CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

phile under: art + institutions + SM

Reminder: 10000 Invitations

we talk arts institutions and new and social media this Friday

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 27, 2009 at 01:00PM 6 Comments

Just at reminder that this Friday, 4-6 PM at the Gerding Theater at the Armory, I’m hosting a roundtable on the ways Portland arts institutions are using, will be using, and imagine using new and social media to amplify their exhibitions, shows, and programs. There is new energy in this direction in the last year or so on the part of a number of institutions that will be represented at the table.

I wrote about 10,000 Invitations: A Roundtable on Arts Institutions and New/Social Media before, about some of the thinking that went into it. The event is part of The New Communicators unconference starting tomorrow. Other arts-related New Communicators events include “Art is War: Reinventing the Art Sales System with New Media” on Friday 7-9 PM at the Art Institute. All New Communicator events are free. You may but need not RSVP to attend.

Here’s a summary of 10,000 Invitations and a list of the participants:

Good minds from Portland arts institutions share the ways they’re using new and social media to engage audiences.

The Portland Art Museum creates conversational videos about works in the collection, creates a community website for its China Design Now exhibition, and tweets as M.C. Escher. Portland Center Stage creates show preview videos that go viral and uses Twitter in innovative ways. The Museum of Contemporary Craft creates video and podcast and invites audience response. PICA integrates Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube into its TBA Festival blog.

In education, programming, and marketing, we’ll talk about what’s worked and what’s on the horizon as the landscape continues to change with new tools and new challenges all the time.

Participants include:

Christina Olsen, PhD
Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum

Beth Heinrich
Director of Marketing & Public Relations, Portland Art Museum

Cynthia Fuhrman
Marketing and Communications Director, Portland Center Stage

Patrick Leonard
Public Relations, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

Rebecca Burrell, Public Relations and Marketing Specialist, Museum of Contemporary Craft

Namita Gupta-Wiggers, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft

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phile under: poem

Kenneth Goldsmith at PMMNLS

the man you have to thank for ubuweb !

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 26, 2009 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Kenneth Goldsmith at Street Poets and Visionaries Mercer Union. Toronto, 2009
Photo Credit: © C. Jones

Kenneth Goldsmith is tonight’s guest lecturer for PSU’s Monday Night Lecture Series at 7:30 PM at Shattuck Hall Annex (1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198) at PSU.

Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry is primarily of a durational nature. If we’re interested in the area of crossover in the Venn Diagram of art and poem, Goldsmith is There.

He’s also the man we have to thank (as founding editor) for ubuweb, that luscious, ever-growing, massive archive of avant-garde and experimental sound, poem, film and more. And for that he is my hero.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007.

Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. A book of critical essays, “Uncreative Writing,” is forthcoming from Columbia University Press, as is an anthology from Northwestern University Press co-edited with Craig Dworkin, “Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.”

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phile under: art

Review: Pat Boas Record Record

exhibition at Marylhurst Art Gym

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 25, 2009 at 06:00PM 0 Comments

Pat Boas. May 20, 2008, Obama Expected to Hit Milestone in Today’s Votes (detail).
Gouache. from Little People series.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Pat Boas. May 20, 2008, Obama Expected to Hit Milestone in Today’s Votes (detail).
Gouache. from Little People series.

Portland artist Pat Boas takes selective readings of the world, processing received information such as front page news or signage through filters that result in, for example, some of the remarkable drawings in her current one-woman exhibition, Record Record at Marylhurst’s Art Gym. Her readings are experiment, expose, illumination.

I’m partial to the work that is more procedural, in particular, her series here that uses as source material pages from the New York Times that become a critical editing of the edited, of, “all the news that’s fit to print,” when by “fit” we mean, what exactly? By isolating certain typographic or photographic elements, her drawings get at questions like this in very elegant ways.

For “All the Heads on the Front Pages of the New York Times,” Boas traces, on a single sheet of vellum the silhouette outline of all of the heads that appear on the front page of the Times for a month. These are ghost crowds of the news-makers, the victims, the heroes, the bystanders. Similarly, for her “NYT Little People” series, she does finely wrought gouache paintings of only the non-famous figures that appear on the cover of the Times. The figures float in isolation on a white ground, holding their places in the invisible layout on which the paintings are based. She titles these pieces with a headline from that day. Both of these series raise questions about who is newsworthy and what the structures are that determine their newsworthiness, and in fact the rules are that dictate what makes anything worth reporting for the Times.

“A3” jarringly isolates incidences of the ad for Tiffany’s jewelry and the international news photos (of disaster, war, death) beside it that shared that page of the Times for many years. “If that’s all there is my friend, then let’s keep dancing,” you can hear Peggy Lee sing. This series is the best example of perfect-pitch political work that says what needs to be said sans sledgehammer.

In contrast to those works that foreground the people on the front page of the Times, “Alphabet (NYT 01/01/01)” isolates the letters of the alphabet that appear in the type on the page (one drawing per letter displayed in calendar form) via solvent transfer. The pieces are beautiful, as if letters were randomly shot through screen and stencil at the paper. It’s as if the practice of recording these letters might reveal a secret and it does: the layout of the page foregrounded with the image areas left blank, and of course, the codebreaker’s cheat, the letter frequencies in the English language: etaoin shrdlu.

Boas’ more current work, her 2007-2009 series “What Our Homes Can Tell Us” suffers in that its methods are more ad hoc. The artist tiles lyric phraselets from photos she’s shot in her home and on her travels of words she finds on signs, packaging, book spines, &c. Because the artist subjectively shuffles the words, these are best seen as micro-poems rather than the mystical readings of a medium as Boas asserts. Higgledy-piggledy framing of the individual words might be deliberate, emphasizing their found nature, but it thwarts any visual rhythm that could create structure. So we’re left with whether Boas’ phrases resonate as phrases.

I’m glad curator Terri Hopkins honed in on this info-related work of Boas’. An exhilarating show overall.

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phile under: art

Processions: an Elaborative Cartography

Team Appendix Project Space takes show on the road

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 22, 2009 at 12:00PM 2 Comments

Procession

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Procession

Bustin’ out of the NE Alberta garage-at-the-end-of-the-alley, the team behind Appendix Project Space opens its first collaborative installation on the road, specifically at Recess Gallery at Shattuck Hall, PSU (1914 SW Park Avenue) on Friday, October 23.

Processions: an Elaborative Cartography is “a fifty foot outdoor fiber installation and an indoor suite of drawings, objects and strung work.” Maggie Casey, Zachary Davis, Joshua Pavlacky and Benjamin Young envision it as, “the first project of our yet-to-be named collective and studio,” which is all to the good because individually they all make interesting work. Head over to the artists’ talk at 4 PM in the Shattuck Hall Annex with a reception to follow at 5 PM on the Shattuck Hall Terrace (they say the piece is best viewed as day becomes night.

“Navigating the topology of the individual, the group, and emergent form, the exhibition is an exploration of process and its structure. Processions is an ecology of making. Composed of a series of hung arcs, each informed by its companion, the resulting structure exists as a material pause in an evolution of possible choices.”

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phile under: theater

See This Now

August: Osage County onstage at the Keller—this week only!

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Oct 21, 2009 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

Photo: Robert J. Saferstein

August: Osage County is a new family drama in the classic American theater tradition. The playwright, Chicago-based Tracy Letts, is a major voice on the modern American stage. He was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama his brilliant, funny, and frightening family portrait.

Experimental It Ain’t

August: Osage County follows in the tradition of the riveting family dramas of Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill. If this is your cup of tea, for heaven’s sake—go! The Broadway touring production opened Tuesday at the Keller, and you’ve only got 6 more shows before it moves on this Sunday.

Things You Might Want To Know:

It Won Prizes 1 Pulitzer Prize, 5 Tony Awards (including Best Play & Best Director) and numerous other NYC accolades let you know that this play is worth your attention. Plus, you get way more laughs with Tracy Letts than you do with Arthur Miller.

It is Long August: Osage County runs 3 hrs and 35 minutes, with 2 intermissions. Ahem, eat dinner first.. Tickets start at $23.25, and hour for hour, that’s a stage bargain when you think about it. Remember: way more yucks than Eugene O’Neill.

It’s a Great Story The yarn spins out over one sweltering month in Oklahoma. Three generations of the Weston family return home to gather around a crisis: the patriarch, Beverly Weston has disappeared. Once they are all in the same room, the Westons will wreak many more crisises on each other. A Caveat: August: Osage County is a sprawling, rollicking, story; the characters are often very funny, and sometimes painful, deeply sad and plain mean.

The Ensemble is Terrific You will most likely recognize someone: the truculent teenage granddaughter, the nosey (and noisy) aunt, the long-suffering uncle, and the oldest daughter’s grab for control.

Estelle Parsons plays Violet Weston, the family matriarch: an erratic, pill-addicted leather-tough woman capable of inflicting on those around her the peculiar cruelties of addiction. Her pills—and her vanished husband’s alcoholism—have cast a warping pall over the Weston family. Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons has many accolades of her own, but you might recognize her as the mother on the TV sitcom, Roseanne.

Parsons is great, as is the rest of the cast. Her first entrance, in a pill-induced haze is a lurching, swaying, rushing, slurring clattering poetry of an addict deep into a long trip. Next time we see her: a Grandma in a pantsuit. Ah, a family can be a complicated business.

The Keller is a big stage on which to see a straight play, and August: Osage County commands every inch of it.

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Tags: Theater