MASS OCCURRENCE

The painting shows a faceless priest pulling a boy's head towards his crotch. "My child," reads the text beside the image, "kneel before the altar and serve your God." The work, titled God Has Left the Building, is local painter Sydney Blue's response to the Catholic Church's recent sex-abuse scandal, and it created something of a stir when she tried to include it in her recent show at the downtown Borders Cafe.

Borders managers had selected the 31-year-old Blue as their July artist of the month after the painter presented her portfolio back in April. But as Blue tells it, those same managers approached her as she was hanging the show, Gutter Vision, in late June and demanded she remove her depiction of the pedophilic priest. "People started gathering around as we were debating it," Blue says. "Almost everybody was arguing that the painting should stay, that it would be nice to have some art at Borders that wasn't boring."

Cafe manager Michelle Hastings did not relent, however, and yanked the piece. "Syd is blowing this out of proportion," Hastings said in a telephone interview, "and she's forgetting two things. One, we're a corporation. Two, people eat here. A painting of a child pressed into somebody's groin isn't appropriate for a place where people are having coffee and eating."

Sitting on the floor of her home-studio in Northeast Portland, Blue told me why she painted the work in the first place. "I was sexually abused as a child myself, so I empathize with those boys. They don't have a voice. I wanted to give them one, and to show how infuriated I was by the Church's whole coverup."

Blue says she considered, but decided against, withdrawing from the show in protest. The once-homeless painter says she could not afford to squander a precious opportunity to exhibit her work. "And for whatever subjective reason," she adds, "they did include some of my other controversial pieces." In one such piece, Junkie Jesus, Blue pairs Mr. J.C. with Mr. Brownstone, taping to the canvas an actual syringe containing heroin residue from Blue's days as a dope addict (she's been clean for three years). Another piece features a gauze crucifix surrounded by torn-up dollar bills.

It would be easy to paint Blue, with her peroxide mohawk and stretched earlobes, as a savvy street artist trying to milk a minor row for more exposure. After all, work deemed offensive to the Church has always been good press for artists (Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin Mary, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, etc.).

Inevitably, one must also ask whether Blue's text-intensive art, inspired more by graffiti and graphic novels than the fine-art tradition, lives up to the art of controversy, which she has more clearly mastered. Yet the history of avant-garde shows that sometimes art is about more than technique. Sometimes it's about transgressing the, shall we say, "borders" of what is appropriate in a given setting. Sydney Blue may have lessons yet to learn as a painter, but she has, just as surely, lessons left to teach as a provocateur.

Syd Blue's next show opens
Last Thursday, Aug. 29 at Addis
2601 NE MLK Blvd.
331-5955.

The Addis show includes the pulled "God Has Left the Building."

WWeek 2015