Art

I spend a great deal of time trying to ascertain the music’s and band’s personalities, and then attempt to accurately reflect them visually. ART CHANTRY is a freaking legend. Practically the inventor of punk poster art, Chantry moved from his longtime home of Seattle to St. Louis two years ago. Chantry is notorious for rendering […]

I kind of operate with the idea that if it’s attractive, interesting, and looks different from what else is out there, then it’s going to draw you in. JEFF KLEINSMITH, whose recent work includes the awesome Hot Hot Heat album art and a Sigur Ros poster, has been designing posters for 12 years. He started […]

Mike King Paper, Scissors, ROCK PNCA Opens Oct 3 Mike King is a longtime Portland designer whose show, 600 Smash Hits ver. 2.0, is up at PNCA in conjunction with Paper, Scissors, ROCK (see feature pg 10). When did you start making poster art for bands? I first did posters when I was like 14 […]

Up to now, TJ Norris’ new gallery, Soundvision, isn’t very Portland. It’s New York or San Francisco, or even Berlin. The gallery’s, ahem, vision of coupling visual mediums with audio installation and performance is one that hasn’t had much of a home in Portland. Nonetheless, it sits alongside the other galleries that line Everett just […]

Ed Ruscha: Recent Paintings at Portland Art Museum I wish I was kidding when I said that: A: Ed Ruscha was featured in the last Gap catalog that came to my house. B: The Portland Art Museum acquired and hung five new paintings by Ed Ruscha, but doesn’t mention it in any museum literature, schedule, […]

Sign After the X_____ is a pleasure to see sitting on one’s desk. An unimposing matte maroon paperback, its cover design is simple, elegant, and understated. It seems to promise a serious, although not necessarily coherent, excavation of something–we’ll call it “X”–interesting. A collection of narratives, poems, drawings, quotations, lists, treatises, and essays, it attempts […]

Crib Sheet: Looking at School Galleries The sweet smells of spray fixative and kind bud are in the air again, signaling the matriculation of local art students. One semesterly art school ritual involves convincing your friends that most grandmas and hobos are sexier than your life-drawing models, and another is turning in the inevitable one-page […]

During his 31-year career, Bielemeier has mastered the juxtaposition between the silly and the elegant; the graceful and the absurd. His very dancing style is both fluid and choppy. He is an extremely skilled dancer, moving from place to place with the wisdom and grace of an older swan. At the same time, something inside […]

Walk Ways PICA Sept 4-Nov 2 After the stunningly lame All the Way with Jim & Shel, PICA rebounds beautifully with Walk Ways, a travelling group exhibition curated by PICA’s own Stuart Horodner. Walk Ways, which even sports a nifty catalogue, focuses on artists who create their art by strolling, pacing, ambling, sauntering, limping, staggering, […]

Molly Torgeson’s Suspended At Atelier Z Gallery, Molly Torgeson’s sculptures look like various methods of footbinding, hanging from above, but the effect is more like timebinding–like she’s trying to imprison this one moment in space through industrial-waste bandages. Torgeson defines the term “suspended”: “to keep waiting in suspense or indecision, to keep fixed, to cease […]

Terence Ulrich and Ryan Kelly You know when you see a piece of clothing or a drape or a tablecloth, and the color is so vibrant that you have to buy it, even though it doesn’t fit, or you don’t need it? I own a maternity dress because of this very problem. If you suffer […]