Arts

Arts August 1, 2016

“CounterPoint” at Gallery 114

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“Counterpoint” by Jon Gottshall Gallery 114, 1100 NW Glisan August 4-27, 2016 Opens Thursday, August 4th, with pre-opening artist’s talk Wednesday, August 3rd, from 7-9 pm The exhibit also features Megan Paetzhold’s multi-medua installation “Studies in: Amblyopia” in the south gallery Story by Jon Gottshall The Sellwood Bridge is Portland’s southernmost Willamette River crossing. The old span, built in 1925, was a narrow, industrial-era structure. High up on its piers, it nevertheless had an uncomplicated, slender beauty as it angled through the trees of the river’s west bank. We’ve known the old bridge was doomed for a long time now. It was never anchored to the bedrock when it was built, and as the western bank shifted, the bridge went dangerously out of plumb. In the time I’ve lived in Portland, the bridge went from handling trucks, buses and cars, to just buses and cars, and finally, only cars were allowed over. Plus, its narrow sidewalk was a terror to every cyclist and pedestrian who had to meet halfway across. Knowing its days were numbered, I began to photograph it. Working at my favorite time to think visually—after 10pm—I became intimately familiar with this broken giant. Today, the old bridge…

Arts, Uncategorized November 10, 2015

Theatre Troupe Seizes Control of Art Salon, Hurls Offenses At Audience

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By Ross Blanchard Photo by Reuben Broadfoot. Foreground: Corey O’Hara. Background: Evan Corcoran A few weeks ago at a Ford Gallery event in Southeast Portland, five actors slipped into the venue, seized the microphone from the event’s host during a presentation, and began to shout offenses at the startled and silented crowd. The art salon in PDX Magazine‘s Mechanical venuewas paying tribute to artist Olinka Broadfoot whose show had launched that evening in the Ford Gallery one floor above. Broadfoot had just delivered a talk about her exhibit and poet Dan Raphael had read, when a man in his early thirties, shaved head, and wearing a yellow nylon jacket burst onto the stage and wrested the microphone from the event’s host. “You are under review by us,” he shouted to the stunned crowd. Another man, dressed in a TSA-style uniform, walked through the audience and shone a flashlight in their faces as a third man pointed a video camera at them. “You don’t have to watch inactively any more,” the man on the stage continued. “You feel the discomfort of being watched and addressed, since you came prepared to watch and make yourselves comfortable in the shelter of the dark. Your presence…

Arts, Featured May 13, 2015

Dear Artists, Toss the Instructions and Forget the Critics

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Discussed in this essay: – What Painting Is, by James Elkins, Routledge, 1999. – Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, by Alva Noë, Hill and Wang, 2009. – Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, et al, Copyright 1972; Penguin, 1977. This article focuses on painting, but if you’re into something else—music, dance, ceramics—these ideas probably apply to your creative endeavors, too. I’ve been working full-time as a painter for four years. Before that I earned a Ph.D. in Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University where I taught courses on an array of topics from film theory to ballet. In both of these lines of work I’ve found that the way we usually talk about painting blows right past the most important thing in painting: the paint, mixed and applied by hands that try and err and retry. What’s going through a painter’s head as she works? Let me put most answers to that question into two categories: “Art History” and “How-to.” This is an overgeneralization, but follow me. Under “Art History” we have critics and historians in coffee-table books, documentaries, classrooms, and museums. Their goal isn’t so…

Arts, Featured March 5, 2015

After The Faux

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Bumps and bruises heal and projects end, but creative, restless minds don’t quit. The Faux Museum in Old Town Portland closed its doors in February. Curator Tom Richards (pictured above. His bruises are from a jogging accident.) operated the art museum since June 2012. When PDX Magazine asked “What’s next for you, Tom?”, he replied with the following open letter to the museum’s fans and to the interested public in which he asks everyone to help him choose amongst myriad options available to an enterprising young man like himself. We’re glad to publish his query. — Ross Blanchard, Editor-in-chief Hello. My name is Tom Richards, and I was the curator/Janitor of the late The Faux Museum, which was a conceptual art museum based in Old Town Portland, Oregon. I say “was” because after January of this year we closed our doors. I know it may be kind of hard to imagine how a conceptual art museum claiming to be the oldest museum in the world could fail. After all we had a Woolly Ant! True, we were surrounded by social services that aid the mentally ill, recovering addicts, and houseless persons; and our neighbors who weren’t strip clubs or dispensaries were bars…

Arts, Events December 5, 2014

Photography At Large: My Tour With The Wild Ones

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“On the count of three, jump back and lean to your right—actually, put that crown on your head first. Mateus, can you help her?” I directed from behind my camera. As Mateus placed a flower crown on top of Bella’s head, I wrapped my arms around myself and hugged tightly. It was a chilly day in New York City’s Central Park and the sun was quickly disappearing behind the city skyline. I had only met Bella and Mateus minutes earlier, but was already comfortable creating art with them—as was everyone else. On the other side of the park, Kory had climbed daringly high into a tree while Sandra, sprawled out on the grass below, quickly snapped photos. Nearby, Wendy was carefully arranging butterflies on Alyssa’s back while Alyssa emoted over her shoulder. Mere hours before, we were all strangers, but had gathered together that day to create conceptual photographs for The Wild Ones tour. We quickly became friends. Combine three best-friend photographers, a van overflowing with camera equipment, and a strong desire to give back to the photographic community and you get The Wild Ones tour. The annual traveling summer workshops are where aspiring photographers befriend and create photographs with…

Photo of Faux Museum by Jayna Milan
Arts November 19, 2014

New botanical mystery on display at Faux Museum

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Past the small curated gift shop of antique postcards, curious pamphlets, oversized classic candy, and other oddities, past the quiet and delightful gentlemen, Tom Richards, seated behind the counter, lies the Faux Museum‘s (139 NW Second Ave.) latest visual journey The Lost Secrets of the Bennett-Brackett Portfolio. Detailed, technical sketches of plants—peculiar plants that you can’t quite identify—line the walls of the museum. These pieces are the crux of the exhibit, a collaboration between Richards, the museum’s curator, and local artist Jessica Brackett, who drew the pieces. The sketches, at once delicate and scientific, are difficult to identify because they’re complete fabrications of Brackett’s—“faux plants” she calls them. “We wanted to make the drawings become a documentation of a grand conspiracy that spanned the ages,” says Brackett. It was she who suggested the notion of a turn-of-the-century lady explorer, the fictional Ms. Bennett-Badger-Brackett, who would follow the “bread crumbs of a secret government conspiracy.” It was Richards who suggested “a larger context involving conspiracy theories and ancient greats like Socrates and Galileo,” according to Brackett. By the end of the collaboration, Brackett notes that the fruition of their planning was equal parts artist and curator. The exhibit tells the tale…

Arts, Events November 14, 2014

Discussing Finances Through Art: Umpqua Bank Launches Exhibit: Growth

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A 40-foot geodesic dome appeared in Portland’s Director Park this week. It, and several sculptures by local and national artists that surround the dome, comprise Exhibit: Growth, an experiential art installation commissioned by Umpqua Bank. The exhibit aims to demonstrate the power and beauty of a collective experience by taking visitors on a journey of personal discovery. “This project began with a simple question: what does it take to have a conversation about money?” says Eve Callahan, a senior vice president at the bank who heads Umpqua’s Corporate Communications department. Callahan explains that since the mid-1990s, when Umpqua began to introduce its bank branches as community hubs, the company has tried to surmount the taboo of talking openly about finances in people’s daily lives. “Like it or not, money is an essential part of life. It guides decisions about where we live, what car we drive, where we educate our kids, travel, eat…in short, just about everything. Yet people don’t want to talk about it,” Callahan adds. Umpqua is again challenging people to think about the topic of money, this time in an unconventional way—through art. It commissioned the talent of digital art agencies Fake Love from Brooklyn and The Mill whose Los Angeles team…

Fight or Flight by Corey Arnold
Arts, Events November 5, 2014

Three must-see picks for November’s First Thursday

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This week, reward the brain with some unstructured playtime courtesy of another installment of First Thursday. The Pearl District’s monthly gallery walk grants access to local, national, and international artists in a setting ripe for socialization. Head over to Charles A. Hartman Fine Art Gallery (134 NW 8th Ave.) with friends to discuss the work of Portland-based artist Corey Arnold. His series, Wildlife, rediscovers the meaning of “awesome.” Used during Romanticism to describe nature, awesome defines a thing that simultaneously evokes admiration and fear—Arnold’s work delivers both. Expect to be drawn in by the rich colors and held captive by the creatures before you, and feel free to share your experience with Arnold. The artist will be present for the opening reception, which runs from 5 to 8 p.m. At Annie Meyer Artwork Gallery (120 NW 9th Ave.), local artist Shawn Demarest exhibits Snow Day, a series of vignettes prompted by a rare heavy snowfall that descended on Portland back in February 2014. Demarest uses oil paints to depict outdoor scenes, often initially rendered on site in a technique called en plein air. Her paintings then evolve in her studio where time degrades the details of the scene causing her…

Arts, Featured November 3, 2014

Between Here and There: My Own Starlight Scope Myopia

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Blessed with great hearing and strong night vision, Army draftee Lance Grebner was often assigned night watch duty for his company in the Vietnamese central highlands during his 1968-69 tour. His story of becoming a go-to guy on the starlight scope brought up some Naval and academic memories for me. Then his narrative took a turn way beyond my field of vision—down a path not fit for sensitive readers. On that path I heard some scary things, recited some poetry, put my foot in my mouth, and tried my best to channel it all into half of a portrait. I work as a figurative painter. For the past few months, sculptor Christopher Wagner and I have been brushing and carving on a series of two-media portraits of combat veterans we’re calling Between Here and There, a project funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Right now, we’re in the middle of creating ten pairs, a sculpture and a painting of each vet created from live models, simultaneously. Setting aside the common image of the homeless, needy veteran or the uniformed vet just off the plane from Iraq, these portraits celebrate each of our subjects as an individual with his…

Arts October 29, 2014

Seeing Beyond the Stigma at J. Pepin Art Gallery

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“The vernacular that’s used around mental health perpetuates the stigma,” sighs Jennifer Pepin, the artist behind the young, eponymous gallery. “Like, mental illness…I hate those words.” In 2007, the same year that Pepin received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, BMC Health Services Research compiled a list of 250 labels—derisive words such as crazy, bonkers, nuts, and psycho—used to stigmatize individuals with mental health issues. The negative attitudes attached to such labels are far reaching, and frequently generate feelings of fear, distrust, pity, and rejection. For some, joining a support group, which offers a nonjudgmental platform to share and explore similar experiences, is a way to mitigate that stigma. After a severe bout of depression in the summer of 2012, Pepin felt alienated and misunderstood. “I was seeking understanding, and people that could validate what I was experiencing. I simply went online and typed in ‘bipolar support groups.’” To her surprise, Pepin found that her support group was bursting with artistic talent. Among its members were several painters, a classically trained pianist-turned-composer, a published poet, and a dancer. They were people whose thriving creative practices and psychiatric diagnoses weren’t mutually exclusive. Still, Pepin felt that the stigma of mental health was…