- Hellion Gallery
- Blaine Fontana installing Mergers & Acquisitions
Friendly germs. Spooky ghosts. Something called the Limerent Alembic. This could only mean one thing: First Thursday!
Scoot past the jump for details on a handful of exhibitions opening tonight during the Westside art walk.
Opening tonight at Upper Playground’s FIFTY24PDX Gallery, Benign, But Still Yucky is a series of animations, illustrations, sculptures, and embroideries by Matt Reynolds. “I think it’s safe to say that our culture shares in a certain paranoid skepticism of the microscopic world underneath our skin,” writes Reynolds. “My aim is to soften the frightening, foreign aspects or our own bodily anxieties by rendering microscopic forms with the hand of a classic cartoonist. It seems easier to confront a tumor if it has a pair of big, glossy eyeballs.” 23 NW 5th Ave, 6-10 pm.
- The Pony Club
Maybe I’ve just been watching too much Ghost Adventures, but I’m excited to check out The Pony Club’s Ghost Show. While I doubt there will be any Ed Hardy bros heckling the lingering spirits, the gallery’s website says to expect “ghostly art by some of [Pony Club’s] favorite illustrators: Andrice Arp, Julia Grofrer, Theo Ellsworth, Zack Soto, Jen Tong, B.T. Livermore, Jason Graham, The Pony Club Members, and lots more!” 625 NW Everett St, #105, 6 pm.
- SoHiTek Gallery
- Sean Christensen’s “Twin Islands.”
Over at SoHiTek Gallery, illustrator Sean Christensen presents The Limerent Alembic. “The show focuses on the places where vessels collide to impact, distill & regurgitate each other in new forms,” Christensen writes in an artist statement. “The Limerent Alembic is where the culmination of elements natural & metaphysical can alter reality by way of passion, or an endless love that seems unnamed but ever torturing & never fully forming.” Just like my dreams of becoming a ghost hunter. 625 NW Everett St, #102, 6-10 pm.
On view at Hellion Gallery, Mergers & Acquisitions is painter/designer Blaine Fontana‘s first solo show in Portland— made up of “all new fine art, design, sculpture, and furnishings”— and it’s been a long time coming. “It wasn’t appropriate to create such a multifarious show until now,” writes Fontana, “until my design, fine art, sculpture and environmental aspects all coalesced harmoniously.” Ten years in the making, Mergers & Acquisitions sounds like an promising departure from Fontana’s street-art roots. 19 NW 5th Ave, # 208, 6 pm.
- Breeze Block Gallery
- James Florschutz’ “Sedimental.”
Lastly, Breeze Block Gallery also strays from the beaten, urban-art path with “a special exhibition of milestone sculptures” by James Florschutz. Florschutz’ sculptures can be characterized as piecemeal assemblages of scrap material. “These discarded materials have their own language and tell their own stories,” Florschutz explains in an artist statement. “I attempt to unite these diverse materials to reveal insight into our culture’s sense of the environment.” 323 NW 6th, 6-10 pm.