Archives for August 2009

Joe Piecuch, Elias Hansen, from review of Truths We Forgot To Lie About:

They treated Tacoma like a science experiment, taking core samples of the place distilled into gruesome forms of theoretically drinkable beverages.

In all manner of glass test tubes (blown by Hansen), they mixed an alcohol base with Western red cedar, brick fragments from Ted Bundy’s childhood home and soil from Port Madison; coyote blood, beard hair, beeswax and butterfly wings; blackberries, club moss from the Hoh rain forest and hydrogen cyanide; soil from Lewis and Clark’s Cape Disappointment camp site, concrete from the Boeing plant in Everett flavored with hobo urine, and brick chips from Francis Farmer’s childhood home with paint flecks from Curt Cobain’s final abode on Lake Washington.

THE GRID at the Milepost 5 Post Space in Portland, reception Aug. 22 (7-9 p.m.), continues through Oct. 17, curated by TJ Norris.

With Post-It Notes in an air vent: (Alastair Levy)

On a clipboard: (Ryan Sarah Murphy)

Outside the box – Early Bus: (Darrell Williamson)

Echoes, not choices: (Heidi Schwegler)

Daniel Lee looks back and forward, on a continuum.

Nancy Burson began making composites in the early 1980s. (Thanks, Jen)

The rise of Photoshop made the mix and match of features between individuals and species easy. Anonymous designers at Converse do this sort of thing as well as anybody. (Design Boom via This Isn’t Happiness.)

Painters tend to be less slick.

Troy Gua, The Boy King of Pop (Tut and Michael Jackson)

Deborah Oropallo blurs male/female, vintage and now.

Eric Yahnker updates Cubism with a shaggy dog story.

Alice Tippit‘s animals look good coming and going.

Yeni Mao prefers an electronic look:

Dawn Cerny‘s portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln shows her youth under her old age.

I love Sharon Shapiro‘s collages, and not because they’re perfect. Like her subjects, they are rough drafts, with the tattered edges of their dreams showing.

Weasel boy/girl can’t wait to grow up, to lose oddball status in the anonymity of adulthood.

If food grew on the ceiling….(Carsten Holler)

Science fiction imagines hybrid animals we can send to war in our stead. Bryon King‘s version pops that bubble. Titled Trophy Soldiers, his series of deer-head drawings is a memorial to the fallen. Even when his figures are holding rifles, they’re the target.

Jean Michel Arseneaux, One Way, The Green Way (Thanks Scott)

One of the best art centers in the NW is in Springfield, Oregon, just outside of Eugene. Yes, Eugene, famous for people sitting in trees to save them from logging and the fire-bombing of the occasional SUV lot.

Opening Saturday at Ditch Projects is Patrick Rock’s happening/installation, Face It, You’re Hippies!

In Face It You’re Hippies!, anti-sociologist Patrick Rock spends six days living in a bunker below the Ditch Projects space, using that time to obsessively and painstakingly construct a physical manifesto of Oregonian identity designed to turn the viewer into salt at a single glance. Details are fuzzy, but the following statements are certainly true: something is going to burn, something is going to die, and the landlord is going to be pissed. Rock’s tenure will culminate in a neo-pagan anti-potluck on Aug. 15 featuring a musical performance by cock rockers PISS.

Patrick Rock, from his series, The West, 2002:

In a one-day only exhibit in a studio behind an alley: Saturday, Aug. 29, 2-6 p.m., 1618 10th Ave. W. Queen Anne, Seattle

Meredith Lee

Dave Badders

[Read more…] about The tiny art movement continues

From Portland, beside the urinals of the largest independent bookstore in the country:

Oscar the Grout

Grout the Devil

Grout of Bounds

Thanks, Scott.

Rachel Maxi’s The Lay of the Land at Grey:

Creatures and Curiosities from the Digital Kitchen at Vermillion:

Paula Rebsom at Form/Space Atelier:

Outskirts
is a site-specific infiltration using photographs and a kiosk to
narrate a previous site- specific exhibit by Rebsom developed during a
residency at the Ucross Foundation in a Wyoming prairie dog metropolis.

Don Kenn’s Post-It Drawings, via C-Monster.

I like these too: Marc Johns, previously on CM, and Xu Zhen.

Triple Candie’s R.I.P. fake show for Maurizio Cattelan, via ANABA, here. Holland Cotter on TC’s 2006 fake show for David Hammons,
here, whom Cotter rightly calls “one of the three or four most
interesting and influential American artists of the last 30 years.”

Susanna Bluhm makes excellent comparisons between artists in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-1978 at the Seattle Art Museum and major moments in art history, here.

She should have identified them, however. Top, Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1958. Bottom, Matthias Grunewald, from The Crucifixion, 1515 (Isenheim altarpiece).

Jen Graves on the (I hope) come-back kid future of Seattle’s 911 Media Arts Center, here. Who’s to blame for its travails?

Billionaire Paul Allen’s “city within a city, where lively
workplaces, shops, restaurants, schools, parks, entertainment, and
recreation are located in a dynamic, emerging neighbor-hood” is once
again forcing out the arts. Allen’s plan for South Lake Union, once
touted as a developing arts and technology hub, is instead turning into
a designer playground for the rich. 911 Media Arts Center, like
independent arts groups Consolidated Works and Center on Contemporary
Art before it, can no longer afford the rent it pays to Allen’s company
Vulcan.

Not fair, but admirably rousing. ConWorks collapsed under the weight of a bungling board. 911 and CoCA couldn’t afford the rent in a dollhouse.

On the other end of the spectrum, Ken Johnson slams the socially relevant at the Newwark Museum, here.

The strategy is pretty clear: almost every piece in the
exhibition, whatever its form — and there is a great variety of formal
approaches –pertains to a social issue. Race, ethnicity, identity,
immigration, ancestry, disenfranchisement and globalization are among
the themes represented, and if they are not immediately discernible in
the works themselves, wall labels helpfully explain. Call it Postmodern
Social Realism Lite.

Ouch.

Finally, Martin Creed on YouTube (TateShots): “Art is just a word.” Word.

Eroyn Franklin debuts her new book of hand-cut images and text, Another Glorious Day At The Nothing Factory, at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Aug. 22, 6-9 p.m.

As the title suggests, it’s a Northwest memoir.

ON FAMILY
ROAD TRIPS WHEN I WAS LITTLE I LAID DOWN IN THE BACK SEAT OF THE
MINIVAN.  I WOULD ARRANGE MY HEAD SO THAT WHEN I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW
ALL I COULD SEE WERE CLOUDS.  I WOULD PRETEND WE WERE FLYING AND THAT
THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS LAND.  WHENEVER A TALL TREE OR A TELEPHONE
POLE WOULD CAREEN INTO MY LINE OF SIGHT I WOULD CLOSE MY EYES AND
SQUEEZE OUT ITS MEMORY, THE MEMORY OF SOIL.

HE WAS BORN
ON THE DARKEST DAY OF THE YEAR.  A FACT THAT SEEMED TO COINCIDE WITH
HIS DEMEANOR.  I LOVED HIS SADNESS, NOT THE MAKING OF HIS SORROW, BUT
ITS AUTUMNAL  KINDRED QUALITY.  ITS SUBTLE PERVASIVENESS SO SIMILARLY
ALIGNED WITH MINE.  HE WAS LIKE A DOLEFUL GRANDFATHER WHOSE MOMENTS
COULD BE BRIGHTENED SO HANDSOMELY BY HIS BROOD.  I SO RARELY GOT TO
DRAW THIS OUT IN HIM, NOT ON HIS FAULT, BUT BECAUSE I WAS LAZY WITH OUR
LOVE.  LAZY BEING THE LEAST BAD THING I CAN SAY ABOUT MY BEHAVIOR.