September 7, 2007 Archives

Last year TBA brought some great visual arts to Portland, and this year looks to be even better, so with that in mind, Wednesday I went south to Reed to check out the new Marko Lulic and Peter Kreider show at the newly renovated Douglas F. Memorial Art Gallery. Also, I wanted a hot dog.

I arrived too late to see Sarah Dougher and Friends, but Root Beer & French Fry were just setting up, and they were completely awesome. It was just their first show, but they sounded really finished, and Fans of Tristeza, Explosions in the Sky, or the Sea and Cake should definitely hop on over to their myspace to download their mp3 and get in on the action before they’re all huge.

But on to the art, eh? Peter Kreider had some great work on display, coaxing the viewer into reconsidering the cleverly manipulated subjects. A giant-scale configuration of electrical attachments (triple-taps, extension cords, etc…) lorded over the floor where I entered, its parts assembled into a large, dangerous looking "X," while nearby, an assemblage of milk jugs with eerily sculpted skulls leered. These two, my favorite pieces at this showing of Peter Kreider’s work, transform everyday objects into almost living beasts; the simple (but well done) manipulations of everyday objects endowing them with the dormant power of a taxidermed grizzly.

Marko Lulic's work was well matched with Kreider's, but was more overt and humorous (i.e. large pink letters spelling "edifice complex" and "social housing for billionaires"). Dealing mostly with themes of modernism in architecture, Lulic's work created an intriguing argument between the promises and possibilities of rebuilding communities in a modern fashion, and the loss of history and past. Maybe they should've shown this stuff up on Mississippi?

By abe

Hollaback?

Today on my way back to the office after the delightful noontime chat I came across a girl reading. She was poised on the street corner near the Half & Half, book in hand, with a look on her face as if she was just...about...to...perform. "Hey," I thought, "it's that on the streets performance Reading Out Loud!"

So I stalled for a minute, looking at her and waiting. She looked side to side, at the book, made a few moves like she was about to speak, looked side to side again...and didn't read. She was just really, really nervous and apparently waiting for someone. I wandered off, disappointed that TBA hadn't randomly materialized on the street.

FYI, below are the books the performers will be reading. Memorize them so you don't stop and stare at every person with a book on the street. Or, hey, stop and stare.

Anyone sighted a Reading Out Loud performance yet?

The list:
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Libra by Don DeLillo
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

--Carissa Wodehouse
Blogger, member, enthusiast

Rob Halverson’s curated room at the Corberry Press definitely warrants a studied viewing. The collection of objects in a small office space self-reference their hand-made qualities to the point of absurd (i.e. a cell phone rock pet). The works are a testament to wonderful crumminess, beautiful roughness and the potential complexity of simple shapes and designs. There is a lot of information in this tiny space and if anything the size of the room limits occupancy, and that is a plus, each item requires an intimate interaction, the kind of interaction distracted by large crowds. The overall impression is of insight into obsessive machinations of tactile oriented folk.

Posted by: Levi Hanes

Against the backdrop of city sounds, Eckert's choir clustered together on the steps of Pioneer Square. I positioned myself towards the back of the audience, in order to experience a melding of intentional and environmental sounds, to hear the boundaries of the performance, in its site-specific nature. On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds used a full range of choral methods, from the strong, simple round of the beginning and end, to the extended techniques of hissing, mumbling, chattering and tongue clicks that mark many contemporary vocal pieces, to the rich unison chants reminiscent of church musics (they even threw in some "Amens" for good measure). At several points, the choir was overwhelmed by the sounds of traffic, Max train announcements, random voices and urban rumble. This seemed to annoy some audience members, who shushed at the world to be quiet. Personally, I was intruigued by hearing those choral voices as another element in the chaos of downtown movement. It seemed to highlight the openness, vulnerability and inhumanity of the American urban center. There was an essential tension between the continuing unresponsive city and the Great Migration's celebration of collective force with its chants of "We are the excellent birds! Where? Here! When? Now!".
The performers flapping books and sheets of white paper created a beautifully mundane ballet. In ordinary clothes, they were distinguishable from the bystanders and passers-by only in their grouping and determination to sing together. This created a feeling of accessibility and ordinariness, and forced the question: "Why don't we do this more often?"
I imagined the piece being performed in a European city center, where the buildings would comfortingly surround, creating a contained space for voices to bounce back, where a plaza of cafes and sidewalks would cater to the human ambulatory experience of real bodies for which this piece seemed to be designed.
I also imagined a different piece in which, possibly at the exclusion of such a unified visual spectacle, the choir would integrate with the audience and the city, spreading out to absorb rather than confront, meshing into the buildings, people and traffic...

- posted by Seth Nehil

In preparation for T:BA:07, PICA decided to do what most of us should have done this summer, which is hold a yard sale. By the time I got there, there were a few cool items still left for sale. I managed to make it home with several really large mirrors that had come from a previous installation, and this really nice small curved piece of wood that will be perfect for an altar that when not in use for art projects will double as my coffee table. I met Scott from Sincerely, John Head (he got the other cool curved pieces of wood which I am sure I will see in the studio at T:BA:07 for the Foghat LIVE tribute encounter piece thingy), and a neighbor Eric who coincidentally co-owns Someday Lounge and the Backspace Lounge/Cafe.

Now, I live in Southeast, so normally when we have a garage sale you get to meet the fat woman from down the street who was petitioning to keep the people from the local church from parking in her spot (you know, the one on the public street in front of her house??). So I was kind of chuckling at the crowd here. I met Bob, a wonderful man who had started a dance studio in L.A., and who was excited to reconnect with the dance scene here in Portland. He had just moved back, so we tossed the catalog back and forth trying to decide which performances were on the must see list. Then I saw Ned, one of the teachers for 6th grade at MLC (my daughter Margaret had Jeff), and tried to talk him into an immersion pass and encourage him and Jeff to get the kids out to see some of the public art installations.

A bit later, a woman was standing talking on her cell phone. She was interested in buying this great neon board with "Heaven" and a halo on it, pale blue with little puffy white clouds. She was talking to whoever on the phone, trying to decide whether or not to take it home. She didn't have a generator, but I did, one that I had managed to drag all the way from Houston Texas with me, so right as it looked like the whole deal was going to happen, a great gust of wind came and blew the whole thing over. Neon went splintering everywhere, and the general consensus was that Heaven had just fallen to earth, and after that the whole thing just went to hell.

A number of PICA people helped me load the huge mirrors into the trusty PICA van and bring them to my house. I am eternally grateful, so maybe there is a little piece of heaven still out there...

When Heaven fell to Earth

Lemonade Stand – with tEEth

Confused shoppers looking on while Jorg lectures on how to build things using materials from the Dollar Tree store.

- Justine Avera www/flickr/photos/justineavera or talk to me at flickerboxpdx@yahoo.com

-posted by Patrick Alan Coleman

A group of individuals join voices in harmony and there is magic. This is ubiquitous in the spiritual world; most churches begin service with song or prayer as song. Voices unite to plead down heaven, grace, love… Soon, it arrives.

The secular world has abandoned the choir for the singular voice. Secular choral music is kept alive on the respirator of scholastic choirs and local ensembles, gay men or otherwise. But yesterday, the downtown afternoon gave up a small hollow of silence to the chirping, twittering, and harmony of Rinde Eckert’s volunteer chorus.

The performance in Pioneer Square was as much visual as aural. The sight of a chorus becoming a flock of songbirds, trumped my urge to close my eyes and simply listen.

Eckert provided a wonderful balance between intriguing conceits (the leaves of books as flapping wings, hands raised to create the long necks of waterfowl) and lyricism in the score. I honestly did not expect such beautiful melodies. As the lilting sound of excellent birds rolled across the chorus, my inner choir-geek, who I ‘d beaten into submission through steady, late-teen doses of Nirvana and Soundgarden, rose up and threw his fist in the air.

I only wish some of the more subtle moments had not been swallowed (no pun intended) by the open space.

We’ve started this annual ceremony of art and performance with song. We’ve called down a flock of excellent birds and they have arrived- Halting their migration for a moment to regale us with their fine colors, sequins, movements, and voices.

Regina Silveira’s tracks as first encountered on the outside wall of PNCA are a maddeningly seductive advertisement of themselves. They link street to gallery and intertwine promotion with presentation setting up a tension that is as much about the narrowing margins between t-shirt graphics and art installation as it is about the amoebic relationship between time and space.

The flat black, meticulously carved vinyl tracks swoop, distort, shrink and magnify along the white walls. There is a double deception here. First, the tracks seem to travel impossible roads. The paradigm of one-point perspective is a road disappearing geometrically on the horizon. In Silveira’s work we face roads that seem more likely the paths of a pricked helium balloon then a Range Rover. The second deception is in the tracks themselves. Tracks almost only occur in messy places, mud, snow, sand, emerging from a puddle or mis-stepping in a freshly poured sidewalk. They are tactile, three dimensional reconfigurations of the landscape, impressions. Here, they are prints.

That the tracks terminate in toy cars painted metallic silver and mounted (in most cases to the wall) is the biggest disappointment. They are a distraction or worse an explanation. The very intrigue of a track is that it is the shadow of a shadow, extended in time and sculpted in space. Behind this door there is a curtain and behind that curtain a veil and behind that veil…I don’t want to know.

This is the viewer’s chance to participate, to paint the face and write the story. The more she layers tracks, crosses walls and defies corners the more I walk their impression, kneeling at times to check the contours. Saw blade: the car is fast, made to handle sharp turns on rain drenched television commercials. Ticket Tape: a blue-collar earth moving muscle. Wood Grain: a family sedan, the kids are young. Dad is old enough to have long since parked his Camero in the garage but not so old that he’s roaring off to the latest retro-restaurant.

Where the tracks are contained in white, I feel cheated, as if some manifest road trip were cut short. I want to keep driving, to blacken the walls beyond recognition, indeed to achieve blackout. Then we will understand the nature of the automobile- that ball of momentum that encloses with equal measure, individuality, and collusion, empowerment and resignation, freedom and self-destruction.

posted by Marty Schnapf

I woke up this morning a bit excited.
The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and today was the first day of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts’ “Time-Based Arts” Festival, an event that I not only look forward to each year, but is one of the main reasons that I was inspired to continue living in Portland when I was considering NYC or LA about four years ago.

If you have never attended PICA’s T:BA, then you are in for a treat.
Go to as many shows as you can muster. Volunteer or sell a kidney if you need to help subsidize it… Believe me, it is worth every penny!

Each year I endeavor to see the whole enchilada. I take off the entire ten days from work and hand over the reigns to the PICA staff. There are quite a number of performances each year, and one never knows where the inspiration will come from. Much like a photographer shooting a roll of film, from thirty six images, you can hope for one good one. I like to think of T:BA in the same light. Sure, many of the performances will be amazing; but it is that 1:36 that really blows me away, inspires me, changes my perspective or even life in a profound manner. This is why I dedicate ten full days to T:BA. This is why I hope that I will see you at not just one, but at many of the wondrous events that PICA has planned for us of the next stint of time.

Over the course of the next ten days, I will be providing you readers with a few thoughts about what I have seen, as a sort-of ‘day in the life’ of a fellow T:BA goer. I welcome comments, and hope that I might inspire something, even if just a distraction from a banal day job.

- T:BA Day One -

T:BA started with a candid discussion between Erin Boberg Doughton, Mark Russell and Kristan Kennedy about “T:BA in a Nutshell”. After passing around some yummy cashews, Mark began to talk in his beautiful, eloquent and excited manner. I am really starting to gain respect for this man, as his vision and desire to bring an appreciation of art to the public embraces all. During the talk, he explained how the former “New Works Northwest” section was integrated, so that artists whom had formerly been in this ‘sub’ category were not fully included in the program as full venue artists, which is wonderful [i.e., Zoe Scofield and tEEth]. There were also questions about urban and hip-hop genres, and how they can be seen in the work of Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Suicide Kings, and Reggie Watts. Oh, and Mark pointed out that if you need to see naked people “we got that for you too”… Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vandendriessche.

One thing to note is that Cristián Silva will not be able to attend T:BA, and all associated events have been cancelled. “Haircuts by Children” is pretty much booked-up, but if you have not already reserved your slot, then atleast come by to see these kids in action at Rudy’s on 13th + NW Davis.

People have been expressing hesitation about the seven hours required for the Elevator Repair Service performance, but Mark and Erin highly recommended the work, and reminded us that the payoff is in the second act, so it is important to stay for the entire show.

As the Noon:30 talks will be at PNCA all week, there is the opportunity to view the visual arts of Arnold Kemp and his curated “SuperNatural” show, plus the work of Regina Silveira. Regina’s work is wonderful. Perhaps it is my great love of tribal tattoos, but the work seems to investigate and common-place imprint of a tire tread mark, and how it can create both dynamic flow, and also be inspirational in and of itself. I do not think that Pirelli, is jumping to start mass-producing these rubber tracks, but they should for areas that do not need to deal with pesky weather issues like snow and rain!

Next was over to the Gerding Armoury to chat with Liz Haley. Quietly sitting in her glass booth on the second floor, she awaits your questions. The piece has great potential, especially on evenings when there will be more of a crowd during performances, and some potential momentum. Just her and I in a room, was sweet, but a bit awkward as I did not have a list of elaborate or juicy questions to bombard her with. I like the premise, as it reminds me of a piece where Marina Abramović in “Rhythm 0”, 1974, placed herself before the audience with the potential of both sweet and sinister energy. Marina luckily was not shot by the gun with the single bullet, but Liz might just be asked just that right question that could pull her trigger. This is Portland, and we kinda frown upon killing folks, so you might want to leave your torture devises at home, but instead consider baking her a cupcake as she can get hungry in that room all by herself all day.

The Museum of Contemporary Crafts just moved their location to the Pearl District along Broadway. It is great to have them downtown, as their collections and exhibitions over the years have always been wonderful, but lost in their former John’s Landing nook. I am looking forward to having a smaller version of New York City’s Museum of Art and Design [ http://www.madmuseum.org ] so readily accessible. Their current exhibit has quite a number of sinuous wooden chairs forms that I enjoyed, plus some gossamer textiles. Larry Kron was not quite ready for the public when I was there, so I will have to check back in some later time.

Back home to walk the puppy and have some dinner.
Even got to chat with a hopeful House District 45 State Representative candidate about the importance of Measure 49… but, that is a completely different bLog…

Then Pioneer Courthouse Square for the kick-off with Rinde Eckert’s public collaboration “Rain Or Shine”. The square was packed with people from all areas of Portland, which shows the level of enthusiasm for the arts here in town. No introductions, or orations, just the drifting in of sound and whistles. Rinde’s piece was quite beautiful. Portraying the migration of birds, there were even a few that flew on by to check-out what was going on. It was fun, whimsical, and sweet. At the end, the crowd showed their appreciation by not only clapping, but by also outstretching their arms into the air with their hands in the shape of a bird’s beak, opening and closing as a bird making a call.

Quietly, the ‘birds’ disbanded as did the crowd, and we wandered off for the multitude of First Thursday activities. But, before we could go out to see the March Fourth Marching Band jamming at Mark Woolley’s new downtown gallery space, the Silent Dance Party outside of Wieden + Kennedy on 13th @ Glisan [which was an amazingly cool idea! Good job W+K], or hang with my former arts daibatsu at Everett Station Lofts’ Rooftop exhibition and bbq; some friends and I headed over to 429 SW 10th Avenue to do a recording of a song with Sincerely, John Head from the FogHat Box set. We, of course, did a rendition of “Free Ride”, which will probably not make any of the charts, but was certainly fun. As we were all feeling a bit shy, or rather just lacking in an intimate knowledge of the lyrics; we opted to cram into the steamy soundbooth [aka bathroom] to listen to the words through a shared headphone as we gave our best attempts to sing the song a number of times. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of FogHat, we signed a large paper with all of our love. It was a lot of fun, and I would highly recommend it. Depending upon your musical prowess, and knowledge of the lyrics, you might want to hit the bar next door first for lubrication if that would help your performance. Call for reservations: 888.774.7456

Ciao,
Fredrick H. Zal
Architect | Sculptor | Advocate
http://www.fhzal.com

p.s. If you are looking for a place to grab a snack before the Works at the Wonder Ballroom, I would highly recommend the new restaurant “Nutshell”, 3808 N. Williams. Bring cash, and lots of it, as the food is off the hook! Primarily Vegan, with some Vegetarian and Raw, the choices will astound your mind and palette.