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Articles

The Blood Rainbow Family

By Jessica Bromer Appropriately, The Blood Rainbow Family's Haunted exhibition at Disjecta is filled with residual material. Documentary evidence and detritus left over from opening night performances add to the various interpretations of haunting already in play at the historic...

Paging Brian Eno

By Megan Driscoll The study and discourse surrounding the arts has long been dominated by the attempt to define the concept of "art." In the nineteenth century, Théophile Gautier popularized the slogan "l'art pour l'art," which translates to "art for...

Vimy Ridge Memorial Monument

By Lance Blomgren Turning onto the path off Canora Street and into the Vimy Ridge Memorial Park in Winnipeg, you quickly approach a triangulate split that could carry you off into the park in three directions. It is evening and...

Diary of an Affair

By Carrie E.A. Scott I've always wondered whether the Affair at the Jupiter Hotel was any good. It's most likely just a glorified party, I've thought to myself, a really busy art opening where seeing the art is near to...

The Borrowers

By Megan Driscoll As summer dwindles, Portlanders welcome the last big event of the season, the annual Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) Time Based Art Festival (TBA). The festival presents contemporary artists and cutting edge concepts in a wide...

Theory #100ASA: The Camera Doesn't Lie but If It Does, I Don't Care

By Carrie E.A. Scott Truth is tricky. Or as Hollywood film producer Robert Evans perfectly said, "There are three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying." In other words, truth is...

Talking Shit (Among Friends)

By Lance Blomgren The sense of unease caused by Robert Niven's recent guano sculptures is a primordial one, we all agreed—the general fear, fascination, and repugnance of excrement. We crinkled our noses and continued. Progress, "Collected Guano" © Robert Niven...

Works on Paper

By Nate Lippens Some of the most vital work making its way into Seattle's newly christened East Edge galleries has come from the rigorous standards and daring of independent curators such as Fionn Meade as well as marginalized venues such...

Transcending Meaning

By Matthew Stadler Photography has been with us for so long, its shapes have settled upon the land, its depths and surfaces have saturated the air—interposed like a mist between ourselves and what we see—that even a child lifting her...

Identity Crisis

By Megan Driscoll In a time when immigration and the clashing of cultures are crucial topics in the social and political arena, the question of personal identity and how we situate ourselves in the world around us has become especially...

Oregon Biennial Draws New Blood

By Jessica Bromer Portland, Oregon is becoming a popular destination for creative young migrants from points east. This demographic is well represented in the 2006 Oregon Biennial, on view at the Portland Art Museum through October 8th. Of the thirty-four...

Founding the Future

By Lois Klassen Recently, something old and nostalgic appeared in the washroom of the studio. Someone left there a stack of Vanguard magazines dating back to the late 1980s. Vanguard was a heavily illustrated critical art journal that covered western...

Box Project

By Regina Hackett Early in the evening on July 15 at the Lawrimore Project, crowds gathered to see John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler pop out of a box. The box in the center of the room was huge,...

Christian Kliegel's Found Objects Spark Controversy

By Lance Blomgren The work of Vancouver-based artist Christian Kliegel is marked by an innate fascination for the subtle, yet patently absurd, structures of our various social institutions, as well as their surfeit of material waste-products. Much of his work...

Polaroids in the Present Tense

By Megan Driscoll As photography reached the hands of the public, it became a symbol for accessibility, immediacy, the ability to record one's surroundings with the click of a button. Although this point-and-shoot mentality is typically associated with the amateur,...

Theory #500,000: For $500,000 I Could Have Done That

By Carrie E.A. Scott A popular phrase among contemporary art skeptics is "I could have done that," and it applies especially in regard to art that seems easy to rip off, such as that of Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol....

Wild Fuck Crazed Bunnies

By Megan Driscoll As I approached Rake Art Gallery this past May, I was confronted by a sea of gray bunnies, their eyes glowing red with single-minded purpose. The rabbits were clustered across a large, glossy block of wood with...

Theory #12345: On Dirty, Pretty Things

By Carrie E.A. Scott So much art these days consists of a happily balanced combination of clean fantasy and dirty realism, the cute measured in equally with the grit. It isn't the newest of trends. Artists of all kinds —...

Horia Boboia

By Jeff Jahn The overall change in Portland's level of sophistication can be seen through the cultural asides made in many of its recent narrative/figurative art shows. A perfect example is Horia Boboia's Spring Collection at Chambers Gallery. The collection...

Playtime

By Lance Blomgren The history of modern art suggests that playtime — with its connotative kinship to children's games, fantasy, invention and adventure, and notions of leisure — has provided artists with a strong inspirational metaphor for unconstrained expression, new...

Impossible Objects

By Nate Lippens Todd Simeone creates impossible objects. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at James Harris Gallery, the artist conjures up the tradition of the readymade, initiated by Marcel Duchamp and transformed by postwar artists such as...

Portland Modern

By Matthew Stadler I met Mark Brandau last September in room 235 at Portland's Jupiter Hotel, where he was assembling an art gallery and I a magazine and bookshop. It was a tight fit. The room was 12' x 16',...

Kelly O: One Hundred Balls

By Nate Lippens Far be it from me to push yet another photographer in the direction of calling their work art (and don't even get me started on architects. Christ.). But Kelly O may be a closet artist. She would...

Last Millennium's Lingo Died and We Should Leave It Buried

By Eric Brown So it's not that I have anything against esoteric language, professional jargon, or excessive linguistic inbreeding among like-minded people. But in reading most art publications these days I am concerned. I am concerned that the shorthand that...

Selected Disappearances: Part One (Introduction)

By Lance Blomgren It has taken less than a month for the site of the old self-serve carwash at the corner of Main Street and 23rd Avenue in Vancouver to be reduced to rubble, razed, and finally removed of any...

Selected Disappearances: Part Two

By Lance Blomgren The Carwash I visited this site for my first and last time on the night before the scheduled demolition. Members of the Royal Vancouver Pornographic Society—a local preservationist group and social club usually devoted to the preserving,...

Selected Disappearances: Part Three

By Lance Blomgren Hadley + Maxwell Deleted Scenes is an exhibition by the Vancouver duo Hadley + Maxwell that showed through May at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG). This series of works takes disappearance as one of its primary tactics...

And the Galleries Marched in Two by Two

By Carrie E.A. Scott Since June of 2004, at least 13 galleries have settled into the Tashiro Kaplan (TK) Building's available commercial spaces. Which makes it pretty hard to keep up; off the top of my head, I am not...

Striking Distance

By Nate Lippens Catherine Opie recently gave a lecture at the Tacoma Art Museum in which she spoke with good-humored urgency of photography as being in crisis. Opie is concerned that advances in phototechnology — coupled with a notable shift...

Present Tense

By Regina Hackett In the gift shop at the Frye Art Museum, there are silk scarves, impressionist notepaper, art history hardbacks, beaded jewelry, floral purses, soft alphabet letters for tykes, and Dean Sameshima's booklets titled, "Men at play." Circle the...

Paradise, Once Removed

By Carrie E.A. Scott Though it's a mere ten minute walk from my apartment, over the past two and a half years I've only been to the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) twice—once, when I first moved to Seattle and...

Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories

By Clint Burnham In a talk he gave last fall in Vancouver, Stan Douglas divided his work into four periods: his early work, his analytic work, his synthetic work, and his recombinant work. These last three periods were divided according...

PDA: Public Display of Art

By Jeff Jahn It is a bit of a second gold rush for Portland these days, one centralized around the aesthetics in rapidly developing neighborhoods where galleries and/or artists are located. In the last seven years I've witnessed a dramatic...

A Curatorial Indulgence

By Sara Krajewski Kelly Mark's witty, low-tech videos share a point-and-shoot technique with the earliest works of the medium, a similarity I mention in the curatorial text for her exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery. Though I don't name them,...

ConWorks: A Year Later

By Carrie E.A. Scott Almost exactly one year after the board at Consolidated Works (ConWorks) dismissed the art space's Founding Director, Matthew Richter, the doors to the South Lake Union warehouse have opened once again in earnest. While there has...

Go Far Enough West and You'll Be Headed East

By Jeff Jahn As I've noted before, in many ways West Coast cities in the Americas are more influenced by Asia than the American East. Situated on the so-called "Pacific Rim," these cities enjoy Asia not only as a major...

Serial in Seattle

By Regina Hackett Because Jasmine Valandani lays smudges of eye shadow, lipstick and flower pollen beneath transparent, shiny squares of tape in her studio in Bellingham and exhibits the results at Bellingham's excellent Lucia Douglas Gallery, few in Seattle know...

Rogue Economies

By Lance Blomgren The nature of economy, as Jonathan Crary posits it in his essay "Eclipse of the Spectacle," is perhaps better viewed as a vanishing point—a disappearance—than an empirically based system of figures, budgets, statistics, and market percentages. As...

Internal Obsession

By Lance Blomgren Since returning to British Columbia a year ago, I've been rediscovering a recurring theme about Vancouver—a generalized cultural leaning if you will—that seems to inform the city's definition of itself and drive much of its artistic impulse:...

Anatomy of an Art Scene

By Jeff Jahn Portland is a city in the midst of reinventing itself with two related forces at work: A red hot market in urban condos and a deluge of highly educated artists choosing Portland as their post-MFA stand. PDX...

Portrait of a Family Snapshot

By Carrie E.A. Scott The photograph is of a family. A child is in the corner and a man, presumably his father, rests at his wife's bedside. A cat sits on the bed cleaning itself. The scene is not unusual....

Photoessays

A Crowded Affair

By Alice Wheeler

Six Months in Visual Codec Covers

By Alice Wheeler

Northbound Roadtrip 2006: Portland

By Alice Wheeler

Northbound Roadtrip 2006: Seattle

By Alice Wheeler

Northbound Roadtrip 2006: Vancouver

By Alice Wheeler

Operation Miami