Chas Bowie

Much of the accepted history of Western art revolves around the construct of bad boys (Caravaggio, Bruce Nauman) doing bad things (Courbet’s “Origin of the World,” Chris Burden shooting at airplanes). Even when you suspect they are good boys (Mike Kelley), they frequently try to associate themselves with “bad” phenomena (Kelley’s John Wayne Gacy painting). […]

Next Spring, Reed College hosts Feast the Eye, Fool the Eye, an exhibition of trompe l’oeil paintings spanning three centuries. As painted images that are designed to fool the eye, trompe l’oeil produce an incredible sequence of perceptive phenomena that short-circuit the very fabric of our eye-to-brain faculties. Like grabbing hopelessly at a 3-D movie, […]

Prenatal Development @ OMSI 1945 SE Water St. It was like those dreamy memories that you grow not to trust. Could I have really seen that? Had that really happened? Or was it lucid wanting and imagination swirled with actual recollections to produce a false memory–an imposter’s thumbprint? What I remembered was a dimly lit […]

www.glasstire.com/features/anspon_Flood.htm Although Mark Flood has been getting press in rags like The New Yorker and Artforum for his hyper-colored lace paintings, his art wasn’t always so dainty. A longtime underground Texas artist, Flood was known for grotesque collages of teen hunks, and most famously, a collaboration with Mel Chin called the GALA Committee. The GALA […]

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who worked collectively under the simple moniker “Christo” until 1994, are likely the most uncompromising and driven artists in the world. Their most famous projects are some of the largest and ambitious artworks ever created: Surrounded Islands, in which they surrounded the perimeter of eleven islands off Miami in shiny pink fabric; […]

AC Dickson: eBay Powerseller plays at the Wieden + Kennedy Atrium, Friday Sept. 10 @ 5:30 pm, Saturday Sept. 11 @ 2 pm, Sunday Sept. 12 @ 5:30 pm, $10 for PICA members, $15 general eBay University happens Saturday Sept. 11, Oregon Convention Center, $39 Andrew Dickson has done what many only dream of doing: […]

So art thieves drive Audi A6’s, do they? I guess it’s an appropriately Euro-trash sophisticated, dashingly criminal getaway car, although if I were choosing Audis to steal masterworks with, I probably would have gone with the 12-cylinder A8 L. It’s six-speed automatic transmission, ability to reach 250 km/h in 30 seconds, and single-frame radiator grille […]

In my younger, more hedonistic days, my former roommate and I decided to check out a movie in the next town over, despite flash flood warnings being broadcast over the airways with increasing urgency. We figured we could outrun the Texas thunderstorm–but first we’d have to inhale enough pot to get us not only to […]

When American civilization as we know it is long gone and strictly the domain of historians and archaeologists, I hope to be spared the posthumous embarrassment of the inevitable discovery of the in-flight Sky Mall catalog. If every era has its own mail-order identity (Sears Roebuck for the post-war boomers, Whole Earth for the crunchy […]

On these Pepsi-fueled insomniac midnights, I find myself returning to Art Is For the People, a confounding, flatfooted, and brilliant art project on the world’s most pedestrian medium: the internet. AIFTP is a collection of colossally bad photographs and brilliantly lame no-tech ideas that may be the only thing saving me from freefalling into the […]

Bud Lawdermilk is a Ft. Worth-based NASCAR photographer whose shots of fast cars and their drivers have appeared in the New York Times, ESPN.com, the Washington Post, and almost every magazine out there devoted to the “sport” of NASCAR. We asked for your questions for Bud, and you sent them in! Here’s what Mr. NASCAR […]