no such place

ON SIGHT Opening
posted by: laura becker
My anticipation for TBA, building up over the past couple weeks of arranging schedules and re-reading the catalogue, turned into an all out fever by last night as I putzed around my kitchen waiting until it was officially time for timebasedart.
A lot of that surge came yesterday afternoon while reading the tete-a-tete dialogue of our local art critics, bouncing across the web pages of the Oregonian, this blog, and the Portland Mercury. Allison Hallet’s piece, especially, keenly explains the reasoning why TBA can’t be taken for granted. Maybe it was her piece, or maybe it was thinking ahead to the Labor Day slow food picnic on the grounds of this year’s masterpiece of a Works, but all I could think about was TBA as a great big satisfying salad, with delicious organic ingredients picked from all around the world, tossed together to get creative juices of their combined bounty flowing together, mingling tastes, and marinating in inspiration. The fact that we’re lucky enough to live in the bowl that salad is served in, for me, is what’s worth taking less and less for granted every year.
Trying as hard as I could to be fashionably late, I waited a whole fifteen minutes before I couldn’t stand it any more and arrived at the wonder that is Washington HIgh School. The site, a preserved time capsule of things reminiscent of everyone’s childhood in some way, looks like a Michel Gondry film set. Walking into dark classrooms re-appropriated for video installations is eerily familiar to dreams involving long school hallways becoming mazes and lights being out that in real life should always be on.

Freudian divergences aside, this year’s WORKS is PICA’s most successful stab yet at incorporating the visual portion into the rest of TBA. The performance space is literally surrounded on two floors by show and tell art pieces and exhibits that one might find in the children’s exploring room of a local museum. The all ages appeal reverted all of us into giggling children as we re-arranged colorful boxes, spying on drug induced laughing fits, creating lifesize jenga towers and climbing over foam lava beds, gazing at still life trick-or-treaters, listening to stripped bare music boxes have conversations with each other, finding rabbit hole after rabbit hole of fun, play and smiles.
No Such Place, Kristan Kennedy’s title for this year’s On Sight, refers to many ideas she eloquently describes and you can read on the wall when you enter the halls, but it also may refer to the childhood we all remember, forever long for, but maybe only ever had in our trippy, arts and crafts induced dreams.