[Please give a big Blogtown welcome to our new arts intern Noah Dunham, who will be filling the very large shoes of Jane Carlen. Seriously, she was like a 16-and-a-half. Those things looked like clown shoes.]

What's a famous director to do when his junk drawer is getting all filled up with arty Polaroids of people that have appeared in his previous films? Hmmm, how about doing away with "annoying pre-Photoshop" ways of rendering images and digitally reconstructing them for an exhibition at PDX Contemporary Art?

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  • Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant will be putting two different photography projects on display in our fair state this month. The first, entitled Cut-ups, will open at Portland's own PDX Contemporary Art center (925 NW Flanders) from May 6 to May 29. The exhibit displays digitally re-imagined cut-ups (hence the clever title) of Polaroids that Van Sant took, throughout his career, as a way of documenting the people who did screen tests for his movies. According to the press release the photographs are meant to be "dreamlike musings on the multi-facedness of persona." And while that sounds awfully pretentious, I'm not going to lie, the pieces (like the ones above) do look pretty cool.

The second show is happening at the University of Oregon in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (1430 Johnson Lane, Eugene). It's called One Step Big Shot: Portraits by Andy Warhol and Gus Van Sant. This exhibition features even more Polaroid portraits (I know! It's starting to get all Pearl Jam - No Code up in here) taken by both Van Sant and Warhol and explores their use with the medium during their careers before digital photography blew up. The work will be up from May 16 to September 5, and the opening reception on May 15 is free to the public. Probably a great show for any die hard Andy or Gussy fan, but eh, then you have to go to Eugene.

For a good article on Gus and his photography I would recommend clicking here.

Also, the best Gus self-portrait I could find after the jump...

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