In Fresh, last spring’s group show at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, two mesmerizing landscapes by Portland painter Adam Sorensen stood out as the best work of the exhibition. Eerily surreal and electric hued, they hardly seemed like landscapes in any traditional sense. Instead, it seemed Sorensen had painted imagined realms, suspended in some gray area […]
John Motley
Posted inArt
Chris Johanson
When Dada spread through Germany after World War I, its practitioners championed the un-self-conscious artistic impulses of the child. Its name even referred to that most basic gesture of expression: a child addressing its father with those first clumsy syllables. But within that movement, privileging nonsensical, automatic expression was couched within hyper-self-conscious theory that belonged […]
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Haunted House
Grizzly Bear Digs Up the Past
YELLOW HOUSE, THE SECOND RELEASE from Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear, is a recording haunted by the past. One of its best songs, “Marla,” was based on a recording made by singer and guitarist Ed Droste’s aunt in the 1930s. In Grizzly Bear’s version, the band resurrects the antique waltz with creaking piano, erratic brushed drums, and […]
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Do No Harm Vs STEP UP
When an artist curates a show, it’s tempting to interpret the art she selects as a kind of sum total of her own artistic strategies. But the scattershot Do No Harm Vs STEP UP, curated by painter Jacqueline Ehlis, sheds little light on what makes her lovely abstract paintings tick. That’s not necessarily a bad […]
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Songs about Songs
Exposing Camera Obscura’s Romance with Pop
CRITICS CAN’T SEEM to mention Camera Obscura without an inevitable comparison to fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian—like it’s some kind of lamprey, hitching a ride in the wake of the latter’s success. Yes, B&S main-man Stuart Murdoch produced the band’s debut single, “Eighties Fan.” And yes, both traffic in understated pop music that disguises dour, […]
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Marc Joseph
In New and Used Marc Joseph presents a loving series of images taken in used book and record stores. They’re clearly the work of someone who has spent serious time flipping through dusty stacks of LPs and paperbacks. The photographs examine records and books as physical representations of the works they contain, while also mining […]
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Damien Hirst
When an artist’s celebrity reaches the level of Damien Hirst’s, paring the deafening hype from the actual product can be a little precarious. But in the case of Hirst, whose work is often predicated on shock value, that doesn’t seem to matter too much. Really, are we compelled to stare at the dead animals Hirst […]
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Circle Triangle Square
JOHN MOTLEY
Cézanne once observed that everything in nature could be broken down to three fundamental geometric forms: spheres, cones, and cubes. That idea, of course, was the inspiration for Picasso and Braque’s exploration of Cubism. But Cézanne’s vision also catalyzed a century of artists who have attempted to distill artistic representation to its most essential components. […]
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Acoustic Warriors
Horse Feathers Declare War on Words
ONE OF LAST YEAR’S loveliest local releases was Words Are Dead by Portland’s Horse Feathers. The band—guitarist and singer Justin Ringle and multi-instrumentalist Peter Brod-erick—craft hauntingly beau-tiful songs that evoke a long history of folk music while managing to evade any obvious touchstones. Or, as Ringle characterized it, Horse Feathers’ music might sound old, but […]
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Shawn Records
At a Loss
In his photographic series Beaver-ton, Shawn Records seemingly did the impossible. He wrenched ghostly beauty out of the kind of eyesores that our minds willfully cross-fade into the background. Given the strength of the Beaverton images, which were deservedly included in last year’s Oregon Biennial and the most recent issue of Portland Modern, it’s a […]
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Brady Cranfield’s Music Appreciation Society
There’s something about music that can turn people into crazed evangelists: I know I spend more time arguing about records than, say, religion or politics. Those heated dialogues are exactly what inspired Brady Cranfield—a Vancouver, BC-based artist—to begin organizing the Music Appreciation Society. In this ongoing event, a panel of artists shares and discusses music […]
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Storm Tharp
We Appeal to Heaven
By now, Storm Tharp’s status as one of Portland’s most gifted artists is old news. His work has been included in three Oregon Biennials and has become increasingly present in group exhibitions since he received his BFA from Cornell in 1992. And somehow the series of portraits in We Appeal to Heaven manages to exceed […]