It may not be too late for you to participate in “Information Studio” by Portland-based choreographer, Tahni Holt. You’ll need to make reservations ahead of time and can reserve a spot every half-hour from 3-7:30 PM Friday, 5-9:30 PM Saturday, and 2-4 PM on Sunday. Reserve a spot by emailing Tahni at hello@tahniholt.com or phoning 503.708.5801. Holt is creating the piece with musician Thomas Thorson, lighting designer Jess Bollaert, videographer Dicky Dahl, with assistance from Forrest Loder, and of couse, you.
POSTED: June 27th, 2008 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: dance | TAGS: art, dance, performance, portland | No Comments »
“I have always delighted in [the] relationship between words and images [and] thought of the book as a form of collage space.” — Jess
We take it for granted that you will go see the Jess: To and From the Printed Page at the Cooley Gallery (3203 SE Woodstock) at Reed College, a traveling exhibition we’re particularly excited about that includes painting, sculpture, collage, book arts and ephemera.
His life as interesting as his art, Jess in a former life was a chemist on the Manhattan Project. But he’s known as the visual artist whose work is tied in myriad ways to the fertile literary soil in which it grew in San Francisco in the 50s and 60s, through collaboration (his partner was poet, Robert Duncan), process, subject.
For pre-viewing homework, why not check out “Didactic Nickelodeon,” one of Andrew Maxwell’s literary product trials, which he calls “poetic fabric samples.” “Didactic Nickelodeon”s fracturations go head-to-head with images from the Jess’ “Jess’s Didactic Nickelodeon, Series Two, ‘The Guardian Angels’ Guidebook,’” (bouncing off Jess-isms like “The great knotted headpiece of the whole.”) which is in the show at Reed. You’ll have to click through Maxwell’s “Rookies” to get to it, but it can only do you good.
See also: for a completely different take on collage, check out Whiting Tennis’ giant collage as part of the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards Exhibition (requires a scroll) at the Portland Art Museum. We were getting nose-close to it checking out the source material which reminds one of old Letraset architectural textures (remember?) or maybe wallpapers that are way cooler than any wallpaper you’ve ever seen. But it turns out (we saw Tennis doing a demo for kids) that Tennis does relief prints of textures like woodgrain, carved surfaces, and composes from the results. !
POSTED: June 24th, 2008 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, portland art, visual art | No Comments »
Detail: ” s/plit,” Jenene Nagy, 2008, Site-specific installation with latex paint, drywall, wood, and neon. Courtesy of the artist.
Lit. Like a bulb. Or a book. Or a class about a book. Split like a seam or a house come under the ministrations of one Gordon Matta-Clark. Split, rent from ordinary circumstances. Spit or sit. It. Multifaceted like a cut gem, the word “split” when rent with a well-placed slash, all the more deliciously ambiguous. “s/plit” is Portland-based artist Jenene Nagy‘s installation as part of the Portland Art Museum’s APEX series that brings dynamic regional artists space into the institution to Make Something Happen. Kudos, NW Curator, Jennifer Gately.
s/plit closes after tomorrow (June 22). Here’s why you need to go see it if you haven’t already been thrice.
Sited and Sited
s/plit fully engages the space in a way that no other APEX artist has. It’s not an installation series, so fine, but this is exciting and not to be missed. What do you mean “engages the space”? Nagy’s work dynamically draws you in, spins you around, and draws your gaze upward and over there. (all the more remarkable as this isn’t done with image, with color and color, it’s simply form (purple) enhanced with the briefest rhythmic frosting of neon light.) Eyes swept up and over your right shoulder, you notice an architectural feature, a cutout high in the wall above a doorway, that you have never noticed before. In this way, like good and truly site specific art, s/plit asks us to re-see a space. It’s the same (critical) function a small child performs on an urban walkabout, teaching us to re-see spaces, features, objects we have neglected to notice, ceased to see. Not coincidentally, the gallery Nagy runs with Josh Smith, Tilt, has shown exemplary work of this nature, esp. that of Alison Owen.
Your Hem Is Showing
The piece starts on the wall, as purple painted jagged form, grows off the wall and you notice the materials at work: the 2 x 4′s holding up panels that continue the wall-painted forms out into the space. You notice the transparency, the deliberate lack of sleight of hand, the methods of the panels’ suspension are here for all to see. And s/plit starts to talk about the walls of this site here, walls we take for granted in their paint over drywall over 2 x 4 studs, 16″ on center, say, foregrounding the space and its containment in interesting ways.
And were your experience of the work to stop here, it would be sufficient. But there’s a bit more, if you’d care to dig. Nagy is thinking about pre-fab American subdivision architecture, advertising billboards, stage props. The purple Nagy chose is a remembered shade, a sunset I think it was. Or see beyond walls, if you are the type whose mind can’t avoid looking at form as representing, and see horizon lines and reductionist landscapes, particularly with Nagy’s new use of glimmers of angular neon which could be reflections, water or glass. It’s a piece that perfectly balances appeals to intellect and eye.
Jeanene Nagy’s “s/plit” is located in the Wintercross Family Foundation Gallery, 4th floor, Center for Northwest Art, Hoffman Wing of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park).
See also:
Nagy has work at upcoming shows in Brooklyn and Berlin: Au Courant at Dam, Stuhltrager in Brooklyn and at Knowable Terrains at Takt kunstprojektraum in Berlin.
“Slip,” Jenene Nagy, 2008. Latex paint and paper, 97”x14”.
POSTED: June 22nd, 2008 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: apex, art, artist, portland art museum | No Comments »
Another public art project from the man who brought you the curbside horses, artist Scott Wayne Indiana, “Do Not Duplicate” is an invitation to disobey. He’s taken a rough-n-tumble image of a key so stamped and has installed it in various Portland public spaces (how much more interesting would it be if all further installs were in close proximity to mysterious doors?!). Indiana invites you too to duplicate, providing the digital image of the key on his website. If you do, email Indiana a photo and cc ultra.
POSTED: June 10th, 2008 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, portland, public art, visual art | No Comments »
Flash installations. Visual interventions. Conversations with Portland spaces. Artist Justin Gorman‘s recent photo series began with a bang, a 60-year-old echo: the words “BangBang” in red Helvetica letters painted on a wall slated for demolition. More than photos, Gorman creates records of temporary installations of phrases speaking to place.
Gorman’s first piece in the series was instigated by an invitation from Andy Powell (who did interior work on the Someday Lounge) who was helping to renovate Daniel Deutsch’s Left Bank Project, in a building that was once the Dude Ranch, Portland’s legendary mid-40′s jazz club where Coleman Hawkins, Thelonius Monk, and others played. The police closed the club after a shooting. “Andy invited me in and told me I could paint what I wanted, it was all being gutted,” Gorman says. Gorman painted “BangBang” directly onto an interior wall of the building and photographed the results. “Those gunshots changed the history of that building,” Gorman says. “When that wall was knocked down, there was a wall behind it signed by members of the Buddy Banks Band. My words and theirs became part of the dialogue built into the walls of that building,” Gorman says. His dialogue with Portland’s built environment and inquiry into history of place had begun.
The next photographs took the conversation out of doors, powerful images of iconic Portland buildings interrupted by a colored rectangle and Helvetica text. In particular, Gorman has been interested in “buildings in transition.” “For last two years now, I’ve been thinking about how important history is in relating to space, to knowing urbanscape,” says Gorman.
A self-described “photo-based artist,” Gorman creates these works to be documented. His relationship to architecture grew one-step closer as he solved the problem of how to create temporary text installations to be photographed. “I wanted to create an architectural layer, a structurally sound wall that’s temporary. So developed a system of panels, c-clamped together.” The words are painted on the wall, installed, and photographed from various perspectives with views including the reactions of passersby. Gorman even shoots his process, from painting the phrases to installation (some of these process photos, the panels face down on the ground, are compelling because of their innocence–it’s just a panel, face down, naked with its 2x4s and c-clamps–the nascent power of the the words/image interacting with its ground still an idea). Photos shot, the wall is returned to the studio and repainted for the next installation.
His phrases can be intimate–”You’ll Get Through This/ Trust Me” created for the under-renovation Pietro Belluschi designed Federal Reserve Bank building–or sweeping–Gorman installed the phrase “New Things To Worry About” at the South Waterfront with the John Ross in the background–aiming always for “pregnant phrases,” he says, for “ambiguity of meaning.”
Gorman’s work is rewarding because there is, Gertrude, a there there.* The work is not about language (“five words in a line”). Language here is both strong visual element and gateway to layers of meaning. The work speaks to design, employing the designer’s typeface, love-it-or-over-it Helvetica, in what is essentially oblique signage. And a cursory view (that of some of the passersby Gorman captures in some of his photos) might appreciate simply the form itself, sharp, surprising. Gorman’s images can be read at various levels, one variable being how well you know your city (or how curious you are). If one digs a little (why this building? why those words?) there’s only more to love. Gorman’s pieces in and around the empty Federal Reserve Building (“ElectroGold” in the empty vault no longer in use because of the way that electronic funds transfers have reduced the number of checks written, and the need for facilities to process checks) tell stories not only of the building’s history and its current state, but of the history of banking. Both “ProblemSolved” and “WaterHelpFire” address the early Chinese community in Portland, “Water” addressing both fire and flood and “Problem” addressing the innovative ways that opium dens were concealed after its use was made illegal.
All of this is to say that while making arresting images, Gorman is issuing invitation, particularly to the many of us who are non-native Portlanders, to acquaint ourselves with Portland past. At a time when we’re looking to Portland’s bold future, with new ambitious mayor, construction cranes optimistically (defiantly) yellow, rail, etceteras considering the how we got where we are and at what expense (cultural and otherwise) is more than worthwhile. And that it is artist rather than politician issuing the invitation, is all the better.
Gorman sees what he’s doing as both cryptic historical response to a piece of history or a building and also as “charting change.” He’s engaging not only Portland architectural and socio-cultural history (reading say, Marie Rose Wong’s Sweet Cakes, Long Journey), but also reading texts like How Buildings Learn. He worked furiously in recent months to prepare for his senior thesis show at PNCA, but the series is by no means played out. He’s just begun. We’re very much anticipating work he’ll do as part of PICA’s TBA:08. On another note, Gorman has work with longtime collaborator Caleb Freese this month in a group show at Upper Playground.
There will be a First Thursday Art opening for the PNCA Senior show on June 5th from 6-9 PM in Swigert Commns and the Stevens Studios at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (1241 NW Johnson) . The show runs through June 15.
See Gorman’s website, resultsunderaction.com for more photos. Click on the photos above for larger versions.
*Gertrude Stein is quoted as saying of Oakland, CA, “There is no there there.”
POSTED: June 5th, 2008 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: architecture, art, pnca, portland, visual art | No Comments »
