art

First Friday Eastside

Drawing the Slight Uneasy

Drawing the Slight Uneasy
Worksound
820 SE Alder
Opening 7 PM, music at 9:30 PM with Soft Paws

Curated by artist MK Guth, this drawing show features work by Bill Adams (NY), Nicolaii Dornstauder (PDX), Tania Cross (NY), Patrick Kelly (PDX), Michael Lee (PDX), Frank Parga (NY), Nicole Eriko Smith (NY), Lynn Yarn (PDX).

Take That and Stand By For Trouble
Gabriel Liston
New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny
First Friday April 2, 6-9PM

Gabriel Liston moves his painting studio from his greenhouse to the gallery for six weeks painting a “scrum, plus chuck norris on a canvas too large for my greenhouse” and several portraits.

“Jim,” he whispered, “take that, and stand by for trouble.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Jacques Barruell

April is the Cruellest Month
group photography show
Nationale
811 E Burnside #122 (in back)
Opening 6-9 PM

May Juliette Barruell curates a show of photography suggested by lines from T.S. Eliot:

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 1
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
–T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

With work by Jake Arcularius, Olivia Bolles, Mimi Dutra, Ty Ennis, Nialls Fallon, Liz Haley, William Skip Haswell, Tamar Monhait, Zachary Reno, Norm Sajovie, Anna Shelton, John Voves, Kersti Werdal, and her father, Jacques Barruel.

Exhibit___ A + Inland Empires
Justin Gorman and Tyler Kohlhoff
NEMO HQ
1875 SE Belmont
6-9 PM

“Typological explorations across American spaces” exploring “the nature and relationship of histories, image and text.” Kohlhoff’s photographic light boxes from the series, Inland Empires, document, “the humility of the original idea of progress throughout the West.”

100% ORGANIC
Michael Brophy, Brian Borello, Grant Hottle, and Joseph Spangler
galleryHOMELAND
Opening 6–9 PM

“Through observational painting, drawing, and printmaking processes, these artists project the tranquility and beauty of the every day landscape…”

FAQ: A PowerPoint Symposium
Car Hole Gallery
114 SE 12th
7 pm

Derek Franklin: The Aesthetics of Weed
Mel Ponis & Olivia Everett: Re:[].ppt
Elizabeth Jaeger: Post Conceptualism
Israel Lund: Abstract_Painting.jpg
Sam Korman: All The Sam Kormans of The World
Emily Bernstein: Bees, Nuts!: Invented Languages and The Hip Hop Honeybee
Andrew Shaw Kitsch: Art as Getting Paid to Masturbate
Sean Carney: Joe Fucking Lihou: American Rebel

Music 9 PM Meth Teeth, Guantanamo Baywatch, Stag Bitten

It may be, humbly, in Sam Korman’s garage, but some of the thinking that’s going on at Car Hole is anything but. Lecture-as-art has a long and illustrious history in Portland. This is the next gen. I wish all “press releases” were like this:

Q: What is FAQ?

A: FAQ stands for frequently asked questions, a common section under the help tab in most Microsoft Office products. It may also be used as a derogatory statement, pronouncing FA together, concluding with emphasis on the Q.

Q: What is the Power in PowerPoint?

A: Improving your digital presentation power may provide many benefits in a variety of outlets, including boardrooms, classrooms, churches, social groups and funeral parlors. Utilizing Rich Media (i.e. images, sound, video) allows the presenter to customize his message in order to improve recall, comprehension and transfer for his audience. Through a hierarchical organization of content, a presenters ability to coerce increases tenfold: never needing to pause for questions, the right image is only two clicks away. A truly successful presentation achieves the PowerPoint when the audience submits to the power of the digital presenters message like a natural and spontaneous conversation.

Q: What is a symposium?

A: According to the OED, a symposium was classically considered a drinking-party where men met for intellectual conversation[1]. In the present context, it maintains the volatile drinking aspect, as many presenters rely on alcoholic assistance to articulate their original material. Usually without a trace, information gets encoded through an alcoholic exchange as members of a symposium deconstruct their conversation through a solipsistic and increasingly problematic judgment. Generally not the point of a symposium, this aftereffect often desublimates the initial import of the gathering and medium.

Q: Is PowerPoint Art?

A: Car Hole Gallery will be presenting FAQ: A PowerPoint Symposium Friday 2 April at 7pm. The night will consist of presentations by several artists and writers taking PowerPoint as a medium for their diverse practices. In Israel Lunds discussion of myriad abstract paintings, PowerPoint becomes a digital gallery wall; as a discussion of an American rebel and friend, Sean Carneys presentation becomes a social pack of smokes; and as a presentation of all the people in the world with Sam Kormans name, PowerPoint exists as a narcissistic binary. The program has over 200,000,000 users world wide, but for these presenters, FAQ is not the holy path to PowerPoint utopia,[2] rather, they render the medium transparent, holding the presentations accountable to their nocturnally social context. It is a night where several points will be made, but, as with a DJ, we can relish the message, while openly reorienting the medium.

Q: What is Car Hole?

A: If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

[1] “Symposium.” Symposium. Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 29 Mar. 2010..

[2] Lane, Robert, and Robert Wright. “And the Research Says? PowerPoint Meets Cognitive Science.” Microsoft Office Online. Microsoft. .

POSTED: April 2nd, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

art

What I Would Do If It Were First Friday In Portland Oregon

YESWAY at Carhole

YESWAY
Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman
Car Hole Gallery
114 SE 12th

Opening 5-9 PM, Music at 9 PM (The Bugs, Lickity)

Here’s Car Hole’s Sam Korman on YESWAY:

YESWAY is a show presented by Car Hole featuring the work of Elizabeth Jaeger and Kit Bowman. It is also a piece of linguistic cheesecake. YESWAY is the expression we use to emphasize our point, an affirmative counter to NOWAY: it universalizes information simply in its frequent appearance. Yet, YESWAY is not a term that often exists beyond this casual, quotidian exchange. Displaced from everyday usage, it’s meaning, or rather, meaninglessness only serves to emphasize its absurdity like some apparition of speech. But in these moments that go casually overlooked, an integral portion of our communication is lost, unrecorded, where YESWAY is not a random tag along, but an expression of the underlying mechanics of interpersonal communication—its mode vastly outweighs its meaning.

In its appearance, YESWAY is linguistic color: a secondary color, emphatic in its contrast—you use it without thinking, as the moment dictates, a placeholder for the larger coding of daily speech. Though different from NOWAY as the affirmative recognition of disagreement, it is nonetheless an immediate attempt at connection between people in everyday terms. Here, YESWAY resides in daily life, but as we expand our network of relations, YESWAY takes on a dual meaning, as interface and articulation—it is about how you shake your hips as much as what you sing. And, art, in our age of global connectedness, is beginning to reside in this social underbelly, as well.

In both Jaeger and Bowman’s work, a life-size portrait emerges of our daily attempts to communicate—whether concerning popularity or reaching aliens, the work develops a picture of our sweet, awkward and futile attempts at communicating with others, even if that means looking in the mirror. These artists humorously examine how, when two people engaged in conversation interpret and synthesize something seemingly innocuous, but ultimately binding—can generate an artistic language, as well. Art has a similar capacity to bond, counter, synthesize and reevaluate our daily lives, and in that, derive some kind of vernacular currency. Art is life, motherfuckers. YESWAY.

L Sub to the Polynomial, Midori Hirose

L Sub to the Polynomial
Midori Hirose
Nationale
811 E Burnside #122 (in back)

Opening 6-9 PM

L Sub to the Polynomial is a show of two series of new works on paper by Midori Hirose. According to Nationale director May Juliette Barruel:

For Series 1, Hirose thought about jokes and extracted the idea of happiness by reducing it to a moment of laughter. For Hirose, the technical elements of a joke are amazing. There is a definite rhythm, pattern, spatial aspect, precision, and a punch line to a good joke. Exploring this deductive reasoning, new portraits were drawn conceptually and visually with a quick, simple capture of the audible expression of happiness, people in the midst of laughing at something funny.

Similarly in Series 2, Hirose’s abstract objects play between figure and ground, paying attention to the space and form with precision, while melding quilt-like geometric patterns with hazed gradients of color. These spatial arrangements and polynomial forms are pushed by Hirose’s bright disorienting palette in a whimsical manner.

Transverse at Worksound

TRANSVERSE
Worksound
820 SE Alder

Opening 7 PM, music at 9 PM (Root Beer and French Fry)

TRANSVERSE, it’s a painting show… is a group show with work by Vanessa Calvert, Jaclyn Fronzack, Ruth Lantz, Jud Richardson, Jason Vance Dickason, Salvatore Reda

Guten Tag Meine Freunde
galleryHOMELAND
Opening 6–9 PM

Guten Tag Meine Freunde is a group show of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin where galleryHomeland has been operating EAST/WEST BERLIN with Dam Stuhltrager for the last six months. The show features work by Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski.

POSTED: March 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: , , , , , , , , | No Comments »