He shares Joseph Cornell’s practice of, what the poet Charles Simic termed, “Dimestore Alchemy”: that restless drive that solders connections between seemingly dissimilar, random odds and ends, renewing and transform materials, sounds, images and experiences—igniting cast-off, forgotten things with a combustible beauty and mystery.
Monsieur Rancière at PNCA
You can expect that an evening spent with Rancière and his “cartography of the visible” and other touching-down points from his seminal en-vogue Politics Aesthetics will leave you feeling moved, maddened, inspired, and transfixed by continental thought with very serious street-cred.
Here Be Dragons: Alaska
Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum’s new work Alaska is a raw and unapologetic piece of dance-theater that simultaneously inspires mystery, hope and a worrisome sense of helplessness (think of the voyeuristic discomfort of seeing Gena Rowlands’ unraveling in Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence). “Gloriously alive,”
Tilt Gallery is TWO
Q & A with Tilt Gallery and Project Space directors Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith on the eve of the two-year anniversary of one of the most consistently interesting galleries in Portland and the wondertwins behind it
Paris Changing
Like Cartier-Bresson or Saul Bellow’s Sammler, who trawled the streets of New York taking in “aesthetic consumption of the environment,” these kinds of discrete projects give us a lens into the found poetry of the city that is priceless.
Welcome Back COTR
In praise of this glorious weekend of allatonceness, Darouian’ s to be saluted for tapping into the promise of Art-signalling-Change—a notion that Portland’s energetic and earnest indie-arts spectrum can rightly aspire to—a synergistic impulse that also seems to fuel the best intermedia projects that AudioCinema helps incubate.
First Thursday at PAC: Panels and Memory
Back in the old days, a strong powerful memory was one of the greatest virtues, representing the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. Seneca the Elder could repeat 2,000 names in the order they’d been given to him. The Roman Simplicius could recite Virgil by heart backward. We’re swiftly replacing our internal memory with external memory, in this case a vast sea of little yellow superstructures supporting experience. Memory Machines’ parable of the 3×3 outsourcing of memory posits both an ode to something lost and something found.
