As seemingly improvised as his loose painting style—all brushstrokes and dripping paint—Colin Matthes’ installation, EXPO, at IGLOO Gallery features sculptures held together by clamps and propped up on cement blocks and milk crates, paintings leaning against or done directly on the walls, and drawings tacked up in the back room around a grocery cart modified into a mobile throne.

The Milwaukee-based Matthes, in Portland for an IGLOO residency, gave a slide talk at PNCA leading us through his work that most often addresses political and environmental concerns, natural resource management, imperialist warmaking, surveillance (he’s made and installed birdhouses in the shape of surveillance cameras). With a view to what he calls, “nostalgic futures,” Matthes makes wall drawings and sculptures/installations that in form and function reference the improvisatory, fake, and provisional nature of Potemkin villages, stage sets, and Wild West one-horse-town facades. His visual vocabulary includes milk crate as symbol of making do, the stripes and palette of carnival tents as both the temporary and the spectacle, and tangles of undulating blue lines as water that can either pose threat to the figures floating on improvised rafts or be threatened by an offshore oil drilling platform.

In EXPO, the water’s drained away and a damaged row boat bearing a spyglass and a milk crate is held aloft on stilt-like 2x4s. Elsewhere water’s contained in a tin tub in which floats a raft (a prototype?) made from Shell and Exxon signs. The repurposing of corporate signage places blame for the global warming that’s clearly on Matthes’ mind, but points as well to improvised survival strategies. In another painting, there’s a tall pink cylindrical hat from from which two plastic milk bottles are suspended on either side making a possible water carrying device. Matthes says EXPO is primarily, “what I imagine an inventors’ convention would look like in the future…that’s small “i” inventors, the kind you’d see on an infomercial. I’m drawn to ingenuity with crappy materials, the small gesture, the simple victory.” One terrific “invention,” a painting of extravagant multi-wheeled vehicle of questionable purpose, begins on a board leaning against the wall and spills over onto the wall itself. This has the effect both of emphasizing Matthes’ notions of improvisation (like the old joke of the “Plan Ahea” sign) and temporariness while integrating the individual works into the whole of the installation. On the other hand, the quick black and white portraits, head-shots, really, tacked up in the lower space feel a bit tossed off, even supposing they are meant to represent the crowd at the EXPO. Signage recurs in Matthes’ work, but whereas in earlier pieces the signs had been an explicit and overdetermining factor, at EXPO we see only half words and truncated phrases creating a productive ambiguity. Like this crazy “inventors’” fair, they invite speculation and conversation about Mattes’ imagined future.

Avantika Bawa. yesterday, Yellow. installation view.

Funny how caution tape, and the smiley face share that same bright, sunny yellow. It’s a hot rod color, a daisy color, and the color of French’s mustard. And in yesterday. Yellow, Avantika Bawa’s installation at Milepost 5 where she is currently artist in residence, every element in the piece is awash in the hue. Bawa deftly uses yellow to displace the found objects she assembled for the piece from the NE 82nd neighborhood surrounding Milepost 5. These materials are those for building, carrying, or storing; not consumer goods but objects that are meant to be used to do something else. Here, most wait in a glorified state of the same purgatory from which Bawa plucked them: concrete blocks are lined up on the floor, low crates are stacked just a bit haphazardly, boards and wood scraps are piled on the floor, lean against the window, or trace a corner. The unity of their hue, the visual rhythm of their repetition and line (it’s interesting to consider their edges as a drawing in the space), their orderly disorder or slightly disordered order makes of the static objects a dynamic whole.

Avantika Bawa. yesterday, Yellow. installation view.

Minimalism’s tactics including Andre’s use of the floor, McCracken’s leaning planks, and the widespread use of seriality are reinvigorated in the project of casting a critical eye on the life (and death and rebirth) of the manufactured good and what it says about where we are and where we’re going…something that Bawa here casts in a hopeful light, a bright yellow one, not least because in the opposite corner of the space, tucked into the corner, it appears that building anew has begun.

Avantika Bawa. yesterday, Yellow. installation view.

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.

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 2x4s.

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.

Version 10 INFRASTRUCTURES AND TERRITORIES
APRIL 22 to MAY 2, 2010
Chicago, USA
Call for Participation
Deadline for submissions: MARCH 1, 2010

Version 2010: now seeking proposals and presentations about tactics and strategies that help sustain our communities, find better uses of our resources, and maintain and expand our networks. For eleven days and nights, we will explore the best practices and boldest failures in interventionist, participatory, and collective social, political, and cultural practices. This year’s theme is presented in order to bring together groups and individuals seeking additional methods for connecting our networks and creating solid foundations for the practice of art, education and social activism well into the next decade. We want to use this opening during the current economic and political crisis to expand and amplify our shared ideals, values and strategies for survival and expansion.

Join us to amplify micro-movements and nowtopian ideas!

The festival will include: community gardens, historical re-enactments, antiwar organizing, an art parade, an artist-run art expo, a catalog of interventionist strategies, networking between independent groups and spaces, inflatable art, one-night exhibition formats, anti-oligarchy planning sessions, DIY and DIT media, the Terminator Bar, a mobile silkscreen printing cart, a national WPA-inspired public poster project, a free school, impressive musical performances, boring theoretical nonsense, mapping projects, pop-up galleries, Korean/Polish BBQ and your proposals.

If you would like to participate in this year’s festival please view our Program Platforms. Submit your proposal online. All submissions are public.

How are Portland-based choreographers Tahni Holt and Linda Austin raising money to support the creation of new work in 2010? They’re doing a dinner series with two guest performers, artists, or writers in conversation with each other and guests at each monthly dinner.

Austin and Holt say the series was inspired by, “Our love for communal eating, a desire for more discourse that touches upon performance as an art among other arts, and a curiosity about other people’s processes: what and how and why they make what they make and do what they do.”

And if you come on May 22, you can eat and talk with me. I’m honored to be in such company.

Feb 27 Angelle Hebert (tEEth)+ Angela Fair

March 20 Linda Austin+ Kristan Kennedy

April 24 Tahni Holt+ Ethan Rose

May 22 Cydney Wilkes + Lisa Radon

June 26 David Eckard + Linda K. Johnson

July 24 Tiffany Lee Brown + Joshua Berger (Plazm)

Each dinner has room for 20 guests. You can email hello@tahniholt.com for reservations. Every dinner is at a different, secret, location that will be given upon reservations. $30-$100 (sliding scale) for one dinner / $100-$200 for four dinners.

From the press release:

Linda and Tahni are both active members in the performance community in Portland whose performing lives have intertwined in interesting ways in the past several years. As individuals they both have received numerous regional grants and awards. Most recently Linda’s work has been seen in New York, PICA’s TBA Festival, and at Performance Works Northwest. Over the past summer Tahni performed in Vienna, Austria and in Seattle, WA. In the summer of 2004 Linda and Tahni were two of ten selected to participate in Regional Dance Development Initiative (National Dance Project/NEFA) in Seattle. In 2005 they fundraised together in order to travel to Scotland for Deborah Hay’s Solo Commissioning Project. They performed back to back solo adaptations of Hay’s Room at PICA’s TBA( 2006), at Reed College Art week (2007) and in the Fusebox Festival (2007) in Austin, TX. They continue to find ways to support each other’s work and have a deep appreciation for the other’s creations.

Give a little listen. On Eva Lake’s most recent Art Focus show on KBOO, she interviews artist and educator, Eunice Parsons. The 93-year-old collagist is having a bit of a red letter year with a piece (one of the best) in the PNCA 100 show at the Portland Art Museum, a show at 12 x 16, and an exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem. I remember the brilliant juxtaposition of her work with Paul Fujita’s in Chambers Gallery’s first show.

See tonight, First Thursday, February 5, Josh Smith’s new exhibition, “The righteous foundation of us.” at the Manuel Izquierdo Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (825 NW 13th).

Cylinders, “the immaculate ideals of early modernism,” specifically in the architectural vein if his website is any indication, an exploration of hive and colony structures, their promise and capacity for control. Go check it out and let’s talk about it. In other lives, Smith ran the brilliant, late Tilt Gallery at Everett Lofts with Janene Nagy and makes criminally good furniture.

Lit. Like a bulb. Or a book. Or a class about a book. Split like a seam or a house come under the ministrations of one Gordon Matta-Clark. Split, rent from ordinary circumstances. Spit or sit. It. Multifaceted like a cut gem, the word “split” when rent with a well-placed slash, all the more deliciously ambiguous. “s/plit” is Portland-based artist Jenene Nagy‘s installation as part of the Portland Art Museum’s APEX series that brings dynamic regional artists space into the institution to Make Something Happen. Kudos, NW Curator, Jennifer Gately.

s/plit closes after tomorrow (June 22). Here’s why you need to go see it if you haven’t already been thrice.

Sited and Sited
s/plit fully engages the space in a way that no other APEX artist has. It’s not an installation series, so fine, but this is exciting and not to be missed. What do you mean “engages the space”? Nagy’s work dynamically draws you in, spins you around, and draws your gaze upward and over there. (all the more remarkable as this isn’t done with image, with color and color, it’s simply form (purple) enhanced with the briefest rhythmic frosting of neon light.) Eyes swept up and over your right shoulder, you notice an architectural feature, a cutout high in the wall above a doorway, that you have never noticed before. In this way, like good and truly site specific art, s/plit asks us to re-see a space. It’s the same (critical) function a small child performs on an urban walkabout, teaching us to re-see spaces, features, objects we have neglected to notice, ceased to see. Not coincidentally, the gallery Nagy runs with Josh Smith, Tilt, has shown exemplary work of this nature, esp. that of Alison Owen.

Your Hem Is Showing
The piece starts on the wall, as purple painted jagged form, grows off the wall and you notice the materials at work: the 2 x 4′s holding up panels that continue the wall-painted forms out into the space. You notice the transparency, the deliberate lack of sleight of hand, the methods of the panels’ suspension are here for all to see. And s/plit starts to talk about the walls of this site here, walls we take for granted in their paint over drywall over 2 x 4 studs, 16″ on center, say, foregrounding the space and its containment in interesting ways.

And were your experience of the work to stop here, it would be sufficient. But there’s a bit more, if you’d care to dig. Nagy is thinking about pre-fab American subdivision architecture, advertising billboards, stage props. The purple Nagy chose is a remembered shade, a sunset I think it was. Or see beyond walls, if you are the type whose mind can’t avoid looking at form as representing, and see horizon lines and reductionist landscapes, particularly with Nagy’s new use of glimmers of angular neon which could be reflections, water or glass. It’s a piece that perfectly balances appeals to intellect and eye.

Jeanene Nagy’s “s/plit” is located in the Wintercross Family Foundation Gallery, 4th floor, Center for Northwest Art, Hoffman Wing of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park).

See also:
Nagy has work at upcoming shows in Brooklyn and Berlin: Au Courant at Dam, Stuhltrager in Brooklyn and at Knowable Terrains at Takt kunstprojektraum in Berlin.

“Slip,” Jenene Nagy, 2008. Latex paint and paper, 97”x14”.

You got your chocolate in my peanut butter! You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!

Artist Brittany Powell is a native Oregonian while Jill Bliss is a native Californian. In a two-great-tastes-that-taste-great-together moment, Powell and Bliss, who now call Portland home, collaborate on a project they call Califoregon. An exhibition at Office PDX (2204 NE Alberta) of their drawings, cut-outs, gocco prints and more celebrate points of interest in and interesting points about the two states opens tonight, March 27 with a reception from 7-10 PM.