In “Untitled Video (A Mother’s Prayer)” by PICA artist-in-residence Matthew Day Jackson, the artist’s mother appears in a small clearing at the edge of a river, engaged in a “ritual blessing of the art of my son Matthew.” Dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of New Balance sneakers, she hardly looks the part […]
John Motley
Posted inArt
Affair at the Jupiter Hotel
It’s the third year of Portland’s very own art fair, the Affair at the Jupiter Hotel. Like the past two years, it’s an opportunity to attend a weekend-long museum in which more than 30 hotel rooms are packed with all the art that dealers from around the country could squeeze into their suitcases. Over the […]
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Supernormal
Most of us would just as soon forget all about our high school years, rather than, say, revisit them as the inspiration for a new body of work. Sean Healy marks the exception with Supernormal, which draws on the iconic imagery of high school. In his cast resin works, strength-training weights hang from the wall […]
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Sutapa Biswas
The work of Indian-born British artist Sutapa Biswas—whose Birdsong at the Cooley Art Gallery coincides with work on display at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery and a performance at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival—often explores issues of gender as well as cultural and ethnic identity. But the work included in Birdsong is hardly […]
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Illegal Art
In a sense, the act of appropriation is as old as art itself: Artists imitating the styles and ideas of their peers is essentially how we conceive of the art historical dialogue. By the ’60s, though, pop artists took this notion to its logical conclusion within a capitalist society, drawing their source material from the […]
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James Lavadour
To call James Lavadour a landscape painter is somehow misleading. Yes, depictions of the Northwest’s desert mountains, swooping valleys, and twilit skies figure in nearly all of his work. But the formal aspects of his paintings are so vibrant and energized that his subject can seem secondary. This is especially true of the new works […]
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Maryhill Double
After several delays and a minor development scandal, Disjecta’s new residence at the Templeton Building under the Burnside Bridge is finally beginning to feel like home. This summer, founder Bryan Suereth and Co. have assembled an impressively diverse program that reminds one just how much the organization has been missed since closing the doors of […]
Posted inVisual Art
Portrait Show
Throughout the history of art, nothing has projected depth or conveyed contradictory emotion as effectively as the portrait. After all, what could offer more insight into the complexity of the human condition than the myriad expressions of the human face? Interestingly, the portraits contributed to the Hall Gallery’s Portrait Show by more than 30 artists […]
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Richard Rezac
For the Jubitz Center’s third exhibition since opening last fall, the Portland Art Museum presents a survey of Richard Rezac’s minimalist sculptures from the last decade. In one sense, it’s an anti-climactic follow-up to its predecessors (Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain and Roxy Paine’s PMU), but Rezac’s understated forms mark a welcome departure from Calle and […]
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Dana Dart-McLean
At first, it’s hard to tell what makes Dana Dart-McLean’s ink, gouache, and graphite works so mesmerizing. They don’t typically dazzle with masterly production values. In fact, there’s often a willful naïveté to her approach—as if she’s painting as automatically as a daydreaming student doodles in the margins of a notebook. Similarly, there’s seldom a […]
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Art vs. Advertising Debate
When the Portland Advertising Federation made plans for a town hall-style discussion between artists and advertisers, they drafted the Portland/LA-based artist Andrew Dickson to host it. It was an obvious choice. Dickson’s performances, such as AC Dickson: eBay PowerSeller, skewer corporate culture with mock seminars that often employ PowerPoint presentations. Then again, that performance landed […]
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grey/area
When Guestroom opened beneath the Wonder Ballroom last January, the gallery set itself apart with a novel idea. As its name implies, each exhibition would be guest-curated by a local artist. But the payoff of this approach remained to be seen until grey/area, curated by TJ Norris. In his own work, Norris relies on the […]