CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS - November 2009

Contour

one-night only video show

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

Busy night tonight. CONTOUR is a one-night show of video art curated by Modou Dieng with work by Hannah Piper Burns, Rose Bond, Linda Kliewer, David Eckard, Jeff Jahn, Damien Gilley, Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, Mack McFarland, E*rock, Jaclynn Fronczak and Randi Razalenti. Contour is tonight, Monday, November 30 at Someday Lounge (125 NW 5th) 7-10 PM.

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Side Tangled

tonight at Half/Dozen

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 30, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

H/D+Projects are performances or short-term installations at Half/Dozen Gallery (625 NW Everett, #111). Tonight, Monday, November 30 from 7-10 PM, it’s gallery director Tim Mahan’s turn with his installation “Side Tangled,” playing with space, boundaries, and permeability.

Most recently, Mahan, with a BA in sculpture and printmaking from Taylor, was Assistant Director of NavtaSchulz Gallery in Chicago.

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Review: Arnold Kemp’s This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 27, 2009 at 12:00PM 2 Comments

Arnold J. Kemp. CANT, 2009. watercolor, acrylic paint, flashe, mixed media on linen
14″ × 18″. image via pdxcontemporaryart.com

Perhaps it is too late to tell you this as the show comes down tomorrow, but This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen at PDX Contemporary is not the last we’ll see of Arnold Kemp, who’s recently become the head of the MFA program at PNCA.

When one invokes Barnett Newman by employing his signature “zip,” that vertical stripe whose role as compositional element Newman made his project throughout his mature period, one is making a statement. Whether it’s about that heroic, almost monastic project, the boiling down of the picture to essentials, the spiritual in art, or perhaps just drawing a line connecting self to the projects of great painters, I’m not sure. The zips appear, but only just, in Kemp’s “Vampire” series. The paintings are matte black but not flat…there is loose, watery, vertical brushstroked evidence of the artist’s hand on the surface (and of course, the barely perceptible zip) while colorful underpainting peeks out on the canvas’ edges. If the zip invokes Newman, a black painting is a kind of art history lesson in a box that extends from Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square” to Robert Rauschenberg’s black paintings, Ad Reinhardt’s not-actually-black paintings, and on and on.

It’s this tangle of art history meeting Emily Dickinson (in the title of the show) and an exploration of black identity (according to an interview I heard Kemp do with Modou Dieng) in a non-pedantic way that makes this interesting stuff.

This Quiet also includes a series, “(THEM),” of lovely photos of a tangle of bare branches black against a white sky. The photos are printed on the top half of a vertical sheet of paper. The bottom half is empty. And there is a series of paintings that nod to landscape constructed of masses of black glitter in the foreground, a cloud or line of googly doll eyes on black matte fields above the glittery horizon line and a thin strip of colored texture at the top edge of the canvas. These masses of eyes imply crowds both watching (you) and being watched as part of the picture. The titles of these pieces all play with “cant"…“Cant,” “Incant,” “Recant.” If incant implies making magic with words, and recant means I take them all back, cant itself is usually, metaphorically a certain slant on those words, but also hypocrisy and, “the expression or repetition of conventional, trite, or unconsidered opinions or sentiments.” The power of the word spoken is silently embedded in the series, then, with its crowds of wide-eyed witnesses listening with their eyes. That’s you, ladies and gentlemen.

This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies

This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies
And lads and girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls;

This passive place a summer’s nimble mansion,
Where bloom and bees
Fulfilled their oriental circuit,
Then ceased like these.

Emily Dickinson

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Review: Antler Necklace at Half/Dozen

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 27, 2009 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Branch with Frame, Valerie Hegarty. image via halfdozengallery.com

One knew going in, with a title like Antler Necklace, that this show at Half/Dozen Gallery was either going to be a hipster gift shop or critique of same. Fortunately, it’s a subtle exploration by NY-based curator Amber Vilas of the processing or commodification of nature. So Valerie Hegarty’s “Branch with Frame” provides the perfect entry to the work here. It’s either a carved gold gilt frame that is melting away into the branch it came from or growing up from same. I love that it implies that precious tree is perhaps not recognized as precious until it is cut and carved up and tricked out in gold gilt. It’s also ironic, given painting’s history of attempting to imitate nature, that the imitation (canvas) is traditionally boxed by an actual piece of nature denatured by the hand of the craftsman, the frame marking the border between the imitation and natural or real world.

This context of our processing and commodification of the natural world is perfect for Antoine Catala’s work, attempting to re-connect the human (nature) with the television (a commodity that processes the human for consumption by the human). His work at PICA’s TBA Festival was an attempt to give television a form that could create a friendlier feeling between human and the television that many spend so many hours with. His “Couple in Garden,” like the works he showed recently at Reed College, is a video portrait of a more or less immobile couple that is distorted in ways that resemble early Photoshop filters (i.e. a glassy relief) as well as decayed video giving it a living, painterly quality, its subtle, temporal variations riveting.

“Couple” connects well with Erika Somogyi’s “Primitive Vision” installed behind it, the luminous qualities of Somogyi’s gouache painting conversing with the light of the television screen. Too, it is a combination of landscape and portrait in a contemporary, day-glo-y palette. (Two eyes=watcher or watched? One isn’t sure.). I’m pretty wild about the textures in this piece and the way they speak to those in Catala’s.

Nichole van Beek’s “Utils” nod to our human toolmaking impulses and the inutility of art. Pieces of driftwood have decorative interventions with colorful if mundane non-precious materials like topographical texture created with yarn, bright blue and green griptape handles, a hot pink handprint, and masses of colorful baubles. Meant to be held, carried, brandished, like many modern products one might question just how useful these “utils” are (with a little wink).

The show is rounded out by Christine Gray’s lovely drawings on polypropylene on which her oil grounds are richly liquid, and Jessica Labatte’s “Untitled (Pomegranate Photogram)” which feels like the odd man out in this context with its Dutch still life meets surrealism mood.

See further images and Vilas’ statement on the show at the website or better yet, make some time tomorrow to go see.

It’s noteworthy that Half/Dozen brought in Vilas who in turn brought work by artists from New York, Chicago, and Richmond, VA. Thus Half/Dozen joins a handful of other galleries in Portland showing work by artists from beyond the bridges…all to the good.

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Review: Black Star

Modou Dieng at Marylhurst Art Gym

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 25, 2009 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Black Isaac, Modou Dieng.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Black Isaac, Modou Dieng.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Lowlita, Modou Dieng

Baby, you’re a star. Being a modern star means in part the making of a public image, or in actuality co-creating that image with image-makers and media.

It is this construction of public self or star that artist Modou Dieng engages for his show, Black Star*, at Marylhurst Art Gym with his collages of album covers, LP records themselves, the graphic images of flyers, and neckties loosely decorated with a limited palette of metallic paints. The collages resemble those unofficial urban noticeboards: the plywood walls around construction sites that become layered with music and movie posters as well as flyers and tags.

Together, the collages can be read as self-portraits of a constructed identity pieced together from totemic images of segments American pop culture primarily from the 70s and 80s. Born in 1970 in Senegal, Dieng has said that turning away from legacies of French colonialism meant turning toward explorations of American music.

While the spine of the work is black beauty, power, and music, this is a more complicated story. Yes, here is the Black Power fist. LP’s emerging from their covers look like afros. Here are James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Isaac Hayes, and Run DMC. But by including images of Blondie and the Beastie Boys, as well as a number of Lichtenstein-esque album covers, Dieng makes it clear that this is both an appreciation for that mashup Mudd Club moment in NY in which cultures collided and a typically ecumenical millennial appreciation of the interconnectedness of various strains of American music. No mistake then, that Dieng’s repeating motif of the crown, is borrowed from Jean-Michel Basquiat whose band, Gray, played at Mudd.

Throughout, Dieng’s painting is graffiti-like, commenting on or obscuring the images of the collage. The painting is Dieng taking ownership of these images (as a graff tag is a way of “owning” a wall), to forge a united self/star from disparate pieces.

And what does it mean that Dieng has taken the appellation “star” for himself rather than waiting for another to bestow it on him? Find the answer as plain as the letters Run-DMC (“We are the Kings of Rock”) who like virtually all other MC’s of the era regularly rapped self-definitions as well as statements of their own superiority. Saying makes it so.

Black Star at Marylhurst Art Gym is paired with Io Palmer’s Artstars which will be considered in another review.

*see also

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Big Acts on the Small Stage

Bingo with the Indians at Portland Playhouse

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Nov 23, 2009 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Something really good is happening on stage at Portland Playhouse Theater. Bingo with the Indians opened there on Saturday night. The play was written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp and originally produced in New York City in 2007.

The vibe at the Portland Playhouse theater is cool: a converted church space on NE Prescott, it’s entryway is invitingly festooned with white Christmas lights. Inside, audience seating is a grab bag of mismatched couches and chairs on plywood risers. There’s beer and popcorn in the lobby.

The lights go down on the single set: a cheap motel room designed by Dan Meeker with understated meticulous attention to detail.

When the lights come back up and the show begins, the acting onstage is superb.

Lava Alapai plays Dee, an unflinching theater director, in fatigues and combat boots. Her intensity becomes iron-willed self-delusion as the story unfolds. Brian Weaver is Wilson, a sweetly androgynous, calmly sadistic, master stage manager. John San Nicolas plays Stash, a sort of monstrous actor, whose looks and talent are increasingly blurred by ego and addiction.

This ragtag group arrives in small-town USA, desperate to finance their next production. The plan: hold-up a local Bingo game, and make a quick getaway with the cash box.

Ahem.

This is a bad plan. Things quickly go awry and Bingo with the Indians spins out to explore larger themes about the costs—literal and metaphoric—of creating art. It is a wickedly, darkly, deliciously, funny play that is often merciless.

AUDIENCE WARNING: Language, Violence, and Nudity

Also, it’s funny.

Yeah, yeah, we can gloss over those elements in the movies. But live onstage, nudity and even violent language can land uncomfortably close.

If this is not your thing… take note of upcoming productions. Portland Playhouse is a company to watch, and if you’d rather see the group clothed—and less foul mouthed—they are planning a production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf in April.

One last word on the actors: Lorraine Bahr, Kurt Conroyd, and Kristen Martz, all play locals who stumble into the plot and every entrance is a spot-on delight. Can’t say more, you’ll be so happy to be surprised. Go, check them out.

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Tags: Theater

Black and Blue:What Not To Do

opens tonight at Milepost 5

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 21, 2009 at 01:00PM 33 Comments

Oh, provocateur, do not look so surprised when your art provokes.

Victor Maldonado tries again. His Funny, Dirty, Wrong hallway exhibition at Milepost 5 (900 NE 81st Ave) of dirty or politically incorrect jokes on blue note cards penned by students in his Art, Ethics and Transgression class at PNCA was closed down as being inappropriate for the venue, or more properly it was moved into a room.

“Get a room!”

Now it is a group show called Black and Blue:What Not To Do. Walter Lee, Alicia Gordon, Sarah Johnson, Allison Halter join Mack McFarland and the artists of Art, Ethics and Transgression for a visual art exhibition about “what wounds us.” Opens tonight, 6-9 PM, at Milepost 5 in room 208 at the Lofts.

“By appointment only with limited viewing hours for the extent of its run, difficult to access works of photography, drawing and installation riff on holy terror, economic meltdowns, beat down and broken forms and the unspecific objects that fuel our divisive ism and phobia cultures. It’s difficult to leave your door and be confronted by things that are obscene and appalling. This curatorial intervention also continues to experiment with Live/work residencies as ritual spaces that promise to create a critical nexus of all types from our creative economy for all types in our creative class. Sometimes the violence in the hall is so loud and physical that you can hear it in every room-even behind closed doors. Managing and controlling the random forces in life can be difficult for some. For some the difficult forces help manage random life.” —Victor Maldonado

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Teri Rueb Talks at U of O

installation artist to spead about large-scale interactive art

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 19, 2009 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Artist Teri Rueb creates large-scale, outdoor, interactive installations that utilize global positioning systems (GPS) technology and digital sound. She lectures at noon today, Friday, November 20, at the University of Oregon in Portland (first floor event room in the White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch).

Rueb’s installations incorporate issues of architecture, urbanism and landscape while incorporating themes like the human body, memory, technology, culture and sound. She intends for her work to “engage the body and senses, and allow for visitors to encounter and experience place and people.”

The lecture is part of the “Machine in the Garden” digital arts studio class and lecture series.

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Review: Surfland at Blue Sky Gallery

Joni Sternbach takes tintype to surfers

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 19, 2009 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Jodi Sternbach. image via blueskygallery.org

“It’s the end of the land sadness, end of the land gladness.” —Jack Kerouac

A good surfer friend of mine and his buddies (of both genders) call them “girlfriend pictures,” i.e. likely to have been taken by, likely to be most appreciated by the non-surfing girlfriend (or boyfriend). The surfer, of course, prefers see a photo of himself or herself dropping in on a double-overhead face, carving off the lip, or if a longboarder, in a laconic, arched-back, toes-on-the-nose stance. Would rather have, in other words, a record of ephemeral and hard-won accomplishment. Ever hopeful, the surfer returns to the edge of the land again and again…and jumps off.

Joni Sternbach’s SurfLand series of tintypes currently up at Blue Sky Gallery (122 NW 8th) captures dry-haired surfers and their weapons of choice at these liminal moments between land and sea. They are photos of potential, possibility, not pose. And what a variety of surfers Sternbach chronicles. By heading to mellow breaks at Del Mar, Rincon (Santa Barbara), Malibu, and Montauk’s Ditch Plain, Sternbach, whether intentionally or not shows us the rest of the American surfers, those we won’t see in the surf mags. Sternbach captures lifers, little girls, families, middle-aged ladies, a stunning African American girl, and one fabulously pregnant woman.

Sternbach’s choice of tintype is inspired—and not just because the tintype, developed on site, forges something of a relation ship between photographer and subject. The tintype’s dirty shades of brownish gray tend to make all but the most youthful appear weathered and hard. It emphasizes the physical and likely philosophical distance between viewer and viewed while implying temporal distance via its aged quality. In the center of the gallery, you will feel as if you are looking at photos more than a century old. The tintype also has the effect of making its subjects appear heroic, which of course, as pioneers daily, they are.

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Listen up: Leslie Miller on Art Focus

Fontanelle Gallery owner talks Queer Gaze

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 18, 2009 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Untitled (Zackary And Her Mother In Bed), 2009. Luke Gilford. via fontanellegallery.com

Yesterday on Eva Lake’s Art Focus show on KBOO, she had Leslie Miller on to talk about the current photography show, Queer Gaze, at her Fontanelle Gallery (205 SW Pine). Listen in.

If you’ve yet to see the show, this Thursday, November 19th at 8 PM there’s a mid-run party with music by Play/Start and Boy Joy. Free!

Find Eva’s show on KBOO every Tuesday morning at 11:30.

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Review: Minor Threats

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 18, 2009 at 09:00AM 23 Comments

Matt Green.

If what passes for punk in 2009 is dropping in under the Burnside Bridge or hopping a train to NorCal, its Kraft® processed cheese food version is in the Manuel Izquierdo Gallery at PNCA at the moment, and I feel fine. Matt Green’s simple gesture of embedding a single chrome pyramid stud in the wall at eye level for Minor Threats made my night on First Thursday, as a tiny, minimalist sculpture that also happened to be a postcard from the past (the studs of course littered many a shoulder on a black leather jacket 2-3 decades ago) and a reminder that eventually every trapping of rebellion will be packaged and sold in a denatured version in the mall. Surf culture, skate culture, and punk were all converted into commodities years ago, and its only the more insulting that the mass market reprocessors of cultural signifiers mix their chocolate with their peanut butter and put the trappings of punk on the shelves next to the trappings of goths and the kids don’t give a shit. Artist Philip Iosca remarked that he’d have liked it more if the stud had been recast into a different metal. Yes, that would further decontextualize (and fetishize) it, but I thought about that and concluded that the stud symbolizes the fact that not only every signifier of punk, but punk itself have been recast often enough that the stud itself functions as its recast model might as both a more pointed* and a watered-down comment on itself. This is all acknowledged, of course, in the title of the exhibition curated by Derek Franklin, where Minor Threat, iconic hardcore band that spearheaded straightedge is drastically diluted with the simple gesture of an “s.”

So what are a bunch of young artists doing making art that refers to punk tropes as with Green’s Pepsi bottle with the Suicidal Tendencies sticker on it? For Green at least, it makes sense that his explorations of recent American masculine cultural expressions (see his MFA thesis show performance—rocker or roadie—on top of a giant black “stage”) would lead to punk. It’s a man’s world. One might forget, thanks to riot grrls that Penelope Houston of the Avengers was a rare bird. The Dead Milkmen could sing, “You and me punk rock girl,” in the 80’s but the girl likely wasn’t holding a mic. Israel Lund, having titled his Tumblr “Youth Against,” might be expected to address punk’s archetypal youthy againstness, and he has made previous work with punk-on-paper, the zine.

Brad Troemel’s short video “Sprinting from Back to Bed to the AT&T Store” documents Troemel doing just that, dashing across a mini-mall parking lot. This is best in show, recalling task-based pieces like Barry Le Va’s “Impact Run.” If suburban living was fertile ground for punk, Troemel’s sprinter looped into speeding nowhere again and again is the kid who never got out.

The edition produced for the show acknowledges punk’s end of the line in brilliant and subtle ways. On the postcard with the Ramones logo on it, all of the names but Tommy’s have been erased. And Israel Lund’s zine with its solid black copied pages couldn’t be any more punk, any more anti-, the negation negating the negation, a symbol of an end game for a game people won’t quit playing.

Well played, Derek Franklin, and thanks for bringing Troemel’s work to Portland.

*pun unintended but acknowledged

UPDATE: SJPC points out the obvious below in comments (thank god someone’s reading and keeping me honest). I blinked and didn’t see it. Coke is now Pepsi. This kind of thing matters to the Suicidal Tendencies and also to Laverne.

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Panel: Directions in Portland Contemporary Performance

theater and dance makers on future of performance

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 16, 2009 at 02:00PM 3 Comments

Take a read on the state of performance in Portland tonight at a panel with many of the more experimental theater and dance companies in town. Tonight at 7 PM Directions in Portland Contemporary Performance happens at Theater (3430 SE Belmont) with Linda Austin (Linda Austin Dance), Mizu Desierto (Mizu Desierto Butoh), Angelle Hebert (tEEth), Trisha Mead (PCS/Fertile Ground), Rikki Rothenberg and Kathleen Keogh (Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner), Hannah Treuhaft (Sojourn Theatre), Jonathan Walters (Hand2Mouth Theatre). Admission is $5 unless you have a program from Hand2Mouth’s show “Everyone Who Looks Like You.”

“The evening will begin with short presentations from artists on their work and process and then move into discussion on our direction as a performance community and what needs are arising particular to creating original work.”

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Review: Bandage A Knife

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 14, 2009 at 11:00AM 1 Comments

There was a moment during which four of the dancers in Linda Austin and Seth Nehil’s Bandage a Knife were standing in place, slowly swinging their arms/torsos back and forth. The knees of dancer Lucy Yim trembled slightly…and I realized all of the dancers were standing, just barely, on their toes. That’s so Linda Austin, I thought, to put things just off kilter, to disorient just a little, to insert a little risk.

It’s one of Austin’s signatures to isolate a small gesture, a kind of kissy fish lips, perhaps, or hands isolated behind the back against the figure’s black shirt, lit by a flashlight. The hands signal, mark, struggle with one another. They converse with another giant pair of hands that flash on and off the video screen (flash as if caught in act). And lest one forgets Bandage is inspired by a Japanese gangster flick (it’s a “forgetting” of Seijun Suzuki’s 1967 Branded to Kill), one hears the sound of…is it knuckles cracking or breaking bone? On NPR the other day, I heard Jake Adelstein talking about Tokyo Vice, his book about the Japanese mob, the yakuza. He said the yakuza bosses were often missing fingers, that one would cut off his own finger for a mistake he made, or a mistake made by one of his underlings. Sleep with the boss’s girl? That’s a thumb.

There are fantastic moments here as when during a monologue spoken by Rebecca Harrison and mimed comically by Kaj-anne Pepper, his face is lit by Anne Furfey’s flashlight banked off a mirror held by Harrison. It starts as a straightforward narrative monologue (“I didn’t think I had it in me.”) but decays into a recitation of words that begin with the letter “b,” “butterfly, bum….” The whole passage addresses filmed reality, the act of acting, having words put in one’s mouth, and melodrama in a fairly brilliant way.

In another sequence, power relationships are flipped with Austin standing on a half-sheet of plywood on the prone Pepper’s back. Under one’s heel takes on a new meaning, or has someone been stowed under the floorboards!? This is Austin at her best, exploiting the simplest prop to powerful effect.

This amidst the general threat-level orange aggression of the choreography (whether frantically real as in self-flagellation or implied as with a foot or open palm placed on a cheek merely suggesting violence) or as aggressive as a passive demeanor can convey, made one feel as if one were swimming in choppy waters to come up for air for these interludes and be plunged under again.

The use of hand-held light sources is part of the lo-fi appeal of Austin’s work. But it’s deceptive. Her husband, Jeff Forbes, is one of Portland’s big time, go-to lighting designers. His golden footlights, his backlit corridors are not to be discounted in setting tone. The staging was interesting with black scrim-shielded corridors running the length of the space so at times, some of the figures would be illuminated there as watchers. In the third ring of the circus, on a video monitor suspended from a track stage right, a figure I initially took to be Austin (it turned out to be Pepper in a white dress) is in a white room pasting small squares on the walls at turns methodically and haphazardly.

Throughout, Nehil’s ominous score with its machinery thrum and spare use of angular stringed accents (violin strikes suggesting horror film soundtrack) held the piece sonically taut save moments of silence, spoken word, and one near the end in which dancers impassively do a low-key twist to the “boogie woogie.”

Also late in Bandage, there is a death scene to end all death scenes as the ensemble engages in an over-the-top, prolonged “Oh, I’m dying!” bit lit by a red bulb. It’s only then that one begins to read Bandage as perhaps more of a spoof than one might have thought. Were there other clues that I missed?

Performance continues through next weekend. Reservations can by had by calling 503-777-1907.

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Around the Way

link roundup

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 13, 2009 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Regina Hackett gets at a few points I’d been thinking about regarding the Tyler Green-provoked flap over the New Museum planning a show of works of the collection of trustee Dakis Joannou curated by (eh) Jeff Koons. To wit, “Yes, the rich and powerful are involved in museums.”

Jen Graves writes rather eloquently on Jeffry Mitchell who both recently showed in Portland at Pulliam Gallery, but also did an artist talk at the Portland Art Museum.

I’ve been mulling over this interview with Robert Storrs entitled “Most theory has little bearing on art,” for a while now.

Micah Malone reviews Arnold Kemp’s show at PDX Contemporary.

Victoria Frey of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) asks that you Help Define Our Times.

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See This Now

Everyone Who Looks Like You from Hand2Mouth Theatre

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Nov 13, 2009 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

The great thing about going to see the new production at Hand2Mouth, is that as an audience there is the privilege of watching new theater get made.

Everyone Who Looks Like You is playing now through Nov. 22 at Theater! Theater! Find It

It’s about family. Everyone Who Looks Like You is a clear-eyed, open-hearted tonic to the impending onslaught of gummy holiday fare. Go see this play if you desire a moment of grounding before launching into your own Thanksgiving carnival of relatives.

The seamlessly attuned Hand2Mouth company ensemble treats is subject with casual intimacy. Costumed at times in pajama pants and undershirts, the play unfolds in a kitchen, a bedroom, the TV room. Each room is lightly drawn by moving a few benches, and the addition of a few props (a hanging kitchen rack, a purple quilt) and designed by Brad Steinmetz. The world of the play is also gently woven through a soundscape, and each element accumulates onstage to create a kind of off-handed vulnerability, an aching tenderness that is spot-on for its subject.

Who else but your family do you send so much time with, eating cereal in your underpants?

Family, Everyone Who Looks Like You seems to say, contains multitudes. There is tenderness, there is cruelty, and there are ferocious tantrums—Dad throws a fit, through the actor Jerry Tischleder, who kicks long legs into the air and explodes, “God damn it!”. Actor Faith Helma, does an uncomfortably convincing 5 year old having a complete meltdown.

Now would be a good time to tell you, that Everyone Who Looks Like You is experimental, or non-traditional, theater.

If you want a STORY, a single-plotted narrative, with the satisfying, conclusive smack, this is going to be a frustrating play for you (and I too am a fan of, “when life gets really rough, I watch a lot of Law & Order.”—they sure catch that guy, every time. Phew.).

Hand2Mouth constructs a play about family in a series of discrete sections.

Some are dance—a movement piece that culminates in watching dad get dressed is absolutely hilarious.

Some are songs—near the end of the play the entire ensemble sings Pat Benatar’s “We Belong” which was surprisingly beautiful, perfectly apt, and sweetly affecting.

Some are scenes- “The Day Mom Came Home With a Perm”, “The Time Dad Took Us to Dinner”. I kept wanting more dialogue or information, but the scenes ooerated like fragments of a shared family history—they live in shorthand as a powerful touchstone.

Some are videos—an elegantly effective staging of memories projected against slatted window shades. I loved each of these sections, designed by Luke Norby and used with such assurance by the company. Particularly great was a tightly-wound, highly nervous discussion of sex, with Liz Hayden & Erin Leddy playing the hopelessly awkard parentals; also a poignant reflection on the end of a long marriage, performed by Julie Hammond.

If you’re nervous about “experimental theater” you needn’t be. You’ve got the internet. You’ve seen live music. You have a family. Without being derivative, Everyone Who Looks Like You pulls elements from our modern lives to define what makes theater relevant today, and what makes live performance unique among all our viewing options.

It’s exciting. It’s ambitious. It’s generous. It asks the same of the audience. In our increasingly entertainment-laden lives that’s not a bad thing at all.

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Tags: Theater

Bandage A Knife

Linda Austin + Seth Nehil = !

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 12, 2009 at 02:00PM 3 Comments

“When you cut your finger, bandage the knife.” —Joseph Beuys

I’ll tell you right now, I’ve been looking forward to Bandage a Knife, a collaboration between Portland-based Linda Austin and Seth Nehil. She makes movement work at the intersection of avant-theater and dance with a dash of quirk and humor. He is a visual/video/sound artist as well as pointed conceptual thinker.

Bandage a Knife opens this Friday, November 13 with performances at 7 and 9 PM and runs through November 22 at Performance Works NW (4625 SE 67th) and you must have reservations. There are only 26 seats in the house.

With live and recorded sound, projection, and movement, the piece is based on a “forgetting” of Seijun Suzuki’s 1967 cult classic movie Koroshi no Rakuin (Branded to Kill) and features Linda Austin, Anne Furfey, Bonnie Green, Rebecca Harrison, Kaj-anne Pepper, and Lucy Yim.

Call 503-777-1907 or visit http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/80237. $10-$15 sliding scale.

In preparation, close your eyes to half-mast and forget this:

Full schedule of performances:

FRI Nov 13, 7 and 9 PM
SAT Nov 14, 7 and 9 PM
SUN Nov 15, 7 PM

THU Nov 19, 7 PM
FRI Nov 20, 7 and 9 PM
SAT Nov 21, 7 and 9 PM
SUN Nov 22, 7 PM

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Review: Shen Wei Dance Arts

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 12, 2009 at 07:00AM 1 Comments

It started before it started: as we entered the Schnitzer on Wednesday eve, the dancers of Shen Wei Dance Arts were seated around the edges of the stage with giant bowls of blue shredded plastic (guessing based on sprinkling, sonic, and sticking-to-clothes-static-cling properties), sprinkling handfuls onto the massive blue and white mandala “sand” painting that covered the stage save a three foot perimeter. In stocking feet several suddenly slid backward into the mandala. To the sounds of a female chant and more enchantingly in silence (so we could hear the swooshing of foot across floor) the dozen dancers moved as perfectly mirrored parts of a whole throughout “Re- (Part I).” They did not pair, did not acknowledge one another, but flocked in chorus or moved alone through eloquent collapse and turn embellished by stroke of the foot or sweep of arm carving a painterly stroke through now mixed blue/white of the mandala redrawing it over and over again.

It was a dance that was both light and grounded. Swiftly the dancers turned and slid, but only late in the second piece did a dancer leave the floor in a lift. An almost-leap always trailed a dragging foot drawing in its wake.

I’ve never seen dancers move in multiple so successfully, with such lack of variation in movement from body to body that one could focus on the whole without distraction by one or another. It was truly remarkable.

The second piece, “Re- (Part III),” was shaped by a movement motif of parallel queues of dancers walking forward and back as in any regimented environment. When two stopped and leaned sideways, shoulder-to-shoulder against each other, flying buttresses to nothing, we too were arrested. When within the queues walking backward and forward, the individual broke out to move otherwise, he or she never actually broke the confines of the queue, rolling, flailing, but held place in line. And the soundtrack, with its ominous momentum touched by the flighty strings narrated too well the story of forced conformity and those who struggle with/within its discontents.

As my companion said at the end of the performance, borrowing a Facebook-ism, “There isn’t a ‘like’ button big enough.” We can only hope that as White Bird’s Paul King and Walter Jaffe have brought Shen Wei to Portland before, they will do so again.

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Portland Art Museum iPhone App Released Today

free app by Spotlight Mobile

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 11, 2009 at 11:00AM 4 Comments

The Portland Art Museum enters the 21st Century today with the launch of its free iPhone app by Portland’s Spotlight Mobile based on its Tours product. At the recent 10,000 Invitations roundtable, we talked about the ways that Portland arts institutions are using new and social media. PAM’s Christina Olsen mentioned the app was in development, but I didn’t realize it was close to release!

Clean and lovely, the app integrates the 11 Conversations About Art videos that the Museum produced with the Smarthistory.org team. These are arts pros talking about a work of art in a casual, unscripted way. The videos were a pilot, let’s hope the Museum can get funding to do more.

I’ve been monkeying around with the app, and though it’s clearly a first pass, there is a lot of potential here.

The basics: there’s general info about both the Museum and the SmartHistory project. The maps alone of the convoluted geometries of our dear Museum will have value in getting first time visitors out of the glassy-eyed blur they sometimes find themselves in, a half-dozen stairways and a tunnel later. And the maps mark the locations of the pieces the Conversations About Art videos address. Clicking on one brings up a photo of the object and one can then link to the video.

Imagine Smarthistory vids on 10 times as many objects or overviews of collections like the Native American collection. The best thing about an app like this is that one can skip around the museum. I can’t bear to be herded through in a linear fashion as with an audio guide. AND I want to either look in silence or talk to my companion about what I see. Information on demand? app technology is made for people like me.

One caveat: to make this of real value, the Museum will have to provide iPhones to borrow to make the app available to all. Apple should be providing these gratis.

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The Art of Xu Bing

Chinese contemporary artist lectures at PAM

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 11, 2009 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Purple Breeze Comes from the East. Xu Bing. Institution:Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America, Washington, DC.
Materials: Carved and hand-finished acrylic characters, dye, monofilament. via: xubing.com

This is the major contemporary art component of the China Design Now exhibition, a lecture at the Portland Art Museum by important ex-patriot Chinese artist and MacArthur Fellow, Xu Bing. Tonight at PAM at 5:30 PM Xu Bing is expected to speak about recent work like his “Forest Project,” “The Tobacco Project, A Case Study of Transference,” and “Landscript Series” wrapped in context of China’s artistic evolution. It’s $5 for members and $12 for non-members.

Here’s Xu Bing’s studio blog and website for previewing fun.

Ranging from monumental installations to handcrafted books, Xu’s artistic practice is a playful and political exploration of the written word, usually in the form of the Chinese character. His work questions our ability to communicate meaning through language, as well as the value of language itself.

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Modou Dieng on Art Focus

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 10, 2009 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Black Isaac, Modou Dieng. Mixed media collage on canvas

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Black Isaac, Modou Dieng. Mixed media collage on canvas

This morning at 11:30 AM on KBOO, host Eva Lake talks with artist, curator (Worksound), and PNCA faculty member Modou Dieng about his exhibition of assemblages, Black Star, currently on view at Marylhurst Art Gym.

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Review: Jelly Gen

Show of contemporary art by young Chinese artists

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 10, 2009 at 07:00AM 2 Comments

Memory City II #3 (2008). Sun Ji. Pigment Print on Fine Art Paper

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Memory City II #3 (2008). Sun Ji. Pigment Print on Fine Art Paper

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Quail Egg.

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Du Yang.

There are two pretty profound takeaways to be had from the Portland Art Museum‘s China Design Now exhibition. First, design talent flows readily into and out of China’s borders. A Chinese fashion designer practices in Paris. European architects design buildings in Beijing. Second, much of the work on display could have come from any one of many of the world’s design centers. The international exchange of ideas, tropes, trends, it appears, is at full throttle.

So it is with the Jelly Gen exhibition, curated by John and Janet Jay of Studio J currently at the Goldsmith Gallery (NW Fifth and Couch). The exhibition features work by Chinese-based or Chinese-born artists, designers, photographers, video artists, and musicians who were born in the 80’s and 90’s. These artists go to university in London, work in Paris, sell on Etsy. On the main floor, smashing oversized digital prints of conceptual fashion, of photography, sculpture, product design, and illustration-based art benefit from a soundtrack of bands PK-14 and Queen Sea Big Shark whose Love Noise 2008 tour is chronicled in a series of short films sponsored by Converse shown in the back of the space. If the songs sound startlingly familiar (close your eyes and it’s proto-UK-punk), that’s because youth culture knows even fewer boundaries. Here Queen Sea plays in the Bay Area earlier this year:

The standout work in the show is by photographer Sun Ji whose photo collages from his “Memory City II” series are claustrophobic layerings of buildings in various states of decay that trick the eye/brain as it struggles to make sense of perspective and scale in a scene that is just a few degrees off from reality. Too, Chi L Lei’s two photos, disturbing as they are, particularly in proximity—a violent hostage scene in one, a dear old couple in a small, green-walled room (in fact the same room staged differently) in another—are compelling for their hyperrealism and in tandem, their vivid palette.

Quail Egg.

Upstairs, Jay cleverly had the artists produce original works on (or with) pages of a 1962 Oregon Journal newspaper. Ding Ding‘s abject doll pushed the assignment farthest in its half ragdoll, half pinata form. Li Xiao Don’s nudes with massive amounts of curly hair share pages with lingerie ads. Quan Chun aka Quail Egg has her bird motif and some sensuous ladies with heavy bangs to play peek-a-boo with the entertainment page on which they’re painted (Elvis!). Some of the pieces felt like doodling drive-by’s, but others, like works by Vader, Driv, and Leal, were alternatively ironic, poignant, and smart.

As high-design object and cross-cultural signpost, Zack Zhu‘s shiny ceramic organic form somewhere between an anemone and a dahlia made in China and “reassembled in London” is fascinating. And Cai Kai’s capturing of the reconceptualization discovered online of the relationships between LiLei and Han MeiMei (characters from an 80’s English textbook) TK. And artist-turned-fashion designer Du Yang’s sculptural designs deliciously delve into both surrealism and craft, but get into troubled territory with a white model in an oversized sweater featuring a black face on the torso and…watermelon slices on the sleeves. How to read an American racist meme filtered through the mind of a Paris-based Chinese designer?

Du Yang.

The two animated video works I’m afraid I can’t credit (I don’t have information) but they interestingly shared both a pursuit in dystopic future theme, one with aliens and one with pursuers become monsters, and faces that rotate vertically. See them, they’re upstairs.

Some of the work feels so familiar. Work by Qian Qian in its superflat and gradient glory will remind you of Murakami. Nod’s bright graphic abstract patterns feel strikingly Scandinavian. The heavy eyes of a figure in a Mr. Paper (Liu Weihua) painting nod to Barry McGee’s enigmatic figures. And some of the work has traditional roots (Bei Bang) or toys with tradition as in the graffiti’d paper lanterns by the Reload Crew (also at the Ace Hotel).

There is something more going on here than shining a spotlight on a group of emerging artists and designers with roots in China. By juxtaposing art, commercial art, product, sponsored art (the Converse-sponsored tour), photos of Wieden + Kennedy’s extraordinary Shanghai office, and a photo essay on lunch delivery at that office, the show’s thesis seems to be that the membrane between commercial art and art or art and design is so permeable for Chinese artists of a certain age (or at least this group here) as to be unimportant. Sound familiar?

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Tags: nudity

PMMNLS: Laurel Nakadate

Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series

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

Laurel Nakadate, “Exorcism in January” 2009  C-print. Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks+Projects

“…I’m drawn to moments of ambiguity, when things could go right or they could go wrong. I’m interested in discomfort. Discomfort is a place where we’re still close enough to comfort to understand our unhappiness. Most of the things we desire are things that can destroy us.”

Tonight, filmmaker and photographer Laurel Nakadate talks at Portland State University: Shattuck Hall Annex (1914 SW Park Ave) as part of the Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series.

The above quote is from an interview with the artist on the website, Rumpus, where she talks more about a series of videos she made by essentially picking up strange men and going home with them to do things like dance to a Britney Spears song or in one instance, inviting a to man draw her.

Rumpus: When you’re making a video with these men, is there a line you won’t cross?

LN: No touching unless invited. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. And, it’s all for the camera. Once we cut, the scene is over. Rules always make things better in art.

Rumpus: What were the parameters you placed on yourself for the videos you made with lonely men?

LN: Tell stories. With strangers. Find them. Go home with them. Turn on camera.

Nakadate received an MFA in photography from Yale University and currently lives in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1/MoMA, The Yerba Buena, The Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia. In 2009, her first feature film, “Stay The Same Never Change” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be featured in New Directors/ New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. She is currently finishing her second feature film, “The Wolf Knife.” She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York City.

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Shen Wei Dance

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 09, 2009 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

In the time since choreographer Shen Wei last brought his company to Portland with “Rite of Spring” that White Bird presented in 2005, he took the world stage with his contribution to the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies. This Wednesday, November 11 at 7:30 PM, White Bird presents Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. New York-based Shen Wei, who was born in Hunan, brings two works based on impressions of China travels. “RE:I” reflects on travels through Chinese-occupied Tibet while a new work, “RE:III” integrates images of traditional China and the new, hyper-modern Beijing Shen Wei observed while there for the Olympics.

Prior to the show, at 6:45 PM, Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator at the Portland Art Museum talks about Shen Wei’s work as part of the White Bird Words series.

The following day, Thursday, November 12, see a conversation with Shen Wei at the Portland Art Museum at 7 PM.

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Io Palmer and Modou Dieng at Marylhurst Art Gym

Artist talk and reception today

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 08, 2009 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Today a double exhibition opens at Marylhurst Art Gym: Io Palmer’s Artstars and Modou Dieng’s Black Star. The Washington-based Palmer shows a dozen mixed-media sculptures in the main space, while Dieng, an instructor at PNCA and curator of Worksound gallery, shows assemblages in the Art Gym’s Gallery 2.

This afternoon, Sunday, November 8 at 3 PM there will be a gallery talk with both Palmer and Dieng followed by a reception for the artists Sunday, November 8 from 4-5:30 PM

The two artists take different approaches to the examination of stardom and status in art and culture. Palmer’s exhibit is made up of mixed media sculptures, and Dieng’s exhibit features vinyl record assemblages that make paintings.

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First Friday November

Eastside!

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 06, 2009 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

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Here’s how First Friday is shaping up with three shows bringing work by international artists to town. Good to shake things up a bit with perspectives from beyond the bridges. Also, it seems to be photography month on the Eastside.

Reflecting China: Gendered Visions from the Diaspora
Nemo Design (1875 SE Belmont)
Opening reception Friday, November 6 from 6 to 10 PM

Nemo opens Reflecting China: Gendered Visions from the Diaspora with work of acclaimed photographers Shen Wei and Jane Tam. The show combines work from Wei’s “Chinese Sentiment” series with Tam’s “Foreigner’s in Paradise” series.

The show “explores issues of Chinese identity, gender, diaspora, cultural memory, imagined communities, longing and belonging. Both artists have been internationally recognized for their work.”

Kunsthalle: Deutschland nach Portland
galleryHOMELAND (corner of SE 11th and Division)
Opening Reception First Friday, November 6 from 6-9 PM

Kunsthalle: Deutschland nach Portland is a group show of Berlin artists galleryHOMELAND has been introduced to through its EAST/WEST Project Berlin. Director, Paul Middendorf calls it a core sample or “bodenprobe” of the state of the arts in Berlin, Germany. With work by Berlin artists: Wolfgang Fütterer, Sanna-Lisa Gesang-Gottowt, Terrell James, Bo Joseph, Marte Kiessling, Sandra Preston, Per Schumann, Ole Ukena and Malte Zacharias.

The exhibition features the work of nine contemporary artists, either currently living in Berlin or having done so are now living in Portland, that have been impacted by the vibrant arts community in Berlin. Filmmakers, photographers, painters, and installation artists, many with a hand in multiple mediums, this selection of artists represents the diversity of art and art making practices emanating from a city positively buzzing with a critical mass of creativity, opportunity and cultural exchange.

20yrs After Berlin Wall—Girls Doing Girl Things!
Worksound (820 SE Alder)
Opening Reception First Friday, November 6, 7 PM to late.

International group show of photography, sculpture, and installation by artists Krystyn Strother, Alyssa Noches, Emily Lazar, Chloé Richard, and Sanna-Lisa-Gesang-Gottowt plus a performance by Tu Fawning at 9:30 PM.

Alex Steckly
Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd)
Opening reception November 6, 6 to 9 PM

Fourteen30 Contemporary opens a solo exhibition of new work by Alex Steckly. Steckly focuses on two related bodies of work – a series of chromatically minimal paintings on panel and three large-scale wall sculptures in white.

Oaks Park Pentimento
Jim Lommasson
New American Art Union (922 SE Ankeny)
Opening reception November 6 from 6 to 8 PM

Over two days in 1982, Jim Lommasson photographed the strange and beautiful paintings that decorated the center column of the historic carousel at Oaks Amusement Park in Portland, Oregon. The original carousel images painted by German and Italian immigrants around 1912 were an exotic assortment of Edwardian pastoral scenes featuring western explorers, Native Americans, an Arab riding a camel, and idealized women. When these paintings began to show signs of wear in the 1940s, two itinerant artist brothers from Vashon Island, Washington were hired to paint over the eighteen panels with depictions of such local landmarks as the Columbia River Highway, Mount Hood, Multnomah Falls, and scenes from the Oregon coast. Eventually, the surfaces of these new paintings also began to flake and fade, revealing parts of the original images in unusual and unexpected ways.

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Northwest Film and Video Festival Preview

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Nov 06, 2009 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Heather Harlow’s Nous Deux Encore is one of the highlights of the festival.

Tonight, the Northwest Film and Video Festival, one of Portland’s premier film festivals, er…premieres with its screening of the first set of short films, and continues through for the next nine days, with films that examine many different facets of humanity, all of them originating in our (relative) backyard of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Here are the showings you need to be at over the next week.

Shorts – The festival will show each of its three sets of short films two times, leaving no excuse for anyone holding a festival pass to miss one due to a scheduling conflict. Shorts I is the standout set, as it comprises of the best of show winner, Heather Harlow’s devastatingly beautiful account of a woman remembering her husband through photographs, Nous Deux Encore, and the best short documentary, 122 Random Seconds. II and III are no slouches either, as the animated politically-charged short Iran: A Nation of Bloggers and coyote-on-the-MAX fable (talk about an inundated genre) Passenger are winning entries, too.

What’s Wrong with This Picture? – Seattle film instructor Warren Etheridge critiques work that didn’t make it into the festival with the directors in attendance. CAT SOUNDS.

Time Being – This 88-minute film consists of 88 one-minute vignettes. Could be brilliant, could crash and burn and feel longer than Ben-Hur. Either way, it needs to be seen.

Sweet Crude – Sandy Cioffi and her documentary crew goes into Nigeria to investigate corruption in the oil industry there and end up getting captured by the Nigerian military. That’s a twist!

Died Young, Stayed Pretty – This documentary follows the insulated art subculture of the artists who make rock posters.

To Pay with My Stories – Brian Lindstrom has already put out great documentaries about the area such as the Central City Concern-based Finding Normal, and continues with this piece about the Write Around Portland program.

Look at this space throughout the week for reviews and interviews from the festival.

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Hot Little Hands: ill starred

new dance debuts

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 06, 2009 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

ill starred. Hot Little Hands.

Irresistable pun alert! Hot times at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center (5340 N Interstate) as Hot Little Hands choreographer Suniti Dernovsek and set designer David Stein debut their new work, ill-starred.

This new work explores loss, relationships, dreams, mourning and the reaction to and understanding of crisis. The dance is accompanied with minimal sound-tracking by musician, Ryan Bjorn Cross.

Check it Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7 at 7:30 PM, Sunday, November 8 at 2:00 PM, and Thursday-Saturday, November 12-14 at 7:30 PM. $15.

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Good Company

PNCA’s untitled, online arts journal

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 05, 2009 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

This one falls into the “doing things right” department: PNCA now has a handsome online arts journal covering the myriad tentacles of its activities including those of its exhibition spaces, programs, faculty, visiting artists, alumni, and Museum of Contemporary Craft staff. Its title, Untitled, according to editor Becca Biggs was settled upon after staff considered both “Louis” and “Bunce!” I love Bunce. (Portland art history tip: Louis Bunce is late, beloved teacher.)

Just a coincidence of course that it shares title with incoming art world parody flick of same name.

So now that PNCA is busy writing about itself, the rest of us can knock off for a long lunches, right?

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First Thursday November

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

Arnold J. Kemp. … (THEM) CHANGES, 2009.
archival pigment print on Arches paper
44″ × 28″, edition 4 of 5

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Arnold J. Kemp. … (THEM) CHANGES, 2009.
archival pigment print on Arches paper
44″ × 28″, edition 4 of 5

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Dianne Kornberg. India Tiger 10 1995
pigment ink print on rag paper

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Grit Hachmeister
Starkes Madchen, 2005
12 × 7 7/8"

What am I going to be looking out for this First Thursday?

“This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen”
Arnold Kemp
PDX Contemporary (925 NW Flanders)

Kemp is the new head of PNCA’s MFA program. In this interview with Modou Dieng (PNCA/Worksound), Kemp talks about his plans for the MFA program but also about this show. Kemp said that in addition to introducing him to his new community, the show explores the relationship between “me as a black person making work that’s primarily chromatically black” with nature and a certain mysticism…he mentioned the “black arts” or magic.

The title of the exhibition (an adaptation from Emily Dickinson) embodies Kemp’s commitment to present at once poetic and at times darkly humorous work that references quietude, passings away and new beginnings.

Delusions of Grandeur
A Subtle Commentary on Economics – A Dance in Three Parts
Alex Rauch
Tractor (328 NW Broadway)

Rauch gets pre-viewing points for what is almost a double colon title. I know you know what I’m talking about. Translating his fascinating/funny text below, he’s creating a myth/fairy tale of himself at 25, an emerging artist. He gets extra triple word Scrabble points for “prosopagnosia,” face blindness, or the inability to recognize a face according to that bastion of knowledge for the lazy, Wikipedia.

I have created an allegorical abstract about a quarter-life sea change (both noumenonological and phenomenological) experience that explores subjectivity as an emerging artist grasps at objectivity within his finite reality. This is a story told via mythological iconography, monetary implications, obsolete technology, black plastic and atmospheric and physical nuances. I describe this creation as, “A morose visual-panegyric for the artist’s ego, and I am the edifice with prosopagnosia.”

“AND NOW WE DO WHAT WE DO”
May Juliette Barruel
IGLOO (NW 6th Ave and Everett #102)

Curator and artist, May Juliette Barruel finally has a solo show (she’s been curating Stumptown downtown and her own Nationale on E Burnside) with photo/text/textile-based work, personal, intimate, created to a soundtrack by Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bill Callahan. Little sneak preview.

Dianne Kornberg. India Tiger 10 1995
pigment ink print on rag paper

India Tigers
Dianne Kornberg
Elizabeth Leach Gallery (417 NW 9th)

Dianne Kornberg’s India Tigers is a recent digital printing of a collection of austere photographs of moths and butterflies from India, preserved in folded, triangular paper wrappings.

Grit Hachmeister
Starkes Madchen, 2005
12 × 7 7/8"

Queer Gaze
Fontanelle Gallery (205 SW Pine)

Queer Gaze is a group photography exhibition featuring images of queer people by queer photographers. This show offers a new examination and response to theories of “male gaze”, as originally described by Laura Mulvey as the cinematic depiction of voyeurism and objectification of a female by a heterosexual male viewer. Queer Gaze explores the gaze from woman to woman or queer to queer, as well as the way that many photographers use their own visage or that of their friends to subvert traditional expectations of portraiture.

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Not Free At Last: Museum of Contemporary Craft

Portland’s only free museum isn’t anymore

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

One of the hallmarks of the Museum of Contemporary Craft, particularly under the leadership of David Cohen but dating back to its origins as the Oregon Ceramic Studio founded in 1937, was that it was an institution of the people, by the people, for the people. Its army of volunteers, its sales gallery supporting Oregon craft artists, and its policy of free admission were testament to this important pillar of its mission.

Yesterday I learned, via a twitter exchange with @travelportland (Thanks Bryan!) that free days at the Museum of Contemporary Craft are over as of November 19, 2009.

Adult admission will be $3, while seniors and students over 13 pay $2. Kids and PNCA students still get in free.

Understandably, the Museum and its partner/parent PNCA search for additional earned income sources in tough times. But this is a step in the wrong direction. While museum curators, administrators, marketing folks, and education pros are talking about the need to expand audience, to encourage deeper engagement, this cuts those efforts off at the knees. We want to encourage multiple, frequent visits by a wider spectrum of visitors. We want that frequent visitor to be able to have a casual relationship with the work because that familiarity leads not only to a deeper relationship with art (via time to question, study, reflect), it allows the visitor to develop a relationship with the museum itself, to feel a part of it and thereby become its supporter, its champion, a volunteer or docent perhaps, and who knows, perhaps one day its super patron.

In September London’s Conservative mayor Boris Johnson caused a stir in calling for Britain’s free museums to charge admission, “saying that the lack of any fee devalues the experience. ‘Cynical young people think they’re seeing something that isn’t prized,’ he said.”

That’s nonsense. I often wonder if people who talk about what young people think ever talk to actual young people. And my valuation of art doesn’t change whether I pay to see it or view it as a guest. Does yours? But let’s be opposite for a minute and take Johnson’s tack, are we then saying that the value of a visit to MoCC exhibitions is a mere $3? That isn’t right either.

Rebecca Burrell, Director of PR for Museum of Contemporary Craft says, “The admissions fee structure is quite similar to many of our peers, including the Hallie Ford Museum, and furthers our mission of accessibility, while still providing funds that go a long way at a small museum like ours.”

If we’re trying to capture tourist dollars, fine, let’s sell a damn t-shirt or tote bag. But if we are trying to bring all of Portland through the doors of our cultural institutions (as any of them how important “outreach” and “diversifying audiences” is) to make their treasures available to all while at the same time demonstrating the value of these institutions to those who might one day vote on a regional arts funding measure, the only way to “further [the] mission of accessibility” is to continue the Museum’s 73 year history of free admission.

Now more than ever, we need wonder and possibility and reminders of the transcendent power of art and craft. Now is not the time to put a petty barrier between the work in the museum and the man on the street.

Lucky for you the Museum of Contemporary Craft is still free on First Thursdays because the upcoming Andy Paiko/Ethan Rose collaboration, Transference, opening coincidentally on November 19, is going to be both important and magical. But as anyone who has gratefully taken advantage of free days at the Portland Art Museum knows, those days are bustling, precluding quiet moments with the work.

On other days of course, you can always join me: I’ll be looking in through the windows.

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Half/Dozen +Projects Launches

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Nov 03, 2009 at 08:00PM 0 Comments

There’s a new game in town and I like it. The not-very-old Half/Dozen Gallery in the Everett Lofts is doing monthly, one-night performance, dance, installation pieces in addition to their visual arts programming. It seems like it’s been a while since time-based art has had much of a presence at Everett. I’m recalling an Uli Beutter video installation, a Mary Oslund Dance at Gavin Shettler Gallery, and a movement piece Kathleen Keogh did in front of Ogle.

The new series at Half/Dozen, +Projects, launched last night with Pace:Repeat choreographed by Bonnie Green. Green and two others dancers executed pedestrianized versions of movements borrowed from exercise class and dance video interspersed briefly with familiar modern dance movements. At its best, Green’s choreography used the three dancers in Newton’s Cradle-like sequences like physical games of telephone (and I did love the first moments of Green’s solo, counting herself into the piece with splayed fingers on the wall). But I challenge that a flat, emotionless execution precludes moving with commitment. Maybe I have Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People on the brain, but I want to see one moving like one means it (i.e. with intent), even if one means to move in a blasé, passive, or automatic fashion.

In a fairly sensational surprise move, once the dancers retreated they were replaced by a man in cycling cleats who rolled out a beautiful, chrome-wheeled LeMond trainer and began to ride, alternating spins and climbs. Would it have been better had he not stopped riding at intervals, dismounted, and moved the trainer to points in a wide circle around the room? Yes. Would it have been better were we able to witness this solitary and punishing act in silence? Yes. But it was a brilliant stroke to interrupt the three repetitions of the dance with this durational moment.

I am interested in Green’s movement ideas, especially that of imperfect repetition and think it would be interesting for her to work with a composer/sound artist.

Looking forward to more +Projects, next up is Tim Mahan on November 30 followed by Lucy Yim on January 31. Green (and Yim) will be dancing with Linda Austin in the upcoming Bandage A Knife.

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