CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS - January 2010

merriment and a fleet of hooves

improvised events by Lucy Yim at Half/Dozen

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 31, 2010 at 11:02AM 0 Comments

This evening Half/Dozen+ Projects (625 NW Everett, #111) continues their performance series with merriment and a fleet of hooves, improvised dance, film, and music programmed by Portland-based dancer/choreographer, Lucy Yim. The dancers will perform twice at 5 PM and 6 PM with a small reception between each run.

Dancers include Bonnie Green, Jin Camou, Leah Wilmoth, Lena Sradnick, Lindsey Lester, Lucy Yim and Sara Naegelin. Musicians include Morgan Hobart, Dana Valatka, Luke Wyland, Jean- Paul Jenkins, Nathan Miller and Jeremy Faulkner. And Laurel Degutis brings film. Free admission.

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Bruce Conkle Doc

short documentary on Portland artist & educator

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 29, 2010 at 05:41PM 1 Comments

Bruce Conkle from Kevin Forrest on Vimeo.

Liking this short documentary on Portland-based artist and educator Bruce Conkle by Kevin Forrest.

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Review: Domestic/Wild

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 27, 2010 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

At the root of it, Domestic/Wild at Performanceworks Northwest this past weekend hinged on the question asked by artist Karin Bolender in one of her monologues, “What distinguishes the wild outside the door from that within or that within ourselves?” Ten women (dancers, artist, performers) addressed this and related issues via movement, movement video, and monologue in a performance “devised” by Emily Stone.

Thematic threads loosely tangled around introducing wildness into a domestic situation (and mining the wildness just under the calm domestic surface) and the domestic entering the wild (dancemaking beyond the studio walls). One moment, three women in white danced sequences that were both gentle and frantic, borrowing movement from the domestic life. The next, white-clad dancers doing what looked like involuntary movement pulled by unseen forces jerked and spun into and out of the door (a recurring motif) of a shed in a video piece or did mini-dances in kitchens that felt feral. Shot throughout were a sequence of videos shot in the out of doors in which dancers explored grass, mud, bramble, and water and explored animal-like movement (once wearing Muppet-like animal-ish costumes). One captivating segment found dancers in house dresses dancing in the headlights of a car on a country road. Three dancers on the dimly lit stage mimicked the movements, melancholy shadows.

A claustrophobic video sequence found Stone crouched on a kitchen counter, yanking on the edge of the countertop, bouncing with a jackhammer insistence. Here and elsewhere she’s exploring a whole new vocabulary of movement, movement that is one part machine and one part animal, movement that is accompanied by vocalized sound that might be a whir and a click, might be a throaty growl. And this is the heart of Stone’s project, of which one might guess that Domestic/Wild is a single moment. Like that of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner (Kathleen Keogh and Rikki Rothenberg represented for WMCTD here), Stone’s movement is often unexpected and unexpectedly beautiful, particularly given that it occasionally comes with slapstick overtones.

Providing a gentle throughline, the delicious score, improvised by Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet) and Matt Carlson (synthesizer) was both pensive and playful with subtle synth-generated texture.

At the beginning of the piece, there was a pile of crumpled brown wrapping paper on the back wall and floor, a hanging rack of white clothes, and tangles of branches overhead. At the end, the floor was strewn with a pile of laundry, ping pong balls, dirt, and hay, and the back wall smeared with mud.

During intermission with the many children who attended the matinee performance messing around on the stage, Rikki Rothenberg danced a flailing dance in a rectangle marked off by masking tape on the floor. Kestrel Gates taped the rectangle off smaller and smaller as she danced. A subplot of the performance was not only the domestic, but life with small children (four of the performers are mothers of small children). By addressing in her performance practice the boxing in that can happen when one is a mother of small children, Stone, with one daughter in attendance and another child on the way (she ended the performance by stripping to her underwear from the bear costume she wore for much of the show) demonstrates she’s clearly transcended it. Lucky for us.

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Tags: performance works northwest, matt carlson, rikki rothenberg, kestrel gates, jonathan sielaff, golden retriever , performance, kathleen keogh, emily stone, woolly mammoth comes to dinner, karin bolender

Live Craft: Gestures of Resistance

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 26, 2010 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

When the Museum of Contemporary Craft reconsidered the meanings of craft itself as it moved from Corbett to the DeSoto Building, one notable idea that the institution embraced was that of craft as a verb in contrast to work made simply in a particular material (wood, ceramic). The new exhibition that opens today, Gestures of Resistance, promises to be the boldest yet curatorial move in that direction. It is both an episodic series of installations that build on one another in the space of the museum and craft performances that happen both inside and outside of the museum. I’m including information from the curators and the museum below.

The curators Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton tonight talk about craft actions, using craft to agitate for change, and their exhibition at the Museum at 6:30 PM.

The exhibition has an independent website and a

More information:

Gestures of Resistance is an ongoing creative/critical undertaking by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leemann. With particular interest in the relationship of slowness and agency within the realm of craft, we delineate and then proceed to interrogate a species of action in which self-conscious crafting, contextual mischief-making, and cultural re-scripting play themselves out.

Gestures of Resistance examines work by contemporary artists who focus on craft actions and create works that use craft to agitate for change. Rather than present a grouping of objects, the exhibition unfolds over its tenure at the Museum. Through a series of seven artist residencies, open conversations and a study center, the exhibition is a timely examination of what it means to create, to have personal agency, and to counter drives towards productivity and consumption through craft.

Sara Black and John Preus (January 26–February 6) begin the exhibition through a live buildout of the museum, creating a workshop space from inherited materials that acts simultaneously as platform, town square and sculpture. This space becomes the staging area for all subsequent resident artists, who will transform and manipulate the space through their performances and objects.

Anthea Black (February 19–March 10) is a Canadian printmaker known for her subversive postering campaigns who will recruit queer youth to deploy her two-sided poster prints across Portland.

Carole Lung, AKA Frau Fiber (March 18–27), an itinerant textile worker, will address herself to the specifics of Portland’s garment culture – hacking a Columbia Sportswear design for rain gear and sewing five sets of the garment using a bicycle-powered sewing machine.

Mung Lar Lam (April 1–3) will perform Ironings, a meditation on labor, gender and class in which the task of ironing becomes the means of mark-making, with the unfolded cloth acting as a mosaic fanning across the gallery walls.

Cat Mazza (May 18–22), whose Nike Blanket Petition won her acclaim in both the craft and anti-sweatshop movements, will set up a process by which cast-offs of Michelle Obama’s favorite popular clothing brands are repurposed into a new sculpture on site.

Ehren Tool (June 1–12), a veteran of the first Gulf War and a potter, will exhaust a supply of porcelain over the course of a durational performance throwing cups. These cups will then act as building blocks to construct and then deconstruct divisions within the gallery, and ultimately will be given away to visitors in the Museum.

Theaster Gates (June 18–19) will whitewash everything that has come before in delicate porcelain slip and conclude the exhibition with a public performance in the Museum space.

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What is Trade?

Eva Lake talks about this Hoffman Gallery show

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 26, 2010 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Today on Art Focus on KBOO at 11:30 AM, Eva Lake talks with curator Linda Tesner of the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery at Lewis and Clark about “What is a Trade?” a show by Donald Fels who collaborated with Indian sign painters to create an exhibition of large scale paintings about trade in India.

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Tags: eva lake

Review: Dregs and Imaginative Qualities

two exhibitions at Marylhurst Art Gym

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 26, 2010 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

The Dregs, Paul Middendorf and Brandy Cochrane. 2009. Marylhurst Art Gym.

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The Dregs, Paul Middendorf and Brandy Cochrane. 2009. Marylhurst Art Gym.

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from The Dregs, Paul Middendorf and Brandy Cochrane. 2009

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Beloved Mother. Paul Middendorf and Brandy Cochrane. 2009

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Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen. 2009. Marylhurst Art Gym.

Portlanders who frequent visual arts events likely know Paul Middendorf, director of Gallery HOMELAND, as a tireless curator, artist, and administrator who has been bringing the work of Portland artists to the public eye for a number of years now—first at the Modern Zoo and Disjecta, and more recently through HOMELAND’S Scratching the Surface festival. It is wonderful that he has an exhibition at our region’s premier independent art venue just as his most ambitious project, East West Berlin, is taking off. East West Berlin is a collaboration with NY gallery Dam Stuhltrager, exhibiting artists from Portland and New York in Berlin.

For “The Dregs” at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Middendorf does as an artist what he does best as a curator/administrator, he collaborates…here with Brandy Cochrane. Made from the items that were left behind after an estate sale, “The Dregs,” we are told, is meant to “honor the story” of the family to which the objects belonged. Specifically, the story concerns the family’s grown son who continued to live in the family home with his mother when his father died, and alone after she too passed away.

from The Dregs, Paul Middendorf and Brandy Cochrane. 2009

Some material is presented as-is in consciously selected groups. There are two large wall collages—one laying bare a number of facts about the family from their papers and another made up of the colorful paper ephemera one tends to accumulate: greeting cards, ledgers, and notebooks—a double-sided display of a multitude of travel-sized soaps and assorted brushes (“Clean/Dirty”), and a small back room painted a yellow that I suspect was sourced from the home in question, filled with odd items displayed as if in a particularly good thrift store.

The rest of the works are crafted of found object as in the lively assortment of oversized papier-mache spheres like the cleverly-titled, satin-beribboned globe called “Don’t Take Larry” which sounds ominous or odd until one finds, in a Welch Ade box in the yellow room, a cardboard spool of satin ribbon on which Elsie has written in pen, “Don’t Take Larry” by which she meant, I’m sure, “Don’t take, Larry.” (Commas matter!) Falling as well into this category are the bedsprings embellished with the word “Crestfallen” in purple neon letters.

It would take an extraordinarily sensitive touch to allow the deceased to speak for themselves through their things. Where “Dregs” trips is when the artists speak on their behalf. One worries that whereas the artists mean “The Dregs” to be a work of narrative anthropology, it ends up feeling closer to the voyeuristic fiction of a “reality” television show, editing the lives of real people—their names, addresses, places of employment are revealed—into the authors’ version of reality. Their neighbors and relatives may see this show, one can’t help thinking.

Beloved Mother. Paul Middendorf and Brandy Cochrane. 2009

One of the most beautiful pieces in the show is an arm chair upholstered with a tangle of octopus-like tentacles in shades of pastel pink and peach reaching up from the bottom of the chair, roiling across the seat, and curling up the back. “Beloved Mother” is crafted of the mother’s undergarments, the grasping mother holding on to her “Beloved Son” (the title of a trio of found portraits nearby of a beautiful young man) or comment on the grown man who can’t leave mother. Does it “honor” the family to draw this conclusion? Even trickier is the piece across the room, the embroidered drawings of two sleeping men on a stained Beautyrest mattress. They create three collages of the silhouette of a man with an erection (one cut from a male beefcake photo), and include in the yellow room a cardboard box of gay-porn videotapes. Airing a family’s dirty laundry in more ways than one—we have to consider the possibility that a man of the son’s generation (he was in his 70s when he died) might well not have been out to all who knew him—the artists veer toward exploitative, tabloid territory.

Remind me, if you know me, as I teeter at death’s threshold, to set the bloody house on fire.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen. 2009. Marylhurst Art Gym.

Which brings me to the installation in the Art Gym’s second gallery, “The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things” by Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen. This too is a narrative told through objects, and it is intensely personal. The few charred objects (the neck of a guitar, a computer, a stack of notebooks) that are embedded in or hugging the walls of the space were salvaged after their home burned. These objects have previously appeared in the duo’s book project about the fire, Integrating a Burning House.

The center of “The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things” is a video poem nestled in a box of boxes (a massive chipboard crate half full of cardboard storage boxes), an apt representation of the limbo in which the artists live as their home is rebuilt. Their poem richly addresses the dawning of the realization that the path taken to be circular (going home again) is in fact a curve approaching, but never reaching its asymptote. “A lot is different,” the artists say in the introduction to their book.

I puzzled over the relationship of the charred objects to the walls. Why does the plaster and paint seem to melt over a stack of newsprint, while the postcard and paintbrush appear to have been blown outward from the center embedding themselves cleanly like shrapnel? Why does the computer sit at a remove? And yet the whole, bound around the poem, is poignant and real.

It’s a subtle art to mine autobiography while avoiding the maudlin. In less capable hands their work around the burning house would fall to pieces like a bad teenage diary entry. Something about the way Gray and Paulsen treat the material, in a manner that is matter of fact yet deeply considered, makes it work.

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Tags: marylhurst art gym, paul middendorf, the dregs, anna gray, ryan wilson paulsen, brandy cochrane

Rauer New Director of NAAU

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 23, 2010 at 08:00AM 5 Comments

This just in: Kelly Rauer has been named the new director of New American Art Union (922 SE Ankeny). NAAU owner Ruth Ann Brown, celebrated for the Couture series of shows the gallery just wrapped at the end of 2009, will be spending more time with family.

Rauer, herself an artist, has most recently been gallery manager for art dealer Heidi McBride while serving as a gallery assistant at NAAU. She served for three years as Director of Programs for the Portland Art Center.

Interestingly, Rauer had already been scheduled for a show at NAAU in August. Plans for that show will go ahead. I wrote about a piece from her “Conversation Series” that was installed at Milepost 5 for Manor of Art as one of that show’s better installations.

Closed for the month of January, NAAU reopens February 14 with an exhibition by Timothy Scott Dalbow, I don’t know anyone in Paris.

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Tags: Galleries, Fashion

Preview: Truth & Beauty

Sneak peak onstage at the Fertile Ground Festival

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Jan 22, 2010 at 12:15PM 0 Comments

Jessica Wallenfels and Betsy Cross in Truth & Beauty.

Well, well, well— it turns out that I’m dumping all y’all to move to Nashville and become Ann Patchett’s new best friend.

It’s not that much of a surprise, really, that the author of The Magician’s Assistant—a tender story filled with love, loss and finely drawn characters—would turn out to be a good sort of egg. It is the stage adaptation of Patchett’s memoir Truth & Beauty that makes me feel that the woman is a friend worth seeking out. Truth & Beauty is the story of Patchett’s long, impassioned friendship with writer Lucy Grealy.

Truth & Beauty the play opens tonight at Shaking the Tree and is part of the Fertile Ground Festival. Patchett brings grace, elegance, beauty and magic to her pages, and Many Hats Collaborations breathes those same qualities onto the stage.

Adapted and directed by Elizabeth Klinger, the play does a remarkable job of avoiding pedantism, and expositional drudgery. Created in collaboration with her two lead actresses, Betsy Cross and Jessica Wallenfels, the play doesn’t hold too tightly to the poetry of Patchett’s writing (although it’s easy to hear, if you’re listening for it) instead, the women have translated that lyricism into movement.

On a simple stage set: a few miss-matched chairs, the occasional video projection, and some props, the cast crafts the story of a friendship between women that starts strong in college and expands across continents, careers, love and marriages. The friendship holds, always at its center, the difficult thing at the heart of Lucy Grealy’s life. A disfiguring cancer, suffered as a child, makes her a star writer, as an adult. But it is also leads to Grealy’s undoing, as her pursuit to repair her damaged body leads to more damage and a grim spiral of addiction.

The story of these two women is told with the help of the multi-hatted Joe Spencer, who plays a variety of supporting roles (doctors, boyfriends, husbands, a fortune teller). He does a great job of quickly sketching, without ever tipping into caricature, the characters who orbit the friendship that lies at the heart of the story.

Jessica Wallenfels, who plays the disfigured Lucy is a beautiful dancer, and we are grateful that her movement can translate the joy of her live, in a way that her face cannot. The dance sequences are varied—painful surgeries, joyful successes, or funny romantic mis-adventures—and they are specific, hueing closely, and clearly to the story that is being told. Betsy Cross plays Patchett with matter-of-fact tenderness and humor, and a grounded-ness that kind of crept up on me. As that as the lights came up I wondered, “what does the real Anne Patchett look like?” It seemed to me that she must look just like Betsy.

This isn’t always an easy play, but Truth & Beauty reminds me of the magic and grace of friendships, and that’s an evening well spent.

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Tags: Theater, Dance

Review: Mathern and Tran

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 22, 2010 at 07:00AM 0 Comments

Minh Tran and Tere Mathern. image via: White Bird

Like a pairing of a work by Sol Lewitt with one by Matthew Barney, a Mies van der Rohe building with one by Frank Gehry, John Cage with Richard Wagner, the White Bird program of two Portland-based dance companies, Tere Mathern Dance and Minh Tran & Company at the World Forestry Center is a study in contrasts. Mathern‘s work, “PIVOT,” is the meeting of intellectual and physical exploration while Tran’s “KISS” is narrative, emotional spectacle.

The two pieces are so different, in fact, that it’s right that there is a palate cleanser between them. And “Twine,” the piece Mathern and Tran perform together is a perfect bridge between the two. I’d not seen the two dance together before, but they have, and are so well matched it’s a shame that they won’t dance together again (Tran has said this is his last performance). In the dance’s most riveting sequence Mathern and Tran symbiotically curl around one another, unwind and intertwine again, making, for some time, a single, shapeshifting form. They do not clutch or hold but wrap and unwrap as connected but independent figures.

Pivot is both the point around which something turns and the act of turning. Beginning slowly, moving like spokes of a wheel around a hub, Mathern’s six dancers moved in trios and duos through rigorous sequences with dispassionate purpose that made for some extraordinarily beautiful contemporary dance. In unison and complimentary variation, the grounded dancers move into and out of lunge and turn with extension of arm and leg drawing invisible lines, creating angled forms. Mathern cleverly plays with juxtapositions of pace between groupings sharing the stage and creates moments of tension as a lean becomes a cantilever becomes a fall. In one remarkable sequence four dancers gather in a corner, execute a series of independent cross-floor movements in close quarters, then return to the corner, reset and scroll through the actions again as time pivots back and forth on the moment of now. The score by Tim DuRoche, performed live by viola, saxophone, electronics, and drums, is at times melodic, loose, swinging, and insistent.

The six dancers of PIVOT share the stage with a giant sculpture by David Eckard that inscribes a circle on the square of this “theater in the round.” Four truss-like metal arms high overhead extend from a center hub to the edge of the dance space. From each is suspended (at varying heights) a length or three of canvas strap with a metal cage plumb bob suspended from it. Periodically, the dancers rotate the arms of the sculpture and/or slide the straps to the center or edge of the stage. Could the choreography have been more circumscribed by the sculpture than it was, its areas of operation more clearly delineated by the position of each pendulum? This might have strengthened the relationship between movement and sculpture.

Like the moment when one has finished shuffling a deck of cards together and 52 become one, it is not until the dancers of Minh Tran and Company strut onto the stage and strike poses in ripped t-shirts with words like “rice queen,” “fem,” and “top,” that the many episodes of “KISS” cohere into the personal narrative/identity piece that it is.

Early on, Tran’s capable dancers engage in duet after duet, scrolling through the many variations that a couple can enact: embrace, clutch, move in parallel, challenge one another. The Margretta Hansen and Suzanne Chi duet crackles with an erotic charge and angular power concluding with one blowing the other off lightly as one would a dandelion. Then there are episodes depicting isolation in ways that are at time benevolent—the blindfolded dancer is guided, prevented from leaving the stage by the rest of the company—at times ominous as when another dancer moves on the ground as the company circles him. Heather Perkins’ score sustains a tension and forward momentum that prods and girds the choreography.

The end of the strike-a-pose episode, when the dancers take off first one slashed t-shirt then another down to skin, sums up the nature of the piece’s tendency toward over-the-topness—e.g. colored strobe lights and a full-floor video projection of red satin sheets and skin—which culminates in Tran’s final entrance in a remarkable leather cage corset and bent wire tutu…one flutter of his lovely outstretched arms and Tran is tellingly Odette. Presumably just at the moment that Tran is free, he dances his swan song.

Full disclosure: Composer Tim DuRoche is my partner.

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Tags: Dance, Review

Tidal

opening at Disjecta on Friday

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 21, 2010 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

Tidal is going to be the Disjecta (8371 N Interstate) exhibition we all remember 10 years from now. Jenene Nagy has the chops to make something remarkable with the alternative art space’s expansive gallery, and I’m glad she has the chance. Opening Friday, January 22, with a reception from 6-10 PM, Tidal is Nagy’s latest in a series of ambitious installations that have included (locally) “False Flat” (2007) at Linfield Gallery and “s/plit” (2008) at the Portland Art Museum.

Nagy’s installtions are often wall paintings of monochrome forms that spill off the wall onto shaped planes, conflating painting/wall/sculpture. Her means are made evident, especially the exposed 2×4′s that provide structure…no illusion here…and no preciousness, these are humble, utilitarian materials. She has in the past referred to her work as relating to stage sets (an earlier piece called “Sky Prop” as I recall was a grouping of pink jagged shapes on 2×4′s like giant matte lollipops, but meant, apparently, to be cloud-like props). In her studio pieces, it’s clear she’s experimenting with the the traditional means and results of painting and sculpture where a canvas sags and twists like the fabric that it is, minimalist paintings are freestanding, and sculptures and paintings talk to one another.

All of this is to say Jenene Nagy’s already working nationally, having just done an installation in Ohio after previously showing in LA with an upcoming residency also in LA, and she may not be ours forever. Go see this show.

The artist’s statement: “Using materials most commonly associated with construction, Tidal transforms the viewing arena into a pared-down space for possibility. Perched high in the rafters of the expansive gallery space, the piece challenges viewers’ expectations of interior and exterior, the spectacle and the mundane. Through the use of drywall and 2×4s, the work is linked to the built space of the gallery, literally merging with its makeup. With its jagged shape and electric pink paint, Tidal encroaches and engulfs; it is an invasion. It shifts the understanding of our physical scale in relationship to the space, de-familiarizing what we understand and expect of both the built and natural environment. Here, the commonplace becomes a super-phenomenon, evoking a violent beauty.”

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Tags: Art, Portland Art

Review: VANTAGE

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 21, 2010 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

Kudos to Archer Gallery Director Blake Shell for curating a group show magnetic enough to draw most of Portland’s plugged-in arts worlders over the river and through the freeway interchanges to the gallery’s Vancouver, WA location. The works in VANTAGE dealt with the altering, questioning, or redefining of perspective or space. This meant bending reality both sonically, as with Greg Pond’s “That Intricate Never” and visually as with Isaac Layman’s photos and Avantika Bawa’s installation.

Layman makes hyperreal photos of everyday objects. Shooting objects from subtly different vantage points and depths of focus, Layman then digitally layers them together to create a single, vivid, oversized image of a kitchen untensil drawer or the back of an old stereo. If Daniel Peabody of Elizabeth Leach Gallery hadn’t pointed out the minute distortions of angle on “Stereo,” (Layman’s work is part of a group show at Leach next month, I believe Daniel said), I’m not sure if I could have identified what was odd about the photos other than their unusual crispness and feeling of being somehow more-than. In a way he’s Andreas Gursky writ small, borrowing method and mundane subject, but focused in on a micro-level, object rather than landscape. By compositing the photos, Layman is actually able to load a finished work with more visual information than one photo could ever contain. In this way, like Stephen Slappe’s work with video (see below) Layman toys with the viewer’s expectations of the medium.

I’ve seen Victoria Haven’s photos of angular geometric forms and their shadows at PDX Contemporary Art. The forms fascinate me because they capture the ongoing fascination with and ubiquity of crystal-like and triangle-based forms in design and because they’re created by running string ’round points or nails hammered into a wall recalling both Naum Gabo and 70s craftsy string sailboats nailed into redwood boards, but have a sketch-like looseness making it seem as if the nails fell where they may. I love their drawing-like nature and their subtle implication of dimensionality.

I walked in on Stephen Slappe’s video, “Bear Witness,” near the end of its running time, the camera panning across a man’s mouth open wide and the serene scene of a cemetery framed in a horizontal rectangle as if viewed through a doorway or a slot. The panning was a device I’d seen him use before: the camera slowly and repeatedly panning 360 degrees. Watched from the beginning, the figure, a male in a hoodie is first pictured standing still. As the world turns (ha!) he appears closer and closer to the camera slowly enacting the arm stretch and gaping mouth of a yawn. As he gets closer to the viewer, the figure seems to detach from the background and float free until the open mouth consumes the field of vision on each swing of the camera with what could be a yawn or a scream. Either is an entirely appropriate and inappropriate response to the pastoral and tragic setting of the cemetery, making the detachment multivariate—physically and emotionally. But what’s more interesting is the work’s comment on the “realness” of the medium. If we have not yet lost our illusion that the camera can be trusted to bear witness, Slappe asks us to reconsider.

Like a wallpiece in a Karim Rashid boutique or the disco great-great-granddaughter of a Hans Arp relief, Golan Levin’s animation appeared to be a futuristic, pulsing grey blobject hovering in a white field. Levin has digitally mapped points on Merce Cunningham’s fingers and knuckle joints during a performance to create this “field of simulated energy.” Cunningham, himself, extensively used a 3-D motion creation software program called Life Forms (now called Dance Forms) as a choreographic tool. If for Cunningham the software’s representation of the body was a midpoint on the way to movement, for Levin the representation is the end, body in abstraction carried to extreme in isolation. I’d be interested to see a choreographer take this animation as a score to create a piece for ten dancers.

Avantika Bawa’s corner installation “Points (for Brunelleschi)” deals most directly with vantage point or perspective, a fact she shouts out in her title with a nod to the man credited with the discovery of linear perspective. Her installation features a pink sawhorse and simple geometric wall drawings that comment on their surroundings including the oblique angle the corner of the floor creates. What interests me about Bawa’s work is that she’s found a way, using shape and color, to move forward Robert Irwin’s minimalist project of making installation in response to the interior space when one might have thought Irwin had exhausted that line of inquiry. It’s not unrelated to work by Portland artist Damien Gilley whose wall drawings, if busier and more illustrative, seem to come from a similar place. Bawa has begun a residency at Milepost 5. I look forward to seeing what she does there.

As always with a sound piece that is responsive to its environment, who could know what Greg Pond’s “That Intricate Never” was really up to when the room was as crowded and loud as it was at the opening. Its form reminded me of a good old fashioned coastal foghorn, an octagonal box with a speaker on each face connected to two mic’s on the ground and a box (in which the guts of the machine must have been) resting on a white fuzzy rabbit fur (nice touch, as were the braided cords cascading from the speaker box). We’re told via the show notes that the sculpture modifies the room’s sounds depending on their wavelength and volume using open source software. I appreciate that Shell included this sound piece to expand the notion of our vantage point to include other than the sense of sight. I wonder whether it might not have been better placed in the center of the room. And of course, I’ll have to return to truly hear it.

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Tags: Art, Sound Art, Review

Domestic/Wild

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 21, 2010 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

I have been waiting for this one. Opening this Friday, January 22 Alembic #6: DOMESTIC/WILD curated by Kathleen Keogh and devised by Emily Stone will see performers from Seattle and Portland use sound, dance, video, and performative lecture to “trace the porous border between the home and the feral.” Emily Stone’s clever, fierce, and often funny performance would get me there in a heartbeat, but throw in Jonathan Sielaff playing improvised music as one-half of Golden Retriever and Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, and you don’t have to ask twice. The evening features video of site-specific dances in response to blackberry bushes, mud flats, and tool sheds, while mothers, drawing from their “surpisingly feral domestic lives” make dances about “holding the house together” or “running away from home,” and a lecture about a herd of American Spotted Asses. The complete lineup includes Emily Stone, Karin Bolender of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (Georgia), Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, Kestrel Gates, Rebecca Harrison, Rachel Kofron, Corrie Befort (Seattle), Beth Graczyk (Seattle), Sheri Cohen (Seattle), and Golden Retriever (Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff, formerly of Parenthetical Girls and AU, respectively).

Performances January 22 and 23 at 8 PM and a January 24 matinee at 4 PM at Performance Works Northwest (4625 SE 67th) Tickets: $10-15. Reserve at 503-777-1907.

EDIT: I changed this post to reflect that I brilliantly mistyped an address I’ve visited many times…PWNW is on SE 67th NOT NE 7th. Thanks Kathleen Keogh for heads up.

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Tags: Dance

Preview: Tandem

Sneak peak onstage at the Fertile Ground Festival

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Jan 19, 2010 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

Come one, come all, and see over a dozen world premieres, and more than 50 other art events, readings, workshops, visual art, dance and music, all made in Portland.

The second annual Fertile Ground Creative Festival starts this Friday, Jan. 22 and runs until Feb. 1.

Last week I, along with a happy-go-lucky group from Portland City Club, snagged a preview of Tandem, which opens at Curious Comedy on Friday night and runs during Fertile Ground.

Tandem is the debut show of the comedy duo (oh, why not) called Jean Louis, aka Stacey Hallal and Bob Ladewig. The couple (in real life, in business, and onstage) are the founders of Curious Comedy and their show explores relationships and communication through character-based sketches and stand up.

And here, of course, is the fifteen dollar question, “Is sketch comedy worth trucking it up MLK for? ‘Cause I’ve got hulu at home.”

Turns out, yes.

Make your way to Curious Comedy, order a beer (and panini, if you want) settle into the cozy cabaret-style table seating and be roundly entertained by the squabbling pair of stick-up artists trying to execute a hold-up, or the lovey-dovey couple pulling faces at the pound; the frantic secretary with an obvious crush on her boss, or the loudmouth father who shouts at his timid son from the Little League bleachers.

These Second City alums are hilarious, and their comedy chops are legit. The proliferation of sketch makes it easy to see lot of yuckster-hucksterism onstage and screen. Comedy is so often the land of the lonely-embittered single guy/gal (and I speak from personal experience), Tandem is written from a different point of view.

Jean Louis’ characters feel effortlessly inhabited, affectionately performed, and true. As performers and writers, the two are confident enough not to take cheap shots. It doesn’t mean the show is snooty. It just means it’s generous. I love that.

Tandem is running as part of the Fertile Ground Festival on a bill with SexyNurd: Rockstar Trapped in a Nurd’s Body, performed by stand-up comic auGi. I haven’t seen it, but the one-man-show is about a self-professed nerd’s childhood dream of become a rockstar. For heaven’s sake—nerd musicians?—this is Portland, there must be an audience for this. Is it you?

Tickets for Tandem are $15, or free with a ticket to SexyNurd. Or get this great deal: festival passes are only $50 and grant you admission to each and every festival event.

It’s local. It’s sustainable. It’s indoors. It’s January. It’s art. So, what are you seeing?

A complete festival calendar is available at fertilegroundpdx.org.

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Tags: Theater, comedy

Finally, Automation Comes to Arts Writing

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 19, 2010 at 10:45AM 0 Comments

Thanks to Nicole Caruth on Hyperallergic, I discovered a tool that is going to change not only my life, but the lives of anyone who writes about art, from artist writing her statement to student in a crit, to gallerist and PR, to critic. How? We’ll all save loads of time and mental energy with The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator by Pixmaven. With the Generator, you simply enter a five-digit number into a field, click “create art critique,” and the Generator spits out twistedly opaque and art-speaky “insights” in seconds! Automatic writing, indeed. Let’s give it a try with a few shows I’m currently thinking about:

The Dregs: Brandy Cochrane and Paul Middendorf at Marylhurst Art Gym
“It should be added that the disjunctive perturbation of the sexual signifier threatens to penetrate the substructure of critical thinking.”

VANTAGE at Archer Gallery at Clark College
“With regard to the issue of content, the disjunctive perturbation of the spatial relationships brings within the realm of discourse the distinctive formal juxtapositions.”

John Berry, Level 1: Stage 1 at Half/Dozen
“Although I am not a painter, I think that the reductive quality of the facture verges on codifying the accessibility of the work. "

Forth Estate at Fourteen30
“It’s difficult to enter into this work because of how the mechanical mark-making of the figurative-narrative line-space matrix spatially undermines the substructure of critical thinking.”

Whew! See how easy that was? A few clicks and genius! Think I’ll go paint my nails.

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Vantage

group exhibition at Clark College

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 16, 2010 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

There is a reception this evening Saturday January 16, 5-7 PM for Vantage a group show at Archer Gallery, Clark College (1933 Fort Vancouver Way, Vancouver WA). Why would I send you to Vancouver, of all places, for art? Blame it on Archer Gallery Director, Blake Shell; this group show features a handful of artists whose work I think highly of, and a handful whose work I don’t know, but whose project descriptions (“animation uses the digitally captured coordinates of Merce Cunningham’s fingers and knuckle joints during a performance to create a smooth field of simulated energy”) I find deeply intriguing. The opportunity to see work by Portand’s Stephen Slappe and Seattle’s Victoria Haven (who has shown at PDX Contemporary) alongside work by Avantika Bawa (whom I believe is starting a residency at Milepost 5), Golan Levin, Greg Pond, and Isaac Layman is too good to pass up.

See you there.

From the press release:

The Archer Gallery presents Vantage, an exhibition of artwork exploring perspective – visually, contextually, and perceptually. Featuring regional and national contemporary artists working in sculpture, video, computer animation, sound, photography, and installation, Vantage invites viewers into uncommon worlds, where meaning is reconstructed and reality subverted.

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Good Night, Sweet Princess

Fontanelle to close

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 14, 2010 at 05:00PM 0 Comments

I usually don’t want to write about gallery closings. I see the value in summing up, but if anything, I think the media are generally too enthusiastic about documenting the demise of a dynamic cultural enterprise. And yet, I regret perhaps not doing more to sum up the work of one of Portland’s more important independent galleries, TILT, when it closed (or rather transformed into the itinerant curatorial enterprise, TILT Export).

So it is that I celebrate the very good work of Leslie Miller and Jess Fogel at Fontanelle Gallery (205 SW Pine) . Fontanelle will close at the end of January. And just to get nostalgic for a moment, this is also the location that Elizabeth Leach Gallery inhabited well before Leach established the permanent Pearl District home for her gallery and the location where Eva Lake curated some fine, fine shows for Chambers Gallery before its northward move.

Fontanelle may be remembered for an illustration/figurative aesthetic that riffed on a melange of Chris Johanson/Carson Ellis/Marcel Dzama with a healthy queer thread. Mostly it will be remembered for showing work that wasn’t finding exhibition elsewhere. I’m particularly grateful to Fontanelle for debuting exhibitions by Midori Hirose/Josh Orion Kermiet and Oregon Painting Society. And I’m looking forward to seeing the book collaboration between Fontanelle and Mark Searcy document the gallery’s year-and-a-half of exhibitions. Fontanelle goes out with a bang with a closing party Friday, January 22, 7-9 PM w/ DJ Party Martyr.

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Tags: Art, Portland Art, Galleries

Dregs and Imaginative Qualities

two new shows at The Art Gym

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 13, 2010 at 08:30AM 0 Comments

Brandy Cochrane and Paul Middendorf, Crestfallen. image via: The Art Gym, Marylhurst University

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Brandy Cochrane and Paul Middendorf, Crestfallen. image via: The Art Gym, Marylhurst University

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Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Assorted Cassette Tapes. From Integrating a Burning House, 2008. image via The Art Gym, Marylhurst University

Just opened at The Art Gym at Marylhurst (17600 Pacific Highway, Hwy 43) are the eagerly awaited show by Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, and a chance for Paul Middendorf, director of Gallery HOMELAND to flex as an artist (in between runs back and forth to Berlin for his EAST/WEST PROJECT) with Brandy Cochrane in The Dregs.

Both exhibitions concern things as they relate to our lives and our spaces.

Curator Terri Hopkins says, “In The Dregs, Brandy Cochrane and Paul Middendorf take the remains of an estate sale to create an homage to and portrait of a family that has passed into history. In The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, whose apartment was lost to fire in 2008, think about experiences in the months that followed and their pending return to a new dwelling at their old address. ­”

Look for a gallery talk on Thursday February 4 and 12 Noon.

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Call for Proposals: STOCK

artist micro-grants call for proposals

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 12, 2010 at 06:00PM 0 Comments

Stock is Portland’s arts micro-granting enterprise. You submit a proposal. Show up for dinner: $10 buys dinner for artists and art-lovers who gather over a meal to award proceeds of the evening to one of 10 artist’s project proposals. Last grant was north of $500. Here’s the official call for proposals. They are due January 17 at 5 PM. The website lists past grantees and all of the artists’ proposals. Check it.

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Fertile Ground

incoming theater/dance festival

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 11, 2010 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Fertile Ground is ten days of new work—theater, dance, performance, and…comedy. Launched by the Portland Area Theatre Alliance in 2009, the fest opens January 22 and runs through February 2.

There’s a bit of excitement around here for the fest (emanating primarily from Interactive Managing Editor, Alexis Rehrmann, who has a secret previous life as a director/actress/&c), so I imagine we’ll line ’em up, knock ’em down, and write home about it.

I, for one, am looking forward to the White Bird double bill of works by choreographers Tere Mathern and Minh Tran at the Forestry Center (five performances starting next Wednesday, January 20) and Alembic #6 (a series of new performance) at Performanceworks Northwest, this time curated by Kathleen Keogh the evening features the brilliant Emily Stone’s Domestic/Wild. “Using sound, dance, performative lecture and digital video, we trace the porous border between the home and the feral.”

I was reminded, recently watching video of Tere’s piece at the Forecourt/Keller Fountain for City Dance, how very much I appreciate her work. This time out, she collaborates on “Pivot” with artist David Eckard and composer Tim DuRoche (who is, full disclosure, my partner in crime). Minh Tran works with composer Heather Perkins and visual film designer David Bryant to create “KISS.”

There is a full schedule of performances, events, soirees on the Fertile Ground website, and you can follow the fun on Twitter at #FG10. A whole-festival pass is only $50 for scads of new theater, from fully staged premieres to readings and workshops. Or get a button for $5 and get discounts on a number of performance tickets.

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Tags: white bird

Distilled

fundraiser for PWNW’s Alembic series

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 09, 2010 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

The cutting edges of Portland performance are sharpened way out SE Foster way. Long a hothouse for the development of new performance, Performance Works NorthWest(4625 SE 67th Ave) has for some time now hosted the Alembic series of evenings curated by guest artists.

“Distilled”—tonight, Saturday, January 9 at 8 PM—is a fundraiser for the continuation of this series that brings together dancers, performance artists, video artists and more with a cavalcade of 2-5 minute works by Linda Austin, Anne Furfey, Lily Gael + Francoise Renaud, Dora Gaskill, Bethany Ides, Kathleen Keogh + Noelle Stiles, Lois Leveen + Chuck Barnes, Mack McFarland, Meg McHutchison, Mark Owens + Leo Daedalus, Kaj-anne Pepper, Leah Wilmoth, Curtis Walker/Impetus Arts , and Lucy Yim

Performance Works NorthWest(4625 SE 67th Ave)$15-$50 sliding scale.

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Transference

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 07, 2010 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Transference. Ethan Rose and Andy Paiko. 2009. Museum of Contemporary Craft.

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Transference. Ethan Rose and Andy Paiko. 2009. Museum of Contemporary Craft.

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Holy.

I’m not going to use that word every day. But it’s the one that the sound of “Transference” brings to mind.

I’ve been thinking about how the secular humanist can miss out on opportunities to convene around music with transcendent possibilities (and/or joining in choral performance of same) by bypassing the great front doors of the church. I’ve been thinking that singing with other people is elevating. And I’ve been surprised recently by occasions when music has briefly lifted me out of now, pressing the pause button on everything but itself.

It is this sensation of a profound and elevating peace walled off from the rest of the world that sound artist Ethan Rose and glass artist Andy Paiko have created with “Transference,” a room-sized armonica at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. It is arresting when one’s eyes are closed, and only more so when one opens one’s eyes to see the 37 large clear glass bell jars rotating on wall and pedestal in the Museum’s ground floor gallery, bell jars that Paiko and Rose report very nearly tuned themselves to the key of F (with only a little coaxing). Delicate, twisting, armatures connected to hidden timed switching mechanisms touch tiny cloths to the edge of the glass (as a finger on the edge of a wine glass), generating the rich tones that swell, sustain, overlap, and fade away.

Tonight, Reed Wallsmith and Joe Cunningham, two tremendously sensitive and magical saxophonists (of Blue Cranes and Better Homes & Gardens), play with/to the sounds of “Transference” during First Thursday from 6-7:30 PM. “Transference” closes this weekend. Please see it.

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Tags: Art, Portland Art, Crafts, Sound Art

First Thursday January

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 07, 2010 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Marco Buti, from the Ficar series, mezzotint, 15.5″ × 11.75″, 2002. image via Froelick Gallery

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Marco Buti, from the Ficar series, mezzotint, 15.5″ × 11.75″, 2002. image via Froelick Gallery

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Megan Murphy, INEFFABLE, 2009. digital transparency, mirror, glass, acrylic, and oil paint. 22.5″ × 36″. image via PDX Contemporary Art

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John Mann, Untitled (sea level), 2009. digital c-print, 24″ × 30″. image via PDX Contemporary Art

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Scott Wolniak, Improvised Grass (detail), 2008. Sculpture – Paper, junk mail, studio debris, glue, wire, and tape. Dimensions variable. image via Chambers Gallery

Interiors: An Invitational Group Exhibit
Froelick Gallery
714 NW Davis
First Thursday Reception: January 7, 5–8 PM

Interiors here means both shelter and psyche, with selected works by artists including Vito Acconci (photo documentation of his “Seedbed” performance), Marco Buti’s remarkable prints, and work by Isabelle Scurry Chapman, Joe Deal, Matthew Dennison, Raymond Depardon, Walker Evans, Benny Fountain, Jeremiah Goodman, Shelley Jordan, Kevin Kadar, André Kertész, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Susan Seubert, Jeff Stuhr, Lli Wilburn, “and a selection of very odd vernacular photographs.”

Glass House, an interactive installation
Jennifer Jacobs
Tractor (328 NW Broadway #114)

Exploring a city is like walking through a hall of mirrors. The surfaces of the urban environment are tuned to reflect elements of your personality back to you with varying degrees of distortion. Observation is central to the flow of power in the city; It feeds into our personal vanities and controls us through our awareness of a detached surveillance. Our modified reflections cause us to engage in a form of self-evaluation and censure. There is a paradoxical relationship with the urban image of ourselves in that we wish to be observed, yet we are conscious of the control this observation exerts over us. Glasshouse examines the contention between narcissism and self-imposed surveillance. The piece itself is an interactive projection of glittering structures resembling city skyscrapers. As the viewer explores these structures, they impose a distorted portrait back upon them in imposing scale. The city’s movement responds to the flow of people throughout the space. The longer the viewer progresses through the city, the more their image is echoed around them. After the viewer leaves, their presence remains, gradually fading to be replaced with the images of others who follow through their own path of exploration. The audience is caught between self-spectacle and self-consciousness, uncertain of their control over the space, but implicitly aware of their presence within it.

John Mann, Untitled (sea level), 2009. digital c-print, 24″ × 30″. image via PDX Contemporary Art

Folded in Place
John Mann
PDX Across the Hall (925 NW Flanders)

Meanwhile, at PDX Across the Hall, John Mann deals with exteriors or landscapes through a series of photos of map-based constructions/deconstructions that look sensational in their low-res online glory so I can’t wait to see in real life.

The photographs in this series are informed by the varied ways that photography, mapping, drawing and sculpture have each tried to describe the landscape. By incorporating each of these methods, Folded in Place highlights the abstraction of the landscape traditionally offered by these means, while creating a tangible photographic “place” in each image that is occupied by a mapped construction. The images therefore provide precise photographic and mapped information while at the same time offering an abstraction of the landscape itself.

Megan Murphy, INEFFABLE, 2009. digital transparency, mirror, glass, acrylic, and oil paint. 22.5″ × 36″. image via PDX Contemporary Art

Porcelain
Megan Murphy
PDX Contemporary (925 NW Flanders">

In Porcelain and Other Works, Megan Murphy uses historical events and locations to construct an understanding of how our contemporary selves and culture are informed by the subjectivity of recorded history. From photographs that she has taken on location—places that are often remote and imbued with dramatic, emotional histories—Murphy produces a transparent image that she then mounts between a mirror and a sheet of glass. Then begins a process of building up and removing dozens of layers of paint and text, imbuing the paint with an internal luminosity while replicating the effects of time: actions once taken and now remembered by how they are revealed through the progression and reflection of time.

Scott Wolniak, Improvised Grass (detail), 2008. Sculpture – Paper, junk mail, studio debris, glue, wire, and tape. Dimensions variable. image via Chambers Gallery

Patterning
Scott Wolniak
Chambers Gallery (916 NW Flanders)

I’m fascinated by number, rhythm, pattern especially those naturally occurring (closet Pythagorean that I am). And so I’m interested in Scott Wolniak’s Patterning at Chambers.

Patterning unites several projects by Scott Wolniak that utilize repetition and rhythm to examine structures found in studio art practice and everyday life. Exhibited projects include two sculptural installations built from found items and household debris entitled Weeds and Grass, the intricate graphite drawing series Untitled Tie-Dyes, the bright Simulated Sunprints, and the single-channel video installation Musical Notes in Harmony with the Attuned Healing Colors. Together, the series explore patterns – found or created – as concept, system, and compositional template.

Play for Keeps
Group Show
Tribute Gallery (328 NW Broadway #117)

Guest curators Elizabeth Lamb and Chloe Gallagher have pulled together works on paper by a national roster of artists to explore “the often underrated importance of play.”

Featured artists include Jon MacNair from Baltimore, MD whose playful yet eerie works of ink on paper have earned him a national following. Joshua Witten, hailing from Fort Collins, IN, works in a variety of media and possesses an impressive mastery of his bold, graphic style. Mixed media artist Patrick Haemmerlein from Los Angeles builds arresting urban images from the ground up using his own photography and source material. Ashley Sloan, a local Portland artist, will be exhibiting clever, thought-provoking graphite works. And, Max Kauffman, hailing from Denver, CO, whose colorful, folkloric works have been exhibited at a number of prominent national galleries, will also be featured. The exhibit will also include works by Brett Anderson, Huy Nguyen, Garric Simonsen, Angela Dawn, Breanne Rupp, Megan Marie Myers, Brian Costello, Jackie Bos, Karri Dieken, Stephan Ferreira, Mark Colman, Heidi Elise Wirz, Coco Papy, Sally Gilmore, Mark Olwick, Louise Krampien and Cara Tomlinson.

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Tags: Art, Portland Art, Galleries, tribute gallery, tractor, froelick gallery, First Thursday, chambers gallery,

Re:PORT

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 05, 2010 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Jeff Jahn puts together a show of work by artists, writers, and photographers who have contributed to arts blog PORT. Re:PORT opens with a preview Wednesday from 6-9 PM at artists’ collective Gallery 114 (1100 NW Glisan).

The show features work by Amy Bernstein, Arcy Douglass, Megan Driscoll, Sarah Henderson, Jeff Jahn, Nicky Kriara, Jenene Nagy, Jascha Owens, Ryan Pierce, Alex Rauch, and Gary Wiseman.

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Tags: Art, Portland Art, Galleries, gallery 114, port

It’s A Wrap

Lists and more lists

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 04, 2010 at 07:00PM 0 Comments

What’s that? You have yet to write your Best of 2009 list? That’s okay, the Motion Picture Academy doesn’t get around to it for ages.

Me, I could write a 2009 best-of list or….I could link to the lists of others and call it a day. I find the end of year round-up thrilling (whatta year!), overwhelming (I need to go stand in front of Robert Irwin’s disk at PAM and clear my mind), and kind of melancholy as there were many good shows I didn’t have time or energy to tell you about. I hope you saw them anyway.

For the Comprehensive List of Lists, we have to thank 16 Miles which links the best of the best-of (and worst-of) lists nationally from Christopher Knight in El Lay to Peter Schjeldahl in New York.

Closer to home, Jeff Jahn at PORT farmed out the list writing, creating a survey which, among other things called out Ruth Ann Brown as MVP for her Couture series at New American Art Union.

Meanwhile, Richard Speer at Willamette Week does his own list making, hitting a number of the shows and venues I deeply appreciated, not least being Damien Gilley and Ethan Rose at Gallery HOMELAND. And thanks for the nod for Culturephile, Richard. We try.

Artist/curator/critic TJ Norris puts unBLOGGED to sleep, Fifty-two Pieces wrapped, Barry Johnson ended his long tenure at the Oregonian, Bob Hicks wrote about what he read, not what he saw in 09 on Art Scatter, while Eva Lake, the Mercury, the O, and Just Out skipped year-end wrap ups.

So I shouldn’t feel too bad about skipping it right?

Lazy Year End Round-Up (a list that may grow):
Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith, Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, Oregon Painting Society, Half/Dozen, Gallery HOMELAND’s East/West Project Berlin, OPENWIDEpdx, Bandage a Knife (Linda Austin/Seth Nehil), Spare Room Collective’s 100th Reading, PDX Contemporary, Fourteen30, Rose McCormick’s Grande Ronde, Pat Boas at Marylhurst Art Gym, Appendix Project Space (and collective), Worksound, Damien Gilley, Transference, STOCK, Karl Burkheimer, PICA’s TBA 09 visual arts at Washington High esp. robbinschilds, Nine Gallery, Jordan Tull, Peaches & Bats, Victoria Haven, Tractor, Nowhere at Disjecta, Matt King at Fourteen30, Victor Maldonado, Open House, Liam Drain, Kelly Rauer, Valentine’s, Brian Lund at PNCA, Stephen Slappe, D.E. May, Ben Stagl, The M.O.S.T. Remixed, John Brodie’s Shop for a Month, Bethany Ides…

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Tags: Portland Art, Galleries

Genevieve Dellinger 4/4

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Jan 04, 2010 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

“Untitled 4” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 4” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 1,” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 2,” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 3,” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 5,” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 6,” Genevieve Dellinger

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“Untitled 7,” Genevieve Dellinger

I can tell you what art of place is not. I am an authority on this because I was raised in a town that had a zillion galleries chock full of well-wrought seascapes, a thousand canvases of finely painted breaking waves with the sunlight shining through their transparent faces, and perhaps the Lone Cyprus® or a low-flying gull. Just because you can does not mean you should.

I can tell you that subject cannot define a regionally inflected art without veering toward kitsch. This is why I’m ambivalent about broken forestscapes. I do think that the lingering of the modernist smokey palette in the work of many NW painters (see PAM’s recent survey of PNCA-affiliated artists) may be a regionalism. Wouldn’t a Hockney or Thiebaud be fish-out-of-water here?

Now that we are all electronically connected, can there even be regional art? Perhaps not. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

All of this is to say that Genevieve Dellinger’s show 4/4 at Stumptown (downtown) came as a pleasant surprise…and felt very Northwest while managing to be very contemporary. It was the two big wool tapestries of course that did it, evoking Pendleton blanket cred (borrowed from Native American patterns, of course) with their pattern blocks geometric applique folding in graphic design’s current crush on simple repeating geometric forms and Dellinger’s long relationship with fiber (everything from felted “rocks” for the W+K nest to apparel).

It might be expected that I would appreciate Dellinger’s “Untitled 5” and “Untitled 6,” two canvas wall hangings whose single minimalist gesture—a single black shape protruding from a sail-like canvas ground (complete with brass grommets for hanging)—nodding to work like Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square” made for strong pieces. That the shape on one of the pieces hung limply while the other was boxed out square, made me think that Dellinger had only begun to explore the possibilities of this direction. Hope to see more.

Rounding out the show were the multiple tubes of Dellinger’s wall sculpture like an oversized necklace, a geometric patchwork of a soft sculpture, and an inverted chevron composed of paint dipped wood blocks, the only non-fiber piece in the show. Did I see in the work the “4/4 bars of minimal electronic dance music” that Dellinger (also a DJ) noted as inspiration? No. But there was something else, and it felt like home.

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Tags: Art, Portland Art, Crafts