Last week, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) announced the lineup for September's Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), which looks as promising as ever. Local artists like YACHT, Hand2Mouth Theatre, and Andrew Dickson will all be representing the home team, while Claude Wampler, Donna Uchizono, and Elevator Repair Service are among the more exciting acts coming into town for the festival.

But what we didn't hear a lot about was the visual art component of the festival, which was only inaugurated last year. As in 2006, TBA will host a number of art exhibits at venues throughout the city, but where much of last year's programming had a political undercurrent, the shows this year will be held together by a loose theme of performance. I spoke with PICA's Visual Art Program Director Kristan Kennedy to find out more about what September holds in store for us. There's no space to get into all the shows coming down the hatch, but here's a peek at some of the more exciting projects.

Arnold Joseph Kemp, an artist and former curator at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has been working heavily with both black monochrome paintings and the influence of '70s horror films. For his TBA show, he'll bring these elements together, along with a curation of objects submitted by local art audiences.

Guadalajara-born Cristián Silva will be planting gardens across the city that are completely void of the color green, which will likely be even more dissociative than I can even imagine.

Guido van der Werve is a Dutch artist whose work Kennedy neatly sums up as "Harold and Maude meets Bas Jan Ader." (Translation: A video shows the artist throwing himself off a bridge, just before a barge floats by with a full orchestra on deck.) This will be van der Werve's first US show.

New York sculptor Peter Kreider crafts porcelain milk jugs that bear jack-o'-lantern faces on them, as well as enormous, nebulous orbs of tangled extension cords and electrical wires, both of which will be great to see in person.

Perhaps most exciting of all, though, is local artist Liz Haley's bold piece, in which she will hook herself up to a lie detector, and answer any queries you might have for her. To quote the poet: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know."