What’s more natural than a partnering between Portland’s on-a-roll arts school, PNCA, and pioneering Portland green developer Gerding Edlen (responsible for the Gerding Theater at the Armory in more ways that one as you can tell from the name)? PNCA and Gerding Edlin are partnering on the brand new Hybrid Gallery: A Roving Project Space (SW 12th and Washington) in GE’s latest project designed by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects (and ZGF’s new home).
I’m into the idea of arts spaces in every building, in every lobby. Bring it on.
The space opens this First Thursday with a party at 5 PM (beer+food+music) but more importantly an exhibition called “movies”, a collection of short experimental videos by PNCA students Jacob Winfield, Ryan Tesar Freeman, Kevin Tinnell, Morgan Alexandra Ritter, Joey Lusterman, Chris Bodven, Bryan Colombo, Adrienne Huckabone, Israel Lund, Sarah Burke, Julia Perry, Brennan Broome, and Jim Hill.
Dive, little man, dive. In Marina Zurkow’s video piece, “Elixir IV,” currently on view at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery (1241 NW Johnson), a crude, clip-art-ish platform diver does a twisting back one-and-a-half again and again. And while the piece and its sister “Elixir I” (which was a still projection when I visited UPDATE: but is now functioning) are riveting for their painterly and hypnotic motion of rotating crystal vessel through an ice-dotted sea near sheer walls of ice while layers of cloud or smoke drift and billow both inside the bottle out, it was the little man’s repetitive sequence that got me thinking.
I loved the phased piece of music Tim DuRoche composed for a recent Tere Mathern dance performance. Based on a morse code phrase, three repeating sequences at three tones slipped into and out of phase with one another, setting up dynamic rhythmic interplays.
There as in Elixir, repetition can have the counterintuitive effect of increasing the viewer/listener’s focus (or in my case, alertness). That is, if you have a viewer who’s game.
After watching “Elixir IV” for a while projected as it is at an ambitious scale—large enough that it attempts, like a Rothko or an IMAX movie screen, to envelop your sensory field—it becomes clear that yes, the sequence is in fact the same every time you see it: he’s doing the same dive again and again. The mind “solves” that bit of the piece and moves on. But meanwhile, in the patient awareness that that “reading” the man requires (willful and elaborate falling? futility? heroics? daily-ness? work?), there is time for the mind to wander over the other visual details of the piece (slipping from fore- to background and back) particularly as they change, but only slightly— the crystal vessel with a little digital splash at its neck slowly rotates; the clouds that move across the field or bubble up inside the vessel, that change color. The accompanying sound, a subtle and insistent machine thrum, also pulses and changes, but only slightly.
I’m grateful too, that although apparently Zurkow looks at the work she’s doing as narrative, this piece at least could bear any number of readings deriving from the desolate beauty of the frigid background, the juxtaposition of the hand-drawn (human-made) vessel and figure with the video of the natural: water and cloud, metaphors of water, the man’s containment, his repetitive action. The duration of the piece allows ample time to weave and unravel readings.
And don’t take this little video for it (above), go see it at scale in the darkened Feldman gallery.
This is part one of a two part invitation to see some exhibitions closing tomorrow. Don’t miss Josh Smith’s “The Righteous Foundation of Us” at the Miguel Izquierdo Gallery at PNCA (825 NW 13th). It’s utopian, architectural, accumulative like a coral reef, windowed like a modernist modular housing dream. And the form, here, you can see is magnificent. But don’t take my word for it, take a minute and go check it out, feel the scale, (and are we talking about density in the urban core and what it means, good, bad, ugly, and here: beautiful?) before it makes way for whatever comes next.
Is this not the perfect moment for a lecture on design entrepreneurship?
In a timely move, PNCA and OFFICE PDX are bringing in Jerry French, founder of French Paper, the only independently owned paper mill in the US, and acclaimed designer Charles S. Anderson, founder of Minneapolis-based Charles S. Anderson (CSA Design who together in 2006 launched Pop Ink. They’re giving a lecture “Art As Commerce, designing and selling your own product (the story of POP INK)” Wednesday, February 25 at 6:30 PM at PNCA’s Swiggert Commons (1241 NW Johnson).
See tonight, First Thursday, February 5, Josh Smith’s new exhibition, “The righteous foundation of us.” at the Manuel Izquierdo Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (825 NW 13th).
Cylinders, “the immaculate ideals of early modernism,” specifically in the architectural vein if his website is any indication, an exploration of hive and colony structures, their promise and capacity for control. Go check it out and let’s talk about it. In other lives, Smith ran the brilliant, late Tilt Gallery at Everett Lofts with Janene Nagy and makes criminally good furniture.
