Skip to main contentWe Americans are terminally adolescent and proud of it. From our former president, a would-be rock star complete with a full-figured, full-service groupie, to our current commander in chief, whose August-long vacation was a Broderickean cross between Ferris Bueller's Day Off and War Games--from our Botoxing Boomers, who dress like Gen-Xers, to our now-thirtysomething Gen-Xers, who dress like Gen-Yers--we are all intent on living a generation or two younger than our means.
But now that the wider world has literally crashed our party and blown us out of our ivory towers, will we, could we, be forced at last to grow up? No. Not if we buy the premise behind Alysia Duckler's Toyland and the Littman Gallery's Play. A year ago, when five local artists began planning the show that was to become Play, one of them jotted off an email to the others: "Let's meet at Pied Cow and throw some ideas around--Does next Tuesday at 6 work for everybody?" Next Tuesday, as it happened, was Sept. 11. The artists showed up anyway. "We decided," says Play's curator, Jeff Jahn, "that a terrorist strike didn't change the fact that play is a critical part of being human. After all, this show was inspired by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who believed we need art and play even at the grimmest times."
Toyland curator Sean Elwood echoes the sentiment, calling his show "a story not for children, but of children. This land of toys is not all sweetness and light. As often as not, there is a sense of darkness that creeps in the corners."
This is where the similarities between the shows end. Not only are Toyland and Play quadrants apart physically and commercially (the former in the bustling Pearl, the latter in the academic haven of Portland State University), their approaches to the same thesis diverge markedly.
Walk into Toyland and a trio of Transformer-type action toys greets you, Fred Fleisher's sole artistic addition, apparently, being the doll faces he's affixed to their heads. On the adjacent wall hang William Wegman's precious Weimaraners, ready for their next calendar or greeting-card makeover. Kojo Griffin has contributed an illustration of a donkeylike anthropomorph weeping hysterically over a child's bed. This, I take it, is the "sense of darkness" we were told to expect. Meredith Allen provides a photograph of a carnival-ride bunny, Marguerite Day an ink-on-paper series of pink ballerinas and babies, packing enough concentrated sacharine to fill a nebuchadnezzar of Diet Slice.
Tellingly, the best work here, Kim McCarty's haunting watercolors of a shirtless boy, are the most adult in feel. McCarty imbues the boy's expression not with the gee-whiz wonder of a child but the ennui of an old soul. McCarty's work notwithstanding, I walked out of Toyland with the queasy feeling of having eaten seven banana splits while sitting in a high chair. A desperate need gripped me to do something adult: smoke, drink, fuck, talk politics, read Proust, something far removed from the formaldehydic idylls of childhood this creepy and ultimately patronizing show attempts to conjure.
Play, by contrast, struck me as an exhibit of true conceptual art, wherein the concepts are sometimes better than the art. In his wide-ranging if sometimes abstruse catalog essay, curator Jeff Jahn outlines the symbols behind his brainchild: game theory, humor as play, art as battlefield. Jahn and his playmates make adventurous use of the gallery space, intermingling their work and making visitors step over sand castles and under a colorful bolt of floor-to-ceiling Mylar. Hilary Pfeifer's wooden fish and flowers, jutting out of walls and sprouting from a hideous green sofa, come across initially as cutesy and cartoonish, but there is a method here. Pfeifer has created a list of 31 "art-gallery rules" and proceeded to break every one. The sofa, entitled Rule No. 27, defies the edict "do not buy art to match your furniture."
Bruce Conkle's Skinned Sasquatch looks better on paper than in person. A commentary on man's demystification of nature, it looks like a bearskin rug made out of cheap faux fur. Jahn's jagged abstracts, fingerpainted on birch panels, are intriguing in form and symbolism but would make their point more forcefully in a different medium (say, painted aluminum à la Mel Katz's current show at Laura Russo). Todd Johnson's photographs of paramilitary manuals do little to rivet the eye. Jacqueline Ehlis, coming off a recent show at Savage, is the most sophisticated player here, with materials and technique matching the quality of her vision. Her paintings actually play with the legacies of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. Ehlis is an artist who knows you have to wear your hair up before you can let it down. In other words, you have to grow up before you truly become a child.
Alysia Duckler, 1236 NW Hoyt St., 223-7595. Closes Sept. 28.
Littman Gallery, 250 Smith Memorial Center, Portland State University, 1825 SW Broadway, 725-5656, www.playpdx.com . Also,
. White Gallery, SMC Room 250. Closes Sept. 27.
WWeek 2015