While researching the content of my most recent body of work, I found that the dismantling of the photograph’s stratified relationship to contingent readings of contemporary art shares a compelling commonality with concepts relating to the dispossession and colonization of native communities in...Read more
Click on image to read interview.
Read moreWhere art, design and dialogue meet: a conversation with Tad Savinar
Read moreIn our PDX booth visitors will discover new, fresh artists and revisit artists they already know. We will present the work by three artists Amjad Faur, Johannes Girardoni and D.E.May. Each is distinct from the other yet they share a certain quiet intensity addressing space and form that has an...Read more
RADICAL REPETITION: ALBERS TO WARHOL
From the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation
Curated by Barbara Matilsky
April 19 - August 17, 2014
Read moreBush Barn Art Center in Salem, Oregon presents, "Contemporary Abstraction" a group show exploring different approaches to contemporary, abstract art through the work of three Northwestern artists...
Read moreSun . Sept 6 . 6:30-10 pm "Younger". Ethan Rose, Laura Gibson, and Ryan Jeffery. Audiences are invited to experience the live mixing from outside the gallery, where sound will spill out and projections will fill the windows.Younger
Ethan Rose, Laura Gibson, and Ryan Jeffery
Go See It !
location:
* PDX Contemporary Art
* 925 NW Flanders
* Portland OR 97209
* 503.222.0063
* Free Admission
* All Ages (More TBA Info. PICA phone # 503.242.1419, http://www.pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?eventid=501)
In our PDX booth visitors will discover new, fresh artists and revisit artists they already know. We will present the work by three artists Amjad Faur, Johannes Girardoni and D.E.May. Each is distinct from the other yet they share a certain quiet intensity addressing space and form that has an emotional content. A peek in our closet will reveal works by additional PDX artists such as Cynthia Lahti, Nancy Lorenz, Storm Tharp, Masao Yamamoto, Kristen Miller and Adam Sorensen.
For more info look under our exhibitions: http://pdxcontemporaryart.com/pulse-miami-2011
D.E. May in "Northwest Artists Draw"
May 7–July 3, 2010
Together with work by artists Michael Brophy, Cat Clifford, Eben Goff and Helen Loggie, D.E. May presents works that focus on drawing and the creation of handmade objects.
Read moreJoin exhibiting artists Bruce Burris, Harrell Fletcher, Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Marie Watt on October 7, at 5:30 p.m. for “Hallie Ford Fellows: Art and Activism,” a virtual live presentation and Q&A on the intersections of activism, social practice and art making in their lives and communities.
To join the Virtual Presentation and Q&A: https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/94097839085
For more information visit: https://around.uoregon.edu/content/fall-brings-some-options-your-arts-an...
Read moreTad Savinar's 'Selected Works about Cities' is currently on exhibit at the Governor's Office, presented by the Oregon Arts Commission. The artwork will be on view until September 27, 2012.
More information here: http://www.oregonartscommission.org/content/tad-savinar’s-selected-works-about-cities-exhibited-governor’s-office
Savinar will also be exhibition with Tony Labat at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in 2013 from January 11 - March 17. From their website:
"This exhibition combines the interdisciplinary works of Tony Labat and Tad Savinar, who each use humor and straightforward presentation strategies to explore human foibles, social structures, and political history. Labatt is an influential teacher of new genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and a fixture in the art and music scene in California; Savinar is a visual artist, playwright, designer, and urban planner based in Portland, Oregon. This pairing offers a meditation on conceptual art as practiced by two artists who have worked for decades in specific West Coast locales."
More information can be found here: http://www.thecontemporary.org/exhibitions/tony-labat-and-tad-savinar/
Read moreRADICAL REPETITION: ALBERS TO WARHOL
From the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation
Curated by Barbara Matilsky
April 19 - August 17, 2014
Radical Repetition examines recurring imagery in art since the 1960s, which has led to unexpected stylistic transformations and reinvigorated content. Although the exhibition concentrates on prints, it also includes some extraordinary works in painting (James Lavadour) and sculpture (Marie Watt) that expand this theme.
Read moreGus Van Sant is an honoree for the 2021 Cinema Unbound Awards!
“The Cinema Unbound Awards is an annual celebration presented by the Northwest Film Center, honoring boundary-breaking multimedia storytellers working at the intersection of art and cinema. We honor artists and nonconformists who are not content to be contained but instead expand the notion of what’s possible. The Cinema Unbound honorees defy expectations and refuse to embrace labels using their creative vision to inspire and push us to look at what is beyond the norm.
The Cinema Unbound Awards represents the Portland Art Museum & Northwest Film Center’s embrace of artistic exploration and commitment to equity and inclusion. Though born out of the tradition of film, the Cinema Unbound Awards expands the reach of cinema as an art form to challenge for whom, by whom, and how stories can be told.
The 2021 Cinema Unbound Awards honorees are Steve McQueen, Garrett Bradley, Gus Van Sant, Mollye Asher, and Alex Bulkley: boundary-breaking multimedia storytellers working at the intersection of art and cinema. The awards will be presented on March 4, 2021, kicking off the 44th Annual Portland International Film Festival running from March 5 to March 14, 2021.”
-Cinema Unbound
This year’s Cinema Unbound Awards will invite viewers to join through both a Drive-In experience as well as a virtual experience. More information about the honorees and on how to attend can be found here: https://cinemaunbound.org/event-directory/cinema-unbound-awards
Congratulations, Gus!
Read moreI am interested in creating a dialogue between my work and the viewer. Not a one-way diatribe, but a genuine back and forth conversation. In order to achieve this I use the tool of visual beauty to bring the viewer closer, language to engage them, content that is relevant to their lives, and...Read more
My formal concerns are merging with those of content. It is the revelatory process of the looking while painting that keeps me engaged; a dialogue between my love of color and physicality of paint. I am interested in how forms relate to the space around them. As I construct a space, forms emerge...Read more
This piece, beast of burden, is an opportunity for me to render issues I usually deal with in my work like perception, empathy, frontality, and instability while being both intimately entangled with the conceptual content and willfully removed from the final product.
The work...Read more
These paintings came about by way of looking at and then internalizing the out-of doors in and around the area I live. The process of making the egg tempera / egg tempera and oil paintings begins with small on-site pencil sketches that I bring back to my studio and paint from. I strive to...Read more
A reductive enquiry into the merger of architecture and light via painting, photography and sculpture are the hallmarks of Johannes Girardoni’s work. Titled “Light Matters,” the exhibition occupies two separate rooms in what could be two separate shows. But the longer we look, the more the lines of distinction between the various approaches are blurred and therefore united. The main gallery houses sculptures which contrast found wood with a tactile paint composed of beeswax and pigments. Some are spilt in diptych fashion; the raw states of wood are paired with thick, cakelike painted sections. The result is a satisfying hyper-state of nature, as geometrical shapes rise from the patina with a dripping, oozing effect. Many of the pieces are voids and enclosures - empty and fully present, sexy and spare, hollow yet full. While monochrome surfaces and content are implied, even when processed as such, the experience of any one color is multidimensional. Light intervenes. His odd mustard in “Diptych – Yellow Green” reminds us how curious and transient color from the natural world is, inviting but also strangely plastic and saturated. The rough found wood is celebrated as such, looking like it just left the farm. The placement of the pieces utilizes just about every surface in the space – on the walls, lying flat on the floor and somewhere in between. They are individuals in conversation with each other, and remind us that the artist is known internationally for his installations. Indeed, the artists will present an interactive light and sound installation at the 54th Venice Biennale later this year. Digital photographs of billboards in both urban and rural settings are the springboard for Girardoni’s “Exposed Icons” series, housed in the second gallery. These pieces are montaged and layered, filtered with digital color and then painted with house paint. Creating a complicated maze and history of experience, Girardoni explores with ease the seams between digital and analogue realms. These icons are a compressed sculpture, once again presenting and repeating the light and the void. Every applied digital or painted color field takes its cues from the natural colors already captured in “reality,” engineering shifts in our perception of space. The layers can be subtle with hidden histories of process, but in pieces like “Exposed Icon 5’” the paint is more the point. It is far from solid, leaving marks and traces of the artist’s activity, aiding the consolidation of many mediums into one. Perhaps the most convincing exploration of a readymade void is “Exposed Icon 21,” in which the billboard is a perfect white. It is then reflected back onto the Mojave Desert in the same blue as the sky above, thus producing a delicious double-monochrome.
Read moreI work sculpturally to capture a moment in time using active processes that become meditations: dyeing, weaving, wrapping, compressing, structuring, ordering, and releasing. The repetition of these acts fosters a connection between the subconscious mind and the body, and these full body rhythmic...Read more
I am interested in creating a dialogue between my work and the viewer. Not a one-way diatribe, but a genuine back and forth conversation. In order to achieve this I use the tool of visual beauty to bring the viewer closer, language to engage them, content that is relevant to their lives, and...Read more
Richard Speer reviews "Maybe it Takes a Loud Noise" CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Read moreAnna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen's print in the MOUNTAIN exhibition misquotes Pessoa.
There are many quotable quotes in his Book of Disquiet. Quite entertaining. CLICK ON IMAGE
Storm Tharp
PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon
Review by Richard Speer
Continuing through September 29, 2012
The fetishization of fabric and flesh in Storm Tharp’s exhibition, "Holding a Peach," recalls similar fascinations in fashion designer-cum-film director Tom Ford’s cinematic debut, "A Single Man." . . .
Read moreMedieval depictions of historical events in Shi’a art and illuminations often depict the prophet Muhammad with a golden flame enveloping his head or show his face entirely shrouded by a veil; an attempt at reverence in both his depiction and non-depiction. This primary tension regarding how...Read more
If an image can be didactic without a title, and Michael David's often are, removing the imagery, as David does in his current encaustic paintings seen at Bentley Gallery (Scottsdale, Arizona), focuses your attention first on optics. But check the title of the show's central work, "The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," and the cinematic quality of the blood red sun of a tondo, and see if that doesn't take you in some surprising directions. If the landscape's presence is indirect in his body of work, it couldn't be more explicit to both the form and content in Vanessa Renwick's current project at PDX Contemporary (Portland), "as easy as falling off a log." Given the Pacific Northwest locale, shades of Ken Kesey's Stamper family, the show conveys how immersion in the environment pushes us to anthropomorphize it. A send-up image like "flat as a board (knot)," translating a bit of tree bark and pine needles into a frontal nude, helps puncture, without contradiction, the environmental polemic.
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