustin’ out of the NE Alberta garage-at-the-end-of-the-alley, the team behind Appendix Project Space opens its first collaborative installation on the road, specifically at Recess Gallery at Shattuck Hall, PSU (1914 SW Park Avenue) on Friday, October 23.
Processions: an Elaborative Cartography is “a fifty foot outdoor fiber installation and an indoor suite of drawings, objects and strung work.” Maggie Casey, Zachary Davis, Joshua Pavlacky and Benjamin Young envision it as, “the first project of our yet-to-be named collective and studio,” which is all to the good because individually they all make interesting work. Head over to the artists’ talk at 4 PM in the Shattuck Hall Annex with a reception to follow at 5 PM on the Shattuck Hall Terrace (they say the piece is best viewed as day becomes night.
“Navigating the topology of the individual, the group, and emergent form, the exhibition is an exploration of process and its structure. Processions is an ecology of making. Composed of a series of hung arcs, each informed by its companion, the resulting structure exists as a material pause in an evolution of possible choices.”
August: Osage County onstage at the Keller—this week only!
Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Oct 21, 2009 at 02:00PM0 Comments
Photo:
Robert J. Saferstein
August: Osage County is a new family drama in the classic American theater tradition. The playwright, Chicago-based Tracy Letts, is a major voice on the modern American stage. He was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama his brilliant, funny, and frightening family portrait.
Experimental It Ain’t
August: Osage County follows in the tradition of the riveting family dramas of Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill. If this is your cup of tea, for heaven’s sake—go! The Broadway touring production opened Tuesday at the Keller, and you’ve only got 6 more shows before it moves on this Sunday.
Things You Might Want To Know:
It Won Prizes 1 Pulitzer Prize, 5 Tony Awards (including Best Play & Best Director) and numerous other NYC accolades let you know that this play is worth your attention. Plus, you get way more laughs with Tracy Letts than you do with Arthur Miller.
It is LongAugust: Osage County runs 3 hrs and 35 minutes, with 2 intermissions. Ahem, eat dinner first.. Tickets start at $23.25, and hour for hour, that’s a stage bargain when you think about it. Remember: way more yucks than Eugene O’Neill.
It’s a Great Story The yarn spins out over one sweltering month in Oklahoma. Three generations of the Weston family return home to gather around a crisis: the patriarch, Beverly Weston has disappeared. Once they are all in the same room, the Westons will wreak many more crisises on each other. A Caveat:August: Osage County is a sprawling, rollicking, story; the characters are often very funny, and sometimes painful, deeply sad and plain mean.
The Ensemble is Terrific You will most likely recognize someone: the truculent teenage granddaughter, the nosey (and noisy) aunt, the long-suffering uncle, and the oldest daughter’s grab for control.
Estelle Parsons plays Violet Weston, the family matriarch: an erratic, pill-addicted leather-tough woman capable of inflicting on those around her the peculiar cruelties of addiction. Her pills—and her vanished husband’s alcoholism—have cast a warping pall over the Weston family. Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons has many accolades of her own, but you might recognize her as the mother on the TV sitcom, Roseanne.
Parsons is great, as is the rest of the cast. Her first entrance, in a pill-induced haze is a lurching, swaying, rushing, slurring clattering poetry of an addict deep into a long trip. Next time we see her: a Grandma in a pantsuit. Ah, a family can be a complicated business.
The Keller is a big stage on which to see a straight play, and August: Osage County commands every inch of it.
QR Code book. Paige Saez. 2008. detail. image via flickr.com/photos/paigedestroy
Paige Saez’s QR Code book project isn’t new perhaps (it dates to 2008), but I’m pretty wild about its use of whizzy technology in service of narrative abstract cartography.
Her book documents a series of almost secret public installations of QR code stickers (one would have to be familiar with QR codes to know what one was looking at on the wall of the bathroom of Vendetta, for example) and songs accessed by each QR code that for Saez have connection to place.
Documenting the project in book form adds an additional narrative layer missing from the first-hand experience of reading the code to trigger song and makes the whole project available to those of us who don’t have readers on our iPhones. Plus the photography is snapshotty beautiful.
This is Saez at her best, approaching the psychogeographic (perhaps better to call it sociogeographic) with her signature mix of poignancy and technological adventurism. She had previously explored similar terrain at on Platial with personal narrative maps of Portland.
QR Code book. Paige Saez. 2008. detail. image via flickr.com/photos/paigedestroy
I have to thank Amber Case (@caseorganic) who tweeted the link to Paige’s book yesterday.
American Craft’s Janet Koplos and Museum of Contemporary Craft curator Namita Gupta-
Wiggers
Call + Response, currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, is a layered curatorial construct of object, word, and idea that begins in the Museum’s galleries, extends online, and reaches out into the region’s academies and beyond, to the larger theater of craft theory in America. The show features work by those who identify as craft artists, visual artists, and designers, all of them professors. An equally weighted though less visible component is the set of essays and interviews of each artist by an art or architectural historian, also drawn from Oregon colleges and universities.
The show features Karl Burkheimer’s modernist wood sculptures, David Eckard’s slight of hand video, Josh Faught’s abject fiber sculpture, Anya Kivarkis’ “celebrity” jewelry sculpture, Jiseon Lee Isbara’s patchworked embroidered drawings, Sam Morgan’s surface-worked ceramic tea pots, Heidi Schwegler’s perforated pattern melamine dishes, and Studio Gorm’s prototype kitchen and mini-house.
As with most efforts by provocative curator Namita Gupta Wiggers, Call + Response aims to shake things up: to show art, design, craft side by side in a “craft” museum blurring what we think of when we use any of those words, to invite if not demand the attentions of art historians for craft, and to forge connections among the faculties of institutions like PNCA, Lewis & Clark, Reed, U of O, and more.
Art historian Sue Taylor in her essay on artist Heidi Schwegler quotes fashionable craft theorist Glenn Adamson who recommends a curatorial strategy to bridge the art/craft divide: treating craft as subject, as a “topic for conceptualization.” And it’s fair to say that much of what guides Wiggers’ work is just such a strategy.
“The objects on view reveal how each artist deals with the frisson between concept and materially-based practices rooted in particular craft-oriented techniques, media and stories.”
I sat down recently with Wiggers to discuss Call + Response at the Museum. Listen in:
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 20, 2009 at 09:00AM0 Comments
Comet, Ryan Pierce, 2009. acrylic on canvas over panel. 72″ × 72″. image via elizabethleach.com
This morning at 11:30 on Art Focus on KBOO, Eva Lake talks with Ryan Pierce, whose show, Written from Exile, is up at Elizabeth Leach. acrylic paintings which explore a post-industrial world.
Regarding Written From Exile, from the gallery website:
In Written from Exile Ryan Pierce presents vivid, large-scale acrylic paintings that examine our world after the end of the industrial era, projected human migration patterns, and the remains of civilization. Pierce poses the questions: Who will be displaced by climate change and where will they go? How will they get there and how will they be accepted? What will happen to the things they’ve left behind? Pierce has used the narrative structure of Jerzy Kosinski’s classic Holocaust novel The Painted Bird – dark, violent, and arguably plagiarized – to form visual corollaries from a post-global warming environment. The paintings in Written from Exile borrow formal techniques from rural, self-taught Eastern European artists, whose approach to landscape painting reflects a personal relationship with the land. Ultimately the viewer is presented with a positive outcome – the renaissance of the natural world after the global human population has been greatly diminished.
Written from Exile includes paintings featured in Pierce’s upcoming artist book, To Those Who Will Not Know the Way, which was partially supported by a project grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Please join us at the gallery for a reception and artist talk to celebrate the book release at 11:00 am on Saturday, October 31.
Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Oct 19, 2009 at 12:00PM0 Comments
Eddie and May come into focus in CoHo Productions’ staging of Fool For Love.
May sits on the edge of her bed, in an anonymous room, in a divey motel, on the outskirts of the Mojave desert. Her feet are bare, her head hangs low, her face is hidden by a tumble of blonde hair.
His boots planted wide, his belt buckle gleaming, Eddie considers her. He has driven miles and miles to see May, to find her, to begin again, and he is concerned. Does she need something to eat? Chips? Tea? Maybe he should go get something?
He moves toward the door and she flings herself onto his feet. No, he should not leave.
As Fool for Love begins, we learn that Eddie and May have begun (and ended) many times before. We will watch them battle it out again in the 70 minutes of Coho Production’s presentation of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, playing now through Nov. 21—get more info on the events calendar.
These two are (unsurprisingly) terrible for each other. In CoHo Production’s version, the roles of Eddie and May are performed by a pair who are married in real life, Chris Harder and Val Landrum, which is sort of cool. Backstory aside, performance matters more—both actors bring life and intensity to Shepard’s muscular, American brand of theater.
Landrum gives May the immutable anger of a grown woman who has been done wrong (after wrong, after wrong) and the impulsive physicality of a rage-full child.
Harder’s Eddie is a carefully calibrated, rodeo clown. He teases and toys, backtracks, and switch hits. In Eddie, Shepard brings to the stage an acid tongued rendition of the myth of our American West.
In this darkly hallucinatory lens, real cowboys are rapidly receding into jumbled memories of the past.
A specter of an old cowboy, played with crease-faced, dirty-dungareed, easy authenticity by Tim Stapleton, sits in a rocking chair nursing a bourbon and watching the action unfold.
Eddie is faintly made a mockery beside the old man, He works as a stuntman, not a cowboy, and he parades through the motel room door with props worthy of the Marlboro Man: a bottle of tequila, a shotgun, a lasso with which he ropes the bed posts.
Fool for Love is at its best during a series of beautiful monologues that dot the story. The characters tell tales and memories, truths and lies, each is plainly spoken and viscerally described—travelling by car along a dark country road, walking into a new town, gripped by your mother’s hand, seeing the woman you love for the first time. Each speech reveals the ties that bind these characters tightly together.
Eddie and May consume each other like a flash fire, sucking the air right out of the room. It is relentless and sort of exhausting to watch at times, and I with that amidst all the duking it out, we felt even more frequently the flashes of passion that keep them so brutally hooked on each other. The performances and production are solid throughout, and Sam Shepard’s masculine vision of America is still fun to watch, more then 25 years after its debut.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 18, 2009 at 12:00PM0 Comments
“Stability” Ward Shelley. installation at Lawrimore Project. image via: wardshelley.com
In late September, PNCA brought Brooklyn-based artist Ward Shelley to Portland. I interviewed Shelley the day after he lectured on his work at the Lab at the Museum of Contemporary Craft.
Shelley, who has exhibited internationally, is known for two major bodies of work: architectural scale performance installation and informational drawings. He spoke about both in his slide lecture. Shelley’s performance installations have meant building a restricted space in which Shelley (and sometimes team) live for the duration of the exhibition. For some of these performances, the issue is living in contained space, for others, there is both living in containment and a program, a building from here to there over the course of the exhibition.
For “We are Mice” he built out false walls in his gallery, Pierogi Gallery, and lived in the space between the walls and the actual walls of the gallery for 35 days. Video cameras projected a view between the walls into the gallery. For WASP, he and his team built a “wasp’s nest” in a multi-story atrium and lived in it for the duration. His tunnel pieces have meant building a “tunnel” or passageway affixed to a roof from one end of an arts space to another. For his early “platform” pieces, he and his team built a platform on which they lived while slowly removing pieces from one end and building them on the other to slowly, incrementally move the platform from one end of a park to the other.
Shelley’s paintings of art diagrams in the lineage of Ad Reinhardt, Alfred Barr, and George Maciunas can be seen on the artist’s website and include “Who Invented the Avant Garde” and “Downtown Body.” He began these paintings with his own autobiography, moved on to recording the careers of artists whose work he admired like Frank Zappa and Andy Warhol, and expanded from there to chart in his organic style, women artists, the Beats, and more.
Shelley’s yet to show in Portland, but recently did “Stability” (pictured) at Lawrimore Project in Seattle. Shelley is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburgh.
InterVIEW:
And some notes from his lecture:
Installations
Shelley created his first architectural scale performance installation at the invitation of Socrates Sculpture park in Long Island City. He had until then been doing smaller scale robotic sculptures for a number of years. “I needed to do something bigger, something different,” Shelley said. “They [Socrates] were worried that little robotic pieces would chew a kid’s arm off if left unattended, and anyway, there was no power, nowhere to plug in.” Shelley said, “I wanted my work to change while you were watching it. I felt that that would push your perceptions in a certain kind of way.”
Shelley created a platform on which he and his team lived for the duration of the piece. Every day they removed sections of the platform on one end and built them on the other, slowly moving the piece across the park.
“We were going to be the motors. It was a completely fresh start for me. I was a sailor, I had done crossings, and I had just gone on my first technical climb. I was all charged up on expeditions,” Shelley said. “This piece had rules: you get on top, and you don’t come down until you got to the other side of the park. Every day we built and rebuilt it. The piece becomes a personal myth.”
“We were doing a dumb thing in a difficult way,” Shelley said. “When I said that was that just defensiveness to ward off criticism?”
“The way it worked was very transparent. But it was a performance in obscure place. How would people find out about it?” Shelley said. “I thought about Chris Burden getting himself shot. I didn’t see it, but I had heard about it. It was like a compressed artwork. You could take it like a pill and it would unfold in your mind. I thought, what can I do for audience that will not see this thing? I decided to make a direct mail package with letters, stickers, postcards falling out, an explanation of how it worked. But wow could I get people to open the envelope? I put on the outside, ‘How did they go to the Bathroom?’ The show postcard is a picture of the toilet. It worked.”
Shelley repeated the piece in Berlin and in Italy.
“You just load with everything you know, every idea you have. I had the time. I had costumes for everybody. It had a strong connection to sports. You have to get to the finish line without breaking the rules. People [artists] try to disown sport. They think that it’s vulgar, etc. but there are a lot of similarities.”
In all of these platform pieces, Shelley said they spent a lot of time talking to people. “Since it was an extended performance there didn’t seem to be a reason not to interact. It created an openness, allowed us to engage. It was practically made for t.v. It was like a hot air balloon, with bright colors and corporate branding. I even made a logo for us.”
For his next piece, Shelley decided to, “Do something very different rather than refine the earlier idea and therefore weaken it.” Inspired by a visit to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, Shelley decided to build a tunnel.
“We couldn’t dig a tunnel so we built one,” he said. It was in France in blocks of abandoned factory where they had manufactured cigarettes. “We built a ceiling tunnel that snaked through building with “Termites” or helpers who brought material through the tunnel.”
“I decided to stop the TV look and make a movie look: dark, closed-in, the opposite of last piece. It was in France. I was thinking carnal. We had costumes, created fiction to go along with it. In the gallery viewers could see on screens what was going on inside the tunnels. I stayed in for three weeks. The termites stayed for two days. It wasn’t their thing. I reached the other end of building: Mission accomplished.”
Some years later, Shelley returned from Europe to his studio, “and here was my friend Jesse, bathing in the sink. At the same time I heard about these artists who were losing their studio and before they had to get out, they moved a wall and created a hidden studio in part of the space. We were all like mice trying to fit in, saying ‘I don’t need much.’” So for “We have Mice” at Pierogi Gallery. Shelley moved the walls and lived inside the walls for 35 days, working on art. Video cameras delivered a feed of what was going on behind the walls to monitors in the gallery.
Timeline Drawings
Shelley copies his complex timeline drawings onto architectural vellum then paints on the reverse. He does them in editions of three, when one sells, he does another, correcting any errors in the first that he’s discovered. The first timeline drawing Shelley did was his autobiography. “I used graphical conventions to analyze my life, with a degree of editorializing.”
What’s interesting in the telling of history is choices about what’s told, what’s not told. There is never a neutral point of view. I responded to what Lucy Lippard called the dematerialization of art in the 60s and called what I was doing, “rematerializing art.” I took the careers of interesting people, and told their stories via these timeline drawings. The first was Carolee Schneeman, basically a career chart, her influences, collaborators. It allowed me to learn about art history, things I cared about. Next I did women painters in America, and there were a lot before 2nd wave feminism, women with no support. I did Andy Warhol, did the history of rock n’ roll based on the Alfred Barr drawings. I did a history of art movements. Then I did Downtown Body, tracing Manhattan bohemia from Whitman on.
For the maps, there is no analogue for reality besides reality. There is always going to be a point of view. You are editing, creating reality.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 18, 2009 at 10:00AM0 Comments
As part of tonight’s Content at the Ace Hotel (1022 SW Stark St), a fashion event modeled after hotel art fairs in which designers take over a room for the night, five Portland-based artists are doing art installations. Modou Dieng, Justin Gorman, Minh Tran, Seth Neefus, Sam Korman, and Minh Tran are doing installations in the stairwell, on the walls, suspended from the ceiling and outside the hotel.
The second floor of the Ace will be given over to 35 Portland fashion designers in 28 rooms, the more adventurous of whom I expect will transform the rooms with interesting installations of their own.
Bands and beautiful people round out Content which begins at 5 PM. Admission is $10, all ages.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 17, 2009 at 10:00AM0 Comments
TV. Antoine Catala.
Oh, grey morning, you are a perfect invitation to the halls of the former Washington High School (531 SE 14th) in SE Portland where for just two days more, you can see the visual art exhibition of PICA’s TBA:09 Festival. The artists and performers from around the country are long gone. That 10 days of performative frenzy on the cusp between summer and fall is memory. But today and tomorrow from 12-4 PM, you can still see one of the year’s more important exhibitions. It is so rare that we have the opportunity to see the work of Portland artists like Stephen Slappe, Ethan Rose, and Jesse Hayward alongside work by artists from New York, France by way of New York (Antoine Catala), Finland (Johanna Ketola), and Beijing (Ma Quisha).
Rose’s “Movements,” an installation of music boxes, is a sublime delight. Ketola’s video installation “The Walls of My Hall,” which isolates still figures on a black ground, will bear all the time you can afford it with its nuanced commentary on human isolation. I’ve written about robbinschilds “C.L.U.E.” before, but it’s my favorite work of the show, capturing contemporary dance, the color wheel, and the American landscape in a beautiful multi-channel video (and during the festival, a series of performances). Catala’s “TV” a mapping of live television feed on a grouping of revolving spheres is Blade Runner grotesque.
Fawn Krieger’s “National Park” is oddly underwhelming as an installation centerpiece of the exhibition—curator Kristan Kennedy called it “minimalist” in conversation with the artist. Krieger’s online “syllabus” for the piece is a lot more interesting, unless you’re a kid…then playing in the cave and under its structure will be a lot of fun. A lot of thinking went into the piece that didn’t make it out the other side.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 16, 2009 at 01:00PM0 Comments
Alembic is a regular new-performance series at Performance Works NorthWest, each evening selected by a different artist. Tonight and tomorrow night we’ll have Meg McHutchison to thank for introducing us to performances by groups from Seattle and Portland. Vanessa DeWolf’s Wobbly Things (Seattle), Kris Wheeler’s Something (Seattle), and redFred (Portland) which is Meg McHutchison, Christine Toth, and Emily Stone.
“The conceptual thread that ties these artists together
is their investigation of the boundaries of performance space. They are intrepid in their improvisational practice(s) of invitation to and feedback from their audiences. Their curiosity is fueled by imagination, and illuminated in the moment-to-moment transformation of performance.”
Alembic runs two nights, Friday and Saturday October 16 and 17 at 8:00 PM at Performance Works Northwest (4625 SE 67th Ave).
Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Oct 15, 2009 at 09:00AM0 Comments
Monologist Josh Kornbluth must be the most voluble guy in his book club. His one-man show, Ben Franklin:Unplugged is playing at Portland Center Stage through Nov. 22 —find event info here.
This bookish, mildly wacky play provides satisfying sustenance on a blustery fall evening.
I was a bit leery due to the hefty title (The Founding Fathers? On a Wednesday night? Really?). And while my Dad, devoted member of his American History Book Club, will find a lot to like about the show, there is also plenty of entertainment for those who don’t spend weekends reading Lyndon Johnson’s (multiple volume) biography (multiple times).
Ben Frankin: Unplugged is often pretty darn funny and slyly scholarly.
Kornbluth looks eerily like Benjamin Franklin—balding pate, bespectacled visage, pearish shape. He looks in the mirror one morning and is shocked to see his likeness to America’s First Citizen, and so begins his herky-jerky journey to discover Ben Franklin.
Before he was a monologist, maybe best known for his Red Diaper Baby, Kornbluth was a copy editor at a series of alternative weeklies. He moves like one.
This is one of the things that I love about live, solo, performance: there is time to sink into the unique burrs and snags of the performer’s rhythm. Kornbluth’s voice rushes, rises, and sloshes about, and he has a gallumping physicality, pulling long faces and gesturing emphatically.
He bumps along, in a cozily-garish orange wallpapered kitchen, and introduces a lively cast of characters: his mother Bunny and her sister Birdie, old Jewish communists who call him regularly from New York City; Michigan Mitch, a militia member protesting outside the United Nations; and Jim, a desperate, dusty, history clerk at Kornbluth’s independent Berkeley bookstore. Kornbluth quickly becomes fixated on the relationship between Ben Franklin and his illegitimate son, William.
He brings his two subjects together: his family, and his Franklin “researches” in Act Two. After a very funny section about shooting cable TV spots on the streets of New York dressed as Ben Franklin, Kornbluth sits at and reads letters between Ben Franklin and his son. He simply, and suddenly, brings onstage the shock and the stakes—the personal, familial, blood costs—of the American Revolution.
What a beautiful moment in the theater. It take a while to get there, but its worth it.
It appears to be America-ness! season at the Armory. Upstairs, Ragtime, a sweeping historic musical set in New York City during the early 1900’s, is playing on the main stage.
Is it a programming strategy, do you think; or a synergistic accident of scheduling?
I am now benching my blogger self for use of the word, “synergistic.” I cede the floor to you.
Blog Note: Starting right now (woot!) Culturephile is covering the Portland theater scene with as much regularity as we can muster. Well, I can muster, since Lisa has graciously agreed to let me perch on her posts. I did some TBA coverage for Culturephile this season, and my backstory is here if you’re curious.
The John Jay curated show of 30 younger Chinese artists
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 15, 2009 at 08:45AM0 Comments
The art component of the current China cultural blow-out in Portland happens not at the Portland Art Museum (currently showing China Design Now with graphic, product, fashion design as well as architecture) but at the Goldsmith building, formerly the Portland Art Center at NW 5th and Couch. There at the freshly dubbed “Goldsmith Gallery,” Wieden + Kennedy’s John Jay has curated Jelly Generation a show with work by 30 young Chinese artists.
The location of the show itself is interesting, but not for the reasons you’re thinking having to do with two golden lions. You are likely aware that outside of exhibitions by PAM and PICA (and galleries like Rocks Box and Fourteen30) we are afforded few opportunities to see work by contemporary artists from beyond the NW. Opportunities to see work by international artists are even more rare (I think back to Jeff Jahn’s Fresh Trouble which included work by Cao Fei and of course TBA:09’s work by Ma Quisha). And yet, one gallery has regularly shown international work. Kitty corner across the 5th and Couch intersection, Katsu Tanaka’s Compound has regularly exhibited work by younger Japanese artists. The recent Survival Drive: Rei & Hooky being a highlight. So it is with a “Welcome to the neighborhood!” then, that I anticipate Jelly Gen’s exhibition of younger Chinese artists.
According to the note on the show, “The battlelines have been drawn, the post 80’s generation vs. the post 90’s.” I’m wondering, and I’ll find out today when I visit, whether that shouldn’t have read, “pre-80’s vs. post-90’s” to indicate we’re talking about one post-90’s “Jelly” generation that has flourished, benefiting from a relaxation of cultural controls. As written, it kind of sounds like two distinct groups, more interesting perhaps, but unlikely. I’ll report back from the front.
Jelly Generation is on view Tuesday through Saturday from 12-7 PM.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 14, 2009 at 07:00PM0 Comments
Sean Healy and Joe Thurston. detail. 2009. Photo: Calvin Ross Carl & Ashley Sloan via OPENWIDEpdx.com
The iceberg has been recurring metaphor for me over last week or two. It’s also recurring motif and centerpiece of The Future Royal Family of Antarctica , a new collaborative project by Portland-based artists Sean Healy and Joe Thurston that that is headed off to Berlin for exhibition at East/West Project October 23 through November 21.
The carved iceberg, studded with one faceted gem, floats on a blue sheet plastic sea that flows down and onto the floor of the gallery. Iceberg reliefs executed in Thurston’s signature style are propped up on the floor while Healy-esque laser-cut penguins keeping glass eggs warm on their feet. The two can protest that Future Royal is a collaboration existing outside the studio practice of either artist, but each shows his hand and the mashup coheres. If the title of the show is ultimately hopeful in the context of front page global warming news, the series of beautifully subtle, white-on-white prints of icy cliff faces (the scale of the cliff dwarfed by the field of the paper) quietly signal the continent’s emergency, today’s cliff is tomorrow’s iceberg is tomorrow’s….
See more great photos of the preview on OPENWIDEpdx.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 13, 2009 at 09:00PM4 Comments
I have been thinking a lot about how museums and arts institutions are using social media, podcasts, video etceteras to amplify their exhibitions and programs. Some, like the Mattress Factory with it’s SM clearinghouse page and Brooklyn Museum with its BrklnMuse iPhone app, are adventurous and on the ball.
Not long ago I had a 140 character tête-à-tête via twitter with @jaymjordan (Jay Jordan, a curator in Louisville) who had chimed in on an exchange about arts institutions and social media outreach saying that new/social media efforts are all well and good, BUT not as important as the actual experience of art. I responded:
@jaymjordan one way to conceptualize it is to think of info,ed,programs as 10,000 invitations (+reinvitations) to the experience of art
The invitation can be a tweet about an upcoming show or a wall text that asks you to consider more deeply or an artist talk that gives you new perspective on work on display. Issuing these invitations in myriad ways is every bit as important as hanging the art. If you build it, they will come, but only if you issue the invitation.
So it is that for the upcoming New Communicators, I’ve invited some of the best minds from Portland’s arts institutions to share the ways they’re using new and social media to engage audiences.
In education, programming, and marketing, we’ll talk about what’s worked and what’s on the horizon as the landscape continues to change with new tools and new challenges all the time.
RSVP for 10,000 Invitations. It’s October 30 from 4-6 PM at The Gerding Theater and The Armory, and it’s free.
I’m going to be talking to:
Christina Olsen, PhD
Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum
Beth Heinrich
Director of Marketing & Public Relations, Portland Art Museum
Cynthia Fuhrman
Marketing and Communications Director, Portland Center Stage
Patrick Leonard
Public Relations, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Rebecca Burrell, Public Relations and Marketing Specialist, Museum of Contemporary Craft
Namita Gupta-Wiggers, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 13, 2009 at 07:00PM0 Comments
“Orbit,” Eric Honan. Dimensions: 5″ × 5.5″ Pen and watercolor. image via wemakeartforfree.com
What?! I never win anything. AND this week I won twice. Should buy a lottery ticket?
My latest prize is “Orbit” by Eric Honan via We make art for free. How did I get so lucky? Just filled out the little “art request form” listing the title of the piece I liked and sometime later, after I’d forgotten all about it, I received an email saying something to the effect that we have some art for you. Almost deleted it as spam! The next giveaway is October 18.
Can’t report that I know too much about WMAFF. Eric Honan, the artist who made “Orbit” is also the guy who emailed me about my score and he’s Portland-based. But I like the concept, and I like “Orbit.”
About his work: “I collaborated for 18 years with Kate Ericson, and our whole thing was finding ways in which our art could infiltrate what we called ‘socially active space,’” Ziegler said. “I’m interested in community. I’m interested in the idea of how art can relate to everything we do.”
From the press release:
Mel Ziegler received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Since that time he has lectured throughout the United States, Europe and South America. He has received numerous awards including National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Awards in 1989 and 1993, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Pollock-Krasner Award, and an Augustus Saint-Gaudens Fellowship. His work is shown nationally and internationally. In 1989, he was included in the Whitney Biennial. He is currently the Chair of the Art Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Professor Zeigler’s work includes many permanent public projects including the Downtown Seattle Transit project in Seattle, Washington, “Wall of Words” at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago, and “Come and Go,” a project commissioned for the Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition, Spaces, in Cleveland.
Posted by: Helyn Trickey on Oct 11, 2009 at 06:00PM1 Comments
To be fair, he warned us from the outset that this was not in any way going to be a G-rated speaking engagement, something most of us were too happy to hear. But one of Sherman Alexie’s latest books, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is an award-winning young adult (YA) novel, which is why I figured the Special Events Stage, which was packed to the rafters, had a fair number of younger fans in the room, most of them male tweens. Alexie’s latest short story collection, War Dances, is absolutely not written for the younger set. It’s chock full of anger, sex, deep sadness, and, perhaps most shocking of all – poetry. “I’m back to my NC17 self,” Alexie crowed at the beginning of the reading. “You have no idea how awful I am.”
He dove right into the deep end by riffing about sex. Specifically, sex in YA novels, which led him to an early memory of his alcoholic father telling him and the rest of the neighborhood boys about pleasing women sexually. This topic yielded several very explicit jokes about dancing and female anatomy, a five-minute ramble that would’ve had most of us falling out of our chairs had we not been stuffed so tightly together. I noticed the tween boy beside me turn red as a crayon and fumble with his copy of Alexie’s book on his lap.
Other topics on which Alexie has strong opinions:
Alexie on his writing themes: “I’ve spent my life writing about my father. I’m stunned I have a career at all.”
Alexie on technology: “There’s just no anticipation anymore,” he said. “No one is going to stand in front of Tower Records waiting for an album to debut.”
Alexie on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win: “Maybe your definition of peace is different than mine. I voted for him (Obama), but this is just bull(expletive).”
Alexie on being a “junior”: “Men! Stop naming your sons after yourselves … it’s egomaniacal …and on my rez there’s a tombstone with my name on it. Stop it!”
Alexie on effective control of body odor: “Face it, Tom’s (Natural) deoderant doesn’t work. Please use regular deoderant. Do it for me. Do it for an Indian.”
Posted by: Helyn Trickey on Oct 10, 2009 at 10:45PM0 Comments
James Ellroy stands up to the liberal media at Wordstock.
The thing about Wordstock that I both love and despise are the heartbreaking little choices we bibliophiles must make as we navigate this tantalizing festival. So many choices! Do I go hear David Biespiel read from his latest book of poetry, The Book of Men and Women, or should I wander over to listen to Michael Rosen and Jerome Gold discuss their experiences working with (and writing about) at-risk youth? This year, Wordstock organizers have done a nice job of staggering like topics and genres so attendees can sop up as much varied literary goodness as possible, which is no small task.
Here’s a peek at what I saw at Wordstock on Saturday:
Joyce Maynard, a writer famous for, among other things, her autobiography, At Home in the World, in which she chronicled her relationship with J.D. Salinger, told us the inspiration for writing her latest novel, Labor Day, came from the loneliness she felt as a single parent. Maynard’s syndicated column, Domestic Affairs, ran some years ago in The Oregonian and chronicled some of the milestone events in her life: the birth of her son, the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother. Maynard says she’s never shied away from sharing intimate, painful things with her readers because it helps her to write truth — at least the truth the way she sees it. Check out Maynard’s essay in The New York Times’ column, Modern Love, entitled My Secret Left Me Unable to Help.
Next, I went to see the self-described “Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction,” James Ellroy. If he’d been a peacock, Ellroy’s electrifying plumage would’ve been fanned out and on full display. The tall, severely thin (he says he exercises “obsessively”)writer began his tirade with his signature rat-a-tat-tat delivery of self-aggrandizing statements, calling himself the “potential savior of American literacy” and describing his birth as being “hatched” out of wedlock and thinking in his crib about “women, dope and literary glory.” After reading an excerpt from his latest tome, Blood’s A Rover, he took questions from the audience. With his signature throaty grumble, Ellroy told the first questioner to “@#$% off” after fielding an inquiry about his right-wing political views. “If you don’t like my politics, don’t read my books,” he growled. Ellroy spoke candidly of his writing process; his influences, including his mother’s unsolved murder; and the new love in his life. Right now he’s living just a few blocks away from where he was “hatched” in Los Angeles, a city he says he always returns to “when I get divorced.” Ellroy is working on a memoir, tentatively entitled The Hilliker Curse (Hilliker is his mother’s maiden name) about “women and me” that should appear on bookshelves in the spring.
Posted by: Helyn Trickey on Oct 09, 2009 at 10:00AM0 Comments
We’ve all told tales: around camp fires, at family reunions, even whispered between cubicles at work. Last night, 2nd Story, courtesy of Portland’s Wordstock festival, made storytelling an almost textual experience, mingling food, interpretive jazz and five great tales about love lost, love-never-had, reconnection and redemption. It was a low-key and comforting performance. Sort of like a big, heaping bowl of mac-n-cheese for the literary set.
Performer Sara Karastas told us a tale about her one-time gig as a telephone operator for the hearing and visually impaired and the phone calls she moderated between two long-distance lovers. I thought Karastas was going to start working blue, the story got so steamy, but it turned corners unexpectedly and dissolved into a sweet reflection on unlikely human connection. Really well done.
Another notable storyteller, Megan Stielstra, had us laughing with her uncanny imitation of a Grey’s Anatomy episode. She got the biggest laughs and most tears of the night for her heart-tugging story about teaching (and failing to teach) at-risk kids. I talked with Stielstra after her performance, and she admitted that all she ever needed to know about good storytelling she learned from tending bar, a job she held while working her way through grad school. “All those people telling you their problems and stories, night after night. You just learn to listen for the rhythms,” she said.
If you missed 2nd Story last night, never fear. You can listen to their free podcasts anytime.
Four Great Things. One one of the wall banners hanging in the shiny new China Design Now exhibition at the Portland Art Museum notes that in the 60’s and 70’s, China promoted bicycle, sewing machine, watch, and radio as Four Great Things one should aspire to own. In the 80s, the Four included television, refrigerator, and washing machine, while today they are a house, car, computer, and phone. These say so much as measure of swift change on many fronts: in development, in government position on consumer goods, in the life of Chinese people, and on and on.
The entire China Design Now exhibition focuses on object as measure of change, and what a picture it paints. It’s worth noting that the word designer was not used in China until about 20 years ago…they were artist-workers. And there was, for example, no such thing as packaging design, according to the fine catalog that accompanies the exhibition.
The exhibition is divided into sections reflecting three cities. Shenzhen is “Frontier City” where China, among other things, created a special economic zone to promote graphic design. Shanghai is “Dream City,” style central. And Beijing is “Future City.” Though there are overlaps, in the exhibition the section for Shenzhen focuses on graphic design, Shanghai, fashion and furniture design and Beijing, architecture.
So here are my Four Great Things at China Design Now that you must not miss: “Father’s House Xi’An” a remarkable stone-clad house by Ma Qingyun with beautiful woven shutters and a pool cutting it in two; Zhang Da’s sculptural dresses in olive wool; Chen Shao Xiong’s “Homescape” (see below); and the symbolic strength of Ai Weiwei’s 90’s nameless, self-published art magazine, the only place artists could publish at the time, here represented by three minimalist volumes behind plexi.
Viewers will be surprised at how much of the exhibition looks so familiar, from Beijing’s architectural jewels to Nike kicks. It’s ironic that it is via an exhibition of Chinese design that get skatedeck art, vinyl toys, t-shirts and sneakers enter the great halls of the museum. The visual language, on posters, zine covers, Chen Man’s photos for the cover of Shanghai fashion magazine Vision, will feel familiar.
The societal context of the designed objects on display is presented through portraits of families in their homes, video of China’s leading television personality, a wonderful installation by Chen Shao Xiong “Homescape” portraying families and their objects cut out of room context and reinstalled in a white multilevel dollhouse display, and wall texts noting facts and figures, history lessons, and insightful reflections on life and design in China now.
On a wall in the Shenzhen section of the exhibit: When asked, “How can our design be more international?” Alex Chan replied, “Go ask your mother how she cooks a good meal. What I mean is don’t forget where you are from.”
The exhibition opens multiple windows not only into the designed in China, but also both explicitly and implicitly, into daily life, evolving at the speed of light even as nil novi sub sole.
The Members’ preview for China Design Now is Friday, October 9, 2009. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, October 10.
A community website for the exhibition lists many events produced by the wonderfully broad web of partners the Museum has lined up for this show as well as a group blog with editors like Brian Libby, John Jay, and Carl Alviani which is already roiling with activity.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 08, 2009 at 08:00AM0 Comments
Lanterns between main and Mark Buildings at Portland Art Museum for China Design Now exhibition 2009
How are you going to celebrate the Oregon Cultural Trust’s Oregon Day of Culture today? It’s the anniversary of the tax credit that funds the trust. And there are happenings all over the state to celebrate.
Me, I’m going to a press preview for the Portland Art Museum‘s China Design Now show which opens this weekend(!), heading out to Marylhurst’s Art Gym for Pat Boas’ exhibition, “Record Record,”, making it to a little opening reception for Mack McFarland’s “Ten Foot Pole” drawings at PSU’s White Gallery in the Smith Building from 5-7 PM, and topping it off with Martin Kersels’ lecture at 6:30 The Lab at Museum of Contemporary Craft.
Oh, and if I have a second, I want to put my head in at the Oregon Historical Society…I understand it’s free today for the occasion.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 08, 2009 at 05:00AM0 Comments
Martin Kersels. detail, Falling 7, 8, 9, 1997, C-prints, 40 × 60 inches each, Courtesy of the artist and ACME., Los Angeles. via tang.skidmore.edu
The photo of the 300 lb man captured in mid-air, in the seconds between launch and impact when like a little kid he can say, “I’m flying!” captures the main thrust of Los Angeles-based artist Martin Kersels’ work, the body as subject— specifically Kersels’ body—treated with equal parts levity and gravity.
Tonight Thursday, October 8, at 6:30 PM, Kersels’ will give a talk in the Lab at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, (724 N.W. Davis) as part of PNCA’s Graduate Visiting Artists Lecture Series.
With a visual art practice born out of performance—he was a member of SHRIMPS, a group of big men performing small movemements—Kersels has created video, performative sculpture, and installation work that among other things, continues to address the physical presence/physicality of the artist (as in photo series “Falling”), his sculptures standing in for or implying the artist’s presence. His work has been called both intense and slapstick. In an early photo An early piece, “Objects of the Dealer” (with Soundtracks) in 1995 at Dan Bernier Gallery in LA attached sound to objects on his then dealer’s desk for the run of the show.
Kersel’s “Tumble Room” (below) at Deitch Projects, a pink-clad girl’s room built to rotate within a 15 foot structure was also the set for his “Pink Constellation” video which alternated shots of a woman nimbly dancing in the revolving space and the artist, who in the end had to scramble to avoid the furniture which had been unbolted from the floor and walls. The installation, “Tumble Room,” recreates that moment, sans artist as the furniture, unbolted, is slowly smashed to bits, tossed from ceiling to floor to wall.
In 2007 the Tang Museum did a a retrospective of Kersel’s work that traveled last year to the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Kersel’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the J. Paul Getty Museum and ACME in Los Angeles, Deitch Projects in New York, and the Galerie Georges-Phillipe and Nathalie Vallois in Paris. His pieces are in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, La Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Posted by: Helyn Trickey on Oct 07, 2009 at 12:00PM1 Comments
Woodstock, the hippie music festival, was all about free love, getting seriously Zen, and searching out mind-bending, new experiences. Granted many of them were hallucinatory or fueled by Sly & the Family Stone, but that’s cool, right? Portland’s literary festival and pun-ish namesake, Wordstock, riffs on some of those same themes this year, and in today’s slouching economy, nothing could be more refreshing.
While Wordstock isn’t exactly free, it’s cheap and accessible. Just five bucks per day pipes you into the Oregon Convention Center and puts you in the orbital pull of more than 150 writers of every stripe. And this year it’s easier than ever to discover a new author or genre guaranteed to stoke your literary appetite. Sure, there are a couple of big names that require extra dough—and we think they’re worth seeing—but there are plenty of other scribes and styles to explore that won’t tug on your wallet. Here’s a half-dozen can’t-miss Wordstock offerings:
Sherman Alexie This guy seems to have the magic touch. No matter what form Alexie attempts—short stories, poetry, novel, young adult fiction, or screenplay—he wracks up literary accolades with the finesse of a pool shark. Check out Alexie’s novel Reservation Blues, where he stretches the conventions of storytelling by combining traditional Native-American myths with magical realism. Another good reason to catch him in person: he tells great dirty jokes. (A $20 fee includes a copy of his latest short-story collection, War Dances.)
Chelsea Cain We know one thing for sure: former Oregonian reporter Cain gives good gore. And she eschews most of those lame stereotypes that stalk the thriller genre by making the protagonist in her wildly popular Heartsick trilogy a leggy, sexy serial killer of the female persuasion. Her latest book, Evil at Heart is also a New York Times bestseller.
Ethan Canin It’s not enough that Canin is Einstein-smart (he attended Stanford University, the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and then Harvard Med School), but he’s also a lyrical, almost hypnotic, writer. If we didn’t love him for his talent, we’d have to hate him for his stratospheric IQ. Good thing he won us over with his thoughtful story collection Emperor of the Air. His latest novel is America America, a sprawling story about the corrosion of social and economic class.
James Ellroy should have fans howling for more. (Below) Local lass-made-good Chelsea Cain will read about her murderous alter ego.
James Ellroy He’s the Demon Dog; a self-described “white knight of the far right” and “foul owl with the death growl.” Ellroy’s provocative antics in interviews and at public readings is just one reason to catch his appearance. Another reason: this guy has written some of the most engaging crime and historical drama fiction out there. Several of his novels have been made into movies, including L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia. His latest tough-guy tome, Blood’s A Rover, concludes his American Underworld trilogy.
Peter H. Fogtdal First, you should know that during his reading Fogtdal will probably hop around, stand on a chair, shout and/or wave his arms wildy about his head. This Dane is as much a performer as he is a skilled writer. Fogtdal has written 12 books in his native tongue, but recently released his first novel in English, The Tsar’s Dwarf, a novel well-reviewed for its humor and raw intensity.
Joyce Maynard She’s a journalist with enviable writing chops who’s been published in all the usual places: the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, USA Weekly. In 1999 she published a shocking memoir, At Home in the World, that detailed her affair—when she was 18 years old—with reclusive author J.D. Salinger. But following her adventures in fiction is just as satisfying. Her novel, The Usual Rules was deemed one of the 10 best books of 2003 for young readers by the American Library Association. Her latest offering, Labor Day, is a mesmerizing story about a drifter who changes the lives of a damaged family.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 07, 2009 at 11:00AM1 Comments
EAST/WESTBERLIN
Sometimes you just have to jump and not worry is someone or something is going to catch you. And while we’re at it: nothing succeeds like success (and other gems of aphoristic thinking). Gallery HOMELAND has made a leap of faith in initiating EAST/WESTBERLIN, a cooperative project with Brooklyn gallery Dam Stuhlrager, and is making a splash with Portland and NY artists at their temporary gallery in Berlin. This raises the profile nationally and internationally of selected artists (including from Team HOMELAND include Holly Andres, Damien Gilley, Dan Gilsdorf, Sean Healy, Christoph Hueppi, Victor Maldonado, Vanessa Renwick, Ethan Rose, and Joe Thurston) as well as Portland as art center.
Josh Arseneau’s work is currently on view at EAST/WESTBERLIN as well as Gallery HOMELAND. Next up: Joe Thurston and Sean Healy head to EAST/WEST with a collaborative project. And we hear that work from Brooklyn/Berlin is going to be heading west to HOMELAND in the near future. All to the cultural exchange good.
What’s perhaps best about the exchange is that it involves artists not just work crossing the Atlantic. And here’s where we come in. EAST/WEST is putting up (on a shoestring budget) visiting artists. With a little financial boost from us, the “residency” can afford to feed the artists too. What a concept.
Make a little investment in cultural exchange. HOMELAND’s doing all the heavy lifting, we just have to spot them a tenner.
Artist lecture series begins tonight in Vancouver, WA
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 07, 2009 at 10:00AM0 Comments
Kartz Ucci, “Opera for One.”
You know I like hearing smart people talk about art. You may not know that I am not as wild about having to leave Portland to do it. How far am I willing to go for art (without getting on a plane)? TILT Export and Clark College are testing my limits, and if their program were not so strong, I wouldn’t even be telling you about it.
Clark Art Talks launches tonight with a talk by Kartz Ucci whose lovely installation at PCC Rock Creek’s Helzer Gallery, “Opera for One,” marks the western limit of my arts driving range. I have yet to get to Springfield, OR’s Ditch Projects—that’s south—and it is certainly not for lack of interest…Ditch is doing heavy exhibitions.
So it is not lightly that I suggest including Clark Art Talks in Vancouver, WA in your fall arts schedule. Clark Art Talks starts tonight, Wednesday, October 7 at the Fireside Lounge, PUB 161, Clark College at 7 PM. The series includes talks by Mike Bray, Karl Burkheimer, Alison Owen and writer Chas Bowie.
I’m curious about Ucci’s process in creating “Opera for One,” (the score is the best part) dealing with synesthesia, Scriabin’s color scoring, and finally, deep into the process, scrapping self-imposed rules in favor of intuition. Here’s her statement.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 05, 2009 at 07:00PM3 Comments
The Biennial is Dead! Long Live The Biennial! Or…
When the Portland Art Museum eighty-sixed the Oregon Biennial in favor of the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards in 2007, many felt we’d lost a rare opportunity to take a broad read on the state of contemporary arts in the city and the state. The short-lived Portland Art Center was for a moment rumored to be in the game to pick up the Biennial baton, but its demise left the biennial nowhere.
Did I notice that the Oregon Cultural Trust awarded $5K to Disjecta to support:
…Portland 2010, the biennial multidisciplinary exhibition showcasing the best artistic talents of Oregon and beyond in the visual, performing and media arts?
Can’t say I did.
Leave it to Eva Lake to dig into it on her weekly radio show, Art Focus, on Tuesday morning at 11:30 on KBOO 90.7 and streamed online. She’ll talk with Cris Moss who will curate Portland 2010 (he’s curator and director of Linfield College Gallery) as well as Cynthia Kirk from OCT and Bryan Suereth of Disjecta.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 05, 2009 at 08:00AM4 Comments
Untitled no. 34, 2004. Léonie Guyer. ink and watercolor on silk, mounted on paper
6 1/2″ × 4 1/2". image via basebasebase.com
Portland is paradise for the wild curious mind that appreciates a good stirring once in a while. We have plenty of opportunities for talks, panels, lectures, but what’s better, our many arts institutions and schools are inviting us to the programs they offer their students for FREE.
Exhibit A: tonight begins Portland State University’s annual PMMNLS series—that’s the PSUMFA Monday Night Lecture Series—with local, national, and international visiting artists lecturing every Monday night of the school year at 7:30 PM at Shattuck Hall Annex, 1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198.
Tonight PMNNLS welcomes San Francisco artist Léonie Guyer who says of her work, “My painting-centered practice explores the interconnection between idiosyncratic shapes and the spaces they inhabit. The shapes conflate geometric and organic structures, referring obliquely to natural forms, artifacts, ciphers.”
Her work is included in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Shaker Museum and Library. Guyer teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. She received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Full schedule for PMNNLS season:
October 12 – Mel Ziegler
October 19 – Joseph Park
October 26 – Kenneth Goldsmith
November 2 – The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Editorial Collective
November 9 – Laurel Nakadate
November 16 – James Yood
January 11 – AA Bronson
January 18 – Holiday
January 25 – Hasan Elahi
February 1 – George Kuchar
February 8 – Paul Ramirez Jonas
February 15 – Barry Sanders
February 22 – Kristan Kennedy
April 5 – Sam Durant
April 12 – Stephanie Syjuco
April 19 – Akihiko Miyoshi
April 26 – Michael Rohd of Sojourn Theatre
May 3 – Swoon
May 10 – Hank Willis Thomas
May 17 – Open Engagement Conference Panel with Nils Norman, Mark Dion, and Amy Franceschini
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 03, 2009 at 08:00AM0 Comments
Brian Lund: New Work.
The artist as re-editor of pop culture product is nothing new, but the drawings of New York artist Brian Lund feel completely fresh as Lund eschews the surface of his source material—Hollywood film—to dig into its underlying structure. Lund meticulously creates drawings that function as both graphical analysis and mashup of popular film with sources ranging from “Die Hard” to “All That Jazz.”
Brian Lund: New Work in the Project Space at PNCA for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival features a series of Lund drawings based on the film “Wall Street,” with several other works incorporating dance sequences choreographed by Busby Berkeley for Depression era musicals. In some pieces, the two sources are overlayed.
Lund creates a spare vocabulary of mark and shape that represent character, prop, action from individual shots from the films. Gordon Gecko is a forest green square. A secretary is an orange circle. Lines connect, contain, or indicate action. Lund supplies spare notation “Bud Fox meets Gordon Gecko.”
Where Lund moves from a kind of data visualization meets micro-storyboarding exercise to something much more intriguing is when he multiplies the diagrammed moment in clusters—“70 Marv’s (on phones)”—often arranged radially or axially. It is as if Lund causes the film to stutter like a faulty CD stuck in a loop and then kaleidoscopes the results. Equally interesting is the collision of like scene Lund creates: one drawing focuses of water-based moments like Gecko on a beach or Bud in a pool. And the overlay of one film on another adds delicious complexity and ambiguity: it can be no coincidence that Lund’s mark for banker is similar to that for dancer (Bring on the dancing girls!). The resulting drawings are rhythmic, dynamic, and beautiful.
See photos of Lund’s work on OPENWIDEpdx (scroll down).
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 02, 2009 at 05:00PM0 Comments
Kartz Ucci
The closing of Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith’s gallery TILT, was a loss for Portland. Fortunately the pair continue to curate with their project TILT Export which recently opened a solo exhibition by Kartz Ucci in partnership with Portland Community College Rock Creek’s Helzer Gallery (Building 3, 17705 NW Springville Road). Tonight is a reception for the artist from 7-9 PM.
The exhibition sounds fantastic. From the press release: Kartz Ucci is an installation artist working with relationships of theory, material and concept within an expanded field of visual exploration. In Ucci’s piece an opera for one, the artist hired the young Canadian opera soprano, Deanna Pauletto to sing a capella, Pablo Neruda’s book of poetry, “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”. The piece was recorded in a cement-encased stairwell, 16 stories high. A colour coded score was composed based on Ucci’s interpretation of the relation between colour and its emotional vibration. The resulting installation is a hauntingly romantic response to this effort.
Ucci’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues in Soeul (South Korea), Limossal (Cyprus), Basel (Switzerland), Toronto and Montreal (Canada). This will be her first solo exhibition in the US.
Tonight Eastside galleries open their October shows with receptions generally from 6-8, but at Worksound that will skew later. Anna Weber Nationale (2730 E Burnside)
Anna Weber presents a new series of paintings and drawings “inspired by geometry, architecture, maps, textiles, sign painters, symmetry, balance, falling, and floating.” Weber had a call out for photos of people doing handstands! Should be interesting.
:MEMORY/FREQUENCY …
Worksound (820 SE Alder)
While Micah Malone’s Sell Out is still up, Modou Dieng is also bringing in “an array of Installations involving Sculptures, Sound, Videos, and photographs by 3 Artists/Faculty at PNCA.” Also Weird Fiction and Swahili perform.
Sword of Light Gallery HOMELAND
Fresh off his show at Gallery HOMELAND’s EAST/WESTBERLIN, Josh Arseneau
brings his provocative work back home. Images drawn from the news, typically tragic, hostile. Will be interested to hear how Arseneau’s work read differently in Berlin. The United States had 9/11, but West Germany had Baader Meinhof. And Berlin had, well, machine guns and a Wall.
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 01, 2009 at 09:00AM0 Comments
Soft Shovel, Signal Fire
The Soft Shovel, opening at IGLOO Gallery (325 NW 6th #102) tonight is a group show of work by Portland-based artists who were the first to take part in Signal Fire’s new Outpost artist residency on Mt Hood. Tom Colligan, Bruce Conkle, Ryan Jeffery, Marne Lucas, Jenn Rawling, Vanessa Renwick, Ethan Rose, Katy Asher with Ariana Jacob, Michael Reinsch, Eric Steen, all show new work.
For the show husband/wife team Ryan Pierce and Amy Harwood are publishing an essay about their experience starting Signal Fire this summer with the aim of getting urban artists out into the wild. This first group of artists invited by Pierce and Harwood (they call them “guinea pigs”) stayed in a vintage trailer, with food and electric power in Mt. Hood National Forest. Applications for 2010 residencies will be available in coming months on the Signal Fire website.
From the press release: “In addition to the Outpost Residency, Signal Fire orchestrated a four-day retreat for ten artists in the Elkhorn Mountains of Eastern Oregon in June 2009. Future plans include backpacking retreats, wilderness workshops, and a second season of Outpost.”
Igloo Gallery hours: First Thursday 6-10pm, first Saturdays 1-5pm, and by appointment.
During her 10 year Portland residency, Anne Adams has contributed to local publications, including Barfly, the Portland Tribune, and Portland Monthly. In 2005 her serial zine, The Bookmark, was endorsed by Wordstock and Powell’s Books.
Anne’s horizons extend beyond pen and page, with an Art Department credit in the movie Coraline, and passionate participation in the indie music community. Anne is an avid arts appreciator who can zero in on a detail of gesture or craft, but cannot suppress a wistful tear when faced with expressions of human truth.
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