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 2×4s 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.”
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