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.

A little hot weather isn’t going to stop the art. In addition to tonight being Last Thursday on NE Alberta, there’s an interesting and a little bit mysterious project going on in SE. Hosted by Andy van Oostrum (note  that the invite says “hosted”  rather than “curated,” and so we ask why? and who? that’s the mystery part) the Open House Opening (7035 SE 20th) is an art event/installation in a vacant house.

Why am I going? Because this lineup of artists represents some of Portland’s best: Stephen Slappe just wrapped his installation at New American Art Union, Karl Burkheimer has great work in the current show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, I haven’t seen Heather Watkins work in a while, and want to know what she’s up to, and I never miss a chance to see work by Josh Smith or Jenene Nagy.

It’s 6-9 PM tonight, Thursday, July 30, and I get the sense this is a one-night-only affair.

Recently I had the occasion to pay a visit to Paul Sutinen at Marylhurst University. After we talked he showed me where “Sculpture in the Form of a Building” and “Among the Pin Oaks” were installed behind the Mayer Art Building. We talked about the greyed patina the wood of “Sculpture” had taken on and how some of the boards were warping away from the structure. It’s perhaps even more beautiful now than it was when the wood was golden and new.

Via research I’m doing on another topic, I’d recently seen a photo of an early installation Sutinen had done in the unfinished basement of the Anne Hughes Gallery in 1976 consisting of rough wooden stakes driven into the dirt floor. It’s ominous and melancholy in equal measure as well as being formally beautiful in spite of its arte povera-ishness. Sutinen has a long relationship with wood, not as a source of content, but as a material means to an end…it’s reasonably inexpensive vs. say, stone. But its true as well that tree and house—respectively source and terminus (for much wood)—have been addressed/employed repeatedly in his siteworks and installations.

I asked Paul about the simple house form that has recurred in his work, because it doesn’t seem that the house form for Paul is expected to say anything about houseness. (See also, his “Sculpture in the Form of a Small Building in the Distance” at Nine Gallery in 2008 reviewed on PORT). “Sculpture has to take a form,” he said. And where does one go after the minimalist box? Paul said it occurred to him that his work uses found forms, that the saltbox house is just one of these found forms.

“Sculpture in the Form of a Building” was built at the time of the mid-career retrospective Terri Hopkins did of Sutinen’s work at Marylhurst’s Art Gym, Incidents and Ideas in 2000 (for which there is a great catalog). I was surprised and dismayed to hear that he is considering taking it down next year. “That would be ten years,” he says.

So may I urge you, on one of these bright days, to take a field trip down to Marylhurst and make your picnic on the lawn behind the Mayer Art Building. You’ll also see, if you look hard enough under the trees close to the building, his sitework, “Among the Pin Oaks,” two intersecting concrete block paths laid from trunk base to trunk base of four oak trees. Both worth the trip.

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.