Who's your art avatar?

Hey Beautiful People!

Well, despite my last blog entry describing my longing for the ITE residency from one year ago, I have actually decided that I'm quite happy to be in the here and now. I'm excited about all the new opportunities I have on my plate at the moment, the weather is warming up and I'm looking forward to painting the house and getting out in the garden, I've been having some inspirational visits with old and new friends. Life is good. Case in point, it's a good month for art in the city of Roses.

Portland has a surprising lineup for its first official offering of the summer--I say surprising because it's customary for galleries to not sell as well or have as high audience attendance in the summertime so they schedule shows that are less interesting than at other times of the year, like, say, fall. Not so this month--I was pleasantly surprised as I walked the streets of the Pearl and Old Town Districts last Thursday night.

First stop is often Blackfish Gallery--a Portland institution. Blackfish is the oldest cooperative gallery in the country, (over 20 years) and there are many distinctive local artists who have been longtime members. It's not my favorite gallery in town, but my friend Gina Carrington is the director there so I like to go early and so she can tell me what she finds personally compelling about each show. This month it's a large group show called the Pacifist Potential. There were a few interesting pieces that stood out for me in this maze of over fifty works--this alone made it difficult for any of the pieces to shine, although it's really the right kind of show to do for this subject matter. Every member of Blackfish submitted a piece, and they invited two or three other artists to contribute works.

The first piece that interested me is a long board that has nails in it, one for every soldier killed in the Iraq war. Every American soldier, that is. It's a very simple, but beautiful and effective piece. There are also several knots in the board which artist Michael Knutson skirted around. This has its own interesting metaphors. I appreciate that Knutson found a way to do a visual body count that didn't involve hash marks, something that is so overused in art that it loses its punch for me.

The other piece I spent some time with was a large group of photographs as well as an audio track of the voices of high school students who volunteered to come talk to the artist one day about their views on pacifism. It's a cool overview of being a teenager in general-- you can see and hear all the personalities trying to take form. But it's an important voice as well because these people are a few short years of being able to vote and/or serve in the military so it's a good perspective to hear. The only unfortunate part of this artwork was the fairly predictable display of the images as an American flag arrangement. I don't have a better idea right now, but I liked the piece other than that. Sorry not to have photos--Blackfish doesn't post many on their site for me to abscond with for the blog. If you go down to the show, check their website by clicking here because they have a huge list of lectures and other gatherings this month at Blackfish that accompany the show. Perhaps the image I used at the start of this blog entry will suffice--it's from a show I'm not reviewing this time, although I did enjoy it. (Matthew Rodriguez at Motel Gallery)

I then went across the street to PDX, excited to see this month's show of drawings and models by Portland's architectural superstar Brad Cloepfil. Many of you readers from outside the Portland area might find this name familiar because he's just completed a highly publicized expansion to the Seattle Art Museum, as well as being the one behind the controversial remodel of the Museum of Art and Design in New York.

This was a really nice show--and as usual, the design of the show itself played a major role in showing the work at its best. Using only pins to attach them to the walls, Cloepfil's drawings were spread around the room, stacked two or three drawings high in some areas. These pieces are what comes first before he starts doing the hard and precise work--representing a mood, or feel for the structure that is to come. Because the work in this show is not for sale (Cloepfil doesn't want to let go of them!) there aren't many images on the PDX website. The ones I used here don't represent the way it feels to be in that room and the way that many groupings work together, so I suggest you get down and see it for yourself. There are a few architectural models there as well.

I was really excited to go to Pulliam Deffenbaugh to see Anna Fidler's new work, which has gotten a decent amount of press this month. I have liked her work for a long time, have often felt that she and I have some aesthetic crossovers--although it's the kind that you can't really verbalize that well so you'll have to judge for yourself why that is. Fidler is a paper cutter and collage artist, often using the tiniest fibrous pieces to create her surreal landscapes. She has been in several of the past Oregon biennials, and has shown with Pull-Deff for the better part of the last decade. She's also a great musician--not sure what her latest endeavor in this is, but I still love my two albums under the name of "The Sensualists" that she was part of a few years back.

I really thought this new body of work pushed it to a new level--first of all, she has pulled the color back from what she used to do--black and white dominate these new works, making them seem more other worldly than ever before. I also really love the use of a watercolor-like backing that adds a new depth to her former work--she's pushing the medium by making it her own more than ever before. Scale is another aspect of this show that seems new to me--there are several museum sized works here. This is many times larger than Fidler's past work, and I admire the way she is able to jump scale like that and still have it work.


I was also really happy to spy one of the prints by Deborah Oropallo that I loved so much at Yerba Buena. Apparently, Rod Pulliam likes her work too. I was really happy to be able to see this work again and it just reinforced how important quality of materials and execution can be to make your work effective. It's all about craftsmanship, baby!!!

The last thing I'll talk about for now is two fantastic shows at the Portland Art Center that ended the night for me, both associated with the Platform International Animation Festival. One I can't stop thinking about and am going to go back down there with TJ today to get another look. It's a show called Alter Ego that shows images of people who play these online social games that are basically complex versions of The Sims. The show pairs these portraits with portraits of their "avatars," or the characters they create to participate in these virtual communities. So, what you're seeing is the image that these people want to be perceived as in the world, or at least this game. I was most fascinated by the wheelchair-bound and oxygen tank-dependent person who designed an indestructible armor-clad version for his virtual self. Equally compelling was the stay-at home mother who chose a sexy little maven for her avatar.

I was hoping to see a little more variety--most of the people seemed to want their alter-egos to be either muscle-bound or sexy and even though some gender lines were crossed, I was longing for someone to pick someone who had something else going for them. But I guess that's what is also interesting about this show for me--the center's director Gavin Shettler told me that many of these virtual communities don't involve combat--so why the huge muscles? I spend some of my down-time looking at a site called 43 Things where people publicly post their lists of up to 43 things that they want to do. This ranges from behavioral changes like "don't eat at McDonalds" or "do ten pushups" to a list of places they'd like to travel in the world, etc. I love seeing these lists that people have created, especially when people come up with creative ones like "make art and leave it in random places for people to find" and the like. It's interactive too, so you can give someone a "cheer" for their list, make a comment, or record your progress on a particular goal. It's a more verbal version of the virtual communities that the avatars in this show are made for, but it's a similar in the way that it addresses yet another way that humans use technology to present a public persona.

In the back gallery, there's a fantastic collection of drawings by Basil Wolverton, an illustrator from the 1950's - 1970's that was curated by Kenny Scharf. Apparently he was a big influence on R. Crumb, and you can definitely see it in some of the wackier images he did for Mad Magazine and the like. But there's a huge series of illustrations from the bible that he did for pamphlets, magazines and bibles after he converted to Herbert W. Armstrong's “Radio Church of God” in the 1940’s. The compositions and graphic skill displayed in this show are really wonderful and it's amazing that his name is not better known. Well, okay, I guess I read on the PAC site that Wolverton gained national recognition after one of his characters appeared in an Andy Capp comic strip.

Okay - got some other things to take care of this morning before going out to see more art this afternoon, especially if I can avoid the blinking Rose Festival, which invades my fair city right when the weather is starting to get nice every year. Back later with more reviews.....but first I'll note that this was the best Wolverton image I could find to show what his religious illustrations were like, but the show is entirely black and white, not color like this.