Over the history of the Oregon Biennial, the Portland
Art Museum learned that it’s impossible to please everyone. When the
museum announced that it would eschew the ever-divisive Biennial for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, the prospect of a
show that would whittle down its participants to five artists and
expand its geographical reach to include Washington, Idaho, Montana,
and Wyoming in addition to Oregon hardly seemed like the solution. Yes,
it would provide visitors with a richer experience, allowing them to
dig more deeply into the work of a handful of artists. But it would
also shift the focus from homegrown talent. (In fact, only one of the
five finalists, Marie Watt, is an Oregonian; the rest hail from
Washington.)
Somehow, walking through the museum during opening weekend, these
quibbles disappeared. The inaugural exhibition may have slighted Oregon
(and local luminaries such as James Lavadour and Storm Tharp), but
curator Jennifer Gately has brought together a group of artists whose
work is fresh, exciting, and unfettered by loyalty to any single
medium: Watt, Dan Attoe, Jeffry Mitchell, Cat Clifford, and Whiting
Tennis, who received the Arlene Schnitzer Prize and attendant $10,000.
More importantly, while the exhibition is undoubtedly preoccupied with
issues of regional identity, it serves to show that the Northwest’s
best artists can capably compete with those in major art markets in the
US and beyond.
Watt’s monolithic “Forget-me-not: Blossom”—a raw pillar of
basalt, barnacled with hand-stitched, woolen “blossoms”—stands as
a gateway to the exhibition. A rustic monument to the Northwest’s
“wild” terrain and spirit, it is also, literally, Watt’s memorial for
Oregon soldiers who have died in Iraq. It leads to an enclosed circular
chamber made of pieces of wool blankets called “Forget-me-not: Mothers
and Sons.” Populated by hundreds of cameo-style portraits of fallen
soldiers (the sons) and historical forebears (the mothers), from Joan
of Arc to theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore, the installation builds on
Watt’s use of blankets both as family heirlooms and as a metaphor for
the fabric of personal connectivity. In short, it’s the best work of
her career.
Attoe’s luminescent oil paintings split the difference between
high-art historical reference and mass cultural flotsam like comic
books, heavy metal album art, and a menacing Twin Peaks vibe.
Many of his paintings are miniature dramas, tiny vignettes about
foresters and drifters set against the Northwest’s gray skies and
Douglas firs. But Attoe’s most ambitious canvases are flat-out
jaw-dropping. “Accretion #38 (This has been coming…)” is a
disorienting swirl of visual information. As a group of policemen
conduct a midnight flashlight search of a forest floor, numerous panels
superimposed on the scene reveal flashes of tangential plotlines. One
senses that Attoe has handed viewers a complete narrative, but
flattened its chronological arc in pictorial space.
Tennis’ folk art-damaged paintings and sculptures narrowly focus on
his interest in, as he described at a recent panel discussion, the
liminal “belt between the urban and rural.” As such, his
sculptures—which are roughly human sized and made entirely of
discarded wood and home improvement supplies—could either be
functionless constructions or eerily sentient beings (implied by titles
like “The White Nun” and “Boogeyman”). His enormous “Bitter Lake
Compound,” though, is the most compelling investigation of this
phenomenon. Splicing collage and painting, Tennis recreates the
rearview of an outbuilding, finding poetry in its textures,
circumstantial geometry, and washed-out palette.
If the show stumbles, it’s the works of Jeffry Mitchell and Cat
Clifford that don’t quite measure up. Both artists are strong
conceptually, but, somehow, the objects themselves feel unfinished.
Mitchell’s largest work to date, “Sphinx,” vaguely recreates the
titular monument with wooden boxes and decorated canvas cloth.
Approaching the sculpture’s rear, Mitchell reveals the mystery of the
Sphinx to be an elaborate display case of white ceramic bears and
elephants (and several nods to queer subculture). It’s a thoughtful and
provocative piece, but remains aesthetically underwhelming. The work of
Clifford, which ranges from pinhole camera photographs to videos of
site-specific performances, is similarly stuffed with ideas. Most
interestingly, Clifford uses projectors to insert her animations within
groups of drawings, creating a jarring spatiotemporal tension between
static and time-based art. Still, both Mitchell and Clifford make
welcome additions to the show because they err on the side of the
cerebral. Like Watt, Attoe, and Tennis, their work is driven by thought
and an intense awareness of what it means to be alive now. Of
course, that’s a concern that isn’t unique to the Northwest—and
the show’s all the better for it.