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REVIEW Drawing the Margins Debra Beers portrays Portland's homeless youth as individuals rather than stereotypes. BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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Recent Work by Debra Beers Mark Woolley Gallery 120 NW 9th Ave., suite 210, 224-5475 Ends Nov. 28 Beers shares a portion of the sale of a drawing with the person or people depicted in it. Beers is the head of the drawing program at Lewis & Clark College, where more of her work can be seen in the current faculty exhibition (Nov. 12-Dec. 19, Gallery of Contemporary Art, 0165 SW Palatine Hill Road, 768-7687). Debra Beers has an intimate understanding of and compassion for her subjects, the homeless youth who spend time on the streets below her studio window at Southwest 12th Avenue and Salmon Street. For her current show at the Mark Woolley Gallery, the artist has drawn elegant, life-sized portrayals in oil stick on fragments of rough-edged found metal. In Crystal, a single stocking-capped figure lifts her shirt as she looks down at her belly, exposed and swollen with pregnancy. In Meisha, Bo and Crystal, the same expectant mother is rendered in profile from the neck up, her eyes closed as she listens to the whispers of a friend with a cat perched on his shoulder. Beers draws upon the long history of class-conscious figurative art but also manages to distinguish herself from her predecessors. In the late 1840s Gustave Courbet was one of the first painters of the modern era to use "common" people as subjects, possibly a response to the politics of the time (The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848). Later, in the 1920s and '30s, the monumental public works of Mexican muralists like David Siqueiros commented on social class as a determinant of political clout. But Courbet and Siqueiros tended to paint anonymous figures as stereotypes or icons. Beers, on the other hand, conveys individual personalities akin to--but slightly more romantic than--Dorothea Lange's 1930s photographs of migrant workers. Some of Beers' subjects claim to have made the choice to live on the street, whereas Lange's were victims of economic circumstance. Because of her attention to the traits that make her subjects unique human beings, Beers fits more neatly into the history of portrait painters, but her position there isn't completely comfortable, either. Historical portraits tended to be commissioned by wealthy patrons and prone to clients' tastes and suggestions; Beers makes her own artistic decisions. A few historical portraits were of artists' friends, such as Édouard Manet's 1868 painting of Émile Zola. Granted, Beers has befriended many of the adolescents she depicts--she volunteers at Salvation Army's Greenhouse, acting as a dependable and consistent adult in their lives--but her intentions differ from those of Manet because her subjects are of an educational background and life experience unlike her own. The results are therefore more of an objective social comment. Beers is a masterful drawer and supports her ideas with careful attention to formal issues. She draws from photographs and often contextualizes her subjects with friends and pets. The rusted metal that serves as her canvas is coarse, rough and pieced together, like the lives of her subjects. Beers salvages much of the metal from dumpsters at downtown development projects, her material-gathering process itself a comment on gentrification's displacement of the underprivileged. She renders faces in more detail and color than other parts of the figures--often at the point where several layers of metal intersect--making them the focus of the compositions. The physical structures of some of the works embody characteristics of the subjects. Tree, for example, is drawn on tall, narrow pieces of metal, conveying the significant height of the teen with that name. Bill is painted in part on a piece of metal that was used as a target for gun practice. Beers has always been interested in the fringes of society; she became involved in the lives of the homeless in particular when she was a resident of Old Town. For Figures and Securities, a 1992 exhibition sponsored by the Metropolitan Art Commission at Portland State University's Littman Gallery, Beers spotlighted three-dimensional sculptures of the working poor, the figures associated with trades based on the tools they held. But it was the subjects' humanity--their simultaneous vulnerability and dignity, rather than their professional identity--that was remarkable. Similarly, her show at Mark Woolley is a culmination of years of study, both of the craft of drawing and of the people who reside at the margins of our community.
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