PICA

Thank you to all who attended this year's TADA! gala - it was a wild party and raised over $150,000 towards PICA's 2009 artistic programming. Highlights included a wonderful introduction to the TBA:09 artistic lineup from new Guest Artistic Director Cathy Edwards, a preview of TBA:09 Artist robbinschilds with their special video, a very impassioned appeal for the arts from audience favorite and past TBA performer Reggie Watts, an energetic live auction, and a beautiful performance from TBA Artist Portland Cello Project with Tahoe Jackson.

Photos by PICA crew member extraordinaire, Jeff Forbes

More photos by photo booth maestro Chris Hornbecker

Posted by Brian Costello, PICA

Video and photos by Brian Costello, PICA

For those of you following us on Twitter, you may have seen our big Twittercast today. Below is the full lineup with more information on the artists and their projects. Festival Passes are on sale now so get ready to dive in.

Details:

2009 Time-Based Art Festival (TBA:09)
September 3 - 13, 2009, visual exhibitions and installations through October, 2009
Portland, Oregon USA
Festival Passes on sale NOW : 503.242.1419
www.pica.org
Locations and venues to be announced.

FESTIVAL CURATORS
Cathy Edwards, Artistic Director
Erin Boberg Doughton, Performing Arts Program Director
Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Program Director

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) presents the 2009 Time-Based Art Festival (TBA:09), PICA's annual convergence of contemporary performance, dance, music, new media and visual arts projects in Portland, OR USA from September 3-13, 2009 with visual art installations continuing through October, 2009. Now in its seventh year, the TBA Festival celebrates every form of contemporary art and is one of the only festivals of its kind in North America.

2009 TIME-BASED ART FESTIVAL ARTIST LINEUP

Performance
Amyo/tinyrage / too (Seattle) Dance
too is a dance/video performance and is the product of two and a half years of filming duets with 50 different people; shooting locations span six US states and three cities in Japan. too follows the fragmented and dreamlike events of two dancers (Amy O'Neal and Ellie Sandstrom) who encounter 50 other people duet style, but manage to miss each other while environments and people constantly change. O'Neal has danced with Sandstrom, in other people's productions and in O'Neal's own choreographic work over the past 10 years.

Back to Back Theatre / Small Metal Objects (Australia) Theatre
Small Metal Objects unfolds amid real pedestrian traffic in a specially sited environment, the plot unbeknownst to passers-by. On raised seating with individual sets of headphones, the audience is wired into an intensely personal drama as Gary and Steve, the kind of men who normally escape notice, play an inadvertent but pivotal role in an arranged drug transaction. Back to Back Theatre creates new forms of contemporary theatre imagined from the minds and experiences of a unique ensemble of actors with disabilities, giving voice to social and political issues that speak to all people. Based in Geelong, Australia, the company makes work locally and tours globally. Small Metal Objects has received a "Bessie" New York Dance and Performance Award (2008), the Green Room Award (UK) for Best Theatre Production (2007) and the ZKB Appreciation Prize (Switzerland) for Extraordinary Achievement (2007).

Erik Friedlander / Block Ice and Propane (New York) Music
A premier avant-garde cellist, Erik Friedlander plays a concert of idiosyncratic American roots music, creating a loose and meditative sound in which he uses his fingers as often as he uses the cello bow. Block Ice & Propane is a collection of solo cello tunes that evoke images of truck-stops, long, lonely highways, and stark panoramas. Lyrical, plain-spoken, and emotional, the project was inspired by memories of summers he spent as a child crossing the U.S. in a station wagon while his father Lee Friedlander photographed an American landscape both elegiac and workaday. Images from these trips and spoken stories from his father accompany Erik's stirring piece. Erik Friedlander is an improviser and a composer who is a veteran of New York City's downtown music world and has played with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Courtney Love.

Block Ice & Propane is made possible by an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People / Last Meadow (New York) Dance
Last Meadow mines movements and texts from James Dean's three films to create a non-narrative patchwork that describes an America where the jig is up and the dream has died. The piece exploits the iconic and inherently misunderstood image of James Dean as a symbol of the ways in which we project unrealistic and outsized expectations onto each other and onto our identity as a nation. Performance artist and TBA Alum Neal Medlyn is creating music for Last Meadow and visual artist Paul Chan will serve as dramaturg. Gutierrez's work has been presented both nationally at Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen and internationally in festivals such as ImPuls Tanz in Vienna and Springdance Festival in Utrecht. Gutierrez has received Creative Capital and MAP Fund support for his work, and won a Bessie New York Dance and Performance Award for his piece Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies in 2006.

Last Meadow will have its world premiere at TBA:09 and is a co-commissioned project by PICA, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Flynn Center for the Arts.

Raimund Hoghe / Bolero Variations (Germany) Dance
Raimund Hoghe, a German choreographer, writer and for a decade dramaturg for Pina Bausch, explores ritual and minimalism in his performances, often drawing inspiration from well-known and archetypal pieces of music, in this case Maurice Ravel's Bolero. Instead of relying on the crescendo of the Ravel music to set the tone of the piece, he cycles through different examples of the bolero, from Eydie Gormé & Trio Los Panchos to Maria Callas to Benny Goodman to Tchaikovsky. He includes several interpretations of Ravel's Bolero, including a sound recording from the famous Torvill and Dean ice-dancing performance at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (commentator remarks included--"Here comes the triple lutz!"). Hoghe, whose own physical difference is often an undercurrent to his choreography, explores physical and musical rituals with patience and an almost liturgical respect. Hoghe's books have been translated into several languages and he has presented his performances all over Europe, as well as in Japan and Australia. He received the French Prix de la Critique in 2006 for Swan Lake, 4 Acts and the magazine Ballet-Tanz named him Dancer of the Year for 2008.

TBA:09 marks the U.S. premiere for Raimund Hoghe's company.

Young Jean Lee / The Shipment (New York) Theatre
The Shipment is the newest theater project by TBA:07 Artist Young Jean Lee. Lee is known for her brazen theatrical inventiveness, and The Shipment applies her signature style and acid wit to the black experience in America. In collaboration with an all-black cast, Lee has created a three-part theatre piece that is provocative, terrifyingly astute, and scabrously funny. The title is based on a rap song that is about a shipment of drugs but that also evokes the African slave trade. Lee's work has been presented in New York City at the Public Theater, HERE Art Center, the Soho Rep and The Kitchen, around the U.S. at the Wexner Center for the Arts (OH), the Walker Art Center (MN), On the Boards (WA), and has toured around the world to venues such as Kaaitheater (Brussels), Hebbel Theater (Berlin) and the Vienna Festival.

The Shipment will make its West Coast premiere at TBA:09.

locust / Crushed (Seattle) Dance
Crushed is a dance/music/video performance work dealing with the idea of being blindsided. Dancers sing and musicians dance in this feverishly physical dissection of cause and effect. TBA:05 Alum locust returns to Portland with choreographer Amy O'Neal to present this very visceral and exciting new work.

Pan Pan Theatre / Crumb Trail (Ireland) Theatre, Dance
A deconstructed version of Hansel and Gretel, this experimental multi-media theatre piece addresses the anxiety inherent in serving up private lives for public consumption in the internet age. Wickedly funny and densely theatrical, Crumb Trail takes on everything from parent-child relationships to internet predators to the self-aware construction of our own identities. Replete with existential uncertainty and musical interludes, Crumb Trail is a beautifully complex and fast-paced piece of theatre for our time. Pan Pan, established in 1993, creates original work through commissioning new writing and through the totally unique expression of established writings. Based in Ireland, the company tours nationally and internationally and has performed throughout Europe, Canada, Korea, Australia, China, and the United States.

Crumb Trail will make its West Coast premiere at TBA:09.

Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods with Philipp Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish / Maybe Forever (Brussels, Belgium) Dance
Vampires struggle with eternity and loneliness. Human beings struggle with each other and with the fact that things are not forever. Everyone struggles with something, and fortunately there are songs that make us feel better about it all. Choreographers Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher let their artistic worlds bleed into one another as they embody the demise of a relationship in Maybe Forever. Brussels-based composer/musician Niko Hafkenscheid joins them on stage, inviting them to waltz to lullabies and into promised lands. But under the velvet surface of sweet melancholy simmers the unexpressed and the embryonic. Stuart received the Flemish Culture Award 2008 and Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods have been artists in residence at the Kaaitheater (Brussels), the Schauspielhaus Zurich, and the Volksbuhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. Stuart is known for her collaborations with other artists, including visual artist Ann Hamilton and media artist Gary Hill.

Influential dance artist Meg Stuart--an American artist living between Brussels and Berlin--makes a rare U.S. appearance with this West Coast premiere.

The following Visual Art exhibitions and installations will be on view through October, 2009. Admission to the Visual Art program is FREE.

Robert Boyd / Tomorrow People (New York) Video Installation
Tomorrow People is a synchronized two-channel video installation. The piece addresses issues of social paranoia and civil distrust in an era of questionable politics using excerpts from syndicated radio talk show hosts, international conspiracists, amateur documentary filmmakers, and the mysterious Commander X. Boyd represents a history of apocalyptic thought as a series of MTV-style music videos within a setting reminiscent of a discotheque.

Working in the areas of video, installation, photography, and sculpture, Robert Boyd culls imagery from Internet news clips, television cartoons, vintage documentary films, and archival footage of doomsday cults, iconic political figures and global fundamentalist movements. Contrasting the familiar and the fringe along with the popular and the notorious, Boyd's work suggests a displacement between the euphoric idyll promised by disco and the chilling reality of collective human brutality.

His work has been widely exhibited at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; 303 Gallery, New York; Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; Artsonje Center, Seoul; Context Galleries, Derry; The Hospital, London; PKM Gallery, Beijing; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Participant Inc, New York; Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona; White Box, New York; Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; The Islip Art Museum, Islip, New York; and Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Antoine Catala / (France + New York) Video Installation
Exploring video compression technologies, Antoine Catala utilizes distortion effects to create video installations that enlighten the medium's very own snags and glitches. In his digital diptychs, he enhances imperfections, renders errors, and highlights other visual malformations to generate complex faceted figures. In rethinking portraiture, he delivers haunted digital composites that move the face across the screen in halting, often painful transmutations of subjectivity. Developing a technique that distorts movement in its continuity, Catala has created a method for inputting data, and outputting distortion, a practice through which he becomes vulnerable to the technology he is manipulating.

His practice includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Antoine was schooled in Sonic and Fine Arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Mexico, and the UK.

Brody Condon / Without Sun (New York) Video, Performance
Named after the classic Chris Marker video Sans Soliel, Brody Condon's Without Sun is a 15-minute compilation of found internet video clips. Utilizing footage of teens experiencing the legal psychedelic drug Salvia divinorum, the sounds and images overlapping, Brody creates a pseudo-narrative utilizing focused on the exterior surface of the "projection of self" into visionary worlds. The clips, posted to YouTube and available worldwide, demonstrate the gap between lived experience of transcendental aims with its representation. For TBA:09 the piece will be installed as video and will also be staged as a live performance, acted out in word and movement by a local dancer and actor selected by the artist.

Condon was born in Mexico and received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. His education includes residencies at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2004 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001. He has participated in exhibitions at galleries, cultural institutions, and event spaces internationally such as the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Pace Wildenstein Gallery and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Monica Museum of Art and Machine Project in California, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Kunst-werke in Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum Post CS and Sonsbeek 2008 International Public Sculpture Exhibition in the Netherlands.

Sharon Hayes / (New York) Video, Performance
Blurring the lines between social intervention, political activism, and public spectacle, Hayes utilizes video, performance, and installation to orchestrate and document collective activity in the public domain. Informed by theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism, her work investigates the relationship between history, politics, and speech and the process of individual and collective subject formation.

Hayes' installation, video and performance work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, HERE, Performance Space 122, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. In addition she has shown in galleries, exhibition or performance spaces in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vienna and Zagreb as well as in California, Florida, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont, and in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States. Hayes is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin.

For TBA:09 Hayes will develop a new site specific piece which comments on the politics of love.

Jesse Hayward / (Portland, OR) Sculpture, Installation -- PICA COMMISSION
Utilizing accumulation, repetition, and ritual, Jesse Hayward creates amorphous armatures out of canvas, plastic, metal, foam, or wood. These assembled forms are covered in ink, raw pigment, and glitter, softening and obscuring the original structure. Resulting in an uncanny use of color, space, and form that re-contextualizes the relationship between painterly and sculptural forms, his work often achieves a heightened sense of balanced chaos and foreshadows the instability and immateriality of future outcomes. The sculptural commingles with the painterly and the drawn, articulating a space wherein boundaries are blurred and the rhythms of color and form create new interpretations of our sacred beliefs and natural environments. Although Hayward engages the basic tropes of art-making, what finally emerges is something alien. The objects exist in a state of diminished hybridization, with multiple genres parasitically collapsing one another.

Jesse Hayward received his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art Window Project in Portland, OR, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA, and The Affair at The Jupiter Hotel Art Fair, among others. In 2006 Hayward's work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week, and the Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was short listed for the Portland Art Museum's Contemporary Northwest Art Award.

Johanna Ketola / The Walls Of My Hall (Finland) Video Installation
The Walls Of My Hall is a multi channel video installation, which refers to the human body as a place to exist, a structure, related to its built environment. The work happens in "selected reality" as bodies are at rest and suspended in motion, the surroundings that they inhabit and the furniture they sit upon is radically removed. Stark black, empty spaces still reflect what was once there- what has been erased. An audio soundtrack of live radio broadcast is pumped into the spaces by small radios, an echo of the present world colliding with these frozen people. Although dark and eerie, the piece also reflects a certain sense of humor, a moment of hope that we carry on even when we are represented in real or fictionalized space that is void of support.

Working in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of every day life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopefulness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland and Oulun City Art Museum in Oulun, Finland.

Ketola's presentation at TBA:09 will be her United States debut.

Fawn Krieger / (New York) Installation, Video -- PICA RESIDENCY + COMMISSION
Krieger will construct a national park as stageset. The structure takes its cues from UNESCO World Heritage sites, Lewis & Clark expeditions, museum dioramas, the Hudson River School, Superstudio, and America's post-war middle-class touristic pastime, the Cross Country trip. Inspired by the artist's own family cross-country trip in 1984, she presents us with an inside-out, indoor landscape--a built environment that asks which of our natures are not made? The sprawling plateau of faded and fleshy territories includes plush, upholstered hills, craggy cement valleys, and cliffs of fragmented cabinetry. With each modeled region, the "untouched" is retouched.

Fawn Krieger is a NY-based artist, born in 1975, whose multi-genre works re-imagine everyday sites like the shop and home. Her "stages" are inhabitable sculptures that transform spectators into participants, and examine the politics of ownership and exchange. Krieger's Flintstonian tactility, and penchant for scale compressions, unfolds an unlikely collision of private and public space, where intimate moments also serve as social ruptures. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY), Art in General (NY), Nice & Fit Gallery (Berlin), The Moore Space (Miami), Von Lintel Gallery (NY), the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Boston), and Neon>fdv (Milan). Krieger is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Foundation (2008) and the Jerome Foundation (2007), and currently teaches at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Molloy College.

This project is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network's Visual Artists Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. www.npnweb.org

Kalup Linzy / (New York) Video, Performance -- PICA RESIDENCY
Acting as director-actor and singer-songwriter, New York-based Kalup Linzy draws on a variety of American pop- and counter-culture genres, including soap operas and early video and performance art. Creating melancholic video narratives that are often frantic and schizophrenic, his storylines mime traditional melodramas while satirizing the medium. Routinely dressed in drag and often lip-synching to Kalup's wildly manipulated prerecorded vocal tracks, the characters interact to uncover the shrewd home truths about race, class, sex, love, family and stereotyping.

Kalup Linzy was born in Stuckey, Florida and graduated from the MFA program at the University of South Florida in 2003. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005. Linzy's work has been exhibited internationally, his work is currently on view in a massive one person exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem and he was recently featured in Prospect One in New Orleans. He is a recipient of a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and was named a Guggenheim fellow in 2007. In 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum.

Ma Qiusha / From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili (Beijing, China) Video
Ma Qiusha presents her diaristic video No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili a simple confessional, which explores the artists' conflict with both parental and societal pressures to be successful. Holding a razorblade on her tongue the artist tells short stories about her life as a young artist, she describes being compelled to strive for perfection, when her female sex has already been deemed "less-than." She talks about for love and affection companionship and understanding while living life as one of the millions of China's "only children". She wonders about her parent's approval and worries about her value to society as an artist and a daughter. Her speech is muddled and stunted by the cutting blade. The video is both psychological portrait and a performance document.

Ma is a young Chinese artist recently featured in REFRESH : Emerging Chinese Artists at the Zendai Moma, Shanghai, China. 1982 Born in Beijing, China. 2005 Graduated from Digital Media studio of The Central Academy of Fine Arts. Beijing, China. Now Living And Working In Beijing, China. Group exhibitions: 2006 35th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands 2005 Rumor Décor, Ddmwarehouse, Shanghai, China 2005 Beijing Documenta - Producing HIGH, Beijing, China 2005 A Cartoon, Taikang Top Space, Beijing, China 2005 920 Kilograms, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Shanghai, China 2005 Archaeology of the Future: the Second Triennial of Chinese Art. Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China 2005 "Experience and Consciousness-The New Vision Media Festival". Beijing film academy, Beijing, China 2004 Automat Contemporary Art Exhibition, Suzhou Art & Design Technology Institute. Suzhou, China 2004 SCARIFY-- China Present Independent Video Exhibition. Beijing, China 2004 The 3rd Changsha Contemporary Art Exhibition. Changsha.

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner / C.L.U.E. (New York) Performance/Installation
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation, it will take the form of site-specific performance, multichannel video installation, and video projection. The flexible nature of this project embraces multiple arrangements of its parts, allowing the environment to inform its presentation. Shifting shape while generating new elements is essential for C.L.U.E. and enables it to continually evolve, remaining a work permanently in progress.

In the process of making their work, the artists visit locales ranging from desolate desert landscapes to darkened parking lots, responding to the environment and capturing the results of these interactions. The subsequent videos are choreographed patterns, crafted through the use of carefully timed jump cuts that divide the piece into discrete, color-coded sections.

robbinschilds was formed by Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003. The company presents highly visual time-based works that explore the intersection between architecture and human movement. In addition to their live work, robbinschilds' video art has been exhibited at Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain (September 2007), Taxter and Spengemann gallery (March 2007), LACE: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, (February 2007) and was screened as part of the BAM Next Wave series. robbinschilds has worked with the art collective Chicks on Speed, choreographing the group's 30-minute video piece Visitors, which premiered at the Deitch Gallery in April of 2005, and has collaborated with Japanther on a rock opera that will premiere in November at the Performa 09 festival in New York City. robbinschilds premiered C.L.U.E. at P.S.122., the piece was adapted for the New Museum in New York in 2008.

A.L. Steiner was born and raised in Miami, FL. Her photo & video work has been published and exhibited internationally since 1997, most recently at Moda Fad (Barcelona), Starship (Berlin) and New Langton Arts (San Francisco). Steiner collaborated with Chicks on Speed, Nicole Eisenman on the publication Ridykeulous (Summer 2005). A.L. Steiner is represented by Taxter and Spengemann in New York.

Ethan Rose / Movements (Portland, OR) Installation
Movements, Ethan Rose's latest sound installation, consists of over one hundred altered music boxes carefully timed and methodically displayed across the gallery walls. The tinkering creates a sensation of a shifting texture, housed in a visually stimulating acoustic environment. Rose uniquely blends electronic devices with instruments of the past, including player pianos and carillons, creating sounds and compositions of new sonic possibility, rather than musical preservation.

Over the past ten years Ethan has released recordings, scored films, performed internationally, and created sound installations. He has worked with a number of artists and organizations including Gus Van Sant, Molo Design, and The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Rose has received several grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and was recently awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. Recent exhibitions, projects, and performances include Player Piano at Tilt Gallery.

Stephen Slappe / WE ARE LEGION (Portland, OR) Web Project
Using video, installation, drawing and printmaking, Slappe sifts through the epistemological wake of technology and popular culture. Drawing on sci-fi, vampire, and B-movies, along with Google street view and footage of rural Oregon, his video projections blend humor, absurdity, and anxiety in works that reflect upon the notion of home, transience, and physical and psychological escape. For TBA:09 Slappe creates a never-ending army of costumed children in a web project entitled WE ARE LEGION.

Slappe's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum, The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi, Consolidated Works in Seattle, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's TBA Festival in Portland, Artists' Television in San Francisco, and Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta. He received a 2007 Artistic Focus Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon.

Special Labor Day Event

Slow Food Movement / Eat In Picnic (Portland, OR) Picnic
The members of Slow Food Portland--numbering over 500--are a diverse group of food enthusiasts with a curiosity about food traditions and heritage, local artisanal products, sustainable agriculture and the protection of the biodiversity of our local and global food sheds. Members include home and professional chefs, caterers, growers, vintners, restauranteurs, food educators, and lots of ordinary people and families that like to cook and eat and know where their food comes from. Join them in this special free Labor Day Picnic open to one and all.

Film/Performance

Daniel Barrow / Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry (Winnipeg, Canada) Film/ Performance
co-presented with Cinema Project and NW Film Center
Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Barrow's newest "manual animation" combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city.

Hitoshi Toyoda / Nazuna and Spoonfulriver (New York/Tokyo) Film
co-presented with Cinema Project and NW Film Center
Hitoshi Toyoda is a self-taught photographer who has worked exclusively in the medium of slideshows for the past ten years. These slideshows are silent and consist of images taken in the course of his daily life. While the material is taken from the past, the presentation of one image after another appearing and disappearing places emphasis on the weight and value of present moment. 


Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill / Between Us (Portland, OR) Performance, Video
Between Us is a performance-based outdoor video installation that examines the lines between private and public spaces, confidentiality and disclosure, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Set in a parking lot, the artists sit in a car and have a "private" conversation. The car is equipped with video cameras and microphones that transmit live video and audio feeds from inside the car. The videos are projected larger-than-life onto a nearby wall and the audio is amplified. The set-up resembles that of a drive-in theater. Unlike a traditional drive-in, however, the car in Between Us faces away from the projected image, converting the car into an imagined stage.

Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill are completing their undergraduate work at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Lectures

Danielle Goldman / Close Encounters: Contemporary Dance and Theories of Intimacy (New York)
Paying particular attention to the choreographers presenting work in the TBA:09 Festival, the lecture will explore connections between contemporary dance and theories of intimacy in philosophy, literature, and histories of photography. What happens when bodies, sensually complex and laden with history, encounter one another at close range?

Danielle Goldman has taught in the Dance Department at Barnard College, the Performance Studies Department at New York University, and the Arts Department at The New School, where she is currently Assistant Professor of Dance History and Theory. She recently edited a special issue of Women & Performance, exploring gendered relations between music and dance, and was guest co-editor for the Movement Research Performance Journal #33. She has published articles in Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Etcetera, and TDR: The Drama Review. Her book, I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in December, 2009. She is also a dancer who has worked with choreographers including Rachel Bernsen, Judith Sánchez Ruíz, Anna Sperber, and, most recently, DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.

Peter Kreider / The China Syndrome (New York)
In conjunction with the release of a catalog co-produced by PICA and the Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, Reed College, TBA:08 artist Kreider returns to Portland to talk about his participation in an exhibition in China and his experience having work fabricated and exhibited in the "world's workshop." Kreider takes us on a wild ride as he recounts his journey from start to finish. In the end a poignant story of an emerging art market, cross-cultural collaboration, folly, intrigue, near catastrophe and eventual triumph emerges.

Posted by Brian Costello, PICA

You've been involved with PICA since the mid-nineties--a long time! Can you give five reasons why you've been a PICA supporter for so long?
David Bragdon: I joined early on to support Kristy Edmunds efforts to bring creative new work to Portland at a time when there was less of it than there is today. Second, in the days when PICA had a performance series I enjoyed my membership as a chance to have my mind provoked. I liked about half the performances and hated about half of them and understood none of them; but I was glad to have attended all of them. Third, when PICA's performance season evolved to a more concentrated series in the form of TBA, I enjoyed that sense of something happening all week long and the energy that accumulates when the events all run together. Fourth, philosophically, I support having an organization like PICA to encourage local artists event during the times of the year when there are not performances. Fifth, I can't believe it's been nearly fifteen years that I have been a member!

Did you ever attend a DADA ball? If so, what is your best memory?
DB: Oh yes, oh yes. I know I attended the first and second ones, and then probably the fourth. My best memory is the first one, on the waterfront in lower Albina near the grain elevator. It was a magical evening. Specifically, my favorite memory is washing blue dye out of my hair in a friend's kitchen sink afterwards.

What is your favorite TBA performance?
DB: Its is tied between two different shows which both took place in the Newmark. One was Laurie Anderson's work with NASA. The other was another spoken word project ...(hmm...I must be a verbal person, not a visual one!) which title I have forgotten [ed: The Spalding Gray Project, during TBA:06], about Spalding Gray and Dustin Hoffman. My all time favorite was the guy at the WORKS who did the Lionel Ritchie medley--Kenny Mellman. In terms of the performance series predating TBA, my favorite was the Israeli dance troupe that baked bread.

Describe your philosophy of supporting the arts?
DB: Arts make me think with a part of my brain that I would like to develop and apply more. That's the selfish reason, so maybe I should not admit it! I also think that arts, especially when I don't understand them, add more to the fabric of a community that I would like to live in.

Are you an artist yourself? What do you create?
DB: I like writing fictional short stories and fantasies and semi-fictional memoirs which go into a desk drawer or to select friends.

Add a question, one that you think should be answered about yourself.
DB: What would I be doing if I didn't have this job? Railroad brakeman.

PICA's Visual Art Program Director, Kristan Kennedy just got back from her annual pilgrimage to the sprawling art fair that is the Armory Show. When Kennedy travels she sends back stream of consciousness emails about the work she sees to the PICA staff. Occasionally the news is fit to print. In this day by day blog, Kennedy has just landed in her hometown of Brooklyn and takes a trip to the Brooklyn Museum.

Today I went to the Brooklyn Museum with my mom who had a rare day off. We went to see the Hernan Bas show a sprawling survey that includes: little works on paper made with alkyd paints (pushed around into storybook images of lonely boys in some lost world) - larger works which get more elaborate in mark and color - dreamy video works of sailors and mermaids and sculptural works that look like piles of sunken treasures.

The show is comprised of 6 rooms and several tiny alcoves jam-packed with works, it could swallow the recent Elizabeth Peyton show at the New Museum whole.

All of the works are from the Rubell collection, which sort of blows my mind. Bas, born in 1978 is still as young as the boys he draws, and it seems like every scrap of paper he touched was snapped up by these and other aggressive collectors. A quick google search will turn up various details, Hernan was born in Cuba and raised in Florida, he graduated from the New World School of the Arts in Miami. (which has to be the best name for an art school ever). He is somewhat of an art world darling, with a billion interviews and party sightings dotting many art blogs and web sites.

It was in a cavernous gallery at the center of the floor that there was some relief from his relentless images of beautiful boys. Here a five channel video piece took over. Cool blue water rushes in intermixed with synchronized swimming scenes of live mermaids, the kinds that used to perform at theme parks across America. They are undulating through the water in seashell bikini tops and are zipped into spandex fins. Flipping and twisting they look trapped and free at the same time. The only thing that breaks the illusion is the tiny tubes they keep floating towards to inhale little bursts of air. 

Upon exiting this underwater land I found myself in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art a newish space on the museums fourth floor. Here, a thin but well-meaning exhibition Burning Down The House: Building a Feminist Art Collection offered a crash course in Feminist Art. With some important pieces, and an ambitious plan to grow the center it still failed to have the impact that WACK! or the plethora of other Feminist Art surveys did that had swept up the art world a couple of years ago. 

By far the crowning jewel of the center is Judy Chicago's stunning installation "The Dinner Party" which will live forever at the Brooklyn Museum in a triangular glass room. 

Allow me to digress....

A couple of months ago when I was languishing out in outer Brooklyn, I discovered that an express bus to Midtown was right around the corner. I started taking it into the city and was amazed that I had missed out for many a year on this luxurious way to make the hour long commute. I had an entire row of giant plush seats to myself, with high backs and giant window views. At every stop from Ocean Ave in Midwood to Flatbush Ave. it became clear that the only people who took this bus were older, wealthy, Jewish women.

Long furs, bandages from plastic surgery, giant gilded sunglasses and nasal tinged chatter started to fill the bus. I listened to these women's conversations with rapt attention. The two loudest ladies were right behind me, one was talking about her five husbands, the other was telling her that she could not keep track of them all, they shrieked and laughed, scolded and berated each-other. It was the stuff of great scripts. Flying down East 23rd the conversation turned towards art, one of the women was blabbing about her long ago life as a collector. She loved to travel the world she said. "I love people and art from all ovah the world, you see our bus driver, he is Chinese, when I get awff I'm gonna say 'sheaaa sheaaa' [xie xie]. You know what that means? It means 'thank you;' I picked up different phrases on my travels." Her friend was non-plussed which made her pull out all the stops. "I still love to look at art, I went to the Brooklyn Museum last week, I saaaw the most buutiful installation, it was caawled 'the dinner party' by Judy Chiiicagggooo, do you know it?..."

The other woman exasperated says, "Oh yeah it was haaariblle, disgusting, lets not tawlk about it."

The blonde retorts, "Whaaa!? Your insane, it is amazing, it shows the whole history of women, it is awwll handmande, how could you say that? It is a masterpiece, you're insane."

The other woman chimes in, "Well , I like what I like. What can I say?" 

At this point the blonde pats me on the shoulder. "Do you know about Judy Chicago?" This was my lucky day! I said, "Yes, and I have to agree with you, that piece is a masterpiece."

She is obviously excited and squeals, "You see! I knew it, it is - it really is. Everyone knows it. What is your problem?"

At this point her friend just scowls, throws up her hand and says "Hmmpf!" then she leans forward and whispers in my ear, "It's all vaginnnaaas!" obviously horrified. With that the conversation turned to the Housing Works thrift shop and all of the prints and art books and Emanuel Ungaro pants they had found there. Soon it was time to get off the bus and I bid my new friends farewell. 

Fast forward to my current position, standing in front of the giant table - yes indeed, the piece is all vaginas. Each place setting, a handmade goblet, fork and knife, needle point and lace table cloths, plates emblazoned, carved and painted. The cloth, the floor, the walls covered in women's names. Women who painted, protested and suffered, women who wrote the greatest poems, composed Gregorian chants, who changed the course of history, quietly and confidently. Women I learned about from my mother, who was now standing beside me. She could have a place setting of her own, if Judy knew her she might consider it. 

It is in this room that I ran into another gaggle of women. They are of the same tribe from the Express bus, I imagine my "friends" telling them about the installation, and of them making a date, getting their hair set, scrawling the orange red lipstick on and heading out to see the piece. I give them a nod and they took it as an invitation to talk to me.

"Are these famous movie stars?
"Did that lady Georgia something paint this?"
I realized that I had to give them an impromptu tour, and took them around the table trying to bring them into the thinking behind the work slowly and steadily. They thanked me for my time and we parted ways. As I left the room, I could hear them shout.

"Awww Hilldeeegaaard!"
"Wasn't she in that movie? Wasn't she someone famous?"

My mother started to shout across the table at them, "Noooo Hildegarde of Bingen!!!" If we had only had more time, She would have told them this:
 

Hildegarde of Bingen 
(b. 1098, Böckelheim, Germany; d. 1179, Ruperstberg, Germany)
Hildegarde of Bingen, also known as St. Hildegard and the Sybil of the Rhine, was an enormously influential and spiritual woman, who paved the way for other women to succeed in a number of fields from theology to music. She was a mystic writer, who completed three books of her visions. During a time when members of the Catholic Church accorded women little respect, Hildegarde was consulted by bishops and consorted with the Pope, exerting influence over them.

In 1136, Hildegarde assumed the role of Mother Superior of the convent. In 1147, she moved the convent to Rupertsberg, a town near Bingen, as urged by one of her visions. Although never formally educated and unable to write, Hildegarde quickly became a well-regarded authority and gave influential advice, relying on secretaries to transcribe her ideas onto paper. She was an idolized visionary who earned a saint-like status and name, despite her lack of official beatification. 

She wrote on topics ranging from philosophy to natural healing with a critical expertise praised by both German advice-seekers and the highest-ranking figure in the Church, Pope Eugenius III. An esteemed advocate for scientific research, Hildegarde was one of the earliest promoters of the use of herbal medicine to treat ailments. She wrote several books on medicine, including Physica, circa 1150, which was primarily concerned with the use of herbs in medicinal treatment.

Hildegarde may be best known as a composer. Stemming from the traditional incantations of Church music, Hildegarde's compositions took the form of a single chant-like, melodic line. These compositions are called antiphons and are a single line of music sung before and after a psalm. Hildegarde combined all of her music into a cycle called Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, circa 1151, or The Symphony of the Harmony of the Heavenly Revelations, which reflects her belief that music was the highest praise to God. Her works, including In Evangelium and O Viridissima Virga, are still released today, and her ethereal style continues to influence New Age music. Hildegarde of Bingen stands out as an extraordinary figure in women's history, not only as a talented musician but also as an unapologetically prodigious woman who found remarkable success by expressing her unique voice.

Moving through the museum from newness (Hernan Bas) to historical (Feminism), I now found myself communing with the ancients. The Brooklyn Museum has one of the best collections of Egyptian artifacts In the entire world. Although I worked at the Museum in my youth and grew up crawling through it's halls of mock ruins and tombs. I have never felt an attachment to these cold carved objects.

Today I feel different, and cannot take my eyes off of this "Head from a Female Sphinx." Perhaps it is because I have recently become obsessed with collecting amateur sculpture and live amongst globs of clay fashioned into half finished heads, perhaps it is because I have been surrounded by all of these women, on the bus, upstairs on the walls, at the dinner table. But this woman, strong and silent, cracked and decomposed seems more relevant than anything else. More loaded than the frolicking boys and mermaids of Bas, more wise than the Cindy Sherman portraits and more stylized than the Chicago plates, louder than those ladies on the bus. Looking back on what spoke to me on this trip from the Armory to my studio visits, it seems the Sphinx followed me...

Next up, Part 2 , Kennedy hits the Lower East Side, and takes a nap at the New Museum...

Entry by Kristan Kennedy, PICA / Edited by Brian Costello, PICA

Holcombe Waller's Into the Dark Unknown is on a special NPR Top 100 Songs To Make Out To. Take a listen to the saucy aural audio. Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Also, get ready for his performances of Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest that PICA is presenting at the Imago in March!

Posted by Brian Costello, PICA

Get a feel for what is to come with Ethan Rose's Oaks Park concert next week. Both the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week have done some great interviews with Ethan.

"Rose's infatuation with utilizing the fruits of the ancient Wurlitzer is absolutely pure. More an artist than your typical musician, Rose has been building, then demolishing, quiet instrumental soundscapes for quite some time now. His sculpted, gorgeous ambient structures are compiled with a frustrating level of detail--this music is akin to a ship in a bottle; you don't know how it got there, but can appreciate its patient assembly. Rose's finest works are delicate in nature, and barely tip the volume scales above a polite hum."
--Portland Mercury

"His latest effort, the appropriately titled Oaks, is made chiefly from the Wurlitzer organ we're investigating at Oaks Park. With some assistance from [organist Keith] Fortune, Rose set up a dozen microphones around the inside of the rink--which sits directly beneath the organ's piping system--recording the organ's tones and chintzy artificial percussion. Back in his home studio, these sanguine noises were elongated and turned inside out, then stitched into long pieces that can evoke melancholic and nostalgic feelings in the listener."
--Willamette Week

Tues . Jan 27 . 8-10 pm (Doors at 7 pm. Admission includes skate rental.)
Oaks Park
7805 SE Oaks Park Way
Portland OR 97202
503.233.5777
$10 Advance and Member Price
$12 General
All Ages

Posted by Brian Costello, PICA

Holocene Records and PICA are throwing a roller rink party to launch the new album by PDX's own Ethan Rose, whose music was recently used in Gus Van Sant's movie Paranoid Park. Rose's haunting electronic music reminds me of Colleen, and is similarly just the thing to load in your iPod and take on a walk at dusk.

Rose used the organ at Oaks Park to create the initial sounds for this album, which he then mixed and layered. There's something creepy but appealing about his music which I expect to pair well with the nostalgia and weirdness of Oaks Park. Roller skating to it will feel like being in an old horror movie or episode of the Twilight Zone--you'll want to keep skating in circles, but just don't look behind you for the ghosts of skaters past.

If you go to First Thursdays then you were probably sucked into the crowd that stood captivated by Rose's player piano at Tilt in the Everett Street Galleries last March. Rose rehabbed the piano, created a punched paper roll of music to feed it, recorded the sounds, and then remixed and broadcast the songs from within the piano. Other antique acoustic musical instruments and found objects, including broken music boxes, ghost through his albums.

And finally, there's a promise of appearances from Portland's elite roller skaters. I have no idea who that means (if not the derby girls), but it's another reason to go. Admission includes skate rental.

Buy tickets here.

Listen to a sample by visiting Rose's site or download the mp3 for On Wheels Rotating here.

-Carissa Wodehouse
PICA blogger, member, enthusiast

PICA info follows after the jump.

Tim Crouch / England
09.08.08 at Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Tim Crouch
Hannah Ringham
2008 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by Axel Nastansky
All Rights Reserved, PICA

Here we are, a few weeks from when the festival ended, and here I am, posting something I wrote the night I saw ENGLAND.

I wrote this emphatically, quickly, passionately, immediately. Hopefully it will capture the show using a little bit of the same kind of syntax that Crouch wrote into the show.

Posted By: Jim Withington

I do not think we can take full credit, or even any credit for the impulses of artists. Although it is kind of strange that several of our TBA alumni take to shearing off their hair post festival. (e.g. Nature Theater of Oklahoma TBA:06 closing night when cast members closed down the Works by taking to a makeshift stage and buzz clipping off their hipster hairdo's).

When Vivarium Studio's visited us in 2006 I not so secretly called company member Zinn Atmane, the "Future of Hair" (a title I had given Lone Twin in 04/05).

Gary from Lone Twin was beard before beard was cool again. TBA:05

So was Lone Twin, Greg. TBA:05

What is the "future of hair"? Well artists are often future forecasters of sorts and while their work often pushes at the sides of reality, so does their fashion. Vivarium Studios returned to PICA this year for the Time-Based Art Festival, and I had heard rumors that Zinn wanted to tease his q-tip coiffure into a Reggie Watts like explosion.

Reggie Watts / TBA:08 / Photo by Kenneth Aaron

Instead he returned to France and made this video.

this video.