GRIP, GRASP, GROPE, AND FONDLE
Lucas Murgida
Autzen Gallery
2nd Floor PSU Neuberger Hall, Room 205, 724 SW Harrison
SF artist Murgida makes work through (and addressing) his work … conducting “research” while employed as cabinetmaking, restaurant work, locksmithing, and now yoga instruction. Artist talk/performance at opening.
Wrecking Crüe
IGLOO
625 NW Everett #102
Titled cute, this is a group show of work by Jordan Tull, Josh Smith, Salvatore Reda, Joshua Pavlacky, and Jeff Jahn (like the j-alliteration…should Salvatore change his first name?). Bullet points from the quite poetic statement:
- constructed space
- structural invention
- half-made/half-undone
- hypershapes
- blueprints and Outer Space
- rendering philosophical material from impulsive architecture
3X_PWN_TRANZ
Future Death Toll
Tractor
328 NW Broadway
sometimes when you pick up the pwn, you don’t know who is on the other line.
sometimes when you pick up the pwn, you do all the talking.
sometimes when you pick up the pwn, the pwn does all the talking for you.
I’m into the idea of “evidence of a past or future mission to transmit” as well as the machines of communication.
Grassland Alphabet
Seth Nehil
In House Gallery
625 NE Everett St. #106
“…calligraphic exercises – letter-forms constructed from waves and clusters of marks. I imagined a field of wheat attempting to form itself into words, a mute landscape swelling in the wind, blades of grass arranging and aligning themselves.”
Constrain to Vertical
Brenda Mallory
DOPPLER PDX
625 NW Everett Street #109
Fabric wall pieces inspired by stacks of UPS “end-of-day” barcodes + Agnes Martin.
Also
Clouds
Lucinda Parker
Laura Russo
805 NW 21st
O.G. Ab-Ex powerhouse and longtime arts educator Parker with a show of new paintings. Parker gives a talk Saturday, March 27, at 11 AM.
Letters from Switzerland
Melody Owen
Elizabeth Leach
417 NW 9th
“For Letters from Switzerland, using the tools and media of the Swiss-originated Dadaists, Owen created a precise and strange group of collages, examining feelings of dislocation and disconnection. Featuring bisected animals spilling flowers from their guts, and hotels sprouting roots that can’t find purchase, these works allude to the deracinated experience of the contemporary traveler.”
Marker
Marie Watt
PDX Contemporary Art
925 NW Flanders
Show of new work by Watt including “Trunk,” this incredible, sinuous cedar sculpture.
Laurie Danial
Froelick Gallery
714 NW Davis
Abstract paintings by Danial that feature tracings, structures, transparencies, the built and the organic.
POSTED: March 4th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, autzen, brenda mallory, doppler pdx, elizabeth leach gallery, first thursday, froelick gallery, future death toll, igloo, jeff jahn, jordan tull, josh pavlacky, josh smith, laurie danial, lucas murgida, lucinda parker, marie watt, melody owen, pdx contemporary art, portland, salvatore reda, seth nehil, tractor | 1 Comment »
Should I tell you that I wrote this once already and that the computer ate my homework? You can tell me that what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. What are you doing First Thursday? Some suggestions.
First up, two shows about touring. At Compound Gallery (107 NW 5th) is Survival Drive a photo and drawing show with work by artist, Rei (Reijiro Mochizuki) and photographer, Hooky (Souichiro Fukuda) who chronicle Japan via a 131 day, 34,033km journey in the tradition of wandering great ukiyo-e artist Hokusai Katsushika, some 200 years gone.
And at Fontanelle Gallery The Art of Touring is a group exhibition featuring photography by Alissa Anderson (Vetiver), Hannah Mae Blair, Sharon Cheslow, Mia Clarke (Electrelane), Jem Cohen, Erika Spring Forster (Au Revoir Simone), Rebecca Gates, Emma Gaze (Electrelane), Megan Holmes, Andy Moor (The Ex), Tara Jane Oneil, Jean Smith (Mecca Normal) and more.
I am very much interested in seeing Jordan Tull’s installation, Reflexion, at Tractor. (Photo by Dan Mclaughlin.)
At Elizabeth Leach Gallery (417 NW 9th), Malia Jensen’s show of new sculpture and works on paper, Knee High to a Worm.
Night Poems, an installation by Aidan Koch and Paul Wagenblast at Pony Club Gallery (625 Everett #105) intrigues me.
And finally, before it comes down on August 8, please see Brennan Conaway’s In Joyful anticipation of Catastrophic Ruin- The First Colony at the PDX Contemporary Art (925 NW Flanders) Window Project (window on NW 9th at Flanders). Inside, find an exhibition of works by the late photographer, Terry Toedtemeier, entitled, Trees.
POSTED: August 4th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, compound gallery, elizabeth leach gallery, first thursday, fontanelle gallery, gallery, pdx contemporary art, pony club gallery | No Comments »
What’s interesting in Portland galleries this month?
Midori Hirose and Joshua Orion Kermiet do an installation (sculpture, collage, and works on paper) at Fontanelle Gallery (205 SW Pine).
Oracle 2, Victoria Haven, 2009, Silver gelatin print, 13″ x 13″ (20.5″ x 20″ framed)
I am looking forward to seeing Victoria Haven’s work at PDX Contemporary Across the Hall’s (925 NW Flanders) aptly named summer group show, Catch All. The exhibition has a variety of work from Brad Adkins, Monica Angle, Lydia Beebe, Victoria Haven, Philip Iosca, Vanessa Johnson, Justin L’Amie, James Lavadour, Raymond Meeks, Vanessa Renwick, Adam Sorensen, Storm Tharp, Marie Watt.
Also at PDX Contemporary (925 NW Flanders) Wes Mills’ Mondrian’s Forest.
And check Josh Pavlacky’s installation, Ark, at Tractor (328 NW Broadway). Pavlacky, whose website is in-progress/enigmatic is part of Appendix. Read Richard Schemmerer’s interview with Pavlacky re: Appendix on ArtLit. And here’s a past installation Pavlacky did at Appendix.
POSTED: July 1st, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, first thursday, fontanelle gallery, galleries, gallery, pdx contemporary art | No Comments »
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.
POSTED: June 22nd, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: anna gray, art exhibition, bookish is a compliment, exhibition, gallery, pdx contemporary art, portland artists, ryan wilson paulsen, visual art, wittgenstein | 2 Comments »