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.

It’s the beginning of the end at Pied-à-terre (904 SE 20th, Apartment 5) the Eastside gallery/project space open only from 12 – 3 PM on Saturdays.
London-based artist Alice Channer’s I Cannot Tell The Difference Between One Thing And Another is Pied-à-terre’s final show in Portland open through August 20.

From the press release:

Recent solo exhibitions include Worn-work, The Approach, London (2009), I have been unable to borrow the template of Big Ben, Punctuation Program, Limoncello, London (2009), and That Make Up Some Things, Associates Gallery, London (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Boule to Braid, Lisson Gallery, London, curated by Richard Wentworth (2009), The Quiet Revolution, Hayward Gallery touring show (2009), Strange Solution, Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2008), M25 Around London, CCA Andtrax, Mallorca (2008), and Dogtooth and Tessellate, The Approach, London (2008).

This is going to go down as Portland’s banner year for contemporary Asian art and visual culture. While for some time Katsu Tanaka has kept a steady flow of contemporary art from Japan to US and vice versa at his COMPOUND Gallery, this year sees Reed College’s Cooley Gallery China Urban show and the upcoming China Design Now exhibition show at the Portland Art Museum for which Wieden + Kennedy‘s John Jay is apparently cooking up a number of ancilliary shows and/or programs.

Opening tonight at Gallery HOMELAND, Fresh is an exhibition of contemporary Korean painting and photography co-curated by Joowon Lee and Gallery HOMELAND’s Paul Middendorf and featuring work by Eun-young Cho, Sahm-kwon Kim, Jihee Kim, Yang-hee Kim, Duk Hwan Jo, Hyunmin Lee, Keum Aeng Seo, Jooahn Kwon, Ji Eun, and Lee. The show promises work that engages tradition as well as the pop now. Check it.

Tonight, July 10, is the opening reception from 6-9 PM.

In 2005, Nathan McKee launched collaborative magazine project, Fake Your Own Death, initially to introduce his artist friends to one another. The second issue is finished and now you can meet McKee friends, too, including Jessie Rose Vala, Rita Badalamenti, Josh Sachs, Liz Harris, NRob Doran, Tim Root, Tamar Monhait, and Fremont Slim. Their work is up at Stumptown downtown throughout the month of July, and you can get the mag at the opening reception and magazine release party First Thursday from 6-8 PM at Stumptown Coffee Roasters (128 SW 3rd).

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.

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).

via Linda Austin’s PWNW blog:

Lori Felker and Ben Popp present “Via Chicago: An evening of films” June 17th at 9 PM at Performanceworks Northwest (4625 SE 67th) FREE or by donation.

“Lori Felker and Ben Popp both came from opposite sides of the country to obtain their masters degrees in film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lori remained to teach at the school while Ben moved back out west to Portland, OR to try his hand at the film scene there screening works in Filmed By Bike and the Portland Underground Film Fest. Lori contacted Ben about doing a show as she comes through town on a trip out west. They both came to Portland…”via Chicago”

Pippa Possible and Crispin Rosenkranz moved from Portland to Chicago in 2007. Pippa began attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she will receive her BFA in December 2009. Pippa is the Station Manager at FreeRadioSAIC, and focuses on the time-arts – video, audio and performance. Crispin recieved his BS in Speech Communications at Portland State University. Before transplanting to Chicago, he has been a dancer, performer and video artist in Portland for over twenty years. Crispin will begin his Graduate Studies at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago beginning in Fall 2009, in Film/Video/New Media.”

Given a Milepost5 residency—a couple of months and some space—what does Justin Gorman do? I have yet to see his new exhibition, ThirtyThousandSeconds, but it looks like Gorman took a look at his surroundings and engaged in a project that does what he does so well, thoughtfully record and/or reflect back on the historical narrative of this city. His previous photography work, primarily text-based dialogue with the histories of select Portland buildings, has been a consideration of the long view both of our past and the future we’re building. By contrast, this project, focusing pedestrian patterns on a busy section of 82nd, digs into the very human Right Now of the paths between here and there.

See ThirtyThousandSeconds at Milepost5 (900 NE 81st Ave), June 20 to August 14 with a reception on the 20th from 7-9 PM.

This Thursday, June 18 from 6-7 PM, John Brodie, proprietor of Store for a Month, gives a presentation/talk about Store for a Month and Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” at the Artemis Cafe across the street with a field trip to the Store following the presentation.

“Visitors are invited to view the show from multiple angles: as an anthropological study of a short lived sub-culture, as a straight forward artist retrospective, as the estate sale of an eccentric family or as an artist’s memorial to a profoundly meaningful set of memories and friendships.” — wall text at BOX SET: The M.O.S.T. Remastered by Katy Asher

Katy Asher’s recent exhibition, BOX SET: The M.O.S.T. Remastered by Katy Asher, (Autzen Gallery at PSU May 18-May 29, 2009) was both document and invitation. Like any box set, it offers the collected works, serving as a point of reentry for those who where there when the works were first released into the world, and serving as introduction for those who weren’t. But there the analogy breaks down because this box set additionally contains photo album, documents tracing the actions and interactions of the group, and an actual member of the “band” (Asher) who sat the gallery every day to answer questions…and serve you an ice cream sandwich.

This enhanced box set comprises two layers of activity, the public and private faces of a four-person collaborative arts group called the M.O.S.T. In 2003, Khris Soden (the M), Katy Asher (the O), Jen Rhoads (the S), and Rudy Speerschneider (the T) met through Red76 curated Ministry of Small Things residencies at the Modern Zoo. That meeting became a five-year collaboration centered around Mostlandia, a country whose form they discovered in a spot on the floor in friend Matthew Yake’s bedroom, and whose customs, geography, politics, culture they explored (developed) together through group meetings and participatory events.

The objects in the main gallery are evidence of the public face of the M.O.S.T., its interaction with its audience. There are the burnt orange Mostlandian uniforms the M.O.S.T. wore at The Mostlandian Embassy at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the four cardboard boxes that served as machines for an early performance, the rubber stamp collection employed during its Misplaced Items Authority at Reed College, and the highest realization of the project, the Mostlandian Embassy Presents: The M.O.S.T. at PICA’s 2005 Time-based Art Festival (TBA) as forms were completed for immigration, passports, great ideas, high-fives, and plenty more in a series of shifting departments and bureaus. The 63-card trading card set, (including series: Hole to China, Super M.O.S.T. Friends, and Searching for a Heart of Gold) cards of which were given away at Mostlandian events provides some of the best evidence of the sense of play the group embodies.

In both social experiment and in play, the normal rules of social interaction are temporarily suspended. Much of play is the allowing of a new set of interactions to be explored. And this is at the heart of the work of the M.O.S.T. Through participatory events, parties, “athletic” competitions, the M.O.S.T. issued an invitation to imaginative play whether the participant was pretending that the big white box was really a machine that could provide answers to one’s questions or pretending that a Pearl District storefront was truly an embassy for a country called Mostlandia. What’s more, this state of play stands in pleasantly stark contrast to confrontational performance pieces of the past like those of Vito Acconci or Adrian Piper, in which the viewer/participant is the object of experiment. The M.O.S.T. engages a fully-committed, loving theater of the everyday. The participants co-create the experience of Mostlandia, the shared social activity and memory and its relationship to place both real (a meeting in a bedroom) or imagined (Mostlandia) while addressing what it is that comprises knowledge of place, what it means to be a native, a tourist, a member, an outsider.

It might be said that the exhibition may have had the most impact for those who participated in Mostlandian activities as the main output of the arts group was experience. Given that, the exhibition critiques the notion that any experience of performance or participatory art can be adequately documented and imported into a gallery setting. More importantly a second, robust layer of information about the collaborative processes of the group change the nature of the exhibition from simple document of the experience to exploration of the internal workings of the group, a lifting of the curtain for a view behind-the-scenes executed in true Mostlandian style.

The second layer is captured by the wall of maps, mostly by Speerschneider, documenting in a whimsically visual form, the individuals, relationships, and processes of the group juxtaposed with an imagined geography of Mostlandia. And Asher provides access to volumes of emails and file cabinets packed with research and meeting notes—the complete records, every scrap of paperwork (extant) in beautiful, ancient wooden file drawers—showing, among other things, the depth of the group’s investment in collaborative process as well as the rigor behind the imaginative play. Because in spite of its engagement with the world the M.O.S.T. is above all an artful collaboration. Asher may say that in May 2008, the M.O.S.T. dissolved, but the friendships and connections live on and will likely result in future projects.

Incoming: more of Asher at PSU MFA show, It’s Possible, at Disjecta, opening this Sunday, June 14 from 4-8 PM.