Memory Machines, Alicia Eggert. Portland Art Center
PDX Panels, A fundraiser at Portland Art Center
300 panels by 300 local artists
Combining the logic of Woolley Gallery’s 100×100 10th-anniversary show with a Tom Sawyer c’mon-y’all ingenuity (”The brush continued to move. . . Ben stopped nibbling his apple. . . watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said: ‘Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.’”), Portland Art Center (32 NW 5th) recently did an open call for artists to “do whatever they pleased” on MDO, untreated, plywood. Results: 300 panels by 300 artists at $300 a piece, with 75% of the proceeds going to PAC, and 25% to the artists. It’s a glorious Moebius strip of holiday cheer that supports a nonprofit organization that supports local art and culture, supports local artists, and allows local artists (who otherwise might not have the financial wherewithal to contribute money to PAC) to invest the creative capital in a worthwhile cause.
Consider it a great investment in both the tangible (affordable work—a veritable song at $300—by some of the region’s most interesting makers) and the intangible (helping keep a place that supports the ideas that beget other ideas afloat and healthy). Even better, entrepreneur/glass artist/robotophile/cultural philanthropist (and now an Art Santa of sorts) Henry Hillman, Jr. has agreed to match panel sales dollar-for-dollar up to $20,000. Buy two, they’re small.
Get there early, work (by, among others, OCAC’s Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, Brian Borrello, Melia Donovan, Ellen George, Stephen Hayes, Harvest Henderson and Scott Wayne Indiana, Mack McFarland, Jim Neidhardt, the TJ Norris, Eugenia Pardue, Hilary Pfeifer, Mark Smith, Abi Spring, and some guy named Sam Adams) will go quickly.
As Frank O’Hara said, “We’re all winning/we’re alive.”
Running through December 22
Also Opening:
Memory Machines, Alicia Eggert
One of the best reasons to buy a panel and support PAC is that places like Portland Art Center are essential to the health and vitality of our artistic ecoculture. They exist for the purpose of providing platform, megaphone, and telegraph for installation artists like Alicia Eggert to take risks, evolve and flex their conceptual muscle.
Eggert’s work,like last year’s lovely “All My Clothes,” has a tendency toward the poetic and personal without being mewling and uncomfortable like a Tracy Emin, and worth keeping an eye on. “Memory Machines,” her latest installation, presents a meditative riff on the classic “art of memory” (remember our old friend Greek poet Simonides of Ceos) based on the visual incarnation of the process of thought and our minds’ attempts at capturing and holding these thoughts and memories.
The kernel of the show arose from an attempt by Eggert to maintain and hold onto all her mnemonic shards over the course of a year and a half. Producing a glorious folia-storm of lists, desires, thought-bursts, and emotive short-hand on thousands of small yellow Post-it notes, the notes became the embodiment of the artist’s subconscious, little yellow birds that form a flock of thought and soar high above the cages that wish to contain them. Eggert’s installation of little yellow birds (two Post-it notes stuck together) aviate around three birdcages that represent the three areas (hind-, mid- and forebrain) and functions of the brain—floating on the sound of the artist’s recorded voice reciting the written content of the cage’s mnemonic evidence.
Back in the old days, a strong powerful memory was one of the greatest virtues, representing the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. Seneca the Elder could repeat 2,000 names in the order they’d been given to him. The Roman Simplicius could recite Virgil by heart backward. We’re swiftly replacing our internal memory with external memory, in this case a vast sea of little yellow superstructures supporting experience. Memory Machines’ parable of the 3×3 outsourcing of memory posits both an ode to something lost and something found. Plus it’s about little birds.
–Tim DuRoche
First Thursday, December 6, 6-10 pm
Portland Art Center (32 NW 5th) (503) 236-3322
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