Owner Liz Gross has spent almost a decade proffering the finest heirloom frocks and frippery.
Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 03, 2010 at 12:00PM0 Comments
“Xtabay” roughly translates as “female ensnarer.” This dress from Xtabay Vintage is trying to beguile you into its coquettish clutches.
Xtabay Vintage owner Liz Gross is less a shopkeeper, than a vintage-couture curatrix. Wafting around her store with balletic elegance, she can appraise the year, region, maker and craft of each piece in her precious, pristinely steamed collection. And what pieces they are: nipped-waist taffeta party frocks, floor-sweeping silken gowns, sparkling sequin sheaths—with here and there the kind of gather, piping, pleat or puff that make vintage clothes such works of art.
This weekend marks Xtabay’s ninth year on SE 26th and Clinton Street, and Miss Liz intends to celebrate with champagne and cupcakes. If you don’t yet think of garments as art, let Liz show you some of these prize pieces.
This event begins at 11am, and closes at 7—just in time to catch a showing of The Mirror (another Culturephile pick; see below) directly across the street! For a more comprehensive list of upcoming events, visit the Arts & Entertainment Calendar!
Joe Warren/Weld-Designed makes animal forms out of recycled spare steel parts.
Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 02, 2010 at 12:00AM0 Comments
Part man, part beast, all parts! Showing through September.
The Attic Gallery (206 SW First Avenue between SW Oak St. and SW Pine St.) presents a few Joe Warren reclaimed-steel sculptures. Imagine you’re at a scrapyard, and all the spare parts reconfigure into man and animal shapes. This exhibit features a horse that would look right at home in Sci-Fi western series Firefly, and a centaur that could cameo in Transformers.
Culturephile can only feature a few First Thursday picks, but for a more comprehensive list of upcoming events, visit the Arts & Entertainment Calendar!
Kelly Rundle’s heart-melting felt, plus musical guests!
Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 02, 2010 at 12:00AM0 Comments
These skates could roll all over your tender li’l heart. Rundle’s soft-sculpture will be showing at TLE throughout September.
Love Always (solo project of Kathy from The Thermals) and Woodwinds (solo project of boppin’ redhead hottie Megan Spear, of Jared Mees & The Grown Children) will provide the live backing tracks for the opening night of Kelly Rundle’s cozy soft-sculpture show at the headquarters of local record label and craft-curio carrier, Tender Loving Empire (412 SW 10th Avenue). Surrender to the benevolent power of Tender Loving Empire. TLE will hug and kiss and never hurt you.
Culturephile can only feature a few First Thursday picks, but for a more comprehensive list of upcoming events, visit the Arts & Entertainment Calendar!
Posted by: Anne Adams on Aug 27, 2010 at 09:00AM2 Comments
A god’s-eye by designer Rachelle Waldie. Gaze into it, and find “AEQUANIMITAS!”
Tonight, fair friends, we usher in the age of AEQUANIMITAS, the most unspellable new art/fashion studio space in the Central Eastside complex erstwhile known as Grass Hut Gallery Row (8th and E Burnside, north side of the street).
The invitation is in all-caps, and wildly poetic. But this is is what we know:
~Designer Rachelle Waldie costumes experimental art-rockers. Her client list includes Deelay Ceelay.
~The word “aequanimitas” refers to the transcendent calm that a physician experiences in the face of life-and-death circumstances.
~The event starts at five tonight in the rear parking lot. It promises libations, and hints at revelations.
Posted by: Anne Adams on Aug 13, 2010 at 11:59AM0 Comments
It’s time once again for the indescribable spectacle of adults who ought to know better, barreling down Mt. Tabor in tacky home-crafted “vehicles.” We could tell you more about the Soapbox Derby, but a little footage of last year’s event is more likely to put you in the action:
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.
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.
During her 10 year Portland residency, Anne Adams has contributed to local publications, including Barfly, the Portland Tribune, and Portland Monthly. In 2005 her serial zine, The Bookmark, was endorsed by Wordstock and Powell’s Books.
Anne’s horizons extend beyond pen and page, with an Art Department credit in the movie Coraline, and passionate participation in the indie music community. Anne is an avid arts appreciator who can zero in on a detail of gesture or craft, but cannot suppress a wistful tear when faced with expressions of human truth.
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Culturephile chronicles the vibrant world of Portland arts & culture, its movers and makers.
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