I have thought and felt many things in the course of experiencing a work of art, but Thursday night was a first. My experience, a momentary epiphany, really, was so startling that when I left I fell down a rabbit hole considering the relationship between perception and existence. Hello, Mr. Husserl.
What happened is this: I became invisible, a ghost. I could see me alright, my hand in front of me in the darkened space of Appendix Project Space. But in the pale patterns of light cast on the three walls of the space apparently through its open roll-up door, I cast no shadow. I passed my hand across a dim shaft of light to no effect; no shadow, no me. And I felt for a second, that feeling I sometimes get when I stand at the edge of something very high, that all of me, blood, muscle, and bone, from the very top of my head rushes down through my body, and I fall through my own feet.
I can’t show you Laura Hughes installation at Appendix. I can’t imagine photographing the faint vertical bands of light, leaf-dappled expanses, little idiosyncratic lines and trapezoids Hughes painted in fluorescent paint on the walls and floor, corners and beams of the garage space, so subtle were the glowing forms. But I can tell you that the longer we stood in the dark, the more heightened our sense of light and shadow, even if it was all illusion…a sliver of light spilling onto the concrete floor from a crack between door and frame, a brighter line at the edge of the garage door where hot afternoon sun must have slipped in. And the more we looked, the more we saw, as the artist had spent weeks in the space painting echoes of natural light that reached into the space at various times of the day, playing across the three sheetrocked walls. That sense of heightened awareness in the viewer felt very much to me like something Robert Irwin would hold to be one of the most pure aims of artmaking.
Further invoking Irwin, periodically the space would be lit by a single window shape of opaque plexi in the south wall, back-lit with a warm evening-like light. Coming in during a lit period, one might have assumed that that, as it were, was that…with its question of is it a real window, a light box, or light cast on the wall in the shape of the window? Primarily the window was a device to recharge the fluorescent paint while reminding us with a capital L that we’re talking about light here, even in the darkness that follows.
One could dismiss this as decorative sleight of hand, but then, one would have to dismiss a whole lot of art for its use of technical cleverness. Alternatively we can say this is about light and shadow and how it shapes our perception of a space and our presence (or lack thereof) in it.
POSTED: August 29th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art, review | 2 Comments »
Midori Hirose
Little Field
North alleyway between NE 28th and 29th Avenues off of Alberta Street
6-9 PM
Hirose’s new work stems from her interest in combining “geometric and loose facets” resulting from “an investigation into the dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian idea culled from reading The Birth of Tragedy. She has a predilection for order and chaos and for this series of sculptures, tries to achieve the genera principle using wood, foam and paint to convey a form of balance between structure and disorder.”
The Span of an Instant
Laura Hughes
Appendix Project Space
South alley between 26th and 27th off NE Alberta
8:30 PM (after dark)
“This installation articulates and enhances fleeting instances of light in the Appendix Project Space. It explores how light, space, time, and architectural form shape one another to produce the visible by amplifying the peripheral.”
Henri Matisse and the Fuckups
Hay Batch!
Also located down the South alleyway between NE 26th and 27th Avenues off of Alberta Street.
8 PM
The Seed Olympics
Rebecca Shelly
FalseFront
4518 NE 32nd
6 PM
Through the use of stop motion animation, Rebecca Shelly documents the growth of starter
plants, looking at vegetable starts as “possibilities, … future nourishment” a project that indirectly considers her role as an artist in a competitive field of many. “The Seed Olympics is a camp exploration of my interest in athletes and horticulture. I don’t care for sports. Strangely enough, I am enthralled by the Olympics…. At the time, I was thinking about doing a test run of all of my seeds under a grow lamp. One night, I had a bizarre dream that my plants were competing as if they were in the Olympics. …”
POSTED: August 26th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | No Comments »
Though the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Art Festival doesn’t officially kick off for another couple of weeks, programming begins today at 3 PM with a conversation between TBA:10 artist Anissa Mack and Sarah Miller Meigs and Kristan Kennedy about Mack’s residency, My Heart Wants More, at Miller Miegs’ lumber room, and the collaboration between artist, curator and patron. The program is free and provides a rare opportunity for the public to see the lumber room (419 NW 9th).
Although frequently referred to as “disposable” in our society, objects often predate and outlast us, continually cycling through owners and contexts over time. Museums, junk shops, curio cabinets, auctions, and collections all serve as sites that help to define the narratives and emotions that we bring to our things. Anissa Mack takes this flow of objects and images as inspiration in her sculptures, installations, and performances and will spend her residency at the lumber room integrating her work within Portland’s collection of objects.
POSTED: August 14th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | 1 Comment »
Peripatetic, pedestrian, a film as a series of moving postcards. Very Large Array at Nationale (811 E Burnside) last evening featured Elizabeth Jaeger, Jenna Kaës in a silent “film” shot by Thomas Oliver, a travelogue, really, of short segments of the performers executing movement phrases at picturesque locales across this great land of ours. In short black frocks and spectacles with long hair blowing in the wind, they hop, stand on their toes, lean, and do awkward arm movements in on red clay soil before a purple butte and a big blue sky, in front of a Loretta Lynn tour bus, in a field of cows, beside a freeway, and in tall pale grass among Donald Judd’s concrete works in Marfa. The colors of the film were occasionally so remarkable, so lush, like the colors of a 50s postcard, saturated but a bit off. Turns out the film was sort of herky-jerky because it wasn’t a film at all, but many digital stills compiled into a very fast slideshow.
When the film was finished, we audience members crammed into Nationale were instructed to execute a series of movements (helpfully read out by Jaeger and displayed on an overhead) making it clear that the performers in the “film” had been executing just this set of instructions in the film we just saw. It was a smart little revelation. And we were funny in our efforts to simply do as told (or maybe only I was funny). In the end Jaeger told us that the instructions were text messages sent by their fourth collaborator, Sarah Elliott, from July 15-30, while she was in New York and the rest were on the road. Accompanying the performance was a booklet entitled MOVEMENTSCORE containing the instructions and an abstraction of the path of the road trip during which the piece was made.
One couldn’t help but be reminded of the robbinschilds performance/installation at last year’s TBA. Both works employed mundane movement by a pair of women in picturesque non-urban locations. What I liked about Very Large Array is its layering, or I should say the iterative revealing of layers of information and its self-referentiality in regard to its making via “film,” audience performance, and booklet. The notion of performer as receiver is intriguing, the Very Large Array, you’ll recall, is an array of radio telescopes…receiving/reading radio waves.
A DVD of the VLA will be available at Nationale in the near future. Check it.
POSTED: August 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: review | No Comments »
Tonight at Fourteen30 (1430 SE 3rd) at 6:30 PM, eavesdrop on a Skype session with Justin Luke from Audio Visual Arts in New York talking with Tom Greenwood (Jackie-O Motherfucker) about the life and work of John Fahey.
More:
Legendary guitarist and iconoclast John Fahey is best known for his adventurous catalog of music. From 1959 until the time of his death in 2001 Fahey released upwards of 40 albums exploring the territory of blues, classical, hillbilly, spirituals, folk, musique concrete, rock, and noise. Lesser known is the fact that he was a fantastic writer in addition to being a hyper productive and explosive painter toward the latter portion of his life, which he spent living in Oregon. This summer, AVA and artist John Andrew present the furiously beautiful paintings of John Fahey.
Justin Luke is the owner of AVA, a for-profit art space in the East Village of New York that has a particular interest in sound. Since 2008 AVA has presented a variety of projects including sound, sculpture, costume, world wide web, minimal drag, painting, chats, flicks, chomps, performance, palabras and once again, the sound.
Portland-based multi-media artist and musician, Tom Greenwood is known for both is passion for collaboration and aversion towards structure and convention. While perhaps most noted for his musical career, founding the band Jackie-O Motherfucker, Greenwood’s background is solidly located in the visual arts and his two practices form an undeniably symbiotic relationship.
POSTED: August 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | No Comments »
