Latin Studies
Al Taylor
Elizabeth Leach
417 NW 9th
Opening reception 6-9 PM

“Don’t call them sculptures,” the late Al Taylor said of his wall constructions of found materials. His drawings and constructions were of a piece, one leading to the other and back again. Taylor, a New York artist whose work is here via David Zwirner, made work with materials at hand and considered shadow as a medium, according to the artist’s widow, Debbie Taylor. As these represent his first forays into three dimensions, this is a rare opportunity to see works from a pivotal point in Taylor’s career without getting on a plane.

In Touch
Judy Cooke
Elizabeth Leach
417 NW 9th
Opening reception 6-9 PM

Portland-based artist Judy Cooke negotiates a space between painting and sculpture with her almost architectural paintings on panel.

Elizabeth Leach
417 NW 9th
Opening reception 6-9 PM

Targets
Eva Lake
Augen Gallery
716 NW Davis
Opening reception 5-8:30 PM

Portland knows Eva Lake as an abstract painter, host of Art Focus on KBOO, arts writer, and former gallery owner. But Targets may take some people by surprise (although they are more Eva than perhaps anything else she’s done in her long arts career). Unified as a series by paper targets (which Lake originally swiped as a teenager from a police shooting range), these photomontages embody Lake’s unique and powerful feminism as an artist. They capture her nostalgic appreciation for pop feminine icons as well as her sense of art’s historical treatment of women as object (even women artists as objects). All the while Lake demonstrates, as to be expected, her deft way with color.

Recent Paintings
Terry Waldron
Augen Gallery
716 NW Davis
Opening reception 5-8:30 PM

A show of Waldron’s paintings which incorporate figure and scrawled word in compositions that suggest precarious and even tragic narrative.

Hercules
Storm Tharp
PDX Contemporary Art
925 NW Flanders

“In some regard, the drawings from Hercules reflect a desire to observe philosophy and to encounter perfection – to be enlightened. The maximal and decorated inclinations are in question. The labor and the effort are being weighed. Representation is scrutinized and the desire to explore the formlessness of abstraction is pursued. I do not intend to discount the work as intermediary, although it is fair and exciting to suggest that the work represents both a closing and an opening. The nods to Minimalism throughout are both revering as much as they suggest an end game and, ultimately, a question.”

An opening and a closing. What an interesting time, then to be seeing this show of Tharp’s uncanny portraits and minimalist abstractions. Particularly on the heels of his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, that we are seeing him at a pivotal moment is exciting. He namechecks the Pillars of Hercules on which the hero supposedly had inscribed, “Non plus ultra,” (or “Nec plus ultra”) “there is nothing beyond.” But it seems, from what he says above, that he’s about to disregard that warning and sail through the Straits out onto the open ocean.

Romance
Brad Adkins
Across the Hall, PDX Contemporary Art
925 NW Flanders

Meanwhile, Across the Hall, Adkins Romance is a show of large scale sculpture and text-based work with a dim (if witty) view of the show’s title.

Pop Coochie
IGLOO
625 NW Everett #102
Opening reception 6-10 PM

Maybe I’m just saying we’re all corrupted in a way; life itself is corrupted, and that’s the way we like it.
- Maurizio Cattelan

With work by Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, Jason Traeger and Liam Drain, Alicia McDaid, Matthew Green, Ralph Pugay, Patrick Rock.

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.

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.

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.

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.