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.

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.

It’s the beginning of the end at Pied-à-terre (904 SE 20th, Apartment 5) the Eastside gallery/project space open only from 12 – 3 PM on Saturdays.
London-based artist Alice Channer’s I Cannot Tell The Difference Between One Thing And Another is Pied-à-terre’s final show in Portland open through August 20.

From the press release:

Recent solo exhibitions include Worn-work, The Approach, London (2009), I have been unable to borrow the template of Big Ben, Punctuation Program, Limoncello, London (2009), and That Make Up Some Things, Associates Gallery, London (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Boule to Braid, Lisson Gallery, London, curated by Richard Wentworth (2009), The Quiet Revolution, Hayward Gallery touring show (2009), Strange Solution, Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2008), M25 Around London, CCA Andtrax, Mallorca (2008), and Dogtooth and Tessellate, The Approach, London (2008).

The new book arts center Em Space (407 SE Ivon), kicks things off with a thematic exhibition, Bridges, opening Saturday, July 18th from 6 to 9 PM. The juried show includes work by Blue Cole Press, The Bungaloo, Crooked Letter Press, Michael D’Alessandro, Design Medicine, Leah Duncan, Enormous Champion, Heroes & Criminals Press, Huldra Press, Anne Keech, Keegan Meegan, Lulu Dee, Miss Cline Press, Perla Anne, Iris Porter, The Post Family, Power & Light Press, Alyson Provax, Amy Rabas, Satsuma Press, Beth Schaible, Sensura Studio, Rory Sparks, Starshaped Press, Two Tone Press, Alisa Walton.

While there, you can tour the 2400 sq ft space and find out about studio memberships with access to letterpress and bookbinding equipment or screenprinting equip. Makes sense that a letterpress town like Portland gets a center like this to supplement the good work the IPRC is already doing.

This is going to go down as Portland’s banner year for contemporary Asian art and visual culture. While for some time Katsu Tanaka has kept a steady flow of contemporary art from Japan to US and vice versa at his COMPOUND Gallery, this year sees Reed College’s Cooley Gallery China Urban show and the upcoming China Design Now exhibition show at the Portland Art Museum for which Wieden + Kennedy‘s John Jay is apparently cooking up a number of ancilliary shows and/or programs.

Opening tonight at Gallery HOMELAND, Fresh is an exhibition of contemporary Korean painting and photography co-curated by Joowon Lee and Gallery HOMELAND’s Paul Middendorf and featuring work by Eun-young Cho, Sahm-kwon Kim, Jihee Kim, Yang-hee Kim, Duk Hwan Jo, Hyunmin Lee, Keum Aeng Seo, Jooahn Kwon, Ji Eun, and Lee. The show promises work that engages tradition as well as the pop now. Check it.

Tonight, July 10, is the opening reception from 6-9 PM.

Bookish is a Compliment is the current exhibition of work by Portland-based artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s at PDX Contemporary Art Across the Hall. In this shared space, it’s interesting to note that a piece that is of scale—”Dear Author”—tilts the gravity of the space toward their work.

Along the left wall, there are three “Index” pieces dealing with W.F. Herman’s Beyond Sleep. “Beyond Sleep Index I – Subject” reads like a traditional text index. There is an object index, “Beyond Sleep Index II – Object,” a photo presumably of imagined possessions of the book’s ill-equipped, adventuring protagonist laid out neatly on a white ground. And “Beyond Sleep Index III – Color” is a color bar chart as index which is most wonderful because it’s most difficult to read. Is that grey, for example, the color of an overcast Norwegian sky? The index pieces provide the delicious paradox of both bringing words to life in unusual ways and separating us further from their meanings by isolating them from context in index form. This produces just the right amount of healthy ambiguity in work that is also formally beautiful.

These Indexes are the closest of readings, demonstrating a process that indicates a deep relationship to text,thrilling in its Thirteen-Ways-of-Looking-at-a-Blackbird meets the Periodic Table way. Taking the content, turning it over and over, analyzing, organizing, making work in response

In their “Literary Ikebana” series of four photos the artists consider two sides of a coin: anxiety of influence and the construction of a root system that feeds into the Gray/Paulsen tree of work. Included in the four groupings are books or catalogs that Gray and Paulsen lay out as a breadcrumb trail for the active viewer to follow to the center of what concerns these thinking artists. Emma Kay’s Worldviewory of the world told through her own memories, the catalog from an ICA show on the void, The Big Nothing. As well there are clever inclusions like David Owen’s Copies in Seconds, a history of the Xerox machine, in the composition subtitled “Conceptual Art, How To.”

I could look at these pieces all day. But in their tightly-cropped way, they pretty much ignore formal hallmarks of ikebana: its use of assymetry and negative space. And of course, the word literary must be taken loosely. But the choice of the word “ikebana” cannot be accidental. Is the materiality of the book being referenced? Wood pulp and ink as analog to the stick, leaf, flower, stone of ikebana? Should I consider the act of composing these as an analog to the practice of ikebana?

Other works are book-related but self contained. The book with black pages, “Grandma’s Autobiography,” is a fine little knot, the object a platter on which the knot is delivered. Is the author, Ruby Randall, grandma, making her third person reference oddball or is she not grandma, making the word “autobiography” a mistake. Should I dig further to find out that the pages are carbon paper so that I can appreciate every aspect of this work. Or should I let it lie like the “The Book in the Stump” (just what it sounds like a paperback embedded in a stump…ashes-to-ashes), the artists’ little secret?

The Wittgensteinian undertow here is heavy, from the fact that Hermans was enough of a fan to translate the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into Dutch to the fact of the pair’s “Wittgenstein’s Pencil,” an actual No.2 pencil inscribed, “What can be shown cannot be said,” which takes on a pleasantly uncomplicated meaning in this context of a visual art gallery, as opposed to an invitation to dig into Wittgenstein’s notion of the picture (with a little “show-don’t-tell” admonition of the fiction professor thrown in for fun).

The oversized “Dear Author” letter illuminates a different aspect of these readers’ relationship with the book. It reads, “Dear Author, Do you think that one day you might include us in one of your books? We are already half-fictionalized.” Here the reader wants in to the book, implying with the word “fictionalized” that the desire is to one day be the subject of a fiction (possibly leading to a work of art made by a sensitive reader who will analyze one’s actions, speech, thoughts, belongings…round and round).

Of course, it’s also critique, perhaps of self (making half of it up, rewriting the story, a healthy imagination), perhaps of a society in which everyone from your neighbor to the anchor on the celebrity “news” show actively nudges the fact, molds it, torques it for motives both innocent and not. But the critique doesn’t mask the alternate reading of the piece that in this context is impossible to avoid: the desire to have one’s name recorded on the page in the history of art.

Gray and Paulsen can bury that thought in a stump and get on with it. Smart work like this will out. Give me arresting image/object with subterranean layers of content that invite both multiple readings and the digging through right to the bedrock of the artists’ concerns (and as to those concerns, good to find that yes, Gertrude, there is a there there). As the pair shake off the anxiety of their influences, I’m going to keep an eye on Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen.

Given a Milepost5 residency—a couple of months and some space—what does Justin Gorman do? I have yet to see his new exhibition, ThirtyThousandSeconds, but it looks like Gorman took a look at his surroundings and engaged in a project that does what he does so well, thoughtfully record and/or reflect back on the historical narrative of this city. His previous photography work, primarily text-based dialogue with the histories of select Portland buildings, has been a consideration of the long view both of our past and the future we’re building. By contrast, this project, focusing pedestrian patterns on a busy section of 82nd, digs into the very human Right Now of the paths between here and there.

See ThirtyThousandSeconds at Milepost5 (900 NE 81st Ave), June 20 to August 14 with a reception on the 20th from 7-9 PM.

“Visitors are invited to view the show from multiple angles: as an anthropological study of a short lived sub-culture, as a straight forward artist retrospective, as the estate sale of an eccentric family or as an artist’s memorial to a profoundly meaningful set of memories and friendships.” — wall text at BOX SET: The M.O.S.T. Remastered by Katy Asher

Katy Asher’s recent exhibition, BOX SET: The M.O.S.T. Remastered by Katy Asher, (Autzen Gallery at PSU May 18-May 29, 2009) was both document and invitation. Like any box set, it offers the collected works, serving as a point of reentry for those who where there when the works were first released into the world, and serving as introduction for those who weren’t. But there the analogy breaks down because this box set additionally contains photo album, documents tracing the actions and interactions of the group, and an actual member of the “band” (Asher) who sat the gallery every day to answer questions…and serve you an ice cream sandwich.

This enhanced box set comprises two layers of activity, the public and private faces of a four-person collaborative arts group called the M.O.S.T. In 2003, Khris Soden (the M), Katy Asher (the O), Jen Rhoads (the S), and Rudy Speerschneider (the T) met through Red76 curated Ministry of Small Things residencies at the Modern Zoo. That meeting became a five-year collaboration centered around Mostlandia, a country whose form they discovered in a spot on the floor in friend Matthew Yake’s bedroom, and whose customs, geography, politics, culture they explored (developed) together through group meetings and participatory events.

The objects in the main gallery are evidence of the public face of the M.O.S.T., its interaction with its audience. There are the burnt orange Mostlandian uniforms the M.O.S.T. wore at The Mostlandian Embassy at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the four cardboard boxes that served as machines for an early performance, the rubber stamp collection employed during its Misplaced Items Authority at Reed College, and the highest realization of the project, the Mostlandian Embassy Presents: The M.O.S.T. at PICA’s 2005 Time-based Art Festival (TBA) as forms were completed for immigration, passports, great ideas, high-fives, and plenty more in a series of shifting departments and bureaus. The 63-card trading card set, (including series: Hole to China, Super M.O.S.T. Friends, and Searching for a Heart of Gold) cards of which were given away at Mostlandian events provides some of the best evidence of the sense of play the group embodies.

In both social experiment and in play, the normal rules of social interaction are temporarily suspended. Much of play is the allowing of a new set of interactions to be explored. And this is at the heart of the work of the M.O.S.T. Through participatory events, parties, “athletic” competitions, the M.O.S.T. issued an invitation to imaginative play whether the participant was pretending that the big white box was really a machine that could provide answers to one’s questions or pretending that a Pearl District storefront was truly an embassy for a country called Mostlandia. What’s more, this state of play stands in pleasantly stark contrast to confrontational performance pieces of the past like those of Vito Acconci or Adrian Piper, in which the viewer/participant is the object of experiment. The M.O.S.T. engages a fully-committed, loving theater of the everyday. The participants co-create the experience of Mostlandia, the shared social activity and memory and its relationship to place both real (a meeting in a bedroom) or imagined (Mostlandia) while addressing what it is that comprises knowledge of place, what it means to be a native, a tourist, a member, an outsider.

It might be said that the exhibition may have had the most impact for those who participated in Mostlandian activities as the main output of the arts group was experience. Given that, the exhibition critiques the notion that any experience of performance or participatory art can be adequately documented and imported into a gallery setting. More importantly a second, robust layer of information about the collaborative processes of the group change the nature of the exhibition from simple document of the experience to exploration of the internal workings of the group, a lifting of the curtain for a view behind-the-scenes executed in true Mostlandian style.

The second layer is captured by the wall of maps, mostly by Speerschneider, documenting in a whimsically visual form, the individuals, relationships, and processes of the group juxtaposed with an imagined geography of Mostlandia. And Asher provides access to volumes of emails and file cabinets packed with research and meeting notes—the complete records, every scrap of paperwork (extant) in beautiful, ancient wooden file drawers—showing, among other things, the depth of the group’s investment in collaborative process as well as the rigor behind the imaginative play. Because in spite of its engagement with the world the M.O.S.T. is above all an artful collaboration. Asher may say that in May 2008, the M.O.S.T. dissolved, but the friendships and connections live on and will likely result in future projects.

Incoming: more of Asher at PSU MFA show, It’s Possible, at Disjecta, opening this Sunday, June 14 from 4-8 PM.

My experience of Gilles Deleuze is through the writings of the brilliant experimental poet Steve McCaffery. Portland-based artist Ben Stagl uses Deleuze’s notion of the fold as a jumping off point for a new body of work he describes as a “playful examination of both the architectural and philosophical concepts surrounding the fold and the act of folding” while also touching on Edo era origami and (new to me, yeah!) Chinese paper folding traditions of Zhe Zhi. Unfolding, new sculptural, print and video work by Stagl opens tonight at Gallery HOMELAND in the Ford Building (2505 SE 11th) Friday, June 5th with a reception from 6-9 PM. The exhibition also includes collaborations with Alison Heppner, Jon Springer, Angela Dawn, and Matthew Allen Wooldridge.

Stagl’s sculptures, installations, and performances combine visual impact, thoughtfulness, and a level of ambition and rigor that keeps me coming back for more. Catch Stagl’s work now before he heads out for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program.

It’s easy. We won’t have to stray far tonight to hit the high points of Portland’s First Thursday, when, as you know, the galleries stay open late with their August shows. Three spots in the DeSoto Building top our list for the night/month.

First up, we haven’t yet seen the show that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Craft on August 2, so first stop will be The Ceramics of Gertrud and Otto Natzler. She created these incredible forms, he developed a couple thousand experimental glazes and together they made 25,000 pieces, elevating vessel to fine art, and introducing modern European ceramics to America along the way through their LA studio and the classes they taught there.

“Alpine,” Robert Yoder, photo via Froelick Gallery

We’re also looking forward to seeing Robert Yoder’s Action Painting! at Froelick Gallery. Delicious vinyl and graphite collages from this Seattle artist aren’t paintings at all are they, but contain plenty of abstract action with a sometimes fractured, explosive surface, sometimes with twisted, falling flatforms. The Portland Art Museum just acquired a great piece of his entitled “Bank.” Now it’s your turn.

“New York Dolls”, Anton Perich at Augen

And you’ve seen many/most of these iconic photos before, pics of Edie Sedgwick, Joey and Debbie in bed, the Velvet Underground, but you’ll go see the new exhibition at Augen (716 NW Davis) anyway. Bande à part (band of outsiders) is an internationally traveling exhibition of work by photographers like Billy Name, Roberta Bayley, and Bobby Grossman (many more) who captured the New York underground scene in the 70′s and 80′s.