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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 © Jeff Jahn

There is tremendous urban energy here with lots of gaps that need filling in terms of institutions, city resources, and patronage, but with a new Modern and Contemporary art wing at the Art Museum and no less than five visual arts institutions involved in capital campaigns, the situation is changing daily.

On the streets it's understood by the general populace that it is the artists who are currently articulating the way the city defines itself in terms of sophistication. And yes, you read that right; artists are acknowledged and appreciated for their varied contributions to the city's culture even as high up as the Mayor and the City Commissioner. I'm surprised at this too, but the question that now looms is: What will be done to further catalyze this situation?

Yes, we have the Jupiter Hotel Art Affair, growing external interest in the internal workings of our artistic scene, and an army of competent, even brilliant, artists, but questions of patronage still abound.

On a civic level Portland is unique in that it rejected many of the standard city planning practices of the second half of the Twentieth Century, keeping its Nineteenth-century style city blocks and maintaining strong communities able to engage with developers on united footing. Anecdotally, The Portland Building by Michael Graves, one of the principal figures of the Postmodern Architecture movement, was so disliked it may have singularly inoculated the city from that type of civic planning as far back as 1980. This meant the city became a bit sleepy during the second half of the Twentieth Century, but the community is now making up for lost time, fiercely forging a new way forward both physically and philosophically.

Still, even with the condo boom, Portland is essentially a city of shopkeepers, not giant chain stores, and artists, as a general lot, seem to thoroughly enjoy and indeed thrive in exactly this kind of lack of corporate hegemony.

So yes, there is a Portland thing, but it isn't entirely unique. Most thriving cities have a few neighborhoods where unique shops and artists mix...the interesting thing about PDX (as many residents call Portland) is that the entire city is filled with just such vibrant neighborhoods, including the downtown. The art scene feeds off this energy and drives it, making the artists the best barometer and zeitgeist channelers in the city. A strong artist gets noticed very quickly here.

Still, with over 10,000 artists indicated (and presumably as many artistic statements) in the out-of-date 2000 census, the heartbeat of the scene is difficult to pin down.

Portland is definitely in love with certain concerns and aesthetics; graphic design, minimalism, community, recycling, advertising, and natural profusion to name a few. And like other regional ports, it's perhaps interesting to mention that in many ways it is much closer related to trends in the rest of the Pacific Rim than to what's hot or not in New York.

At any rate, at this point you might expect me to run down a list of suggested venues and their various scholastic bents. However, since the scene is really comprised of the individuals that populate it, I thought I'd discuss the artists that make it all happen.

To serve as a sort of sub-guide to the guide, I've come up with a few genres to explore via the artists that define them in Portland.

Installation Art

This Genre is probably the strongest element of the Portland scene and a lot of it involves pop-art appropriation. Call it perhaps popsploitation, it's cropped up as a way to turn marketing back upon itself as both a celebration and critique.

From the Legacy, Boxed Version Series
© Katherine Bovee + Philippe Blanc.

• Artists like Sean Healy (who is currently completing a $250,000 project for the new FBI headquarters in Houston) take 70's pop iconography (ala Ed Ruscha) and mix it with discreet commentary about demographic groups like the Boomers, Generation-X, and Generation-Y.
• The impressive Chandra Bocci is a virtuoso who reconfigures throwaway pop packaging into jawdroppingly detailed environments, and often seeks to fulfill the unkept promises of wonder that marketing campaigns like skittles, my little pony, and snuggle-the-fabric-softener-bear never quite deliver upon. Recently Bocci has also moved into creating dystopian disaster fantasies such as forest fires with flames made of celebrity hair clipped from magazines.
• Another popsploitationist, Bruce Conkle, mixes posable figurines, manipulated videogame screen captures, tinfoil weapons, and puking gnomes to create consumer-driven fictional realms that closely parallel ecological concerns and world affairs.
• Katherine Bovee and Philippe Blanc take low cost cardboard to evoke a geek-culture tech fantasy realms.
• Justin Harris (a member of popular indie-pop band Menomena) recently wowed audiences in Melbourne Australia with his, "The Late great Libido, a rock opera," a red velvet theater where a lone viewer is treated to a minutely detailed music video in which a gaggle of Harris' silhouettes dance and perform every aspect of the song.
• Artist Aili Schmeltz creates installations that critique the ergonomics of couch potatoes amongst other things, recent Art Center MFA grad, Daniel Fagereng, produces hilarious, unplayable electric guitars he defines as 'haptic' objects, and, last but not least, Patrick Rock, who makes Styrofoam coolers that are conveniently coffin-sized as well as a massive 30 foot wide inflatable circus attraction that is hotdog shaped but womblike inside, titled "Simulacra-Hermaphrodite."

Unnatural Naturalists

• The Unnatural Naturalists complicate minimalist tropes. Chief among them is Ashland based Matthew Picton. He has received rave reviews from the LA Times Christopher Knight (and many others) for his mylar appropriations of parking lot cracks. A standout from Miami to San Francisco, Picton is Oregon's hottest emerging artist nationally and has a project for the new De Young museum in the works.
• A recent transplant (circa 2003), Amanda Wojick also lives south of Portland in the crunchy city of Eugene but remains active in the state's cultural capital. Her styrofoam cliffs covered in paint chip samples usually deliver the goods.
• Quite dissimilarly, Laura Fritz creates disturbing lab-like spaces filled with video and strange objects that challenge viewers to question their own senses. Seattle's Regina Hackett has called her one of "the most exciting video artists in the country."
• For something less dark, Ellen George creates delicate installations and discreet objects that evoke fungal, plant, and giant sized germ forms. At once weird and (dare I venture) tasty looking, her work went over very well at the Aqua Fair in Miami in December 2005.

Graphic Allegoricals

Trust © Storm Tharp
Photo Credit PDX Contemporary Art

• A creator of wry, Twain-esque witticisms and trippy graphic design, Chris Johanson is Portland's biggest International Art Star, but he keeps a relatively low local profile, a common mannerism of Portland's artistic elite. Johanson originally gained worldwide attention while working in San Francisco's Mission District, but as the city became increasingly over-developed, Portland offered him more urban funk.
• Other graphic-oriented artists like Martin Ontiveros show regularly in Los Angeles, and Carson Ellis is known for her work with bands like The Decemberists and Weezer.
• Painter Adam Sorensen is a painterly painter, but is heavily influenced by Hiroshige and Superflat.
• Storm Tharp, is a purveyor of many graphic styles but an edgy delivery is always a trademark.
• Justin "Scrappers" Morrison weaves together odd tales of man-and-nature utilizing found objects and recycled paint.
• Pat Boas' recent Mutatis Mutandis seamlessly weaves many audubonesque anatomical studies into Gordian Knots of fur, fin, and feathers.
• And I suspect Zach Kircher may be the son of Norman Rockwell as well as a succubus; he's one of the best figurative painters in the Pacific Northwest.
• Lastly, arch-nihilist Corey Smith is getting a lot of attention amongst the hipster crowd while the rest of us wait to see whether he will buckle down and challenge his obvious talent.

Material Abstraction

This genre dominates the market in the more progressive Portland gallery spaces.

Necessary Abstraction - Violet
© Jacqueline Ehlis

• Jacqueline Ehlis studied under Dave Hickey for her MFA but may be the Northwest's heir to Jo Baer and Mary Henry. She seamlessly combines stainless steel with canvas as well as paint served up like huge fillets of candy. Her shows that have a dia-like rigor I seldom see outside of that institution. She has even taken to using photography to make paintings that confound how materials are read on the picture plane, a brilliant reversal of Stieglitz's equivalents.
• Three backbones of the Portland scene and this genre are Judy Cooke, Lucinda Parker and Mel Katz; they have approached painting as object, and sculpture as painting during their long, successful careers, and deserve much of the credit for its popularity in the galleries.
• Younger artists like CCAC MFA grad Jesse Hayward literally create forests and cities of paint, while Kristen Kennedy and Anna Fidler amalgamate a plethora of painting tropes into each work. The two create very different fantasias of the studio practice by turning the studio into terrain and pallet into finished painting.
• Brenden Clenaghen is more psychological in his focus on materials and their relationship to desire. He creates almost gothic patterns that evoke angelic confections and/or badass shiny blackness.
• Last but not least is Tom Cramer, the city's unofficial artist laureate. His often silver or gold leaf covered woodcarvings are nothing short of miraculous zen mandalas with a hint of Art-Nouveau and a touch of pop-camp culled from his work in the 90's.

Conceptual Participation

As a genre conceptual participation artists are some of the most active and best traveled artists in the scene.

• Of course, after two consecutive Whitney Biennials (2002 & 2004), Harrell Fletcher has lead the way for a number of younger groups. Fletcher is famous for his LearningtoLoveYouMore.com website (partnered with Miranda July) as well as his "Blot out the sun video" where passers-by perform Joyce's Ulysses in a service station.
• The Red 76 collective is catalyzed by Sam Gould and Khris Soden. Through January 2006 they produced Ghosttown, featuring shops where clothes and their stories were exchanged without money, as well as in-house film festivals where individuals chose films to which they would play host to complete strangers during the showings.
• And one last mention here in this genre: A new group, The MOST, manages the unlikely by turning bureaucracy into a kind of Utopia.

Political Art

Where would an art scene be without political art?

• It's a difficult genre but Damali Ayo has managed to ruffle more than a few feathers nationally with her RentaNegro.com website and panhandling-for-slavery-reparations performance pieces.
• Longtime political installation artist Bill Will and comparatively younger Daniel Duford both recently had successful retrospectives at the Art Gym, while Portland painter and founding member of the Black Panthers Inka Shamsud-Din and Bruce Conkle (mentioned earlier) also add more than a little social commentary to the mix.
• Last but not least in this genre, Michael Brophy paints ecological allegories and phantasmagorias that often relate to the forest clear-cutting so familiar to those of us who call the Pacific Northwest home.

Photography

• Portland has more that a few good photographers but Dianne Kornberg has to be one of the most adventurous. From bleak landscapes, to fetuses, to tromped-le-oil effects, she approaches photography like a private investigator on a stakeout.
• Curator and artist TJ Norris recently produced an excellent show of highly manipulated circular photographs that had a zen-like centering effect.
• On the scientific side of the adventure, Mariana Tres was the first artist-in-residence hosted by Harvard's Astrophysics department and has thusly created wry phonograms using baking soda and flour to produce 'real' fake constellations.
• Another artist/curator, Marne Lucas, is keeping busy lately not only with her own wry, suggestive nature photos, but also as the co-curator (with Teresa Dulce) of the Danzine Retrospective for the May 2005 Whitney Independent Study Program, as the co-founder (with Bruce Conkle) of the artist collective Blinglab, and with a recently completed residency at Caldera (also with Conkle).
• The list of Photographers really is immense from Jim Lommason's documentation of boxing Gym's, to Chas Bowie's excellent shots of Smithson's spiral Jetty, Nan Curtis' blue hole photos, Daniel Peterson's daily photoblogging, and the Portland Art Museum's Photography curator Terry Toedtemeier's studies of the Oregon Coast.
• Last but not least is Christopher Rauschenberg who is a founding member of Blue Sky Gallery, as well as wellspring of source material for his famous dad.

Obsessive Compelling

Artists like Linda Hutchins, Rene Rickabaugh, Brad Adkins and Melody Owen all walk a bit on the obsessive wild side by focusing highly labor intensive effects, but after that comparison all show themselves as quite different. Hutchins explores the creation and breakdown of meaning through repetitive typing on vellum while Rickabaugh creates miniature still life worlds. One could call Adkins an anti-ergonomic since he often appropriates mundane circular objects and then obsessively modifies them until they are no longer able to serve in their utilitarian role. Lastly, Melody Owen creates everything from tables of paper crowns to chandeliers of shattered safety glass. Even her video work has a more than a hint of orderly unease.

Mythic Video

Sculptor and performance artist David Eckard has created a video from his recent residency in France, and MK Guth creates fictional situations where myth is inserted into daily life. Other artists like Melody Owen and Anna Fidler roughly fit into this genre as well.

Documentary Video/Film

Matt McCormick was recently one of several young artists chosen for Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist's Uncertain States of America show in Oslow last September. Similarly Vanessa Renwick and Bill Daniel finished their excellent film about a legendary train riding hobo artist, "Who is Bozo Texino?"

Optical Painters

• Reed college professor Michael Knutson, has been wowing Portlanders and Art in America magazine for years with his complicated and sometimes huge tetra coil paintings.
• Gallerist, radio show host, and darn good painter Eva Lake creates some of the nicest optically mesmerizing paintings we've seen as well.
• Lastly Matthew Haggett creates nearly crystalline patterns of positive and negative space.
• Artists like Tom Cramer and Jacqueline Ehlis also utilize the optical effect as content...

And to Sum Up...

Now that I've used up a good hundred yards of cyberspace, note that for every artist and genre I've listed there are five others that are also worthy of a closer look.

Needless to say there is increasing international attention for artists in this city, and those who care to do just a little digging will notice that Portland is one of the most active contemporary art scenes in the country, possibly precisely because it is institutionally underdeveloped. That vacuum creates a scene where artists are clearly the trendsetters, not the institutions or market, and that is noteworthy chain of command.

Note: If you're still thirsting for more information to digest in your quest to understand the Portland artistic anatomy, other good sources to refer to are the 2003 Core Sample catalogue and my recent history of the Portland art scene.