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Portland art blog + news + exhibition reviews + galleries + contemporary northwest art
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March 2013 First Thursday
Breeze Block Gallery is back from winter break, and they're kicking off the season with something new, the first large-scale transformation of the gallery, an installation by Stephen Scott Smith. Smith's SEEYOUYOUSEE explores perception and shifts in perspective through reflection, light, shadow, CCTV, video, objects and spatial relationships. The show involved a 60-day construction period starting in January 2013, while the gallery remained closed. The first phase of the installation required stacking 10,000 pounds of plywood (piece by piece) in Breeze Block's new Project Space. The flooring in the Project Space had to be reinforced to withstand the load! Once the plywood was in place, erection of the floating wall and door system in the traditional gallery began. Smith simultaneously designed the space and objects, created works and documented the process of boring into the ply stack for over 200 hours. SEEYOUYOUSEE explores myth, faith, and mystery while engaging the viewer to connect the dots through their own story. SEEYOUYOUSEE | Stephen Scott Smith
Known for her sculpture made from everyday materials, Amanda Wojick's recent body of work, The Hawthornes , consists of a series of 12 welded steel sculptures, each painted in a different color. The human-scaled sculptures are delicate, light, and open yet also angular, fixed, and structurally sound. Wojick's materials and processes engage a long history of sculpture's dynamic relationship to ornament, decoration, and modernist ideals. The sculptures encourage the viewers' awareness of the space and substance around them. Wojick uses abstraction as a way to describe indescribable states of mind that are rooted in nonverbal or kinesthetic aspects of human experience.
Joseph Park uses photographic references to create paintings that tell the story of a cosmic journey towards enlightenment. References to photographers such as Eugene Atget, Paul Outerbridge and Stephen Shore provide an air of familiarity and lend a sense of nostalgia and longing to the unpopulated scenes. The first painting has the main character in a hotel room, and the following paintings quickly immerse the character into an unfamiliar alternate reality where he navigates a dream-like city. Mimicking the artist's own journey over the past seven years to investigate and develop a new painting methodology, the paintings in Morphic Fields use a translucent palette and his signature prismatic refractions of light and color.
Bernhard Epple (October 11, 1912 - July 1999) was a German artist, teacher, and Russian prisoner of war. He traveled extensively within Germany and Europe, and spent considerable time in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Chicago. Greatly inspired by architecture, and landscapes some of his prints are now on display at Augen Gallery. Epple is best known for his masterful engravings, but is also known for his drawings, watercolors, oil paintings, wood cuts, lithographs, and collages.
Minden's holograms deal with the concept of everyone's objective existence and reality. His art seeks to explore personal, subjective experience and the different way each person experiences the same thing at the same time. He calls these works light drawings because circles are incised by hand onto plastic. However, the way the light reflects from the surfaces and grooves, makes the pieces more characteristic to sculptures. They are interactive and three-dimensional holograms, which can appear in normal light Prints | Bernhard Epple
In his series, Inventory of a Private Library, Russian artist Vadim Gushchin has arranged piles of books from his library on a pedestal where the titles are not are not visible. He reveals nothing in terms of the books' content to the viewer. The books are in turn transformed into sculptures and photographed. These photographs pay homage to the book, taking them out of their functional context and making them a symbol of collective knowledge and cultural treasure.
Arthur Tress has had a long career behind the camera. His fantastical images transcend reality. Exploring "magic realism", actual life is staged with fantasy. In the late 1960s Tress did a series based upon children's dreams and his interest in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. The works and the strange stories they tell are truly captivating. Inventory of a Private Library | Vadim Gushchin
Two Northwest artists look through an apocalyptic lens, meditating on the end of things and what may or may not come after. Intriguing. The End and After | Michael Endo + Stacy Lynn Smith Posted by Emily Cappa on March 05, 2013 at 23:21 | Comments (0) Comments Post a comment Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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