Spare-Changers, PLEXIGLASS and Fag Booming

There is something odd about an artist with an M.F.A. degree painting local spare-changers and street kids, then turning around and selling those paintings in a gallery for $2,300 a pop. But maybe that's a simplistic way to describe what Debra Beers does. After all, as gallery owner Mark Woolley explains, Beers doesn't paint just homeless Portlanders; she recently extended her range to include working stiffs like street vendors, construction workers and policemen. She also donates a portion of her sales to charity and often remains a part of her subjects' lives long after the paint has dried.

Some of these new working subjects are people you may recognize if you live or work downtown: Trevor the Burrito Cart Guy, a Beefeater from the Heathman Hotel, the girl who plays Celtic harp at Pioneer Courthouse Square and the dreadlocked bagpiper. Many of these folks came out for Beers' opening night, making for an interesting mix with collectors and the art-walking set.

What is Beers up to here? Is it empowerment, exploitation or simply exposition? Meta-questions aside, the paintings are noteworthy for their inventive use of materials and three-dimensional space. The artist layers wood panels and found objects one upon another--a handful of nails and screws here, a trash-can lid there, drawing from her background in sculpture. Beers shows a more highly developed sense of anatomic proportion than in previous outings and is clearly taking her aesthetic in new spatial directions.

There's also something odd about paintings that are so willfully banal that you have to be in the right clique to "get" them. New Yorker Cary Leibowitz has won a cult following for his solipsistic, post-Pop meditations on his plight as a self-avowed "self-loathing gay Jewish artist." But suppose you didn't know his reputation when you walked into Leibowitz's show at Soundvision. Suppose you'd never heard of the guy when you saw on the walls panel after pastel-painted panel, each one blank save for the scrawled words: "faggy faggy boom boom"?

In search of some kind of explanation, suppose you picked up Leibowitz's artist statement and read the following: "faggy faggy boom boom is, as Frank Stella might have said what you get-(when you see it)-get it? I like to think they are abstract (and dumb and wacky [n tacky] and goofy [n poofy]...the paintings are not aggressive-(unless you are already on the defensive--oh go away please). Hip Hip Hooray!" Now what?

First Thursday gallery-goers responded in three different ways: by admiring the fabulous pink balloon decorations of the gallery while ignoring the paintings; by seeking out dinner-jacket-dapper gallery owner T.J. Norris for some much-needed context, or by ditching the place to check out the ballerinas two doors down at Gavin Shettler.

There is something odd about searching for profundity in the mundane, but that's photographer Kevin Wildermuth's modus operandi at Blue Sky Gallery. Wildermuth creates grids, eight photos wide, four photos tall, each photo portraying an object from everyday life: an ashtray, a fire hydrant,
a can of peaches, a dried-up Christmas tree on its way to the dump. If Warhol can find fame and bliss in a lineup of soup cans, Wildermuth seems to be saying, cannot the rest of us find meaning in a pencil sharpener and a bicycle tire? And if we pile up enough of this stuff, won't it tell us something about the human condition--and if it doesn't, isn't that a clever statement in and of itself?

There is, after all this strutting and fretting, something oddly refreshing about Barbara Tetenbaum's The Reading Room, an installation in the Nine Gallery that marries accessible content and high style. Tetenbaum, an associate professor at the Oregon College of Art & Craft, has created a stunning kinesthetic environment that riffs on the relationship between visual art and the written word. As a starting point, Tetenbaum wrote a short story, then inscribed each line on small plexiglass plates: "The phone rings." "A squirrel runs across the telephone line." And so on. She then hung the plates (more than 100) from the ceiling with fishing line, each plate at a different angle and height. As you walk through the maze of floating rectangles, taking care not to bump into them, you're forced to put the story together in your head. "It's about unbinding the text," Tetenbaum says. Or, as a man exclaimed on his way out, "It was like walking through a storybook!"

Whether the installation works as literature we shall leave to the literati. But as purely visual art, it would be a knockout even if the plexiglass were inscribed in Chinese, or not at all, or were multicolored instead of transparent. Imagine, conceptual art that engages the senses without the aid of street kids, pink balloons or dried-up Christmas trees. Boom boom indeed.

Nine Gallery
1231 NW Hoyt St., 225-0210. Closes Dec. 28.

Soundvision
625 NW Everett St., #108, 238-7007. Closes Jan. 11.

WWeek 2015