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BY KATE BONANSINGA
FRANCIS ALŸS: LE TEMPS DU SOMMEIL AND DOG ROSE
Belgian-born Alÿs currently lives in Mexico and is best
known for his collaborative works with sign painters and for his "performance
walks." Curated by contemporary art historian Kitty Scott, Le Temps
du Sommeil is an ongoing work initiated in 1996; it consists of
found photographs, sculptures, drawings, video and 84 small-scale paintings,
some of which depict aspects of Alÿs' performances. Also on view
will be part of Dog Rose, a mixed-media series portraying life
in the city from a dog's perspective. Alÿs was a PICA artist-in-residence
in August and created a performance/installation for PICA's Web site;
PICA will publish a catalog with the exhibition's co-sponsor, the Contemporary
Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC. Recently chosen to represent Mexico in
the forthcoming Saõ Palo Biennial, Alÿs had a solo exhibition
at the the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 1997.
PORTLAND INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART (PICA) AT THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
COLLEGE OF ART GALLERY, 1241 NW JOHNSON, 242-1419. ENDS OCT. 4.
JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE
This important French photographer tripped his first shutter in
1900 at the age of 6; by 1902 he was working in the darkroom on his
own. Lartique captured the beauty and humor of French aristocratic life,
often using subjects from the French Riviera, where he spent much of
his youth. In 1963 John Szarkowski, the director of the Department of
Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, offered Lartigue a solo exhibition
and said of his photographs, "They seemed--like a fine athlete--to make
their point with economy, elegance, and an easy precision." On view
in this exhibition will be images from 1904 to the 1950s.
SK JOSEFSBERG STUDIO, 403 NW 11TH AVE., 241-9112. SEPT. 3- OCT. 10.
JUN KANEKO
Japanese-born Jun Kaneko is one of the better-known contemporary
ceramic sculptors in the United States. His signature works are huge
forms, some up to 11 feet high, built with layers of clay coils in the
manner of traditional pottery vessels created prior to the advent of
the potter's wheel. Brightly colored and often covered in spots or stripes,
they address issues of scale and interaction between forms, and of the
possible broader implications of these aesthetic concerns. On view will
be wall slabs and a number of small-scale sculptures, but the show-stopper
will be a series of large-scale spheroids (in Japanese, dango,
or dumplings) that Kaneko created when he was in residence at the European
Ceramics Work Centre in the Netherlands in 1995-96. In Kaneko's most
recent exhibition at the prestigious Klein Gallery in Chicago, the 8-to-10-foot-high
sculptures represented human heads.
LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART, 0615 SW PALATINE
HILL ROAD, 768-7398. SEPT. 16-OCT. 31.
JAPANESE/AMERICAN: THE IN BETWEEN
This two-person exhibition features the installations and prints
of Keiko Hara and the sculpture of Michihiro Kosuge, both of whom were
born and raised in Japan and came to the U.S. for college. Ms. Hara
and Mr. Kosuge have built their artistic careers in the Northwest and
are not only influential artists but also long-term educators: Hara
teaches at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and Kosuge is on the
faculty at Portland State University. Together their work creates a
context, from male and female perspectives, for contemplating the lives
and art of first-generation Japanese-American artists in the area. It
will also offer an interesting juxtaposition to the concurrent exhibition
at Lewis & Clark College of recent sculpture by Jun Kaneko, who
is also Japanese-born.
MARYLHURST COLLEGE, THE ART GYM, HIGHWAY 43 ONE MILE SOUTH OF LAKE
OSWEGO, 636-8141. SEPT. 20-OCT. 29.
SOL LEWITT
LeWitt first came to public attention in New York City in 1963 for
his grid-based line drawings. They are perhaps the most conceptual drawings
in history because they have no permanent manifestations: Each gallery
installer draws them according to LeWitt's instructions, so the actual
physicality of the ideas changes according to the space. The Portland
Art Museum's From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works from the Herbert
and Dorothy Vogel Collection last autumn included one of his reconstructed
drawings; the Cooley Gallery will exhibit several. In the catalog of
LeWitt's solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978, Lucy Lippard
wrote, "Integral to the systems that generate LeWitt's art is the 'idea,'
which, he has implied, can be considered synonymous with intuition...
He sits at the center of a web of activity thinking up tasks for others
to perform and in the process he produces objects and ideas for others
to ponder."
REED COLLEGE, COOLEY ART GALLERY, 3203 SE WOODSTOCK BLVD., 777-7591.
NOV. 3-DEC. 31
SEEING MONEY: AN ART EVENT OF UNCOMMON CURRENCY
Organizer Helen Gundlach, who has been at work on this exhibition
for several months, has ambitious plans to include 70 artists, some
with national and international exhibition records. Their work, in Gundlach's
words, "incorporates money or images of money, or addresses issues of
money and economics." If the premise is treated with intelligence, this
event, complete with children's activities, live performances and a
panel discussion, will be exciting and interdisciplinary. Gundlach's
headliner artist is JSG Boggs, who was recently in Portland for the
Annual Numismatic Convention, which indicates that the exhibition may
be more about money than it is about art or artistic patronage.
PORTLAND OPERA'S PEARL DISTRICT REHEARSAL SPACE, 225 NW 14TH AVE. DEC.
3-30.
PAUL MAURICE
"A little agitation is a good thing," says Paul Maurice. The University
of Tennessee graduate creates installations of assembled objects, texts
(often from media reports and prisoners' journals) and photographs commenting
on racism, brutality and the abuses of totalitarian regimes. His most
recent pieces include Civil Progress: Images of Black America
at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and We Don't Hang Them Anymore
at the Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, B.C. Maurice's last exhibition in
Portland was in 1992; this is a long-awaited return.
INTERSTATE FIREHOUSE CULTURAL CENTER, 5340 N. INTERSTATE AVE., 823-2000.
JAN. 7-30.
HOUSE OF CARDS
The artistic team of Joseph Biel and Richard Kraft consistently
creates intriguing installations abundant with objects and ideas. House
of Cards will combine still photography, sculptural constructions,
found objects, film and video projections and sound in the creation
of a world meant to unlock viewers' memories and sensations.
MARYLHURST COLLEGE, THE ART GYM, HIGHWAY 43 ONE MILE SOUTH OF LAKE
OSWEGO, 636-8141. FEB. 21-MARCH 28.
ROBERT COLESCOTT: RECENT PAINTINGS
This exhibition of 19 of Colescott's large canvases appeared at
the United States Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. Colescott,
who uses a bright palette and figurative imagery, is the first African-American
artist to represent the United States in a single-artist exhibition
at the Venice Biennale and the first painter to do so since Jasper Johns
in 1988. Miriam Roberts, the U.S. Commissioner/Curator of the exhibition,
wrote of his work: "Simultaneously seductive, hilarious and disturbing,
the paintings of Robert Colescott depict a world of contradictions and
dichotomies--between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women,
black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present."
The exhibition, which met with mixed reviews after its Venice showing,
consists of paintings from the past 10 years. They're primarily from
the artist's collection, but a few are borrowed from museums, and one,
A Taste of Gumbo, is from the collection of Arlene and Harold
Schnitzer of Portland.
PORTLAND ART MUSEUM, 1219 SW PARK AVE., 226-2811. JAN. 15-MAR. 21.
POINT OF VIEW: LANDSCAPES FROM THE ADDISON COLLECTION
Nineteenth- and 20th-century landscape paintings by such well-known
masters as Ralph Blakelock, Winslow Homer and Worthington Whittredge
will be on loan from the collection of the Addison Gallery of American
Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. As regional land issues have
received increasing political attention, idealized representations of
the American West have recently attracted museum-goers' attentions in
response. Seattle Art Museum (SAM) has just hosted the the National
Gallery of Art's popular retrospective of paintings by Thomas Moran
(1837-1926), long recognized as one of America's foremost landscape
artists; SAM's accompanying show, The Paving of Paradise: A Century
of Photographs of the Western Landscape, on display through Jan.
24, includes photographs by William Henry Jackson and Imogen Cunningham.
The Addison Collection's American landscapes will provide an interesting
counterpoint to these visions of the American West, as well as to French
landscapes (Claude Monet's renderings of Giverny) from the same period
on view at the Portland Art Museum (Sept. 18-Jan. 3).
REED COLLEGE, COOLEY ART GALLERY, 3203 SE WOODSTOCK BLVD., 777-7591.
LATE MARCH-JUNE.
originally published
September 9, 1998
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