Review: Linda Austin and The Metaphysics of Notation

“And then I’ll come over here and do this.”
“And then I’ll come over here and do this.”

On Friday, Linda Austin and JP Jenkins traversed the mezzanine of the Armory in a performance of Mark Applebaum’s visual score “The Metaphysics of Notation” that was loose, wacky, and charming. In paper jumpsuits, with a truckload of inspired props from vases of tired flowers to piles of clothes (robe/disrobe), a slinky and a couple of ping pong balls, Austin and Jenkins scrolled through movements best described as serious play. I’d expected Austin simply to improvise a solo to the graphic score (which I was really looking forward to). What I got instead was a series of delightful surprises that made my day.

Jenkins scored the piece with vocal improvisations (any/everything but singing), guitar, hitting and or trailing a big fake gem ring along the railing and a metal panel wired with contact mics, oh and a Linda Austin solo for piano and toy keyboard.

This was the last of four noontime performances at the Gerding Theater at the Armory co-sponsored by Portland Center Stage and Third Angle New Music Ensemble, which will perform “Metaphysics” in a program of other adventurous music on March 5 at Hollywood Theater.

Review: Annotation: Configure

I have punched a computer punch card. I learned binary the way you might learn Morse code. I was a tourist in the land of data input/output, but coming back from that land of zeroes and ones, I retained an interest in the recording of data, its march from notched sticks, stone carvings or the equivalent of hashmarks in wet clay tablets through ledgers, wax cylinders, and bytes.

What’s fascinating is that in mere decades after data became invisible, recorded on magnetic tapes rather than ledgers, vinyl disks rather than sheet music, the interest in making it visible again has just recently skyrocketed: data visualization has never been so hot. Blame Tufte or take it as a natural reaction to data’s invisibility, to the ephemerality of data recordings (when did you last back up your computer? will your email be archived as the carbon copies of the letters of your favorite author have been? do you trust Facebook to archive of your posts?)

Portland-based artist Derek Faust makes art that accumulates visible evidence of obsolete methods of recording data, specifically overlarge one-off vinyl disks sent to record stations for broadcast, player piano rolls, and the cards used to create the intricate patterns on a Jacquard loom. The OCAC graduate’s current show at Alpern Gallery (2552 NW Vaughn) is anchored in the back room, really, with a set of prints: “Transmission Lineage.” They are hung one in front of the other in three groups with just enough space between them that you can sneak a peek at those behind the front print from the side. The black and white prints are fine enough to show evidence of record grooves, even as filtered through the holes in the player piano rolls. The way they are hung—providing the viewer only fragmented views of the whole—mirrors the prints themselves as fragmented impressions of the original physical data storage objects.

The groove of the record is translated into sculpture in one of the wall pieces in Alpern’s front room. Untitled, it’s a long roll of clear vinyl in which a large circle has been cut (record form) and two leaning pieces of wood bearing the marks of repeated shallow cuts of a saw. Another hanging work of grooved pieces of white painted wood splayed out around a vertical spindle is meant by the artist to suggest the kind of machinery that traffics in data…its clear plastic tubing implying conduit or perhaps fiber optic cable. Of the lot, it’s the least convincing. Faust is best when he addresses the recording of data directly as when in an unassuming and somewhat haphazard pile of slats on the floor, he’s really riffing on the cards that drive pattern in the Jacquard textile loom. This card-based data storage system was a bridge between the production of goods, namely luxe textiles, and the production of information; the loom’s punched cards later becoming a conceptual model used in computing.

Faust’s whole project becomes metaphor for art itself, for what is art but the recording of data, and what is abstraction but the disappearing of that data deeper into the work. Looking forward to seeing where this project goes.

images: top, Derek Faust, Transmission Lineage, 2009, Series of 23 24″x36″ Prints. bottom l-r, detail. Derek Faust, Transmission Lineage, 2009, Series of 23 24″x36″ Prints.

Linda Austin and the Metaphysics of Notation

Portland-based choreographer Linda Austin is the final artist to perform “The Metaphysics of Notation” today at noon at Portland Center Stage on the Mezzanine, Gerding Theater at the Armory.

Performance series “The Metaphysics of Notation” finds abstract notation interpreted through a kaleidoscope of methods: theater, movement, music, and sound poem. Third Angle and Portland Center Stage have invited a number of artists from different disciplines to interpret “The Metaphysics of Notation,” an epic, 72-foot graphic score by Mark Applebaum currently installed on the mezzanine at the Gerding Theater at the Armory.

The series is in anticipation of Third Angle’s concert “Chance/Perchance: A Musical Happening,” on Friday, March 5 — featuring work by David Schiff, Terry Riley and Mark Applebaum — at the Hollywood Theatre.

Review: Jenene Nagy’s Tidal

Liquid Mercury
We called it “mercury sea:” the Pacific on a windless evening in a thin fog just after sunset when the glassy surface of the Monterey Bay reflected the orange-tinged grey of the sky.

A Shattered Polyhedron, A Wave, A Horizon Line
As as if a giant pink polyhedron had been cast into the corner of Disjecta, Jenene Nagy’s “Tidal” is a massive installation of hot pink irregular polygons and jagged shards cast across the floor, splashed onto two walls, and shattering on the rafters and trusses of the soaring space.

Unlike earlier installations, including “s/plit” at the Portland Art Museum, where flat monochrome fields are both painted on the walls and extend out from them on panels, “Tidal” hugs but maintains a distance from floor and wall. It tangles but does not merge with the rafters above.

The installation is lit only by a horizontal strip of florescent tubes a few feet off the floor that run the perimeter of the l-shaped space. It was not until my second visit to “Tidal” that I perceived the magic that the horizon line of florescents worked, making mercury sea of the panels propped on the floor and brushing exquisite gradients on the vertical panels. If my first impression was that the panels pushing and pulling with the wooden rafters in the shadows were lost without further illumination, my second was that the lighting strategy both further complicated the relationship of installation to architecture overhead and toyed with my perceptions of a single hue.

Real, Hyperreal, Un-
But Nagy’s always thinking about how we perceive and/or remember color, hence her use of intense, hyperreal hues. She’s dealing with space—Nagy’s recent installations are both big enough to envelop the viewer and nimble enough to create a sense of movement with static parts. She is, in fact, creating stage sets—referencing natural world with forms that evoke wave here, or flock as in “s/plit” at PAM, or with titles like “Meadow”—built of drywall and exposed 2×4s.

As set, “Tidal” signals that we are to suspend disbelief, be willing to meet this fractured hot pink wave somewhere between reality and artifice. Unlike strictly representational art (say a pastoral scene painted in oils and surrounded by a massive gold frame) Nagy’s work is resolutely honest about its fakeness.

If Nagy’s work employs reductive methods borrowed from minimalism (while addressing space and perception as did light and space artists), the  blue-collar 2×4 supports of her installation point away from the thing itself to that for which it is a stand-in, reinvigorating the reductive with possibility…the possibility of viewer-supplied narrative or memory…not unlike that of a mercury sea.

Melody Owen at Art Gym

Two new exhibitions open at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University on Sunday, February 21 with a reception for the artists from 3 to 5 PM. The Art Gym’s main space features So Close to the Glass and Shivering by Melody Owen. In Gallery 2, Paula Rebsom will present If We Lived Here. Both exhibitions continue through April 9, 2010.

From the press release:

Both exhibitions address human and animal interactions, migration and travel. Owen uses drawing, video and sculpture as “quiet ruminations on whales and exploration.” Paula Rebsom built a house-like structure and set up an observation station on her family’s abandoned farm in rural North Dakota. Images of the structure, landscape and the birds and animals that frequent the site will be recorded or broadcast live from North Dakota and projected in The Art Gym’s Gallery 2 over the course of the exhibition.

So Close to the Glass and Shivering is a major exhibition for Portland-based Melody Owen. In this new show, the artist presents works in a number of media that are records of travel and exploration. Some of her travels have been in North America, others in Europe. Owen is interested in the records that explorers keep and in making her own. In this exhibition she also builds on the concept of the whale as a record keeper and traveling library. She created an 11-foot, white-wire sculpture of a beluga whale—a drawing in space—and a trace of a whale that lies on the gallery floor. Owen has also carved and sanded a vine from Borneo to resemble a narwhale tusk — something explorers might bring back from the journey — and added a message in Morse code. During a recent residency in Switzerland, Owen was reminded of some old glass slides of European mountain landscapes she found years ago in Beacon, New York. She added collage elements to the slides that will be shown in a light box.

Many of Owen’s significant experiences have been with animals, often through the glass of an aquarium or zoo enclosure. The title So Close to the Glass and Shivering comes from the title of a video Owen made of white wolves in the Berlin Tiergarten. The exhibition includes video recorded through a telescope at the Cornell University ornithology lab and bird sanctuary in upstate New York, and videos of a Beluga whale filmed at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and of a leopard recorded at the Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

The Art Gym is on the third floor of the B.P. John Administration Building at Marylhurst University, which is located one mile south of Lake Oswego on Highway 43.