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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', with a queen bed taking up most of the floor space and the tiny bathroom filled by our combined overstock.

Mark's "gallery," Portland Modern, is normally confined to the 40-odd pages of a magazine. He keeps things cheap by forsaking the usual physical gallery. Issues of Portland Modern circulate widely (the print-run is 8,000) and customers buy from it the same way they would buy from any printed catalog.

His use of print made the organizers of the Affair at the Jupiter see him as the right roommate for my book and magazine shop, but really he wanted to spread out. Who didn't? It was like popping the tab off an inflatable vest. Mark's inventory wanted some fresh air and space.

By the time I arrived to unpack my trunk load of books and borrowed art journals, the room was hung floor-to-ceiling with a few dozen lovely pieces, mostly paintings and photographs, from issue #3 of Portland Modern.

My stock went on bedsteads, windowsills, and on the bed itself. I spent three days wedged into an IKEA chair, beside a beguiling, totemic statue, a tall, thin piece of wood that sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae had thrown to his dog over and over so that it was chewed near to breaking at the center, where the dog could balance things properly, and hardly at all near either end.

It was a beautiful piece.

My back kept bumping this enchanting water color of a kind of mountainous breast that lifted from the flat horizon, surmounted by a pink nipple that had dimpled the paper with its abundant application. I bought the piece, which is by Christy Nyboer, and now it hangs by my desk.

I liked the art Mark displayed, and I really liked the resourcefulness of his gallery. We had a good, three-day conversation and he invited me to co-curate Issue #4 of Portland Modern with the painter Kristan Kennedy.

The invitation to co-curate was attractive largely as a way to get to know Kristan. I don't have strong convictions about visual art. I had no pressing desire to usher certain artists into the limelight or make a statement or present any kind of visual thesis or argument. Mostly I wanted to have a conversation with Kristan, and I remembered how enlightening my prior work as a jurist—of writing, visual art, and architecture—had been. You see a lot more through far fewer refined filters when you jury.

Mark decided that Issue #4 should have a theme, and he chose "saturation." Kristan and I, amiable, bereft of agendas, agreed.

160 artists submitted work, and Kristan and I spent two-and-a-half days looking through them. This was kid-in-a-candy-store stuff, and our hours of gluttonous pleasure were only compromised by the sheer mental and optical exhaustion of looking closely at several hundred images in a short time (submissions averaged a half-dozen pieces each).

We didn't talk much at first. At least two-thirds of the work dropped out in silence as we saw it and recognized that neither of us could advocate for its inclusion. The third that remained got us talking.

Philip Iosca, mi hai fatto venire voglia di farti l'amore
(you make me want to make love to you)
2006, Sign Lettering and Metal Framework, 48" x 72"
Courtesy of i

This is a fair analog to the way I usually come to my enthusiasms and engagement with art. I scan and fix on things that make me think. When there are two curators (or more), thinking becomes talking, and if it doesn't the thoughts remain private enough to possibly disappear from the process. The work we picked was the work that got us talking. You can see our conversation in the formal echoes that run throughout the work, in its poise between figuration and abstraction, and in a kind of underlying levity that gives what are often quite rigorous formal experiments the lightness of propositions and guesses. These pieces aren't arguments so much as hunches.

David Corbett, Nature Trail
2005, Enamel on Canvas, 13" x 17"
Courtesy of 65grand, Chicago IL

The show offers a fair window onto some of Portland art now, especially in its odd combination of intensity and lightness. Artists here work seriously, but don't take things very seriously. It's hard to have arguments in Portland. People tend to shrink or back off, usually feeling wounded, rather that holding a position (even for the sake of argument). Mind you, this is just one slice of a bigger, variegated whole, but we reflected this micro-zeitgeist in the work we chose and in the way we chose it.

Kristan and I didn't stick by many rules. We had high ambitions but improvised our way toward achieving them. We did whatever we could to be smart. For example, when one of us knew an artist, we didn't exempt ourselves or censor info and opinions; we talked about it. Friendship or the close quarters of a small, intensely social arts community were not treated like unfairness-bombs to be defused by the masked, gloved machinery of conflict-of-interest rules. Instead, our biases and prior knowledge—what we already liked and disliked or had been drawn to in the community—were utilized as resources for making good choices.

Chelsea Mosher, Clouds and Legs
2006, Silver Pring on Fiber Paper, 13" x 18"
Courtesy of the Artist

We chose what we love, which is the only thing we could stand by. The result is two dozen artists, mostly painters, who span the demographic range pretty thoroughly (as much as Portland spans it). The show won't go to the Jupiter, but instead will hang at Disjecta's huge Templeton Building space on East Burnside in July and August of 2006, with a narrower selection showing at two galleries, Tilt and Ogle, the following August and September.