First Thursday at IGLOO Gallery (625 NW 6th #102) is a gamble. They’re having an art raffle to raise some $ with raffle tickets costing $5—you gamble on any piece you like—and work by artists including: Jenene Nagy, May Juliette Barruel, Vanessa Calvert, Salvatore Reda, Craig Wheat, Ashley Sloan, Calvin Ross Carl, Sydney S. Kim, Chris Lael Larson, Ryan Burghard, Avantika Bawa, Ralph Pugay, Josh Pavlacky, Zack Davis, Maggie Casey, Ben Young, Travis Fitzgerald, Miles Sprietsma, Nathanael Thayer Moss, Chelsea Linehan, Lori Gilbert, Mack McFarland, Kevin Nagler, Kathleen Brown, Christine Taylor. The draw is at 9 PM and you don’t have to be present to win.

Meanwhile Oregon Painting Society is raising money to get themselves to London for their part in the NO SOUL FOR SALE exhibition at the Tate Modern by selling their screenprinted boxes from their Portland2010 Biennial installation and t-shirts screened with a similar vocabulary of symbols. Boxes are $25 and t-shirts are $10. Email oregonpaintingsociety at gmail dot com.

Molly Roth, Forgotten Foxes 2009

And Gallery HOMELAND, which has been doing the incredible EAST/WEST BERLIN project with Brooklyn’s Dam Stuhltrager gallery, sending artists from HOMELAND and Stuhltrager to Berlin for exhibitions and residencies, is raising money for its 2010 programming via its HOLY SHEET extended edition shop full of moderately priced works by Portland artists like Ethan Rose, Mack McFarland, JoAnn Kemmis and many more. HOMELAND has also printed team t-shirts, available for $15.

A handful and a half of Portland2010 Biennial artists talk about their installations at the Templeton Building tonight. Specifically, they’re talking about “approaches to site-specificity in installation,” one of my personal favorite topics. Curators and artists toss around the term “site-specific” so loosely that it is virtually meaningless. No, that’s not fair. It usually means an installation in a space. Period. Robert Irwin makes useful distinctions about the relationship of an installation to a site/space, distinguishing between site-adjusted, site-determined, site-specific, and site-dominant.

From Robert Irwin’s Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art and included in my favorite Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art:

1) Site dominant. This work embodies the classic tenets of permanence, transcendent and historical content, meaning, purpose; the art-object either rises out of, or is the occasion for, it’s ‘ordinary’ circumstances — monuments, historical figures, murals, etc…..

2) Site adjusted. Such work compensates for the modern development of the levels of meaning-content having been reduced to terrestrial dimensions (even abstraction)….

3) Site specific. Here the ‘sculpture’ is conceived with the site in mind; the site sets the parameters and is, in part, the reason for the sculpture

4) Site conditioned/determined. Here the sculptural response draws all of its cues (reasons for being) from its surroundings. This requires the process to begin with an intimate, hands on reading of the site.

We could also talk about site-inspired, site-denying, site-nuzzling, site-bullied, and on and on.

Damien Gilley, Jenene Nagy, and Oregon Painting Society have all made extraordinary installations at the top of their games for Portland2010. Should be a good discussion.

Tonight, Friday, April 16 from 7-9 PM at the Templeton Building (5 SE 3rd, Underneath the Burnside Bridge).

Here’s a conversation with Irwin on ArtBabble.com.

It’s the second opening weekend for the Portland2010 with shows opening at Leftbank (240 N Broadway) and the Templeton Building (230 East Burnside but entrance is under the bridge at SE 3rd) tonight from 6-10 PM. That’s right, the Templeton Building, that sprawling vacant hulk that opens onto the Burnside Bridge and that once housed Disjecta, returns to its former glory as sensational art venue with work by photographers Holly Andres and Corey Arnold, sculpture from David Eckard, work by Pat Boas, John Brodie, and installations by those we’ve come to expect will hit it out of the park by Damien Gilley, Jenene Nagy, and Oregon Painting Society. A strong lineup of artists bringing photography, sculpture, painting, and killer installation: this is going to be very good.

At the same time, an exhibition by video artist Stephen Slappe (who recently had work in the Vantage show at Clark College and in PICA’s TBA:09) opens at Left Bank. Recall Slappe’s sculptural video installation at NAAU, and you’ll know why I’m heading there first tonight.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen new sculpture from David Eckard, as he’s been working on performance/video; eagerly anticipating. Pat Boas just had a very strong show at the Art Gym, (I reviewed Record Record) and has work in the group show currently at Elizabeth Leach. Damien Gilley’s (IGLOO Gallery) wall-based installations that comment on the space their in have rocked both Gallery HOMELAND and Homeland’s EAST/WEST Berlin in the past year. And Jenene Nagy (her recent Tidal at Disjecta was magnificent) is installing “Destroyer” in the Templeton basement. Oregon Painting Society’s performances and installations just keep getting more interesting.

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.

Disjecta is doing a happy hour every Friday from 5-8 PM with artist Jenene Nagy whose epic installation, Tidal, is currently on view. Friday night, February 19 at 7 PM, “Nagy will present a talk on her work in the form of a Q+A led by fellow artist Avantika Bawa. The conversation will range from practice in general, site-specific and project-based works, Tidal in particular and how it came to be, and the influence of curatorial practice on artmaking.”

Nothing says summer like a good group show (except maybe margaritas and Dr. Scholl’s sandals). And I have to love a gallerist (Jeanine Jablonski) who quotes Camus—“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”—while deploying Cheech and Chong in the show poster.

Tonight Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd) opens SUMMER SHOW with a reception from 6 to 9 PM with a Left Coast-heavy lineup of artists whose work I’m really looking foward to seeing including Mike Bray (Eugene, OR); David Corbett (Portland, OR); Hamlett Dobbins (Memphis, TN); Alex Felton (Portland, OR); Corey Lunn (Portland, OR); Jenene Nagy (Portland, OR); Devon Oder (Los Angeles, CA); Nicholas Pittman (Portland, OR); Patrick Rock (Portland, OR); Jennifer Shimatsu (Los Angeles, CA); and Nick Van Woert (Brooklyn, NY).

Count on it. Exhibitions at Tilt Gallery and Project Space (625 NW Everett #106) are hands down among the most interesting, critically acclaimed, and talked about of those at any gallery in Portland. Tilt has made space for installation work that is happening in few other places in Portland, and they do it month after month, exhibiting work both visiting and Portland-based artists.

Count two: two is for Tilt’s two-year anniversary, celebrated with a party January 25 from 7-11 PM at the gallery. And two is for the number of Tilt’s gallery directors/curators: Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith (“Wondertwin powers, Activate!”). Nagy’s APEX installation at the Portland Art Museum opening February 16 is bound to be one of the notable visual art exhibitions of the year. She has been curating good work into the Autzen Gallery at PSU and she also teaches. And Smith makes incredible work somewhere between furniture and fine art (more on his work soon) and is currently at OCAC.

The Friday night celebration doubles as closing reception of ONE NONE DONE, a site-specific project by Portland artist Jesse Hayward.

“Worry” by Rebecca Ripple, styrofoam and acrylic, 2006.

On the eve of the anniversary, Tim DuRoche asked co-directors/co-curators Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith a few questions about what’s next for Tilt:

What do you look forward to in the coming year?
We look forward to working with several new artists. Our highlight for the year is Lauren Clay from Brooklyn. Also bringing in Rebecca Ripple from LA who will participate in PSU’s Monday Night MFA Lecture Series. A Portland artist we’re excited to host is Ben Buswell in his follow-up from the 2006 Oregon Biennial.

With established players like Motel and Portland Art Center vanishing and larger galleries taking fewer big risks do you see Tilt stepping up to fill an emerging/divergent niche?
We specifically opened Tilt two years ago to fill that niche. As a non-commercial space we feel like our agenda is different form both of these venues. Tilt is run with the rigor and professionalism commonly associated with commercial galleries and the risk-taking and innovative programming of a nonprofit. We continue to specialize in emerging and under-recognized artists, both regional and national. Primarily, we exhibit experimental and difficult to show work.

What are some watchwords for Tilt’s curatorial momentum?
Diverse, experimental, challenging, educational, enthusiastic.

What is the nature of the universe, permanence or change?
Permanently changing.

What are three things you’d love people to know about Portland art (and/or artists) that they don’t know?
Mostly that the artists who live and work here are incredibly supportive of one another, making it a really great community. Although opportunities are limited, it feels like the artists are genuinely excited when peers succeed. Also, there’s so much happening here, something for everyone on many different levels: Crafty Wonderland, the Alberta scene, the Pearl, of course, mixed-use venues like Jace Gace and Ogle, and great academic institutions like the Cooley Gallery (at Reed) and the Archer (Clark College in Vancouver).