http://www.portlandart.net/ PORT is an online visual arts publication dedicated to critical discussion as lensed through Portland, Oregon. en Copyright 2010 Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:33:04 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.16 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
Crystal Schenk, "Have and Have Not," currently on view at Disjecta for the Portland2010 Biennial

March's Art Spark is happening at Disjecta. They're celebrating the Portland2010 Biennial and offering attendees a chance to win a show at Disjecta (for individual artists or curated group shows). Submit a one-page synopsis of your proposal along with images before 5pm on Thursday and be ready to present your project to the Art Spark crowd if chosen.

Art chat • 5-7pm • March 18
Art Spark @ Disjecta • 8371 N Interstate • 503.286.9449]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/art_spark_disje.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/art_spark_disje.html Openings & Events Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:33:04 -0800 Uncertain Times: Contemporary Art Views on the Fate of the Newspaper: "Newspapers today face an uncertain future, as television and the Internet erode print media’s traditional customer base. This exhibit interprets the challenges that newspapers face today through paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and multimedia art." The submission deadline is May 15, and you can get more details and a registration form on their website.


PSU's Littman and White Galleries are seeking show proposals from local artists. Applications are due by April 15. For more details, contact littmanandwhite@gmail.com.


The Renewable Energy Roundup & Art Show in Ellensburg, WA is seeking submissions for their 2010 exhibition over Memorial Day weekend. They're interested in work that includes "concepts, and/or themes that relate to renewable resources, global climate change, conservation, clean and sustainable energy." Submissions are due May 1. Visit their website for more info.


Mark Woolley and the Anka Gallery have invited artists to submit work for a new line of "wearable art." The winning artist will receive a percentage of net revenue on the clothing line. The winning art and pieces by select finalists will be exhibited in April in Anka Gallery. Submissions are due by April 8. Lots more details on their website.]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/opportunities_1.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/opportunities_1.html Calls for Artists Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:56:18 -0800

Matthew Green's Nibog at Fourteen30 (photo Jeff Jahn)

Dark: A Show to Winter at Fourteen30 appropriately ends tomorrow (a week before the Spring Equinox). Typical of the Blood Family Rainbow's curatorial collaborations it has a dark, gothic, even occult focus. It's a good show with the first room being significantly stronger than the others. This is partially because 3 of the 4 best pieces (By Matthew Green, Sven Stuckenschmidt and Molly Vidor) are in the first room. The strongest by far is Matthew Green's Nilbog (goblin spelled backwards), which has become the show's mascot. If it were a person it would be the cult leader of this group of dark souls. What makes Nilbog important is it is quite genuinely the product of a ritualized burning. By fetishing a simple chainsaw sculpture and burning the piece becomes a totemic anthropological place marker, an analog of a bog man that preserves its ritual killing, freezing it in a silent yet horific/humorous state. Nilbog mutely stands as a proxy sentinel of some mute set of laws and social codes we the non Blood Family members as visitors must confront.

Its mute provocation stands for "the other"… we have clues to its condition but nothing further. Frankly, Nilbog is the only thing in the show that is significantly better or at least more genuine than anything Banks Violette has ever done. Let's just say Violette is the show's neo-goth, dark metal lov'n patron saint and a lot of the other work in the show has the same semi-crafty, semi-subculture riffing we've all been seeing en masse for over half a decade because of Violette's success.


Alex Hubbard, The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight I-III, Video Still

Nilbog is better because it isn't fetishing some obvious subculture lifestyle as much as a manifesting a legitimate primal urge, transformed and given form through ritual. Till now Green has been a merely promising recent art school grad making still very "art school" work (i.e. it riffed on subcultures in clubby, "ha I get it so we are both cool" ways). Nilbog is something else and goes much deeper, nobody gets it, nobody can... it's not just a dark piece, it's a silent apophenia producing sentinel; simple, hilarious, serious and terribly effective. The fourth strong piece in the show is Alex Hubbard's excellent video, The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight I-III… a dark channeling of Gordon Matta Clark style structural cutting in video. His other video in the show though is an unimaginative and twee rip-off of Fischli and Weiss' classic the Way Thing's Go, we expect better of the former Portlander.


Caleb Charland's Demonstrations series at Bluesky

Another excellently dark show is Caleb Charland's Demonstrations at Bluesky. His haunting black and white time lapse photographs of moving light sources recall Nicolai Tesla's fantastic coils (which are most easily visualized as the devices used to bring Frankenstein's monster to life in the 1931 film version). There is something haunting about Charland's photographic mad scientist antics… like a really talented poltergeist at work. Bean Gilsdorf wrote this excellent review of a related photographic show The Eye of Science.


O. Winston Link's Living Room on the Tracks, Lithia, Virginia, 1955

Right next door another at Charles Hartman Fine Art is O. Winston Link's show of uneasy railroad photographs The Last Steam Railroad in America. This show also ends on Saturday. Normally one doesn't associate choo choo's with a gothic sensibility but some of these like Living Room on the Tracks could be right out of a David Lynch's Twin Peaks. There's just something alchemical about transforming hard dark coal into steam to propel giant cast iron and steel machines. Don't miss this show… the iron horse as a niorish demonic force or at least a symbol of unstoppable fate is quite compelling and it says a lot about America's drive. Is that drive gone with the great steam locomotives?


Jack Ryan at PCC Cascade Gallery (photo Jeff Jahn)

Another excellent but dark show is Jack Ryan's Scriabin's Moustache at PCC Cascade Gallery. Featuring somewhat arcane sound/sculpture, flickering light sources and a video called "Moon Rise" of the moon cycling from full to crescent with unnatural speed, the show feels like a séance for the haunting genius that was composer Alexander Scriabin. This is yet another excellent show from PCC cascade, which has become the most consistently adventurous university gallery in Portland this season. Sculptural/sound elements like the piece Black Parallelogram/after Tony Smith explore the arcaneness of Scriabin the composer and highlight a similar arcaneness in sculptor Tony Smith's black forms. Sometimes to be ahead of your time the things that artists create have to feel out of their time… or "weird" (weird is a word derived from the Old English (via Nordic) idea that one can know their fate or "wyrd"). Scriabin was a brilliant if completely eccentric composer and died of a carbuncle, which grew in his moustache then ruptured with tragic results. Perhaps Ryan is creating a metaphor for odd fate and its effects as the legacy of an artist, which others then inherit and similarly pass on? Very moving and reminiscent of shows at Small A gallery, except better because it substitutes odd arcaneness for that onetime Portland venues' Brooklyn-esque irony fetish (something I often find an easy audience finding crutch, others love it).


Of Walking in Ice @ White Box Gallery, U of O Portland

Similarly, Jack Ryan has also curated a show called, Of Walking in Ice at the U of O's White Box Gallery in the White Stag Building. It shares a lot of similarities with his solo show, not the least of which being both are rather arcane. Of Walking in Ice comes from Ryan's interest in a text by the rather arcane filmmaker Werner Herzog where he chronicled a chilly walk from Munich to Paris by a young filmmaker. The interpretations, be they Melody Owen's intertwined infinity symbol snowshoes, Anna Fidlers' Daniel Richter-esque figures in a landscape or Anna Gray and Ryan Paulson' literary index, all display an elliptical sense… perhaps because when walking on ice there is this sense of endlessness. On an iced over lake or ice cap the surfaces is relatively uniform and white, giving little hint of scale, direction or shelter. Once again fate seems to be at play here but since Herzog is involved one senses there is an utter conflation of the absurd, artistic and legitimate documentation.

Overall, this theme of darkness isn't anything new for the area, In 2002 Stuart Hordoner curated the noirish "Northwest Narrative" at PICA's once glorious full time exhibition space. More recently Laura Fritz, Carl Diehl, OPS, Stephen Slappe, Paula Rebsom, Patrick Rock, Arnold Kemp, Michael Brophy, Dan Attoe have put on haunted sanity challenging efforts. In the tradition of David Lynch, this noirish suspension of reason for generating apophenia is a great strength of Portland's art scene because it deals in intangibles and the unknown (all very common themes for a settlement carved out of the deep dark woods rather recently). ]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/the_darkness_wi.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/the_darkness_wi.html Reviews Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:09:23 -0800
Bob Ostertag and Pierre Hébert

Artist and filmmaker Bob Ostertag is lecturing tomorrow at PAM in conjunction with Disquieted. "Ostertag explores the common ground and points of friction among music, creativity, politics, culture, and technology. In [his] lecture, "Between Science and Garbage," Ostertag will explore the notion that today's cutting-edge technology is tomorrow's garbage. The title of his lecture is drawn from a performance and film of the same name, which Ostertag created with his partner in Living Cinema, Pierre Hébert."

Artist lecture • 2-3pm • March 13
Portland Art Museum • 1219 SW Park • 503.226.2811]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/between_science.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/between_science.html Openings & Events Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:07:39 -0800 Judd Conference now has its own blog and Arcy has laid out a very helpful reading list with links. Remember to register early, the cost goes up after March 22nd and space is limited. If you are an installation artist, designer or architect this event will be of capital interest.

Todd Eberle is doing some fine blogging and always great photos on Marina Abramovic's latest.

Nicolai Ouroussoff's fascinating article on Claude Parent is definitely worth a read, contextualizing the architect who has influenced younger designers like Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas. Call him the father of the current strain of counterintuitive (yet good) architecture.

Tyler Green contemplates the ethical legacy of curator Edward Fry in the Gugg's new Contemplating the Void exhibition.

The WWeek reviews the Blakely Dadsen show at Chambers. ]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/suggested_readi.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/suggested_readi.html News Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:20:08 -0800

Portland's latest stab at a Biennial begins this weekend. Curated by Cris Moss and running from March to May 2010, exhibitions will be held at Disjecta, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, the Marylhurst Art Gym, Rocksbox, the Templeton Building, the Leftbank, the Alicia Blue Gallery, and Alpern Gallery. You can already see shows at Elizabeth Leach and the Art Gym by Melody Owen (both), and the following is opening this weekend:



Ditch Projects

Are You Ready for the Country? brings Ditch Projects to Rocksbox. "Finding inspiration in the apocalypse of vacancy that marks urban failure, Are You Ready for the Country identifies and celebrates the urban center's sudden and full submission to the rural margin. Refusing the iconography of idealized naturalism, the members of Ditch Projects opt, instead, to frame rurality as the physical lack of constant urbanity."

Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 13
ROcksbox Fine Art • 6540 N Interstate • 503.516.4777



Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas

Six shows will be opening this Saturday at Disjecta (the hub of the Biennial): Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas' Warlord Sun King, David Corbett's New Work, Sean Healy's Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma, Tahni Holt's Culture Machine (in progress), Crystal Schenk's Recent Work, and Crystal Schenk & Shelby Davis' West Coast Turnaround. While you're there, pop over to the Vestibule to see Evertt Beidler's Cured of Second Chances (not part of the Biennial).

Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 13
Disjecta • 8371 N Interstate • 503.286.9449]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/portland2010_bi.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/portland2010_bi.html Openings & Events Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:28:22 -0800

MP5 presents Avantika Bawa's yesterday. Yellow. Bawa writes: "My altered and seemingly 'perfect' construction aims to transform the objects beyond their perceived banality into a dynamic phenomenon that reinvents the mundane. Ordinary, discarded material is used to construct a landscape, where the common place is glorified. Here, the flawed is perfected and the familiar obscured, rendering an emergent and difficult communication to be examined and relearned." The exhibition is on view from March 12 - April 30, 2010.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 12
MP5³ • 900 NE 81st Avenue • Gallery space of lofts building



Shaun Jarvis

Alpern Gallery presents Shaun Jarvis' Hard Luck. The photographs are part of a decade-long ongoing project photographing the artist's associates in available light without post-production.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 12
Alpern Gallery • 2552 NW Vaughn • 503.477.7721]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/yellow_luck.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/yellow_luck.html Openings & Events Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:04:00 -0800
Bill Gilbert

Bill Gilbert has been the Lannan Foundation Chair in the Land Arts of the American West program at The University of New Mexico since 2000 and is the author of Land Arts of the American West. He took time to answer a few of PORT's questions on the eve of his talk for The Museum of Contemporary Craft this coming Wednesday at PNCA:


Alex: Michael Heizer has indicated he'd like to fix Double Negative because it has deteriorated, isn't that the Land art equivalent of George Lucas redoing Star Wars? How do you feel about artists tinkering with their early earth art?

Bill: Heizer has gone back and forth on this one. I really appreciate his ability to be inconsistent and answer depending on how he’s feeling or who his audience might be at any given time in the over the forty years it has been since the piece was completed. We artists all have complicated relationships with our work. So, I understand the impulse and the difficulty of attaining detachment from your work once it enters the public sphere.

On the other side is the perspective expressed by John Link in his essay “The Hardness of Art”. He argues that all that matters to society is the art and artists are merely the necessary vehicle to deliver the work. So then the question is separate from Heizer and his ego and it becomes what is the essence of Double Negative as a sculpture in the public sphere. Is the work the actual clean walled geometric cut in the ground that needs to be maintained in perpetuity. Or is the work the sharp graphic image in the aerial photograph in Art Forum. If so, is the photograph sufficient? Or is the work the imposition of Heizer’s intentions on a landscape and the slow process of its erasure? What is the frame of the work? My interest is in the work as a site piece across time. I find the erosion taking place, the reclaiming of the site through natural forces to be quite beautiful. I don’t expect LA MOCA or Heizer to agree with me.


Spiral Jetty May 2009 (photo Jeff Jahn)


Spiral Jetty partially came about because the environmental standards around the Great Salt Lake were relaxed, now the water levels are threatened and the piece could become landlocked. What is your take on the preservation of Spiral Jetty?

I guess as the director of an Art Ecology program I should be interested in the “environmental standards” issue. But I’m not. It’s hard for me to see Spiral Jetty as a big environmental issue. The oil jetty next to it and the possibility of it being reactivated is of much more concern that some rocks piled in the water. That said the work is a jetty. It reaches out into the lake and interrupts the water flow across the lake shore, catches slit and will slowly be subsumed. What a smart piece!.... a work whose form is a symbol (The spiral) for the cyclical nature of existence that then acts out its own image, appearing on the lake, disappearing for decades under water, reemerging only to be covered by the silt its structure entraps. The piece is poetry, they should let it continue to speak through its absence as well as presence.


How does your training with Rudy Autio in Montana play into his current work with land arts of the American West?

Indirectly, Rudi was a great artist and teacher and a wonderful human being. His work came out of the western movement in ceramics led by his buddy Pete Volkous. They endeavored to bridge the gap between the craft history of ceramic vessels and contemporary art issues of painting and sculpture. While that’s where his interests were located Rudi never tried to get us to make work like his. I learned a lot from Rudi about artistic integrity, about the necessity of taking risks and following your own vision and that certainly effected my path to the Land Arts program, but we didn’t really ever talk about Land Art except in the sense that he understood that I was looking for my own way to build upon his generations’ efforts to take ceramics into contemporary art.


There is a quote on page 85 of your book Land Arts of the American West, “It’s about being conscious in everything that you do as a way of learning how to be in the world.” Could you speak a little bit about your holistic mentality of art and life?

Okay, that’s a big question. Let me take a deep breadth and dive in. Here goes, I hope it is coherent.

I got into art because of the Vietnam War and my sense that our culture had lost its bearings, its ethics, that it had become, on a certain level, unbalanced, insane. I was at Swarthmore College at the time and the inability of the intellectual left to stand up to the immorality of the war made me question everything about my education. The sciences were totally compromised by their association with the war effort, the Christian religious tradition in which I was raised seemed corrupt, so I turned to art as a methodology to pursue the truth in a more holistic way in the hopes that it might lead me to a more balanced life. I was searching for a reintegration of mind, spirit and body.

I had the good fortune to fall into Paul Soldner’s studio in Claremont. Paul very much operated on the basis of approaching everything in life as an artist, not just your studio practice. His studio was a community in which we lived, worked, ate and slept together. We made our own tools and kilns, cooked communal meals and danced and it was all a seamless expression of an artist’s life.

That idea of an integrated life got taken forward in my work with Mary Lewis Garica at Acoma Pueblo. I started teaching a course with Mary in which I took the students out to Acoma to study pueblo pottery. We spent the first half of the course gathering our materials. We’d go one Friday to a spot in Chaco Canyon to dig clay, another Friday to a hill by the Rio Puerco to search for paint stones, another Friday to an old sheep camp at Acoma to find pot shards. Each Friday Mary would tell us the stories that were attached to the specific place. Before long I came to understand that the pottery practice was a way for Mary to reinforce her identity as an Acoma woman and not just through the forms and designs on the pots but through her connection to place.

Each week we would share a communal meal. They would go on forever and I tended, at first, to become impatient, to want to get back to work. Mary would give me this stare and say “Bill you white people are always in such a hurry, slow down”. After a while I got it. Mary put as much attention into cooking the food for our meals, sewing leggings for her children to dance in the ceremonies, etc. as she did into her pottery. In her view, she isn’t a professional potter, she is an Acoma woman who makes pots, cooks, sews, etc. They are all an equal part of building a cohesive identity.


What are some of the connections between the ancient traditions of ceramics and the contemporary practices in land art?

We tend to think of art practices in mutually exclusive boxes. Michael Heizer and Mary Lewis Garcia belong to different traditions that are kept separate in our culture. Well they both work in direct response to the earth. When I got hired to teach Ceramics at UNM, I was operating in the zone of Environmental Art in my own work. I started looking around for a living tradition in ceramics of environmental artists and that lead me to the pueblo potters. Their work is completely place based. Their materials are all extracted for the local environment. They waste nothing. The earthworks artists superficially appear to be operating in a similar zone. Heizer’s Double Negative and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty are both site based, silica and alumina sculptures. Their interests are in fact quite different. Pueblo potters would never say that they work in Nevada because the land is cheap (Michael Heizer). The entire concept of the landscape as a blank canvas on which to inscribe your image is foreign to their thinking.

As Land Art has evolved from Earthworks to Environmental Art and Eco Art the connection to place, the reverence for the earth on its own terms has grown much stronger. Contemporary Artist such as Hamish Fulton, Basia Irland, Lynne Hull and even the Harrisons share a fundamental understanding of their practice in relationship to place with the pueblo potters though their work tends to be less object oriented in its final expression.


Paraphrasing Ann Reynolds, "The problem of return: It can be lamented as loss, or its limitations can be embraced to propose something new – a Smithsonian balancing act between loss and insight." How do you think about this problem as paradox or pattern and why?

Smithson’s concept of the site non-site relationship is a central concern to anyone working in response to place. It acknowledges that as soon as the site is detached from the audience (as in all the early Earthworks which most people know from their images in ArtForum not from actual haptic experience on site) the artist becomes involved in the role of translation. What Smithson postulated is that there is an inherent loss in this translation. The physical reality of the non-site is never the same as the physical reality of the site. What occurs in the non-site of the gallery is never a direct equivalent with what occurs on the actual site. The key in Smithson’s terms is to see this loss as an opportunity, a freedom to create a parallel expression rather than attempt a direct representation.


Acoma Pueblo, c1910 (source Charles Francis Saunders)


Land art is about experience yes? How would you describe the experience?

The Land Arts program experience centers around creating a mobile artist community to investigate/to become intimate with place. We provide students with direct, physical engagement with a full range of human interventions in the landscape, from pre contact Native America architecture, pictographs and petrogylphs to contemporary Earthworks, federal infrastructure, and the constructions of the US Military. We are looking at how culture has interacted with the environment of the desert through gestures both grand and small, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and track in the sand to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military/industrial projects such as hydroelectric dams and decommissioned airfields.

We balance the investigation of cultural sites such as Chaco Canyon, Roden Crater, Hoover Dam, Wendover Complex of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Juan Mata Ortiz, Spiral Jetty and the Very Large Array with time spent in the variety of eco-niches that together make up the environment of the southwest. Land Arts gives students seamless time to explore the environment for over fifty plus days each fall. We have work sites in places such as the Grand Canyon, AZ, Grand Gulch, UT, San Rafael Swell, UT, Gila Wilderness, NM, Bosque del Apache, NM and Otero Mesa Grasslands, NM. Our current focus is on the issues of sustainability with a particular interest in food production and water use in the southwest. Perhaps most important, Land Arts is an experience in community. We live, work and travel together as a mobile arts studio. Each year we complete two collaborative projects bringing this communal aspect into our art practice, as well.

Is there a dialectic within ideas of local and international within land art? How does the global community interact with the specific sites?

I don’t see it as a dialectic. I see it as different layers. The local version is much more involved in an intimacy with the specifics of a site. As a result, this work has deeper vertical connections (roots) in community and environment. The international tends to operate more from the idea of place or site. The issues are broader, the connections to other communities and environments more evident, more web like, less rooted.

I see this as similar to the small local vs large national organic food question. My thought is that we need both.

I believe you started out with more of an intellectual approach to art – with more experience now in ceramic and land art where has the equilibrium fallen for you when it comes to intellectuality and action?

The great thing about starting out in ceramics is that it is physical. Ceramists are doers. It was a great way for me to begin with integrating body and mind. I see Western Culture as valuing the mind over the body and I talked earlier about the dysfunction that has resulted. That said, I happen to like ideas and I have certainly followed a conceptual course in the progression of my work, but the proof is still in the pudding for me. Don’t tell me about, do it. Bring the idea to life.

My path from ceramic pottery to ceramic sculpture to native material installation, to mixed media installation to Land/Environmental/Eco Art for me has a clear conceptual thread formed as I try to figure out my place as a human in this world, as I attempt to weave the social and environmental back together. While driven by intellect, the expression of that path has tended to require long hours of physical work. I tend to think with my body as well as my brain, to believe in body knowledge as a more grounded truth.

The Land Arts program has certainly thrown me a curve. From the start I saw it as a means to bring my role as teacher and artist together. It is imperative that I work alongside my fellow LandArtians. Being in the field for fifty days each year has required me to develop a new methodology in my work. I can’t take a lot of tools. I can’t cart around a lot of materials. So I have turned from native material installation to something that is more like performance. My body is now my tool. I take ideas about place as expressed in the mental abstraction of maps and attempt to act them out on the ground. In short, I walk, record what happens and then transpose my physical experience back onto the maps. The irony is that for every day spent walking the work requires ten days in front of the computer to complete.

Could you speak about your approach when it comes to the juxtaposition of native or naturally available materials and architectural [man-made] materials?

Early on in my work as an Environmental Artist I would pit the presence of native materials against architectural settings as a dialectic between man made and natural definitions of spaces. I soon realized that was too easy. Now I look for points of harmony or symbiosis. As Jerry Brown said there is no opposition between environment and technology. ”use satellites to track whales.” I like to combine low and high tech, to dig up my backyard to make forms that house digital videos. Culture and the environment are not involved in a dialectic. Culture is merely a small part of nature. Let’s start to see ourselves as conjoined. ]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/interview_with_7.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/interview_with_7.html Interviews Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:01:38 -0800
Whiting Tennis, "Bitter Lake Compound," 2007

PAM's artist talk series continues this week with Matthew Stadler, a novelist who also writes about art and architecture for various publications, including Frieze, Artforum, Volume, Fillip, and Domus. Stadler will discuss Mark Tobey's Western Town, 1944, and Whiting Tennis' Bitter Lake Compound, 2007. The group will meet in the Hoffman Lobby, walk around the museum, and return to the lobby for happy hour after.

Art lecture • 6-8pm • March 11
Portland Art Museum • 1219 SW Park • 503.226.2811



Daniel Joseph Martinez

PNCA presents a lecture by Daniel Joseph Martinez via the MFA in Visual Studies program: "A strategic provocateur with a keen intelligence and a wicked sense of humor, Martinez deploys the full range of available media in his practice, having used at various times (and in various combinations) text, image, sculpture, video, and performance to construct his uniquely tough-minded brand of aesthetic inquiry."

Artist lecture • 6:30-8pm • March 11
MoCC in partnership with PNCA • 724 NW Davis • The Lab]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/talks.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/talks.html Openings & Events Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:10:21 -0800
David Shaner, "Garden Slab," 1964

The Museum of Contemporary Craft presents Land Art: David Shaner. The exhibition explores the relationship between craft and the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s through the work of a "potter's potter." Land Art includes works from the artist's estate and the museum's collection, as well as photos and personal notes taken by the artist, which "reveal a concurrent, domestically-scaled yet quietly sensual relationship between art and the landscape of the American West."

Exhibition • March 10 - August 7, 2010
Museum of Contemporary Craft • 724 NW Davis • 503.223.2654

On the first day of the exhibition, William Gilbert will present a concurrent Craft Perspectives lecture via PNCA/MoCC on "Land Arts of the American West." Gilbert "will discuss shifts in contemporary understanding of the genre of Land Art, tracing connections from his own study of ceramics in Montana with Rudy Autio to the innovative 'Land Arts of the American West' program he co-founded with Chris Taylor."

Artist lecture • 6:30 - 8pm • March 10
PNCA • 1241 NW Johnson • 503.226.4391]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/land_art.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/land_art.html Openings & Events Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:34:32 -0800 the Koons curated New Museum show, Skin Fruit. To me it seems like a show calibrated for 2007 and people are going to hold the New Museum to higher standards because of the mission statement and presence of "New" in its name. The problem isn't Koons or the collector, it's the fact that the New Museum can't really afford to be behind the curve the way other New York Museums are... or even behind the those other institutions for that matter. Everyone wants the New Museum to be bleeding edge, but it isn't. Perhaps large group shows are simply the wrong way.

It's part of the reason PORT didn't get all Whitney-excited (even if several Portland friends are in it and the Museum linked to several of our articles). To me its like a cliff notes version of the art world and this iteration's focus on being conveniently self-conscious felt dated (anyone remember 2002?). Also,why must they always have a car or other wheeled vehicle in each version? Overall, the Whitney can get away with being a little behind the curve, in fact I think that is part of being a venerated museum and its a valuable way to intersect with those who are not 100% art world creatures. Honestly, Id like to see Museums put on more small group shows 3-5 artists... politically that's a rats nest to navigate as a curator but that is what these times require. Will the Portland Art Museum's CNAA's be up to that challenge regionally? Balancing politics and freshness is difficult for large institutions.

The NYT's also did a piece on the Armory, a confab which in my mind has somewhat overshadowed the Whitney Biennial.... even in this diminished economic climate. PORT's award winning Amy Bernstein will have a report soon. ]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/nyc_roundup.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/nyc_roundup.html News Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:46:12 -0800
Stefano Minzi

Gallery Homeland presents Guten Tag Meine Fruende, a collection of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin. The show grew out of the ongoing relationship Gallery Homeland has been building over the past 6 months with the creative community of Berlin. Featured artists include Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Gallery Homeland • 2505 SE 11th Ave • info@galleryHOMELAND.org




Worksound presents Transverse: "It's a painting show." Featuring work by Vanessa Calvert, Jaclyn Fronzack, Ruth Lantz, Jud Richardson, Jason Vance Dickason, and Salvatore Reda.

Opening reception • 7pm (live music at 9pm) • March 5
Worksound • 820 SE Alder • mojomodou@gmail.com



Julie Orser

PNCA's Hybrid Gallery presents Incubate, an exhibition of work by former artists-in-residence in their Intermedia Department. Artists include David Cipriano, Fei Disbrow, Cris Moss, Julie Orser, Patrick Rock, Stephen Slappe and Intermedia Department Scholarship Alumni Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Tyler Jackson, Claire LaMont, Mack McFarland, and Nickolaus Typaldos.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Hybrid Gallery / Indigo @ 12 | West • 430 SW 13th



Susan Burnstine, "Bridge to Nowhere"

Newspace presents Susan Burnstine's Within Shadows. In this series, the artist "explores the fleeting moments between dreaming and waking - the blurred seconds in which imagination and reality collide... The images are created entirely in-camera, rather than with post-processing manipulations. To achieve her unique look, Burnstine created twenty-one hand-made film cameras out of plastic, vintage camera parts, and random household objects, with single element lenses are molded out of plastic and rubber."

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Artist lecture • 12pm • March 6
Newspace Center for Photography • 1632 SE 10th • 503.936.1935



Midori Hirose

For their first exhibition in their new space, Nationale presents Midori Hirose's L Sub to the Polynomial, an installation of new works on paper. "In analyzing and trying to reduce elements of her studio vocabulary to bare visual elements, Hirose took two distinct directions. For Series 1, Hirose thought about jokes and extracted the idea of happiness by reducing it to a moment of laughter...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."

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Nationale • 811 E Burnside Suite 122 (in the back) • nationale.portland@gmail.com]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/first_friday_pi_29.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/first_friday_pi_29.html Openings & Events Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:00:17 -0800
Poster for Judd Conference featuring image of Judd's 1974 piece at the PCVA (photo Maryanne Caruthers)

The University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts and PORT are pleased to announce what promises to be a major highlight of Portland's 2010 cultural calendar; a scholarly conference and exhibition, "Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication; history, practices, issues and implications" on April 25th 2010. With keynote speaker Robert Storr and other notables like Peter Ballantine, this promises to be a conference where Judd's most radical artistic contributions are examined and discussed. Space will be limited to encourage discussion so this wont be one of those static lecture and listen style events.

Furthermore, I'll be curating the exhibition Donald Judd, which will support and encourage the conferences discussion. It opens on conference day and runs through May 21st at the U of O's White Box gallery in Portland. The event is sponsored by the University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Allied Arts, PORT and through the generous patron support of Bonnie Serkin and Will Emery.

Official Website for registration
$65 early registration (through March 22)
$35 students

Sunday, April 25, 2010
University of Oregon in Portland
White Stag Block
70 NW Couch Street, Portland, OR 97209

So why Portland? First of all, there needs to be more scholarship on Judd. Judd completed his first full room sized installation here in 1974 and wrote about the piece in his last essay, "Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular." Also, Judd's Douglas Fir plywood mostly came from Oregon (in fact industrial plywood was invented in Portland and showcased in the 1905 Worlds Fair). Overall though, Portland is kind of "Switzerland" or neutral ground in terms of Judd history, we aren't New York or Marfa and though those were his two main centers Judd was active globally till his death in 1994.

Arcy and I have been hard at work on this for over a year now and the whole process began when Arcy wrote his piece on Donald Judd's important 1974 exhibition at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. It was Judd's first full room installation and part of a series of little known plywood works in London, Portland, Bern, Los Angeles... etc. (most will be familiar with the slant piece at Dia Beacon). That article lead to the Judd Foundation pointing Arcy to longtime Judd fabricator, restorer and curator Peter Ballantine and the wheels were set in motion. Tremendous thanks should go out to those responsible for making this important event happen, Bonnie Serkin and Will Emery, Peter Ballantine, Kate Wagle (University of Oregon Portland), Arcy Douglass (Conference Director), Sarah Meigs, Paige Saez (graphic design), PAM's chief curator Bruce Guenther and The Portland Art Museum's Crumpaker library whose PCVA archives made this all happen.

For April art venues in the Portland metro area will have Judd Conference related programming:

Elizabeth Leach Gallery will present a show of Judd prints and Museum of Contemporary Craft, PDX Contemporary Art, Reed College's Cooley Gallery, Froelick Gallery and Linfield College will all have related shows. Add that to the Portland Art Museum's continuing Disquieted and Twombly shows... plus PICA's TADA party the night before on the 24th and you have got one great Portland art weekend.]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/major_annouceme.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/major_annouceme.html News Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:35:54 -0800
Pae White, "MetaFoil"

Reed College's annual Reed Arts Week starts today. RAW 2010's theme is Alchemy: Organized by Students to Blow Your Mind. During the 4-day arts fest, there will be exhibitions/check locations throughout campus by visiting artists Pae White, Jonah Freeman, Marko Mäetamm, and Vanessa Lang. Most will be open to the public from 12-6pm. Other public events include Saturday's Dublab: Tonalism musical event, a screening by Pierre Huyghe, a table hosted by the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and a reading by David Shields. Check the full schedule for more info on art projects and lectures.

Arts fest • March 3-7, 2010
Reed College • 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd



Jordan Tull, "Shadow Traces" diagram

OCAC's Hoffman Gallery presents Schema: Craft in Context, "the first exhibition in a series exploring the intersection of art, craft, and design in the Northwest...The artists in Schema invent images and forms that exist as the material embodiment of a conceptual framework. The interaction between form and space is primary here. While many of the selections deal with an obvious plan or structure each work can be viewed as presenting actions or directions not immediately evident. As such the pieces become systems to engage multiple possibilities rather than a fixed preconception." Among the included installations is Jordan Tull's architectural intervention, Shadow Traces: "For Hoffman Gallery, Shadow Traces is meant to disrupt visible aperture while shadowing interior surfaces. The intervention offers a shifted architectural context to experience artwork in." The exhibition runs from March 4 - March 28, 2010.

Opening reception • 4-7pm • March 4
Oregon College of Art and Craft • 8245 SW Barnes Road • Hoffman Gallery]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/raw_schema.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/raw_schema.html Openings & Events Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:35:56 -0800
Susan Seubert, "Lovejoy Fountain"

Brian Libby presents 8 x PDX: Photographs of Portland Architecture at AiA's Center for Architecture. The show features works by Jeremy Bitterman, PORTstar Jeff Jahn, Chris Hornbecker, Shawn Records, Susan Seubert, Sally Schoolmaster and Michael Weeks, as well as two pictures taken by Libby.

Opening reception • 5:30-8:30pm • March 4
American Institute of Architects • 403 NW 11th • 503.223.8757



Blakely Dadson, "Platinum and Argyle"

Chambers@916 presents All that glitters... by Blakely Dadson. The exhibition features new paintings by Dadson, who compares his process to alchemy - the transformation of paint into gold. Using bright colors and flashing metallics, Dadson asks the viewer to consider how we assign value to the objects around us, from gold chains to fine art. The work synthesizes contemporary culture's obsession with bling, adding an ironic twist with prominent Jesus iconography. Full disclosure: This blogger works with Chambers@916.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 4
Chambers@916 • 916 NW Flanders • 503.227.9398



Melody Owen, "Drought in Kenya: Swan"

Elizabeth Leach presents Melody Owen's Letters from Switzerland. "Through her photographs, videos, and works on paper, Owen reaches out and touches, processes, and examines the objects and stories that define a specific place...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."

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 4
Elizabeth Leach Gallery • 417 NW 9th • 503.224.0521




Tractor presents 3X_PWN_TRANZ, an installation by FUTURE DEATH TOLL. "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." They'll be conducting a live transmission via Tractor on March 20th.

Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 4
Tractor • 328 NW Broadway #114 • charles@tractorpdx.com




IGLOO presents Wrecking Crüe, a group exhibition that "owes no allegiance to systems or practicality, working in an interstitial state of half-made/half-undone...In terms of genre, this gathering of artists presents ideas at once related under the umbrella of constructed space, yet provide a variety of challenging perspectives. These artists conspire in a loose category of structural invention, whether found at the foot of a modernist monolith, or in an impossible world flirting with utopian sketchbooks." The show features work by Joshua Pavlacky, Salvatore Reda, Josh Smith, Jordan Tull, and PORTstar Jeff Jahn.

Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 4
IGLOO • 625 NW Everett #102 • iglooarts@gmail.com



Brenda Mallory

Doppler presents Brenda Mallory's Constrain to Vertical. In this show, Mallory creates works inspired by stacks of UPS "end-of-day" barcodes. "Drawing from the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, Mallory utilizes vertical line on fabric. As she confines herself to work within strict linear parameters, Mallory's work moves outside of her norm of organic form."

Opening reception • 5:30-9pm • March 4
Doppler PDX • 625 NW Everett #109 • dopplerpdx@gmail.com




PSU's Autzen Gallery presents Grip, Grasp, Grope, and Fondle by San Francisco-based artist Lucas Murgida. "Through performances and interventions, Lucas Murgida engages the public in a dialogue concerning their notions of service, perception, liberation, and derivations of power. To do this, the means by which he earns his living is employed as 'research' to inform his artistic practice. Lucas first finds employment in a particular area of interest and then constructs pieces that expose the embedded metaphors inherent to the jobs structure."

Gallery talk & artist reception • 4-7pm • March 4
Autzen Gallery @ PSU • 724 SW Harrison • 2nd Floor Neuberger Hall Room 205]]> http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/first_thursday_48.html http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/03/first_thursday_48.html Openings & Events Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:56:10 -0800