Review: Ontologue

Melis van den Berg’s “Untitled” fills the entire first gallery at the White Box (70 NW Couch), shoving gallery director Elizabeth Lamb’s desk into a corner under this massive cardboard structure that looks like a model of a flying saucer. It’s dramatic, formally beautiful, appropriately architectural for this gallery in the building that houses U of O’s architecture program. “Untitled” is all about the space of the gallery, what’s in it (it includes, is propped up on, gallery furniture), and how we interact with/in it.

Review: Hard Cover

On the back cover of the 100+ page catalogue for the exhibition Hard Cover at Car Hole Gallery (114 SE 12th) is a giant cross, two lines hastily drawn with a wide black marker that is running out of ink. These two lines serve as a kind of documentation for one of the two covers by artist Jacob Kassay (NY) of minimalist works by Fred Sandback that make up the show.

500

Little timely note. Museum of Contemporary Craft curator Namita Gupta Wiggers just told me that she’ll have a complete set of issues of Veneer magazine that we can check out as part of the new exhibition opening this week Object Focus: The Book. Veneer=Flint Jamison=co-founder YU. But what I want to tell you is that Jamison was just featured in ArtForum’s 500 Words column talking about Veneer, the art magazine that’s art as magazine.

Stacy Lynn Smith: Accumulate

Opening November 19th, Vestibule (8371 N Interstate) will be presenting work by Portland artist Stacy Lynn Smith. The work is a collection of posters and flyers manipulated and organized by Smith in an attempt to make a kind of sense out of the constant barrage of information that is a common contemporary life. According to the press release: “Accumulation confronts the inevitable fragmentation of experience made possible by abundant connection and access.”

Public Art, Moving Beyond the Box

by Linda Wysong

Try balancing on a ladder with a bucket and scrub brush while polishing Abraham Lincoln’s nose and you will soon learn that there are many people who care about public art. During the short time I was employed by RACC as a sculpture cleaner, I came to expect art conversations with strangers. …