The role of album art is a challenging one: to capture, in graphic terms, the essence of the music the record contains. Not only does compelling artwork sell albums, but also the very best adds depth to a record. The latter is an aspiration of local artist Daniel Peterson. Although his photography is exhibited by […]
John Motley
Posted inArt
invisible.other
Last July, TJ Norris curated grey|area at the Guestroom Gallery, resulting in one of 2006’s best group shows. This month, Norris has curated a sequel of sorts with invisible.other at the New American Art Union. Again, the work is largely muted and understated, but, collectively, far more visually arresting than grey|area. That the work achieves […]
Posted inMusic
Graduate Studies
Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer on the Classics
Prior to recording the band’s fourth album, Tears of the Valedictorian, Carey Mercer of Victoria, BC’s Frog Eyes began to question the longevity of the band’s previous output, asking himself: “Are we making records that people are going to want to listen to in five years?” Where 2004’s The Folded Palm was full of explosive […]
Posted inMusic
Pop’s Bastard Sons
Sunset Rubdown Talks Tour and More
Spencer Krug keeps busy. In the past few years, he’s split his time juggling duties in no less than four bands. He’s responsible for the half of Wolf Parade’s songs that do not resemble Bruce Springsteen’s. He occasionally contributes keyboards to Frog Eyes’ visceral live shows and albums. Last year, he collaborated with Frog Eyes’ […]
Posted inArt
White Light
In a solid month for group shows, White Light at Motel is among the best. Culling work from 10 artists from Japan, Canada, and the United States, White Light continues Motel’s departure from a steady diet of twee drawing with a group of satisfying studies in abstraction and electric coloration. Primarily consisting of geometric shapes […]
Posted inMusic
An Elegy for Youth
Death, School, and Deerhunter
When Atlanta’s Deerhunter released its second album, Cryptograms, in January, critics drooled over its intoxicating fusion of effects-drenched ambience and incendiary post-punk rave-ups. Rather than coast on the success of the album, the band recorded a new EP while Cryptograms was mixed. Fluorescent Grey—out later this month—strikes an even better balance between the band’s two […]
Posted inArt
Dan Cameron
On Sunday, Dan Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, will be discussing “the dramatic sea change in curatorial practice that’s taken place in the last 10 or 15 years” as part of the Portland Art Museum’s Critical Voices Lecture Series. Having curated numerous international exhibitions, including the Eighth […]
Posted inArt
Minimalism/ Postminimalism
When Minimalist art became the dominant movement in the 1960s, it shed all the romantic baggage of Abstract Expressionism. But Minimalism’s rejection of that movement’s accompanying machismo and self-absorption was a desperately needed breath of fresh air. Walking though the recently opened Minimalism/Postminimalism exhibition reminds us how true that remains today. Unlike so much gimmicky […]
Posted inArt
Sue Coe
Graphic Witness
It’s often said that all art is political. But overtly political, agenda-driven art threatens to reign in a viewer’s imagination and squelch interpretation. In other words, it undermines the very sense of freedom we associate with art. The British-born artist Sue Coe has built a career out of persuasive political art. Coe certainly gives a […]
Posted inArt
Marie Watt
Tread Lightly
At first, Marie Watt’s decision to use blankets as the principle medium in Tread Lightly, her current show at PDX Contemporary Art, seems a little curious. Then again, most of us formed one of our first intense attachments to a blanket. And it’s easy to see why: All the psychological value a blanket offers—warmth, security, […]
Posted inBooks
George Saunders in Conversation with Mary Gaitskill
Perhaps the rarest breed in literature is that writer who can deliver incisive commentary, while managing to be so funny that you actually snort and hiccup with laughter as you read. George Saunders is one such writer. His characters are always superbly pathetic and dunderheaded. They work shit jobs. They rely on the psychobabble of […]
Posted inArt
Thoughtless…
Given how much art is mindlessly derivative or intellectually vacant, naming an exhibition Thoughtless… is a bold move. The title could be a punk-like appropriation of a derisive appraisal. Then again, it could be the gallery calling it like it is. The show in question, at small A projects, falls somewhere in between those two […]