Cities are often metaphorized as living things: Their streets and thoroughfares are veins and arteries, their pulsing centers, hearts. Of course, their citizens are responsible for their animation, but somehow the most impressive metropolises suggest that as environments, they have nearly outpaced such human dimensions. Instead, they seem to take on a life of their […]
John Motley
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Rebecca Ripple
language/habit/rubber/God
Los Angeles-based artist Rebecca Ripple’s show at Tilt, which closes this weekend, is one of May’s best exhibitions, but it manages this distinction in spite of itself. Ripple’s four pieces are all exactingly stuffed signifiers; a dizzy swarm of interpretations hovers around even the most restrained work here. But that sense of restraint nearly buries […]
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Jess Collins
Jess: To and From the Printed Page
In 1948, Jess Collins—later known to the art world simply as “Jess”—dreamed that a nuclear holocaust would decimate the earth in 1975. It made sense that this particular doomsday scenario would haunt his subconscious: As a radiochemist, Jess had been drafted into the Army to contribute to the Manhattan Project and later worked in plutonium […]
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Nell Warren
Quandaries
When Nell Warren debuted at PDX Contemporary Art in last summer’s group show, True Bearing, alongside such luminaries as Justine Kurland and Harrell Fletcher, her aesthetic vision fell into two categories. On the one hand, she presented a number of fairly uncomplicated natural scenes, from water rushing around a lone rock to a small stand […]
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Eric White
New Paintings
Compared to some of his earlier work, the new paintings in Brooklyn-based artist Eric White’s show at Quality Pictures trade in a more discreet version of surrealism. Previously, White often telegraphed the absurdity of his paintings through can’t-miss representational distortions; in these new works, however, he masks head-scratching content by painting in a masterly photorealistic […]
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Mark Hooper
There: Here
Like many, I was introduced to Portlander Mark Hooper’s photographs through his Lewis and Clark series, featured in the 2006 Oregon Biennial. Those sumptuous black-and-white images presented the titular explorers as a bumbling, suspender-clad pair, embarking on the impossible task of quantifying wilderness. Whether tape-measuring boulders or gathering water specimens in tin buckets, the two […]
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Anissa Mack
The Last Full Weekend
Each September
The work of Brooklyn-based artist Anissa Mack has long sought to connect viewers with bygone rituals and distinctly American traditions. Those who see her performances and installations encounter a brush with nostalgia that is often vaguely familiar at the same moment it is jarringly incongruous with our very modern times. In her 2002 piece, “Pies […]
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Ethan Rose
Player Piano
For the past five years, Portlander Ethan Rose has been modifying antiquated music equipment—including music boxes and player pianos—to create his own dreamily atmospheric instrumentals. As much a product of the artist’s musical vision as they are experiments dictated by the laws of chance, Rose’s compositions blossom from such theory-steeped musical practices as musique concrète […]
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Boolean Logic
James Boulton
James Boulton has never tried to hide his scattershot influences, which veer from the pixilated contours of vintage videogames to the conceptualism of Rauschenberg’s combines. Certainly, there’s an inherent tension in this collision between the flotsam of pop culture and the monumentality of the art historical canon. But Boolean Logic, the artist’s first solo exhibition […]
Posted inMusic
Mapping the Subconscious
The Secret World of Atlas Sound
When I call Bradford Cox at his home in Atlanta, it’s a full 15 minutes before we start talking about his first release as Atlas Sound. He’s gracious and apologetic, but puts me on hold to seal the deal on a Korg microsynth he found on craigslist. When he gets back on the line, he […]
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Roadside Attraction
In the artist’s statement that accompanies Roadside Attraction, photographer Paula Rebsom explains how she and sculptor Stephanie Robison share an interest in “the ways in which we, as a culture, mediate our interactions with nature.” Based on the work in this collaborative exhibition, the impulse behind that mediation is a drive to read the natural […]
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Wild Wild West
In the group photography exhibition Wild Wild West, curator Todd Johnson organizes a show that is as vast and lawless in its depiction of the American West as the mythic terrain itself. Of course, Johnson’s inclusions are far more diffuse than that Romanticized frontier where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play. […]