art
galleryHOMELAND, Appendix + Hay Batch!
Thursday night was a sprint from a galleryHOMELAND dinner up to Alberta for the openings. At HOMELAND, we had dinner with visiting Berlin-based artists Malte Zacharias (Gartenstudio) and Per Schumann (Entwurf-Direkt) at the long table they’d built from scrap for the occasion with the help of Von Tundra. During dinner with a number of artists HOMELAND has sent to Berlin, including Victor Maldonado and Vanessa Renwick, and artists in the current exhibition “Doing It To It,” like Amy Steel, Hannah Piper Burns and Dustin Zemel of Grand Detour and Nim Wunnan of Research Club, Schumann gave a talk called Mind the Gap which involved drawing on the wall, a “potato helmet,” or the way being an adult can constrict one’s imaginative thinking and a lovely diagram of a flower growing up through a crack in the sidewalk, flourishing by drawing minerals and water through its extended root system below the concrete.
Michael Reinsch @ Haybatch! from OPENWIDEpdx on Vimeo.
I was disappointed to miss Michael Reinsch’s performance; he sang songs from the peak of the roof of the Appendix garage. Next up, Reinsch currently has the window gallery at PDX Contemporary.
After wending my way on NE Alberta through the summer throng who appeared to prefer art of a liquid variety, I did catch Oregon Painting Society’s installation and end of their performance at Appendix. Wearing “sunglasses at night,” OPS improvised on the latest crop of synthstruments built by Birch Cooper, the best of which, hands down, was a spinning wheel that was “played” on edge with a rod, the second best of which, hands up, was the instrument Cooper “played” with photosensitive black gloves which translated gesture (visually amplified by his back-wall shadow) into sound. This was all set in yet another fractured domestic environment in which familiar wall textures like tile and paneling give backdrop to simple constructions of low walls and oddball cabinetry studded with dowel-kabobs. The sloping table-of-wall-switches paneled in faux wood that Matt Carlson played was suburban sci-fi while the gothic-y porchlight is a holdover from their Portland2010 Biennial installation, Hexenhouse, reminder of just how busy OPS has been lately.
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