Oh, What a Night. Appendix + Open House for the Win
It was hot. I couldn’t see it all, partly because there were two good shows at opposite ends of the city. I didn’t Mapquest second destination which delayed my arrival. But I saw some excellent work last night.
I might have missed the piece of the evening by Cara Stewart at GEOFRONT because of the chanting costumed party people bouncing around, blocking my view into the garage that is Appendix Project Space. It was…”a rehearsal” I was told for the subsequent and chanting, bouncing that the group executed on NE Alberta, fitting in seamlessly with the rest of the more exotic Albertanians. I am tempted to call this neo neo hippie…with all of the utopian community vibe, but a wry and critical sense of hippie/tribal history not unlike the Oregon Painting Society’s ritual/community actions and themes, not unlike an Assume Vivid Astro Focus project.
In the Appendix space, Cara Stewart installed a number of found and natural objects on the floor and walls, including slabs of tree, acoustic ceiling tile, a container of dirt, a couple of push-broom heads and provided two brooms that were rigged with contact mic’s. Viewers were invited to use the brooms to interact with the objects to create sound.
The sounds created had some delay applied so one stroke of the broom created a repeating rhythm. And the aural textures created by the two brooms on the physical textures combined for a pretty stunning sonic effect. The broom is an inspired choice (Oregon Painting Society loves them, too) not only because of the sounds it creates but because a broom is for sweeping. As long as I was there, the viewer-initiated performance included plenty of just plain sweeping, an interestingly odd action both its art space context and its overgrown alley context.
Meanwhile, in the alley (and this is an unpaved, weedy alley, just to establish, as they say, the scene of the crime…an alley you would not venture down if not for the hot pink spray paint stenciled Appendix sign) Matt Green had installed a 12-pack of Hamm’s beer which was audibly crying. That’s right, the man had cried himself all the way into his beer and was bottled and boxed.
I received a little map that required some interpretation. So Appendix’s Josh Pavlacky talked me through the pieces installed up and down Alberta. He wouldn’t tell me who some of the artists were because some of the work was installed without permission of the vacant lot owners. I saw the group installation by Appendix crew and friends with Japanese-garden-style raking of stone-riddled dirt, the arrangement of abandoned tires, and string lines running from cyclone fence to the lone juvenile tree. I understand it was lit by LED lights at night. I missed the light/shadow puppet work because I couldn’t hang around until dark. And there was another sound work way down Alberta that I missed…if you’ve tried to walk a block on Alberta during last Thursday, you can imagine how crazy trying to plow through 6 or so blocks of it…because no one but you is actually trying to get anywhere.
And that’s what’s so interesting about GEOFRONT and the fact that Appendix is on NE Alberta in the first place. Last Thursday is a massive burst of (mostly unmediated) self expression. It is chock full of creative entrepreneurialism with street vendors selling enthusiastic art and craft (and otter pops) enthusiastically. Meanwhile GEOFRONTers are talking about interventions—drawing attention to the vacant lot behind the cyclone fence on which the carved portrait of Jimmy Hendrix is hung for the night. You have likely seen Maggie Casey’s fiber installations in gallery-type spaces, where the field of vision is cleared so that you can focus on the form she creates. Here, her installations engage in a visual dialogue with graffiti, weeds, walls, all contained behind cyclone fencing that restricts the viewers ability to engage move around and experience the work.
After a mad dash southward, I found the little two-story house with the “for sale” sign out front. This was OPEN HOUSE, with art installed in every room. And sadly for those who didn’t make it there during the three hours for which it was open, the work was, for the most part, really, really good. I loved Dan Anderson’s graduated set of leaning equilateral triangles in the front room. It let you know you were in for something remarkable here. And it was great to see echoes of it throughout the house like the leaning triangle on the basement stairs. In a weird case of deja vu, Cyan Bott did a string installation in the backyard that was a kissing cousin of Maggie Casey’s work some miles away. Karl Burkheimer’s terrific “Insular Sketch” suggested table or even work bench in its form, material (pallet wood?), and location (basement), but with a hole in its center, partial cross-layering of smaller pieces of wood, and peg-joinery on the legs, the mundane was transformed by high craft into something lovely. (That didn’t keep someone from resting his hands on it while chatting!) I appreciated Jenene Nagy’s free-standing flat painting (grey, cloudy) facing a pink crumpled form installed on the wall, as if her new paintings were talking it out with her earlier sculptural work.
What knocked my socks off? The “Cooling Tower” by Katy Anderson and Karen Wolf at the room at the top of the stairs was a head-high coil of heavy rust-colored hose (that entered the house through a window on the stairs and snaked its way up). In a dark room with a light inside near the top and in the shape of a…cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. Sure its title made it perhaps too easy…hose>water>cooling>nuke commentary…but it was surprising, ominous, and powerful, in spite of its humble means which made me love it all the more.
Stephen Slappe’s “Portal” was perhaps my favorite work because it had some of the subtlety that others were aiming for—it was, after all, behind a closet door that was jammed open only about a couple of inches—but rather than tuck into its quietness and huddle there, opened out into possibility in a very good way. In the closet projected on the side wall was a circular moving image of drifting clouds that slowly slid from one colorway to another. It was simply enchanting.
The pièce de résistance was, of all places, in the bathroom. Joe Thurston’s “The End is the Cause of the Beginning” devoured the bathroom with varieties of scrap, from a sawdust-filled tub to the basin overflowing with coils of offcut something-or-other and the floor laid with multicolor strips of scrap wood. It was thorough and visually stunning and the title gave the viewer something fun to wrestle with, especially at the End of a mad-dash art night.
