The comet that is Portland2010—burning ball, long glowing tail—having buzzed Portland this past month is heading back off into space after this weekend. At least one show continues: Heidi Schwegler at Alicia Blue Gallery, a new gallery on Alberta.
Today blazes with the first performance of Tahni Holt’s Culture Machine at 6 PM at Disjecta (8371 N Interstate), and Oregon Painting Society kicking out the jams with Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner at 9 PM with a performance, “WitchAngel,” in OPS’ installation “HexenHouse” at the Templeton Building (230 E Burnside). Doors at 8 PM. It’s free, and the performance is only 30 minutes long. AND OPS, who are heading to the TATE MODERN next month as part of No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents will be selling their printed boxes (and t-shirts) at the show to raise dough for the trip. Tomorrow, there’s a curator’s talk by Cris Moss at 3 PM at Disjecta, and another performance of Culture Machine.
ARE YOU READY?
There are two things you should not let slip away from you before the end of the weekend. By hook or crook you should see the work by numerous artists at the Templeton Building and Ditch Projects’ “Are You Ready for the Country?” at Rocksbox (6540 N Interstate). Ditch is the crew from Springfield, OR who run the alt arts space of the same name doing exhibitions of the caliber Portland wishes we had in an artist-run space. Ditch Projects, I probably don’t need to tell you, is a play on the soon-to-be-late Deitch Projects in NY (Jeffrey Deitch is shuttering it as he heads west to direct MOCA). Like Deitch, Ditch does exhibitions, environments, and eyelash-searing performances. Here, the Ditch crew—Julie Berkbuegler-Poremba, Mike Bray, Jared Davis-Haug, Damon Harris, Tim Meyer, Donald Morgan, Dave Siebert, Robert Smith, and Jesse Sugarman—address, obliquely, a Portland-Springfield relationship…or not…celebrating “the urban center’s…submission to the rural margin,” displaying, “the trappings of this neo-rurality, creating a buck hunter’s trophy wall of crude plaza monuments and high-tech folk art.” I love that last description almost as much as the show itself. Sculptures of crystal chunks suspended from hot pink cord and bent black acrylic sheets in the mylared interiors of white boxes are about sensationalizing the natural, in the form of the crystal, in a most unnatural way (the white boxes not unlike white box gallery spaces, I read it as comment on romanticized, nature-inspired art in the gallery). One of these works has what I recognized as a Donald Morgan cast pile of shit on top, with a little mushroom growing out of it. Nice.
The black light suspended in a lean-to of tinted car windows is possibly the best element of the show, making Larry Bell-like minimalism of the discarded, either the city as filling in cracks in the country or primacy of car culture in many rural towns. The obscured symbols of a series of black-on-black, triangle-on-circle paintings are perfectly indeterminate. But the best works are two video works: one of two hands arranging and rearranging two car windows into symmetrical forms (which I found mesmerizing) and the other of a tree-shaped car air freshener hanging from a rearview mirror…in flames as the Eagles play on the radio. We see the flames and the windshield and the headlit field beyond, the everynight of the rural kid, “parked.” For all I love about the subverting-one’s-expectations aspect of this show, what the hell with the black noose in the back room? Pretty damn loaded to work with the rest of the show. Feels like a sucker-punch, after which the artist runs away.
Sean Healy. Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma 2010. detail.
The Portland2010 Biennial opened last Saturday night at two of its eight venues, Rocksbox Fine Art and Disjecta. The exhibition by Ditch Projects at Rocksbox, I’ll talk about in another post. But the work at Disjecta was very familiar to followers of the arts in Portland. David Corbett recently had work in a group show at Half/Dozen Gallery, Crystal Schenk’s stained glass shopping cart, “Have and Have Not,” was at the PNCA faculty show, Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas’ installation, “Warlord Sun King,” had been previously installed at the Marylhurst Art Gym while Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis’ drywall semi, “West Coast Turnaround,” was installed at Milepost 5 albeit with a few yards fewer of trailer.
David Corbett. Past Craft. 2009.
Sean Healy. Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma 2010. installation view.
Sean Healy. Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma 2010. detail.
Sean Healy. Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma 2010. detail.
Crystal Schenk. Have and Have Not, 2006. Holy Cow! 2010.
Crystal Schenk & Shelby Davis. West Coast Turnaround. 2009.
Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas. Warlord Sun King. 2009.
David Corbett. Glass Houses. 2010.
It was fantastic seeing Sean Healy’s installation yesterday with fewer viewers in the house and with the benefit of knowing its title, “Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma.” The four candy-colored resin “concrete blocks” are the shadow of that muscle car that finally made if off the blocks in the suburban driveway while the accompanying wall pieces constructed of what look like the paper end of hundreds of cigarettes on end are missing only the grease marks of fingerprints as they stand to mark the mechanic’s time spent under the hood. This is the second time today I’ll note in writing the minimalist overtones (in particular, West Coast minimalism as influenced by car culture) of work that’s moved beyond it, in Healy’s case toward a sort of oblique slice of All-American narrative. It’s such a strong installation.
While Crystal Schenk’s crystal-encrusted longhorn skull is lovely, its mounting on wood paneling made it feel too winkingly NW kitsch and deterred its ability to jab at Damien Hurst’s absurdly over the top diamond-encrusted human skull. Her “Have and Have Not” fares better, an extraordinarily crafted grocery cart with turned wood handle and stained glass sides quietly referencing the church of consumerism in a charged form that doubles as transportation tool of last resort.
The more I see of David Corbett’s exploration of complex if improvised structures the more I like it. Here there are three works on paper and a sculpture, two and three-dimensional representations in transparent ochre and dripping glossy black respectively of something like a Buckminster Fuller dome folded in on itself once and again, an irregular, tangled armature of a failing polyhedron or a ridiculously complex model of an unknown molecule. The works on paper, “Glass Houses I-III” are forms floating free of context. The thick and dripping coating of the sculpture, “Past Craft,” anchors that form in the real and messy world.
Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas’ “Warlord Sun King” is a blinding tanning bed studded with plants and garbage, suspended from the ceiling and dangling various minerals and stones like a monster chandelier gone to pot. Conkle and Lucas invoke the decadent style of the court of Louis XIV (tanning bed >> Sun King)—a kind of grotesque Hall of Mirrors reflecting the recent financial bubble that made wealthy art stars—but with a DIY aesthetic: panels of used tinfoil, a very handmade golden shovel, and gold thrift store frames. In the frames the natural world (also busy retaking the chandelier) is pristine but deformed in a stand of burled tree trunks and boxed in glass in natural history museum diorama. Meanwhile there’s a portrait of Lucas in repose holding a framed photo of Conkle, le roi et la renne au fin de civilization as we know it?
Portland2010 Biennial continues with openings tonight at Left Bank for Stephen Slappe and the Templeton Building with multiple installations/artists.
Here we go. Portland2010, a biennial exhibition of contemporary art curated by Cris Moss and organized by Disjecta kicks off this weekend with a double hit: new exhibitions with a powerhouse group of artists opening at Disjecta and Rocksbox Fine Art. Portland2010 is really a series of exhibitions in several Portland venues rather than a single venue/multiple artists. Eighteen artists were chosen from a field of 300 and shows will happen at venues ranging from established galleries like Elizabeth Leach to the Left Bank to the Templeton Building (hell, yes, bring back the Templeton Building!). All kicks off tonight, 6-10 PM at Disjecta and Rocksbox.
What I’m most interested in for this first round of openings is to see Are You Ready for the Country? by Springfield, OR’s Ditch Projects at Rocksbox Fine Art (6540 N Interstate). This artist collective runs a space in Springfield where they’ve been putting up what look like really strong shows for some time. And I’ve never been able to get down there. So I’m glad the mountain comes to Moses. I’ve seen great work by a number of Ditch members like Mike Bray (at Fourteen30) and Donald Morgan at the Hoffman Gallery at OCAC. The current members of Ditch Projects are: Julie Berkbuegler-Poremba, Mike Bray, Jared Davis-Haug, Damon Harris, Tim Meyer, Donald Morgan, Dave Siebert, Robert Smith, and Jesse Sugarman.
There exists a separation between the rural and the urban, a relationship of margin and center in which the urban assumes the position of primary focus. Are You Ready for the Country rejects this relationship, offering in its place an extraction of the phantom presence of the rural from within the facade of the urban. Finding inspiration in the apocalypse of vacancy that marks urban failure, Are You Ready for the Country identifies and celebrates the urban center’s sudden and full submission to the rural margin. Refusing the iconography of idealized naturalism, the members of Ditch Projects opt, instead, to frame rurality as the physical lack of constant urbanity. This expanded arcadia offers an alternate interpretation of provinciality, an opportunity for country objects and backwoods instances to be birthed from the crises of urban decay. Are You Ready for the Country displays the trappings of this neo-rurality, creating a buck hunter’s trophy wall of crude plaza monuments and high-tech folk art.
Bring it.
And at Disjecta (8371 N Interstate), Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas further explore their trademarked(!) Eco-Baroque concept they’ve worked with before at The Art Gym and at PSU. The artists’ statement:
‘Eco-Baroque’ is a maximalist aesthetic approach and style based on natural forms in which magnificent opulence is created using ornate or decorative materials, and mixing in simple natural materials when possible or practical. Exploring this concept, the aim is to inform and amuse while questioning our consumption of energy, (tanning beds, grow lights, and by extension – nuclear fusion), resources, and humanity’s ever-changing relationship to the environment, drawing analogies between complex beauty as found in nature and the luxury goods with which mankind seeks in order to try and separate himself from the animals.
We draw inspiration from moss, lichen, crystals, minerals, honeycomb, coconuts, Native American culture, reflections, gold leaf, fountains, dioramas, chandeliers, most shiny things and psychedelic patterns found abundantly in nature. Our collaborative process is very spontaneous and allows us to push the boundaries of each of our individual oeuvres, often to absurd dimensions. We share a similar sense of humor, political, social and eco-based attitudes about the world and making art. Individually, we have produced work that explores Pacific Northwest regionalism with both humor and reverence for the place where we have been raised and live.
Also at Disjecta (8371 N Interstate), we’ll see work by David Corbett (who recently had work in The Quadratic Logogram of Almost Everything show at Half/Dozen, Sean Healy, who most recently did a project with Joe Thurston at Gallery HOMELAND’s EAST/WEST Berlin, Crystal Schenk & Shelby Davis who I think are reinstalling West Coast Turnaround, their installation from Milepost 5, and dancer and choreographer Tahni Holt whose “Culture Machine (In Progress)” performance will be developed and performed over the course of Portland2010 (more on that shortly).
Ongoing are two exhibitions of work by PORTLAND2010 artist Melody Owen, Letters from Switzerland through March 27 at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (417 NW 9th) and So Close to the Glass and Shivering through April 9 at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (BP John Administration Building, 17600 Pacific Highway).
Still to come: work by
Holly Andres
Corey Arnold
Pat Boas
John Brodie
David Eckard
Damien Gilley
Oregon Painting Society
Melody Owen
Jenene Nagy
Heidi Schwegler
Stephen Slappe
Kartz Ucci
Weird-Fiction heads south with its “Cryospheric Disturbances” to Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR. With Future Death Toll, Weird Fiction plays the opening of an exhibition of work by J.B. Raetzke and Matthew Gamber as part of “Ditch Freeze: A wintry mix of exhibitions, festivities and special events” this Saturday, February 20, 7-10PM. Performances begin at 9 PM.
Staving off vamplers and rogue Space-Time Transients, Weird Fiction undercover new paths in the Hollow Earth. Culled from reams of reports and emergent patterns from a year’s worth of posts, Weird-Fiction’s latest offering, Cryospheric Disturbances, sweeps the viewer into a shadowy realm of mythos and mystery not soon to be forgotten. Eager denizens of the interweb will find suggestive correspondences between hours 9pm and 10pm, dispatched from feed: http://twitter.com/cthulhucalling
