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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.