art

What I Would Do If It Were First Friday In Portland Oregon

YESWAY
Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman
Car Hole Gallery
114 SE 12th

Opening 5-9 PM, Music at 9 PM (The Bugs, Lickity)

Here’s Car Hole’s Sam Korman on YESWAY:

YESWAY is a show presented by Car Hole featuring the work of Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman. It is also a piece of linguistic cheesecake. YESWAY is the expression we use to emphasize our point, an affirmative counter to NOWAY: it universalizes information simply in its frequent appearance. Yet, YESWAY is not a term that often exists beyond this casual, quotidian exchange. Displaced from everyday usage, it’s meaning, or rather, meaninglessness only serves to emphasize its absurdity like some apparition of speech. But in these moments that go casually overlooked, an integral portion of our communication is lost, unrecorded, where YESWAY is not a random tag along, but an expression of the underlying mechanics of interpersonal communication—its mode vastly outweighs its meaning.

In its appearance, YESWAY is linguistic color: a secondary color, emphatic in its contrast—you use it without thinking, as the moment dictates, a placeholder for the larger coding of daily speech. Though different from NOWAY as the affirmative recognition of disagreement, it is nonetheless an immediate attempt at connection between people in everyday terms. Here, YESWAY resides in daily life, but as we expand our network of relations, YESWAY takes on a dual meaning, as interface and articulation—it is about how you shake your hips as much as what you sing. And, art, in our age of global connectedness, is beginning to reside in this social underbelly, as well.

In both Jaeger and Bowman’s work, a life-size portrait emerges of our daily attempts to communicate—whether concerning popularity or reaching aliens, the work develops a picture of our sweet, awkward and futile attempts at communicating with others, even if that means looking in the mirror. These artists humorously examine how, when two people engaged in conversation interpret and synthesize something seemingly innocuous, but ultimately binding—can generate an artistic language, as well. Art has a similar capacity to bond, counter, synthesize and reevaluate our daily lives, and in that, derive some kind of vernacular currency. Art is life, motherfuckers. YESWAY.

L Sub to the Polynomial
Midori Hirose
Nationale
811 E Burnside #122 (in back)

Opening 6-9 PM

L Sub to the Polynomial is a show of two series of new works on paper by Midori Hirose. According to Nationale director May Juliette Barruel:

For Series 1, Hirose thought about jokes and extracted the idea of happiness by reducing it to a moment of laughter. For Hirose, the technical elements of a joke are amazing. There is a definite rhythm, pattern, spatial aspect, precision, and a punch line to a good joke. Exploring this deductive reasoning, new portraits were drawn conceptually and visually with a quick, simple capture of the audible expression of happiness, people in the midst of laughing at something funny.

Similarly in Series 2, Hirose’s abstract objects play between figure and ground, paying attention to the space and form with precision, while melding quilt-like geometric patterns with hazed gradients of color. These spatial arrangements and polynomial forms are pushed by Hirose’s bright disorienting palette in a whimsical manner.

TRANSVERSE
Worksound
820 SE Alder

Opening 7 PM, music at 9 PM (Root Beer and French Fry)

TRANSVERSE, it’s a painting show… is a group show with work by Vanessa Calvert, Jaclyn Fronzack, Ruth Lantz, Jud Richardson, Jason Vance Dickason, Salvatore Reda

Guten Tag Meine Freunde
galleryHOMELAND
Opening 6–9 PM

Guten Tag Meine Freunde is a group show of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin where galleryHomeland has been operating EAST/WEST BERLIN with Dam Stuhltrager for the last six months. The show features work by Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski.

POSTED: March 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: car hole gallery, elizabeth jaeger, gallery homeland, kit bowman, may juliette barruel, midori hirose, nationale, sam korman, worksound | No Comments »

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