Good Slop/Bad Slop
Anna Fidler finesses the line while others falter.
October 1st, 2008
Bruce Conkle at Rocksbox0 comments
October 1st, 2008
Gate Closing | Why is Jennifer Gately leaving the Portland Art Museum?2 comments
September 17th, 2008
Volume at Worksound | Portland artists explore space in curator-about-town Jeff Jahn’s latest show. 0 comments
September 3rd, 2008
Ed Ruscha at the Portland Art Museum | An edgy elegy to youth from a pop art original.0 comments
August 13th, 2008
History Versus Nostalgia | Two shows offer differing takes on the swingin’ ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.0 comments
July 30th, 2008
Something To Believe In | With Immaterialized, Disjecta scores a direct hit.0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
From Seattle, with Gusto | Kinga Czerska and John Dempcy show Portlanders how it’s done.0 comments
July 16th, 2008
A Summer Serenade | At New American Art Union, Jacqueline Ehlis shines in one of the year’s best shows.0 comments
June 25th, 2008
Heart Of Glass | Henry Hillman Jr. explores Relationships—in art and life.0 comments
June 18th, 2008
Lowbrow Writ Large | The Contemporary Northwest Art Awards capture the zeitgeist—too well.0 comments
![]() |
[June 20th, 2007] There is a good way to be sloppy and a sloppy way to be sloppy. Anna Fidler 's Mistique: New Works on Paper at Pulliam Deffenbaugh is improvisatory but not slapdash, childlike but not amateur. In her fantastical landscapes, she cuts and layers paper into multicolored shapes that manage to look crude and intricate at the same time. Casting Spells is a riot of rainbows, crystalline surfaces, craggy mountains and caves of ice. Sam Coleridge or Dr. Seuss would be equally at home in such kindergarten-on-laudanum terrain. Fidler has been exploring this general style for many years, but she's blasted it into hyperspace in this outing, surely her most accomplished, adventurous and integrative to date. 929 NW Flanders St., 228-6665. Closes June 30.
Elizabeth Huey 's Chronophobia at Quality Pictures aims for the same looseness Fidler does but misses the mark when she ventures out of her depth. In her cluttered jumbles of sloppily painted figures and buildings, the Williamsburg, N.Y.-based artist attempts a commentary on fin de siècle psychiatric wards, teeming with Proustian ghosts who haunt the medical history books. Thematically, this material could have legs, but Huey hobbles it; the technique is poor, the composition a mess, the trestle between conception and execution dynamited like the bridge over the River Kwai. 916 NW Hoyt St., 227-5060. Closes June 30.
Also erring on the unfortunate side of the impetuous/sloppy divide is Ogle's David Hacker. While Hacker's darkly beautiful charcoal drawings are arguably more charismatic than Brad Cloepfil's utilitarian drawings at PDX (see WW's Visual Arts section, June 13, 2007) his painted scrap-metal sculptures should have stayed on the drawing board and in the junkyard. I have seen aluminum recycle bins with more artful composition. Starting with a car wreck for materials, Hacker winds up with a train wreck of a show. (310 NW Broadway, 227-4333. Closes June 30.) At Mark Woolley, Brian Mock also uses discarded metal and found objects to create sculptures. His craftsmanship is superior to Hacker's, but his cloyingly whimsical mermaids, dogs and female figures send our blood sugar through the roof—Woolley should have provided complimentary vials of insulin. 128 NE Russell St., 224-5475. Closes June 30.
RECENT COMMENTS ON “Good Slop/Bad Slop”
watch out for richard speers opinion when searching for a good art show to attend. Richard speer would try and sell you a rats asshole for a wedding ring and call it a riot of rainbows.
It is pity Mr. Speers that you perhaps have not seen Mr. Hacker's work from "The First Year" (MIGRATION/ W.S. Merwin). Heart stopping paintings, drawings, and poetry. Even though I am three ...
p.s. to beth and mr. tree face- perhaps you should get out a bit from "the neighborhood" and see a good art show, but then your verbage passing as insult is equally mundane.
verbiage...spelling lost in speechless awe of absubrd analogies









