POV Dance Ford Building Project

POV Dance is going to dance the Ford Building (2505 SE 11th), its stairwells, walls, windows, and rails. What’s the Ford Building you say? You know it as home of Gallery HOMELAND.

Mandy Christiansen, Noel Plemmons have choreographed an evening-length work called “The Ford Building Project” in which their nine dancers will move from one end of the building’s ground floor to another, making a moving landscape of architecture, bodies, light and sound. $15 at brownpapertickets.com

Note: The performance runs approximately 65 minutes with no intermission. Seating is extremely limited and options include sitting or kneeling on the ground, with the option of standing. All performances are ADA compliant.

What I Would Do If It Were First Friday In Portland Oregon

YESWAY
Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman
Car Hole Gallery
114 SE 12th

Opening 5-9 PM, Music at 9 PM (The Bugs, Lickity)

Here’s Car Hole’s Sam Korman on YESWAY:

YESWAY is a show presented by Car Hole featuring the work of Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman. It is also a piece of linguistic cheesecake. YESWAY is the expression we use to emphasize our point, an affirmative counter to NOWAY: it universalizes information simply in its frequent appearance. Yet, YESWAY is not a term that often exists beyond this casual, quotidian exchange. Displaced from everyday usage, it’s meaning, or rather, meaninglessness only serves to emphasize its absurdity like some apparition of speech. But in these moments that go casually overlooked, an integral portion of our communication is lost, unrecorded, where YESWAY is not a random tag along, but an expression of the underlying mechanics of interpersonal communication—its mode vastly outweighs its meaning.

In its appearance, YESWAY is linguistic color: a secondary color, emphatic in its contrast—you use it without thinking, as the moment dictates, a placeholder for the larger coding of daily speech. Though different from NOWAY as the affirmative recognition of disagreement, it is nonetheless an immediate attempt at connection between people in everyday terms. Here, YESWAY resides in daily life, but as we expand our network of relations, YESWAY takes on a dual meaning, as interface and articulation—it is about how you shake your hips as much as what you sing. And, art, in our age of global connectedness, is beginning to reside in this social underbelly, as well.

In both Jaeger and Bowman’s work, a life-size portrait emerges of our daily attempts to communicate—whether concerning popularity or reaching aliens, the work develops a picture of our sweet, awkward and futile attempts at communicating with others, even if that means looking in the mirror. These artists humorously examine how, when two people engaged in conversation interpret and synthesize something seemingly innocuous, but ultimately binding—can generate an artistic language, as well. Art has a similar capacity to bond, counter, synthesize and reevaluate our daily lives, and in that, derive some kind of vernacular currency. Art is life, motherfuckers. YESWAY.

L Sub to the Polynomial
Midori Hirose
Nationale
811 E Burnside #122 (in back)

Opening 6-9 PM

L Sub to the Polynomial is a show of two series of new works on paper by Midori Hirose. According to Nationale director May Juliette Barruel:

For Series 1, Hirose thought about jokes and extracted the idea of happiness by reducing it to a moment of laughter. For Hirose, the technical elements of a joke are amazing. There is a definite rhythm, pattern, spatial aspect, precision, and a punch line to a good joke. Exploring this deductive reasoning, new portraits were drawn conceptually and visually with a quick, simple capture of the audible expression of happiness, people in the midst of laughing at something funny.

Similarly in Series 2, Hirose’s abstract objects play between figure and ground, paying attention to the space and form with precision, while melding quilt-like geometric patterns with hazed gradients of color. These spatial arrangements and polynomial forms are pushed by Hirose’s bright disorienting palette in a whimsical manner.

TRANSVERSE
Worksound
820 SE Alder

Opening 7 PM, music at 9 PM (Root Beer and French Fry)

TRANSVERSE, it’s a painting show… is a group show with work by Vanessa Calvert, Jaclyn Fronzack, Ruth Lantz, Jud Richardson, Jason Vance Dickason, Salvatore Reda

Guten Tag Meine Freunde
galleryHOMELAND
Opening 6–9 PM

Guten Tag Meine Freunde is a group show of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin where galleryHomeland has been operating EAST/WEST BERLIN with Dam Stuhltrager for the last six months. The show features work by Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski.

Paul Middendorf of gallery HOMELAND on KBOO with Eva Lake

Tomorrow on Eva Lake's Art Focus on KBOO, it’s Paul Middendorf, director of gallery HOMELAND. Show’s every Tuesday on 90.7 FM KBOO at 11:30 AM. Paul’s doing some great shows at HOMELAND in the Ford Building (SE 10th and Division) in SE Portland, and now, he’s lining up Portland-based artists for fall shows at a space in Berlin. Tune in.

ESCAPE at Gallery HOMELAND

A slate of experimental shorts from Canada for free tonight? Just press <ESC>.

Tonight curator J.J. Kegan McFadden brings ESCAPE, a free program of experimental shorts from Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Canada to Portland’s Gallery HOMELAND (in Ford Building, corner of SE 10th and Division) at 8 PM. The program includes work by Lori Weidenhammer + Donna Lewis, Sylvia Matas, Ho Tam, Hope Peterson, Tim Raffey, Leslie Supnet, Dominique Rey, Lisa Graves + Deborah Van Slet, Victoria Prince, Doug Melnyk, Anne Borden + Gail Mentlik, Jeremy Drummond, Divya Mehra, Collin Zipp, and Ken Gregory.

Curator’s statement:

There has always been more than one way to escape. The term itself carries with it several connotations: to flee, to transcend, to avoid. In our ever-evolving digital realm, to escape means something different altogether. When online, we escape through various quasi-anonymous discourses (blogs, games, chat rooms). The button located at the top left of the computer keyboard provides the user a means to get out of certain messy situations; to begin anew. Here, I am interested in an escape narrative, one informed by the medium, by the history of story telling, and the Hero’s Journey. This escape attempt is for us all.

Various metaphors for escape are alluded to in the fifteen videos collected here: disguise, travel, dance, sex, and meditation each become important elements on this ESCAPE route. Thus, the sequential ordering of the videos in ESCAPE is important. I have attempted not only to collect these titles within a specific trope, but also to shape them in order to tell a story. The plot, one might recognize, when discussing such a topic, is informed by archetypal stories.

Fresh

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.