Surface Surface: Prints Charming

From the prints all over the runways for spring 08 to the all-over prints for streetwear and the op-prints in the world of avant fashion, the print’s the thing and a Portland-based company delivers.

Pattern People is the surface design duo of Claudia Brown and Jessie Whipple Vickery who specialize in prints for apparel and interiors. Having work under their belts for Nike, Macy’s, and MTV, they launched PP in 07 to rep their own work, do custom surface design projects, and rep the work of a handful of other designers.

Their newly minted weblog does what blogs do best, tracing the idiosyncratic and esoteric sources of their inspiration, tripping through all-star textile design wonders (we love Celia Birtwell+Ossie Clark as much as PP) and a couple of mysterious deaths.

We are lucky to be able to feature, over the next few weeks, some examples of their work up front on ultra.

Monsieur Rancière at PNCA

I once attended a talk that the philosopher Jacques Derrida gave in the ‘80s and the philoso-paparazzi effect was incredible: hungry graduate students clambering for seats, female art students fawning, palpable electricity abounded. In times of numbing political tide and cultural sea change where a sense of revolution is in the air to the point where we can taste it, (in 1776, 1968, during the Reagan years, or now—take your pick) it never fails that a swarthy Gallic figure emerges capturing our imaginations and setting cocktail parties ablaze with chatter and new brazen ideas.

Enter: Emeritus professor of philosophy Jacques Rancière, a strikingly original and distinctive social thinker who wet his feet during May 1968, co-authored the seminal Structural Marxist classic Reading Capital with Louis Althusser, and of late has sent the artworld’s heads spinning with his rich writings on visual culture, aesthetics and their relationship between politics and modernity.

You can expect that an evening spent with Rancière and his “cartography of the visible” and other touching-down points from his seminal en-vogue Politics Aesthetics will leave you feeling moved, maddened, inspired, and transfixed by continental thought with very serious street-cred. Unlike other big-time French rockstars of the intellectual armchair-Marxist variety (such as Bernard-Henri “God is dead but my hair is perfect” Levy, a man who developed his “immoderate taste” for the power of media glitz by allegedly watching the entire 1968 revolt on television), Rancière is the real deal—a vivid thinker who’s easily had as much influence as Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault.

Never mind Mother Mary and Joe DiMaggio—in times of trouble, turn to politically grounded, “sensuously impenetrable” French social thought. Rancière’s appearance this evening at PNCA (part of the PNCA+FIVE “Idea Studios” lecture series) promises to be one of the great events in Portland’s noosphere this year.

Jacques Rancière : What Makes Images Unacceptable is tonight, February 29 at 6:30 PM at PNCA (1241 NW Johnson)

–Tim DuRoche

Fresh Impressions at Oregon College of Art & Craft

Blue, Inge Bruggeman. via the artist’s website texturaprinting.com

Much has been made about the letterpress revival in the world of applied art and design. A new exhibition at Hoffman Gallery at Oregon College of Art & Craft (8245 SW Barnes Road) looks at letterpress in the context of contemporary art both in the ways that it informs innovative work and the ways it is to be distinguished from “other mediums such as silkscreen, lithography, or digital printing.”

Fresh Impressions: Letterpress Printing in Contemporary Art, curated by acclaimed artists like Inge Bruggeman and Heather Watkins (on faculty at OCAC and Lewis & Clark respectively) is a group show featuring work by more than a dozen artists. It opens tonight Thursday, February 28 with a reception from 4-7 PM and runs through March 20.

Loggernaut

What’s on Wednesday? The Loggernaut Reading Series at Mississippi Studios  (3939 N. Mississippi) produced by two of the most beautiful Smart Girls in Portland Erin Ergenbright (who co-wrote the Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook) and Heather Larimer (writer, Eux Autres drummer, fashion columnist for the Portland Tribune). This time around, they’re presenting poet Joshua Beckman and fictioneers Arthur Bradford and Pauls Toutonghi in a reading they’re calling “Trying” at 7:30 PM Wednesday, February 27. Trying harder? Trying our patience? We’ll see. We do know this: when Beckman (Shade, Things Are Happening, Something I Expected to Be Different) blew through PDX a million years ago with Matthew Rohrer for Nice Hat. Thanks. (they traded lines on-the-fly) we sat up in our chairs. $5 donation.

CARTUNE XPREZ

Live and learn! We just found out last week that groundhog=woodchuck. We don’t come from woodchuck country nor have we ever witnessed a ground hog seeing or not seeing his shadow, but Spring Is In the Air, even if we know in our heart of hearts that it’s really a Fake Out before the Long Grey Pre-Spring.

Hooliganship! photo: M Blash.

So the manic rainbow aesthetic of the animated video and multimedia performance that CARTUNE XPREZ brings to Holocene tonight, Sunday February 24 at 9 PM, is as welcome as seven minutes of sweet sun. Thank Hooliganship’s Peter Burr and PICA for filling Holocene with WNTR WRKS, new animated videos from Takeshi Murata (NY), Barry Doupe (Vancouver, BC), Bruce Bickford, Josh Mannis, and more with performances by E*Rock, Hooliganship (Burr and Christopher Doulgeris who are premiering their new work “Trash”), Gay Deceivers, and Nollifur with musical interludes by DJ Beyonda.

Hooliganship! photo: M Blash.

Smells like: early 80s video game soundtrack, animatronic theme song, New Wave keyboards, glitchery, Peter Max, pixels, mutated visual bitstreams, jittery collaged artificiality.