Installation Situation
Two effective installations shine at Marylhurst and Portland State University.
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 11th, 2008
Divine Phantasmagoria | Tilt’s group show is simply...Divine.1 comment
May 21st, 2008
The Aftermath of Experience | Multimedia virtuoso TJ Norris conjures 1980s Manhattan, even as he embalms it.0 comments
May 7th, 2008
(Im)material World | Two artists break on through— the fourth wall.0 comments
April 23rd, 2008
Late-April Roundup | See these shows before they come down!0 comments
April 9th, 2008
Live Review: Cap Auction Saturday, April 5 | Great people watching; not so great art.2 comments
March 19th, 2008
Defining Sex | Two shows confront masculine and queer identity.0 comments
February 27th, 2008
The End of the Affair | The Affair at the Jupiter says goodbye...for now.0 comments
![]() STORM WARNING: Kate Simmons’ work at Autzen Gallery. |
[April 16th, 2008]
Jenene Nagy’s and Stephanie Robison’s Sitelines at the Marylhurst University “Art Gym” is an elegant show made up of inelegant pieces. Nagy, whose s/plit is currently part of the APEX series at the Portland Art Museum, is an artist obsessed with the relationship between landscape, abstraction and the relationship between the 2D plane and 3D sculpture. She continues this preoccupation in this show, with crinkled sheets of fluorescent-colored paper on the walls, on the floors and in a hidden, peeping-Tom closet called Pink Room. This is a subtler show than APEX; it does not invade your personal space; but it is effective nonetheless, with a rigor that recalls Jacqueline Ehlis, except with cheaper materials. Robison’s pieces are more ambitious in their cheeky architectural etude, managing to deconstruct without becoming stolid. Her Salvage rises in fabric mushroom forms from a bed of crisscrossing gray planks, while Stand-in towers like an oil derrick, a massive plume of squishy, inflatable clouds billowing up like a cross between There Will Be Blood and a Jabba the Hutt plush toy.
Meanwhile at Portland State University, Kate Simmons’ Household Predictions and Fanciful Remedies is Autzen Gallery’s most engaging show in recent memory. With meticulous drawings of projected coffee filters, a bed frame covered in drippy, caramel-like sugar cream and a tapestry of Bounce dryer sheets woven together with gold thread, this well-conceived, spatially invigorating installation is a fearsomely surrealistic nightmare of domesticity gone amok.









