In which I copy and paste a press release, because it is too weird to paraphrase:
Pink Martini / Oregon! Oregon! 2009 : A Sesquicentennial Fable in IV Acts / Visit pinkmartini.com for showtime and ticket prices. / All AgesIn 1959, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Oregon, the Blitz-Weinhard Brewing Company commissioned the Grammy Award-winning radio personality Stan Freberg to write a 21-minute-long musical comedy about the Beaver State. The result was a hilarious tale of two explorers in 1859 named Harry and David, their encounter with a witch, and the subsequent birth of a state which must go back into the bottle after 100 years…that is, if the citizens of 1959 can’t break the spell. Sound confusing? Well hold on to your myrtlewood, because a team of Oregonians, including Metro President David Bragdon, Chariots of Fire conductor Harry Rabinowitz, Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, PICA Flash Choir’s Sarah Dougher & Pat Janowski, and the writers of Livewire! have teamed up to write a new Act IV, complete with brand new songs and rollicking plot! With sets by Scrappers and an all-star Oregonian cast backed by the Oregon National Guard 234th Army Band and Pink Martini, Oregon! Oregon! 2009 will debut at the Oregon State Fair, followed by performances in Bend, Jacksonville and Pendleton. The final performance—in Portland—will be co-presented by PICA in the bowl of the historic Memorial Coliseum (built 1959) for one night only!
David Bragdon is such a Renaissance man. Also, congrats on the gig to Mercury art director Justin "Scrappers" Morrison. The rest of the new artists added to the TBA:09 lineup are after the jump, and my original TBA post is here. (Did I mention that I think new guest artistic director Cathy Edwards is completely reinvigorating this festival? Because I do.)
We'll have more on the Pink Martini project in the next week or so.
Luke Cage and Prescott Sheng / Crock: The Motion Picture / Mature Audiences
Screening with Directors' Live Commentary
Chaotic, challenging, and absent of marketable aesthetic, Crock premiered in 1996 and promptly sank into obscurity. Filmed with Hi-8 cameras and edited at Portland Cable Access, this feature-length video stars artists and musicians from Portland’s 90s indie scene. Inspired by the French Foreign Legion comic strip of the same name, Crock is a messy and doomed counterpoint to the boosterism and cosmopolitan ethos that eventually altered the city’s character. Somewhere in North Africa, revolutionary Pretty Boy enlists the aid of Legionnaire Maggot to steal the iron fist of Commandant Vermin P. Crock. Meanwhile, Pretty Boy’s sister Flossie plots her own overthrow of the colonial regime with the help of her all-womyn militia. The movie shares characteristics with a genre of no-budget, underground films, and gestures toward conceptual art as initiated by artists including Hans Haake and Raymond Pettibon. Over a decade later, the film continues to vex audiences with its weirdly puritan perversity and disregard for cinematic conventions. Celebrating the film’s thirteenth anniversary, PICA brings together the filmmakers and cast members for another look at this odyssey of insurrectionary filmmaking.
Special Event: Jon Raymond and James Yu record live commentary with interjections from cast members and special guests on September 5th.
circles and spinning wheels & if i could crowd all my souls into that mountain / Curated by Melody Owen / All Ages
www.thistlepress.net
The artist Melody Owen has spent the last few years traveling in Paris, Quebec, Iceland, and the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. As she roamed, she collected video works from artists she met along the way. Owen has organized these works into two distinct screenings. The first, circles and spinning wheels, is a compilation of animations, mini-documentaries, music videos, and experimental films that feature the curves and planes of circles. This simple shape of Euclidean geometry remains constant despite the artists' different styles and methodologies. The second, if i could crowd all my souls into that mountain, features videos by an international cast of characters who have stepped from behind the camera and transformed into both subject and performer as they document their actions in the world. Artists featured include Boris Achour, Guler Ates, Barak Bar-am, Jean Charles Blanc, E*rock, Ben Fino-Radin, Liz Haley, John Hey, Gretchen Hogue, Cassandra C. Jones, Alexandra Lakin, Chris Lael Larson, Zak Margolis, Alicia McDaid, Ma Qiusha, Daragh Reeves, Michael Shamberg, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson, Catarina Simoes, Matt Underwood, and Ola Vasiljeva. Melody Owen is an artist and curator, and is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Carter / Erased James Franco / All Ages
www.carteroffice.com
Recalling the intellectual gamesmanship of Robert Rauschenberg's 1953 drawing Erased de Kooning, from which it derives its title, Erased James Franco is simultaneously a study of the craft of acting and of the fracturing—and reconstitution—of narrative and identity. While filmmakers in recent years have attempted shot-for-shot remakes of existing films—most notably Gus Van Sant with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Haneke with his own Funny Games—the emphasis here is on a single actor, alone on stage, recreating iconic film performances that have been stripped of their original context. In addition to re-enacting scenes from several of his own past film roles, Franco also reinterprets a pair of haunting portrayals of psychic disintegration and renewal: Julianne Moore's role in Todd Haynes' Safe and Rock Hudson's in John Frankenheimer's Seconds. Denied the charged interplay with other actors, Franco adopts a strangely flat affect, imbuing the film with a quality that Carter describes as "like bloodletting or a kind of cleansing…a building up and tearing down, simultaneously." Courtesy Carter and Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris.
Peter Coffin / Untitled / All Ages
www.andrewkreps.com
Please ask the attendant about this work.
Peter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald St, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery (NY); The Wrong Gallery (NY); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (CA); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami (FL); The Horticultural Society of New York (NY); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; as well as recent group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NY. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Brian Lund / Curated by Mack McFarland / All Ages
Pacific Northwest College of Art Project Space
Brian Lund works primarily in the medium of drawing. His recent series of works on paper combine the visual vocabularies of two cinematic sources: Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) and Busby Berkeley’s choreographed dance sequences from Depression-era Hollywood musicals. Every character and/or action in every edit of Wall Street and the Berkeley dance numbers has been graphically translated to a series of marks. These marks cluster and expand to form a map-like surface. Through an interweaving of these diagrammatic forms, Lund interprets a complex and layered multimedia experience. Lund’s work has been exhibited at numerous venues including Smith-Stewart Gallery, New York (2009); Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York (2009); Newark Arts Council, Newark, NJ (2008); Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT (2008); b42 Gallery, Oakville, Ontario, Canada (2008); Moti Hasson Gallery, New York (2008); Josèe Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2008); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2008); The Drawing Center, New York (2008); and chashama, New York (2006). His work has been reviewed in several publications including The New York Times, Time Out New York, Art Review, and The Journal News. Lund is represented by Smith-Stewart, NYC. Courtesy of the artist and Smith-Stewart.
Broadcast / Curated by Irene Hoffman / All Ages
The Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College
www.lclark.edu/dept/gallery
Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged with, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, the artists reveal the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems and challenge their authority and influence. The exhibition spans four decades of work by an international group of artists. It begins with Nam June Paik’s manipulated news footage from the late 1960s and moves on to Chris Burden’s infamous 1971 hostage-taking of a TV host at knifepoint; and TVTV’s iconoclastic broadcast from the floor of the 1972 Republican convention. The exhibition ends with a 1980 work made by Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter as artists-in-residence at a Texas news station. Recent works in the exhibition include the pirate FM radio-station installation that Gregory Green initiated in the basement of his New York gallery in 1995, neuroTransmitter’s live radio transmissions, and Siebren Versteeg’s manipulations of cable news.
Broadcast is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, and iCI (independent Curators International), New York; circulated by iCI.
W.A.G.E. Lecture wIth A.L. Steiner / Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)
www.wageforwork.com
A.L. Steiner speaks about the work of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), a New York-based activist and consciousness-raising group formed in 2008. W.A.G.E. advocates that fair payment practices be established for the visual artists, performers, and independent curators with whom U.S. art institutions choose to work. A.L. Steiner is a co-organizer of W.A.G.E., along with A.K. Burns and K8 Hardy. Steiner is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and performer, and is an instructor at the School of Visual Arts. This lecture is free and open to the public. Artists, performers, curators, arts administrators, politicans, collectors, gallerists, and other interested/implicated parties are encouraged to attend.
Tarek Halaby / An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Part One
www.parts.be
An attempt... is the result of a research process in which Halaby looks into the varying and matching points between collective and personal stories inside the choreographic creative processes. By presenting this piece as a "product" in process, to finish or resolve, Tarek relates the work to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and he questions and explores the ironies and paradoxes of art works with a deliberate political content. Co-produced by P.A.R.T.S.
