Visual Codec

visual codec archives »

one shot project »
one shot specifications »
one shot purchasing »

about us »
contributors »
submissions »
contact us »

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 artists featured in the Biennial, fewer than a third are Oregon natives.

Biennial curator Jennifer Gately is a recent transplant herself. Two weeks after moving to Portland from Idaho to assume the newly created role of Curator of Northwest Art at PAM, she began sifting through submissions and visiting studios in an intensive six-week process.

Gately—who invited Jesse Hayward to create a site-specific installation for the occasion—draws comparisons in her introduction to the Biennial catalog between Hayward's stumpy, varicolored forms and the shrubbery surrounding his home, which, she writes, "has been pruned to the point of abstraction."

Hayward, who added his unpredictable style to Portland's growing artistic infusion in 2003, affirms the importance of pruning to his artistic practice, pointing out that the act is at once destructive and progressive, "allowing for the regeneration of fruitful pathways." Hayward's method could well serve as a metaphor for a curatorial process in which countless artworks are considered, set aside, categorized, revisited, and eventually pared down to a cohesive group.

"Large Pod Project" (Detail)
© Jesse Hayward
Image Courtesy of the Artist

The title of the Hayward's work, "Large Pod Project," includes a term whose original scientific definition—a seedcase for a flowering plant—has been overshadowed in the minds of American consumers of pop culture by imaginative reinterpretations of the pod's function. The iPod has become a cultural emblem and the word "pod" continues to carry the alien, futuristic associations it acquired after Invasion of the Body Snatchers introduced "pod people" into the collective consciousness in 1956.

Calling the piece "installation as invasion," Hayward points out that artistic freedom within the context of a museum frequently runs counter to the values a museum must adopt to ensure its own financial solvency. Artistic interventions can interfere with the consistency and control needed to establish credibility with a museum's patrons. Hayward adds that projects like his require the attention of trusting, sympathetic curators who can push the boundaries of an institutional framework from within.

Though conflict is central to his artistic concerns, it is the absence of struggle that has motivated the Philadelphia-born and previously itinerant Hayward to stay in Portland. He settled into this accessible, community-minded environment after determining that the conflicts inherent in big-city life sapped him of time and energy he would rather devote to making art.

New York native Kristan Kennedy echoes these sentiments when describing her decision to leave the center of the international art world for Portland 11 years ago. Portland comes closer to fulfilling certain of Kennedy's artistic ideals, particularly open communication and mutually supportive attitudes among fellow artists. Says Kennedy, "I like the people I surround myself with here. There's not a lot of social climbing and backstabbing. It leaves room just to make work."

Kennedy is represented in the Biennial by two large drawings that reinterpret landscape through intentionally messy, emotionally charged abstraction. She is influenced by classical Chinese painting techniques in which the artist allows herself to be led by the marks she makes early in the creation of the work, rather than creating an image based on a preconceived idea.

"Big Drawing of Ruin"
© Kristan Kennedy
Image Courtesy of the Artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery

Over the past two years, Kennedy has found a way to merge this intuitive process with frequent car travel throughout the Pacific Northwest. "I don't drive, not because I can't, but because I gave up my driver's license when I moved here 11 years ago, so I'm always the passenger in the car, which allows me to draw on the road. Sometimes I'll hold a drawing tool and keep my hand steady, letting the movement of the car make the mark, so that even if I'm not looking at the landscape, I'm drawing from it."

Her visual observations of the local landscape were equally important during the earliest period of this artistic phase, when she began to reject the illustrative elements that had previously anchored her work. "I started taking in the shapes and masses in a different way and they started connecting to the abstract drawing I was doing at home."

Her art has become less overtly personal since she stopped using recognizable imagery, but, says Kennedy, "It's me at my most vulnerable; a lot of my work is about throwing your guts on a page." Citing her childhood home, Brooklyn, as an influence on her approach, she compares the raw, emotional mark-making and layered surfaces of her large works on paper to "the grit of a city or frustration of a city that's worn on the surface instead of underneath."

Sculptor Marcy Adzich, a Canadian native, is represented in the Biennial by two companion pieces made in response to her 2004 move from Alberta to Eugene, Oregon.

Explains Adzich, "'The Divide (Buffalo Jump)' was created from my memory of a particular place in Southern Alberta, a fantastical place rich in history that I identify with for a number of reasons, one being that its expansiveness holds no perceptual boundaries. I chose to adorn 'The Divide' with a fence-like structure. Besides visual considerations, it also related to harnessing my memory of this special place, and perhaps my own vulnerability."

"The Divide (Buffalo Jump)"
© Marcy Adzich
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Adzich reinterprets architectural features she observes in the landscape, integrating them into her sculptures in a manner she describes as "similar to the way we adorn our bodies to reflect character."

"Large Surface Area," produced after her move stateside, is embellished with tiny LED lights. "I deliberately refrained from constructing a boundary, leaving it open and inviting," adding that the work was partially inspired by a baseball stadium in Eugene. "The field—perfectly manicured and fortressed by a wall of local advertisements—visually and conceptually reflected for me an inaccessible 'clean slate.'"

"Large Surface Area"
© Marcy Adzich
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Anna Fidler, well known in Portland for her surreal cut paper landscapes, is also adjusting to a new locale: Los Angeles. Fidler submitted her work for inclusion in the Oregon Biennial before embarking on a January 2006 trip to L.A. This casual visit turned into an extended stay after she was offered the chance to share a highly desirable live/work space. Residing in the urban center of the film industry has reinforced Fidler's fascination with the landscapes of '70s horror movies, a major influence on her work.

"The films that I like are stylish, creepy, and feminine," says Fidler, citing Phenomena, in which a girl communicates telepathically with insects, and Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which Victorian schoolgirls experience a magnetic attraction to a large boulder.

In a contrary response to her new surroundings, Fidler has also begun to explore Nordic landscape elements in her work, finding inspiration in the haunting, largely barren landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich.

Akin to Kennedy and Adzich, Fidler's affinity for this type of landscape dates back to her Michigan childhood. "I view Northern Michigan as the Sweden or Finland of the USA," she explains. "It's very Nordic, snowy, and surrounded by water."

Similarly, sculptor and performance artist David Eckard draws inspiration from his own childhood home, a corn and soybean farm in Iowa. In his performances, Eckard frequently incorporates equipment of his own construction that is comparable to farm machinery both in visual aesthetic and specificity of function.

"Podium," one of Eckard's three works in the Biennial, involves just such highly specialized equipment as part of a performance that addresses cultural perceptions of labor and leadership. Originally conceived for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival, "Podium" has been reinterpreted several times, but certain aspects of the performance remain consistent: Eckard wheels a mobile podium and a gigantic megaphone to a predetermined point, assembles and decorates the structure, then ascends it and begins speaking.

"Podium" (As Performed at the Portland Art Museum)
Work © David Eckard
Photo © Team Photogenic
Image Courtesy of the Artist and the Portland Art Museum

"Podium" remains compelling years after its initiation because of the endless variations that occur when each new monologue meets each new audience. Because Eckard wears an only slightly absurd variation of traditional work attire (white jumpsuit and tie) he is often able to use the element of surprise to engage viewers.

Says Eckard, "With 'Podium,' there is an elaborate roll-in and assembly—the 'roadie' moment—that transforms into the 'authority' moment as soon as the bunting is strung and I mount the steps. The laborer has briefly made himself king as a result of his labors. Conflict and absurdity arise because the two men are one and the same."

Eckard's transformation from the self-described "quintessential farmboy" toiling in the cornfields of Iowa to experimental artist performing at the Portland Art Museum could be seen as a radical shift in his mode of existence; Eckard notes the similarities.

"My father and family's success on the farm was singularly dependent on an incredible, self-determined work ethic. All efforts could be wiped out with one natural, uncontrollable fluke: hail, storms, drought, disease. The scale, unpredictability, and cyclic repetitiveness of rural living—coupled with a hesitantly optimistic pragmatism—seems strangely parallel to trying to make a 'career' out of art."