ultra Q: Jennifer Armbrust

Jennifer Armbrust, photo by Anthony GeorgisJennifer Armbrust is as bullish on Portland as an arts center and as savvy a gallerist as a young Elizabeth Leach. Armbrust’s motel gallery is a few blocks closer to the river than Leach’s, but she’s every bit as committed to building a stable of artists, nurturing a new crop of collectors, and fostering what’s essentially healthy soil in which PDX visual arts can thrive. motel has cut its own path brilliantly, combining gallery with gift boutique featuring primarily local designers. Last and best from our perspective, Armbrust is one of the critics behind PORT, the Portland arts blog with a level of criticism that rivals or surpasses what one finds locally in print. Here she takes a minute out to answer the ultra Q:

Qualities you most admire in design:
Functionality, integrity & pleasure.

Qualities you most despise in design:
Form without function.

Reading:
Emails, they never end!

Listening to:
Old Jazz, Classical, Hip-Hop, This American Life, streaming iTunes

Dream project:
Fully integrated and self-contained gallery, artist’s boutique, design studio, resource lounge and print studio with on-site chef.

Favorite virtue:
Glowing optimism

Favorite vice:
Fine dining

Tragic flaw:
I’m a princess.

Secret superhero power:
Ad hoc psychoanalyst / motivational speaker.

That which keeps your afterburners firing:
Visions of grandeur.

What you’d like to be when you grow up:
How much longer till I qualify as a grown up.. haven’t I earned it yet? I’ve got lots of gray hair!

Portland’s best kept secret:
Wine and sunset on the roof of a SE industrial warehouse. And the racing car arcade games at Wonderland.

Portland heroes (sung or un-):
All of my local heroes are essentially anonymous. They offer amazing wisdom, support and inspiration. You know who you are.

Interesting on the horizon (PDX):
Portland is the next big thing. Artists are moving here like mad from all over the country; the national press will catch on and then the professional class will follow. Just you wait…

motel gallery
PORT

updated Tuesday August 30 2005 16:19

Live Like This

The next splash that Jeff Kovel’s Skylab will make in Portland will not be a nightclub, restaurant or a commercial space. It will be a statement house in a quiet location…the architectural equivalent of a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear (although we guarantee you will see it, if the coverage of earlier Kovel projects like the 1680 is any indication). What Skylab is calling the Metcalf spec house will be built on one of the last remaining undeveloped lots in Forest Park.

Live like this: at the delicious intersection of Modernism and engagement with site and the unconstructed world that is the hallmark of a Skylab house. Witness other Skylab projects clinging to impossible lots in the West Hills. Goosebumps.

Scheduled to break ground this fall, the Metcalf project is currently still in permitting. That does not preclude your phoning Laurie Holland of Windermere Realty today. Think of it like a waiting list for a Kelly bag. Except bigger.

Dan Ness, Mott the Hoople, and fix

Hazel Cox of fix gallery let us know that this Friday will be the opening of a show of new work by Dan Ness. At the opening, from 7-10 PM, Ness will, according to Hazel, play every Mott the Hoople record he owns.

updated Monday August 29 2005 23:36

Jeff Jahn is Nothing But Trouble

Who’s Jeff Jahn? Need you ask about the shock-haired, speaking-his-mind arts instigator and critic? He’s been writing his Critical-I column for NW Drizzle for ages, but this year saw the beginning of PORT, an arts blog with muscle he created with Katherine Bovee and Jennifer Armbrust. He’s curated ambitious local shows like Best Coast and Play featuring artists like Hilary Pfeifer and Chandra Bocci. Jahn is co-VP of the Contemporary Arts Council at the Portland Art Museum, which is raising funds and making waves as the opening of PAM’s new Center for Modern and Contemporary Art approaches.

Jahn’s at it again with his, Fresh Trouble warehouse show. He let us know that Trouble will open either September 24 or 23 with recent Venice Bienale-ers and the west coast debut of, “the hottest video by the hottest video artists on the planet (she’s from china and the video involves costumes can you guess who it is?).” Coy is not a word one would normally associate with Jahn.

Throw some trouble into the PAM, Affair, TBA mix. We can’t wait.

NW Drizzle
PORT

ultra Q: Eva Lake

Eva Lake in a Rudi Gernreich dress circa 1980

Eva Lake’s new gallery with Wid Chambers, Chambers, opened with a bang recently in the old SW Elizabeth Leach space. The first show juxtaposed a seasoned collagist with a young gun who makes assemblage of broken skateboard decks. A painter, Eva (who formerly ran Lovelake gallery) hosts the ArtStar radio show, writes a fab online diary and other art crit. Her fave fashion era? “The 60s. I love the optimism and freshness. And the short lengths, the innovation. And the color. And the makeup….” Eva Lake has done all of the cool stuff you wish you’d done or still hope to do. We hope you run into her at a Chambers opening or another art event so you can enjoy her as much as we do.

Qualities you most admire in design: Mackintosh, Hoffman and their progeny

Qualities you most despise in design: too much fluff

Reading: Chronicles by Bob Dylan, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon and John James Audubon, The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes

Listening to: Hall and Oates, Stevie Wonder, The BeeGees, Duke Ellington

Dream project: to live as an artist

Favorite virtue: organized

Favorite vice: better art through drugs

Tragic flaw: paranoid schizophrenic

Secret superhero power: like Edmund Dantes, I can see in the dark

That which keeps your afterburners firing: ideas keep me awake. And sometimes the things you say.

What you’d like to be when you grow up: a big time philanthropist

Portland’s best kept secret: Portlanders can’t keep them

Portland heroes (sung or un-): Randy Moe

Interesting on the horizon (PDX): I never know