Night Ride. Eva Lake. 2006. 36 x 36″ at Augen Gallery
“A certain amount of combustion is not only possible, but maybe necessary.” —Eva Lake
Celebrate the opening of artist Eva Lake’s solo show “Take Off, Recent Paintings at Augen Gallery (817 SW 2nd) at the First Thursday reception, August 3, 2006 from 5:30-8:30 PM. Lake recently had work in our beloved Portland Modern and now takes over a room at Augen with her visually oscillating paintings.
Critical to the arts in Portland, Lake is gallery director of the Chambers Gallery, a fascinating writer and diarist, great interviewer (on her ArtStar radio show on KPSU), former owner of Lovelake Gallery, and the list goes on.
For all of this whirl of activity that is Eva Lake, there is a calm discipline in her paintings that vibrate as she does, but in strictly regulated form. Everyone always likes to point out that her grids, her straight lines, are drawn freehand, which is an interesting aside, but the real story here is the rigor of her practice. However challenging the paintings are with their charged juxtapositions of color forcing the gaze into search mode, offering no pat resting place, suggesting infinity, we can’t get away from thinking about the fierceness and discipline it takes to repeatedly attack using this visual strategy of the grid (even as it is elongated to very new proportions this time out without losing its Lake-ness). We also deeply appreciate her isolation of one aspect of picture making, color, for almost scientific study in her selections and positioning of oppositional colors that make the canvas surface thrum.
Go see, go see. Then we’ll talk.
Correction: We had previously misidentified Lake as an “Oregon Biennial artist.” Was that wishful thinking on the part of the writer? ultra regrets the error.
POSTED: August 2nd, 2006 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art | No Comments »
Scott Wayne Indiana’s “Waiting Room” at the Portland Art Center
ultra likes artist Scott Wayne Indiana. You’ve seen his name recently either because of the delicious controversy over his modification of a coffee table book on Liz Taylor’s jewelry collection for TJ Norris’ grey|area show at Guestroom and because of the notice for his horsies. He now has a team of cowboys and girls deployed to attach all manner of inanimate horse (mostly of the plastic, eight-year-old-girl variety) to the iron rings embedded in PDX sidewalks for just such a purpose. Keep an eye peeled.
Indiana regaled us with the difficulties of embedding axes in ceilings when we saw him at the opening of the Oregon Biennial. He also talked about his upcoming curatorial effort, inCLOVER (more soon on this one-day visual art exhibition in a park in SE Foster-land). But we’re interested in his installation “Waiting Room” that opens tomorrow eve at the Portland Art Center (32 NW 5th). 39 axes embedded in a 12 foot high ceiling. We dare you.
See also: our beloved poet, David Abel and the sound installation, “Eclipse,” he’s created with Liminal’s John Berendzen AND “Focus Group,” an installation by Houston.
POSTED: August 2nd, 2006 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art | No Comments »
PDX-based Melt Modern’s dynamic aluminum bowl
What we love most about the Splash Bowl from Portland’s Melt Modern is that it makes dynamic what would otherwise be the still life on your table top. Motion captured, each piece is unique, made using a sand cast mold into which liquid aluminum is repeatedly splashed. See also, Melt Modern’s fab aluminum table runner.
Sculptor Matt Proctor and artist Aixé Djelal are Melt Modern, working out of a warehouse in inner SE. They do custom work as well as the bowls, table runners, and an aluminum room divider.
Ah, now we know why this speaks to us. The bowl, in particular, reminds us of Richard Serra’s “Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift, 1969/1995,” in the collection of SFMOMA (interestingly a gift of Jasper Johns), but of course Serra’s piece, bad MF that he is, is lead.
POSTED: August 2nd, 2006 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art | No Comments »
