Scribe, David Eckard. 2004
David Eckard ranks at or near the top of our list of most interesting artists in Portland. This Saturday night at dusk (around 9 PM) he’ll perform “Widow’s Walk” for Gallery Homeland’s “Scratching the Surface” on the Eastside Esplanade.
Eckard brilliantly marries conceptual performance with compelling, well-wrought (primarily metal) sculpture. He creates the machines or devices of his performance with the same kind of integrity with which he approaches the conceptual underpinnings of the piece. His machines and his performances contain enough nuance, enough ambiguity that we will come back again and again to reconsider them and will find this return satisfying because there is so much to come back to. Would that Portland had a raft of artists like Eckard whose pilings are driven as deep as the skyscrapers they aim to build.
Tournament (lumens), David Eckard. 2003
Even some of Eckard’s gallery work is a meeting of sculpture and performance. His recent piece for the grey|area show at Guestroom is a wall piece that captured on several panels the smoke of glass burners that remained unlit in the gallery…the smoke image on the panel served as evidence of the performance of the previous burning.
Podium, David Eckard. 2005
But he’ll be best known for performances like Podium (at TBA04), Tournament (Lumens), or Scribe in which he constructed a yellow, mobile, human-sized compass which kind-of looked like a handtruck/stretcher until Eckard lay face-down on it, and brushed, clipped, chalked or painted circles with a diameter of Eckard throughout Portland.
For “Widow’s Walk” Eckard has built what he describes as a “baroque cage…an elaborate lattice-like steel gown and veil adorned with 60+ votive candles.” He’ll slowly walk the Esplanade at dusk. Read the whole description here or better yet, visit his newly revamped website.
Tags: art