POV Dance Ford Building Project

POV Dance is going to dance the Ford Building (2505 SE 11th), its stairwells, walls, windows, and rails. What’s the Ford Building you say? You know it as home of Gallery HOMELAND.

Mandy Christiansen, Noel Plemmons have choreographed an evening-length work called “The Ford Building Project” in which their nine dancers will move from one end of the building’s ground floor to another, making a moving landscape of architecture, bodies, light and sound. $15 at brownpapertickets.com

Note: The performance runs approximately 65 minutes with no intermission. Seating is extremely limited and options include sitting or kneeling on the ground, with the option of standing. All performances are ADA compliant.

Review: Dark: A Show to Winter

MATT GREEN Nilbog, 2010 Cedar 33 x 16 x 15 inches. image courtesy the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

As unpredictable and welcome as the weather of winter 09/10, Dark: A Show to Winter at Fourteen30 Contemporary, opened 2010 with a bang as a strong group show with an international scope. Rather than fighting fire with fire (or darkness with blunt darkness for darkness’ sake), curators The Rainbow Family have put together a subtly conceived panoply of visual manifestations of darknesses from the serene to the disturbing.

Let’s start, in this international show, by recognizing an artist from the home team, recent PNCA MFA Matt Green, whose burnt readymade “Nilbog” is the mascot of the show and its mute witness. The black gaping mouth of this charred knee-high figure issues a silent Munchian scream, its eyes are dark hollows, but the ash striations on the blackened cedar make the figure unexpectedly beautiful. Green created the piece by purchasing a chainsaw sculpture in rural Oregon and throwing the piece on a bonfire, making this in some ways a document of a performance, “a show to winter,” indeed.

SVEN STUCKENSCHMIDT Lake, 2009 Acrylic, lamp Dimensions variable. image courtesy the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

Among its many rewards, Dark offered a number of works that read as portals one might fall into and through. Arnold Kemp’s matte black canvas with its tantalizing hint at unviewable underpainting beckons to something beyond/behind the canvas. Sven Stuckenschmidt’s (Berlin) jagged “Lake” of gleaming black acrylic strips onto which a moon’s reflection is cast by a utilitarian lamp is simply magical/magically simple, its lakeness making it a penetrable surface one could step right into. Molly Vidor’s black painting “Odile,” active as it is with alternately matte and glass brushstroke, paradoxically prevents entrance, holding you on its surface (looking at light plays on its textures), even as it’s cleverly hung low as to imply an enterable void. Thomas Moecker’s “Curtain” is a large reductive landscape of grey triangle forms repeating as trees against a washed out red horizon line. Because its features repeat without landmark, because of its size (114″x226″), and because it hangs unstretched, “Curtain” envelopes the viewer to the point it threatens to swallow one up. Meanwhile Alex Hubbard (Brooklyn) creates three portals one might choose not to enter in his video “The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight, 1-3.” In this theatrical rendition of a mundane act, the artist uses a chainsaw to cut a hole in a wall from behind. Lit from behind, the act is rendered as drawing with light…it’s extraordinarily beautiful, but the implications of the chainsaw/the unseen intruder make the piece as threatening as you care to be paranoid. More on Hubbard in a moment.

(foreground) SEBASTIAN GOEGEL Figur, 2007 12 x 6 x 6 inches Bronze, plywood AP (background) THOMAS MOECKER Curtain 2009 114 x 226 inches Acrylic on canvas. image courtesy the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

So what is Sebastian Goegel’s (Leipzig) “Figur” beckoning to in the fog of “Curtain?” More than the sum of its parts, one of the best things about Dark is the way it’s hung. “Figur” is a roughly executed, hoary little figure who beckons with a bony finger toward “Curtain.” When you stand with your back facing “Curtain,” “Figur” both issues his invitation to you and takes the place left blank for him on the wall behind between two untitled pieces—the show’s most overtly (a creepy painting of an almost-skull) and most abstractly dark (a white-coated lattice wire X)—by Frank Haines (Brooklyn). Too, the show’s most disturbing piece with all of its implied violence, Jo Nigoghossian’s untitled sculpture of a woman’s wig stiffened with concrete is situated before Alicia Love McDaid’s “Tierra de Sueno,” making for a darker reading of this photo of a naked woman jumping on a bed while a man lies reading impassively.

Alex Hubbard’s video piece, “Weekend Pass,” is a playful respite from the dark, a brilliant take on the kind of mischief one might get up to spending long hours in the studio. As the camera continuously circles on a sometimes visible track, the artist conducts various “I-wonder-what-would-happen…” experiments like piling wax slabs on an electric burner and letting them melt/catch fire, drilling a hole in a rubber boot full of something, smashing a hunk of clay with a sledgehammer. “Weekend Pass” and “The Paranoid Phase…” exist at this great nexus where in-studio conceptual process piece with all of its history as a strategy and its deadpan execution (only here the artist is only at the margins of the work) intersects with the trajectory of experimental abstract narrative film. PNCA grad and native Oregonian now living in Brooklyn, Hubbard currently and unsurprisingly has work in the Whitney Biennial.

Dark sets a high bar for group shows, Portland. Open through the 13th.

Check out OPENWIDEpdx where you can find more images from the opening of Dark, their Show of the Month.

A Naked Man With A Saw And Five Minus One Baby Coffins

Five minus one baby coffins smoking and a naked man with a saw. He used the ryōba (a Japanese double-sided saw) a screwdriver, and a hacksaw blade to take apart the sixth coffin. When I arrived, Lucas Murgida was bent over one of the coffin sides, arduously sawing off its molding. The parts of the disassembled coffin were neatly arrayed around him: a row of screws, the bottom, the top, neatly aligned.

In a four-hour performance yesterday at Autzen Gallery at PSU, Los Angeles artist Murgida disrobed, lit the sage smudges in the coffins with a blow torch, and began to disassemble one of the coffins. According to Gary Wiseman who was there longer than I was, Murgida kept relighting the smudges when the curls of smoke coming from the coffins died away.

The title of his exhibition will be perfectly creepy for those who see the coffins in the artist’s absence. But for those who saw the performance, GRIP, GRASP, GROPE, AND FONDLE, clearly refers to the artist working with the wood in the absence of a workbench and clamps, for example trying to brace the wood between his feet and calves while he bent over it with a saw, or jamming a screwdriver between two loosened pieces to pry them apart.

The installation was beautifully lit with the blond wood coffins against the concrete floor, Murgida’s skin, a tone not far from that of the wood. The curls of smoke (though nearly asphyxiating) were disturbing and poetic at the same time. And when Murgida took a break from sawing, one could hear the coffins emitting tiny clicking sounds.

Could unbuilding the coffin bring its tiny contents back to life? Is this a protest against the necessity to build such small coffins in the first place. Is the artist naked because never are we more metaphorically naked than when we deal head-on with death? Am I being to literal? What of the smoke? Ashes to ashes? One thinks of the comfort of work, especially physical labor, in the face of trauma. I know that Murgida makes art related to his employment, and I know that he’s done cabinetry, so it’s no surprise the coffins were cunningly crafted. The ideas embedded in the installation, while less linear, seem equally so.

GRIP, GRASP, GROPE, AND FONDLE
Lucas Murgida
Autzen Gallery
2nd Floor PSU Neuberger Hall, Room 205, 724 SW Harrison

What I Would Do If It Were First Friday In Portland Oregon

YESWAY
Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman
Car Hole Gallery
114 SE 12th

Opening 5-9 PM, Music at 9 PM (The Bugs, Lickity)

Here’s Car Hole’s Sam Korman on YESWAY:

YESWAY is a show presented by Car Hole featuring the work of Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman. It is also a piece of linguistic cheesecake. YESWAY is the expression we use to emphasize our point, an affirmative counter to NOWAY: it universalizes information simply in its frequent appearance. Yet, YESWAY is not a term that often exists beyond this casual, quotidian exchange. Displaced from everyday usage, it’s meaning, or rather, meaninglessness only serves to emphasize its absurdity like some apparition of speech. But in these moments that go casually overlooked, an integral portion of our communication is lost, unrecorded, where YESWAY is not a random tag along, but an expression of the underlying mechanics of interpersonal communication—its mode vastly outweighs its meaning.

In its appearance, YESWAY is linguistic color: a secondary color, emphatic in its contrast—you use it without thinking, as the moment dictates, a placeholder for the larger coding of daily speech. Though different from NOWAY as the affirmative recognition of disagreement, it is nonetheless an immediate attempt at connection between people in everyday terms. Here, YESWAY resides in daily life, but as we expand our network of relations, YESWAY takes on a dual meaning, as interface and articulation—it is about how you shake your hips as much as what you sing. And, art, in our age of global connectedness, is beginning to reside in this social underbelly, as well.

In both Jaeger and Bowman’s work, a life-size portrait emerges of our daily attempts to communicate—whether concerning popularity or reaching aliens, the work develops a picture of our sweet, awkward and futile attempts at communicating with others, even if that means looking in the mirror. These artists humorously examine how, when two people engaged in conversation interpret and synthesize something seemingly innocuous, but ultimately binding—can generate an artistic language, as well. Art has a similar capacity to bond, counter, synthesize and reevaluate our daily lives, and in that, derive some kind of vernacular currency. Art is life, motherfuckers. YESWAY.

L Sub to the Polynomial
Midori Hirose
Nationale
811 E Burnside #122 (in back)

Opening 6-9 PM

L Sub to the Polynomial is a show of two series of new works on paper by Midori Hirose. According to Nationale director May Juliette Barruel:

For Series 1, Hirose thought about jokes and extracted the idea of happiness by reducing it to a moment of laughter. For Hirose, the technical elements of a joke are amazing. There is a definite rhythm, pattern, spatial aspect, precision, and a punch line to a good joke. Exploring this deductive reasoning, new portraits were drawn conceptually and visually with a quick, simple capture of the audible expression of happiness, people in the midst of laughing at something funny.

Similarly in Series 2, Hirose’s abstract objects play between figure and ground, paying attention to the space and form with precision, while melding quilt-like geometric patterns with hazed gradients of color. These spatial arrangements and polynomial forms are pushed by Hirose’s bright disorienting palette in a whimsical manner.

TRANSVERSE
Worksound
820 SE Alder

Opening 7 PM, music at 9 PM (Root Beer and French Fry)

TRANSVERSE, it’s a painting show… is a group show with work by Vanessa Calvert, Jaclyn Fronzack, Ruth Lantz, Jud Richardson, Jason Vance Dickason, Salvatore Reda

Guten Tag Meine Freunde
galleryHOMELAND
Opening 6–9 PM

Guten Tag Meine Freunde is a group show of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin where galleryHomeland has been operating EAST/WEST BERLIN with Dam Stuhltrager for the last six months. The show features work by Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski.

Jonah Freeman at Reed Art Week

Reed Arts Week brings Brooklyn-based artist Jonah Freeman to town with his film The Franklin Abraham screening today tat 5:30 PM at Vollum Lounge. The screening will be followed by Q & A with the artist. (Enter Reed’s campus via the main entrance and you’d run right into Vollum the way I read this map.)

The Franklin Abraham is a short film that, in conjunction with a set of collages, imagines the upper West Side as a 150-year-old endlessly expanding building with two million residents. You’ll recall Freeman gained notoriety for his collaborative installation Black Acid Co-op (Hello Meth Lab in the Sun) at Deitch Projects in 2009 (16 Miles has photos).

Filip Tejchman interviewed Freeman about The Franklin Abraham and Hello Meth Lab (an earlier iteration of Black Acid Co-op) in issue 11 of Museo Magazine. An excerpt:

The Franklin Abraham came out of thinking about interior space, but I wanted scale to be something ridiculous. One beginning for the piece was the idea that in New York, you’re always inside. Even when you’re outside, it’s always like a big interior. It was a goofy idea: what if we smooshed all the buildings together? What if the Upper West Side was compressed into one building? What would be the most extreme and stupidest place to take this? A building for one million people to live in. And then I thought, well, let’s just make it two million, if it’s going to go into the realm of the ridiculous. It becomes immediately unbelievable, but it’s also rich and thick with intimate interior spaces because of that scale. The camera is a sort of roving eye. You get the sense that the camera is almost a character, moving through the building, stopping on these observations, and through that, you get a sense of the scale of the building. The collages grew organically because I imagined this world, and there were necessities to articulate it. I don’t draw, but I am a photographer, so I could take photographs and collage them together. I pieced the photographs together and connected all the buildings. This process of making the images was similar to the way the building [would have been] built—added on to and added on to over years. They’re in a mishmash of styles.