When I first encountered the work of sculptor Jenene Nagy in her 2005 solo exhibition Backyard Icing, her project hinged on the intimacy of its scale and on the artist’s acute attention to detail. Those sculptures, which were the result of an artist residency at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), were inscrutable forms made […]
John Motley
Posted inArt
Jesse Hayward
One None Done
When I visited Tilt last week to see Portlander Jesse Hayward’s installation, One None Done, it was clear the artist was taking the gallery’s role as a “project space” quite literally. Rather than display his work in a stable arrangement that would last the duration of the show, Hayward was frantically moving pieces around the […]
Posted inMusic
Just Say Yes
Yeasayer Devours Styles, Goes Pop
At first, Anand Wilder—who sings and plays just about everything in Brooklyn’s Yeasayer—might seem like your average guy who forms a rock band for predictable reasons. After all, he justifies his musical pursuits by explaining, (1) “It’s the only thing I’m good at,” (2) “It’s damn fun,” and (3) “It’s better than an office job.” […]
Posted inArt
Hap Tivey
Sands of the Ganges
In Hap Tivey’s previous solo show at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, his work was dominated by references to Modernist color field painters such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But where those artists attempted to articulate sublime tension through tonal shifts in coloration, Tivey emulated those masters using the medium for which he’s known: light. […]
Posted inArt
Carrie Iverson
Catalyst
In much of her work in Catalyst, currently on display at Bullseye Gallery, Carrie Iverson turns to the very literal and qualitative imagery of science and mathematics. In “Systemic Series,” a grouping of lithographs that stretches across multiple walls, she organizes prints of sonographs, scatter-plotted grids, and heart-rate readouts like a mason. Interspersed with images […]
Posted inArt
Farewell, Motel
Gallerist Jenn Armbrust
Closes Shop
In the five years since Jenn Armbrust opened Motel, the gallery has become a staple of the Portland scene, creating a niche space for both storybook-style illustrations and less categorical artwork. Though she has long championed emerging local artists, from Jesse Rose Vala to Carson Ellis, the last two years saw Motel steadily importing impressive […]
Posted inMusic
Rock of the Nation
Blitzen Trapper’s Sonic Conquest
In a year full of Portland bands breaking through to the national level, no one else captured the hearts—and iPod playlists—of rock fans quite like Blitzen Trapper. Their self-released third album, Wild Mountain Nation, uprooted the band’s sound from its familiar terrain of fragmentary lo-fi and relocated it to a land where breezy folk, blistering […]
Posted inArt
Ryan Jacob Smith
The Young Alchemists
While the title of Portlander Ryan Jacob Smith’s exhibition at the Independent Publishing Resource Center ostensibly refers to his use of found and recycled materials, the imagery in The Young Alchemists fittingly splices the scientific with the magical. In these paintings, executed on frayed paper, bark-edged slices of trees, and the gallery walls themselves, he […]
Posted inArt
Michael Brophy
Here There Nowhere
By now, Michael Brophy has assumed the status of the Pacific Northwest’s quintessential documentarian. For more than two decades, his oil paintings have seldom strayed from the region’s most ready subjects: forests, rivers, lakes, mountains, and valleys. But unlike, say, James Lavadour’s sublime and otherworldly depictions of the Columbia River Gorge, Brophy’s landscapes are far […]
Posted inArt
Chuck Close
Process and Collaboration
Although Chuck Close has spent his career creating work with traditional printmaking techniques, he has always retained the panache of a painter. His earliest black-and-white prints—including instantly recognizable portraits of the sculptor Keith Hollingworth and the composer Philip Glass—showcase an intensely rich tonal range that imbues these images with a sparkling, hyper-real patina. And while […]
Posted inArt
Amanda Barr
Case of the Wolves
One of the high points of Motel’s White Light group show last April was North Carolina-based artist Amanda Barr’s work, which was as preoccupied with the natural world as it was in rendering it in unnatural terms. Papier-mâché sculptures of rocks, covered in fractal patterns, appeared feather light. In another hallucinatory sculpture, an arm-like appendage […]
Posted inArt
Sincerely, John Head
BOX SET: Car Show
During this year’s TBA Festival, Nat Andreini and Scott Porter—the Portland duo of Sincerely, John Head—set up a recording studio and invited the public to come in and record a version of one of the six songs from Foghat LIVE (1977). Called “Studio Sessions,” the project revealed the pair’s detached commentary on the obsessive devotion […]