Sayre Gomez: Self Expression

This week, Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd Avenue) opens Self Expression, a show of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Sayre Gomez.

There’s a reception, this Friday, March 19, 6–9 PM and the show’s open through May 1.

“Sayre Gomez creates installations, drawings, and collages that address the most basic formal instincts of art making, born from a practice in which process/form and content are equally important. Gomez had his most recent solo exhibition (2nd Cannons, Los Angeles) in 2009. And Self Expression will also act as the title of the artist’s forthcoming exhibition at Kavi Kupta Gallery in Berlin.”

Some Things I Didn’t Write

Justin Gorman interviews artist Patrick Kelly (above) about the large graphite drawings he calls “Carbon Traces” on PAPERMAKESTACK, Gorman’s recently overhauled (and beautiful) website, which also serves as Gorman’s portfolio site. Kelly’s work will be featured in “Drawing the Slight Uneasy,” the April group show at Worksound curated by MK Guth. Who else is in the show? According to Gorman: Bill Adams, Nicolaii Dornstauder, Patrick Kelly, Tania Cross, Michael Lee, Nicole Eriko Smith, Lynn Yarn, Frank Parrga.

The latest beautiful issue of Work for Free, edited by Aidan Koch and Paul Wagenblast is Issue Six: Sensation. Scriabin’s synesthesia as jumping off point for issue? Yes.

Tanner Dobson has started a blog. Tanner Dobson’s brain to mouth filters are set alarmingly low. Tanner Dobson is smart, funny, and obnoxious. Tanner Dobson, brought to you by artist Sean Joseph Patrick Carney (they look so much alike, it’s uncanny), reviews Radiohole’s “Whatever, Heaven Allows” at PS 122. He concludes, “Experimental theater is for stoners. On a scale of Gary, Indiana to Portland, Oregon, I’d give ‘Whatever, Heaven Allows’ a Boise, Idaho.”

A little interview with Audio Dregs’ E*Rock by Hiram Lucke on Circle Into Square.

Plus this piece from the NYTimes on the hot topic of performance art and the museum.

Field Trip: Paul Sutinen’s “Sculpture in the Form of a Building”

Recently I had the occasion to pay a visit to Paul Sutinen at Marylhurst University. After we talked he showed me where “Sculpture in the Form of a Building” and “Among the Pin Oaks” were installed behind the Mayer Art Building. We talked about the greyed patina the wood of “Sculpture” had taken on and how some of the boards were warping away from the structure. It’s perhaps even more beautiful now than it was when the wood was golden and new.

Via research I’m doing on another topic, I’d recently seen a photo of an early installation Sutinen had done in the unfinished basement of the Anne Hughes Gallery in 1976 consisting of rough wooden stakes driven into the dirt floor. It’s ominous and melancholy in equal measure as well as being formally beautiful in spite of its arte povera-ishness. Sutinen has a long relationship with wood, not as a source of content, but as a material means to an end…it’s reasonably inexpensive vs. say, stone. But its true as well that tree and house—respectively source and terminus (for much wood)—have been addressed/employed repeatedly in his siteworks and installations.

I asked Paul about the simple house form that has recurred in his work, because it doesn’t seem that the house form for Paul is expected to say anything about houseness. (See also, his “Sculpture in the Form of a Small Building in the Distance” at Nine Gallery in 2008 reviewed on PORT). “Sculpture has to take a form,” he said. And where does one go after the minimalist box? Paul said it occurred to him that his work uses found forms, that the saltbox house is just one of these found forms.

“Sculpture in the Form of a Building” was built at the time of the mid-career retrospective Terri Hopkins did of Sutinen’s work at Marylhurst’s Art Gym, Incidents and Ideas in 2000 (for which there is a great catalog). I was surprised and dismayed to hear that he is considering taking it down next year. “That would be ten years,” he says.

So may I urge you, on one of these bright days, to take a field trip down to Marylhurst and make your picnic on the lawn behind the Mayer Art Building. You’ll also see, if you look hard enough under the trees close to the building, his sitework, “Among the Pin Oaks,” two intersecting concrete block paths laid from trunk base to trunk base of four oak trees. Both worth the trip.

Unfolded: Ben Stagl at Gallery HOMELAND

My experience of Gilles Deleuze is through the writings of the brilliant experimental poet Steve McCaffery. Portland-based artist Ben Stagl uses Deleuze’s notion of the fold as a jumping off point for a new body of work he describes as a “playful examination of both the architectural and philosophical concepts surrounding the fold and the act of folding” while also touching on Edo era origami and (new to me, yeah!) Chinese paper folding traditions of Zhe Zhi. Unfolding, new sculptural, print and video work by Stagl opens tonight at Gallery HOMELAND in the Ford Building (2505 SE 11th) Friday, June 5th with a reception from 6-9 PM. The exhibition also includes collaborations with Alison Heppner, Jon Springer, Angela Dawn, and Matthew Allen Wooldridge.

Stagl’s sculptures, installations, and performances combine visual impact, thoughtfulness, and a level of ambition and rigor that keeps me coming back for more. Catch Stagl’s work now before he heads out for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program.

Linus and Osa: We Are Cats at Nationale

If it’s from the mind of Rikki Rothenberg, one of the founders of contemporary dance group Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, you can bet I’ll be there. Rothenberg has a B.A. in sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art, but most of us know her as choreographer and dancer in one of Portland’s most adventurous and engaging dance groups, marking paths from the pedestrian and modern idioms into a fabulous future.

Nationale tonight opens a solo show of recent work by Rikki Rothenberg, Linus and Osa: We Are Cats. Rothenberg has a sharp and adventurous mind, and I’m curious how it manifests in two dimensions. Expect “glitter silhouettes and repetitive, kaleidoscope-like pen drawings.”

Opens tonight, First Friday, June 5 from 6-9 PM. Woolly is scheduled to perform, but I’m using the word scheduled loosely as I only know that it will be sometime during the hours of the reception and probably more than once.