Skip to main contentIt's hard not to compare Last Thursday with First Thursday. The Alberta vs. Pearl mises-en-scène invite adversarial contrasts: funky vs. fuddy-duddy, street art vs. high art, rye bread vs. white. What's the point in dichotomizing, though? To pigeonhole Last or First Thursday is to ignore the fluidity of Portland's art scene, where artists routinely cross the river.
On the river's east side tonight, Indian pop music wafts through the chilly air. Shahjahan Sheriff cranks the volume on his boombox, bopping along as he paints canvases on the sidewalk. Half Egyptian, half Sri Lankan, he accents his female nudes with a blend of Arabesque calligraphy and Sanskrit ornament.
At Groundswell, Paul Dahlquist holds court, a great, white-bearded bear of a man with a wheat-cracked voice like Burl Ives'. He's been a photographer since 1975 and often shows at Gallery 114 in the Pearl. His show tonight, Real People, features black-and-white portraiture of friends and acquaintances. A sumptuous image from 1989 depicts a Reed College student named Christopher Ellis posing with a crown of thorns on his head. With his dreadlocks and handsome face, Ellis is a striking enough subject on his own, but the Jesus pose, given that Ellis is African-American, kicks up the symbolism more than a notch.
Over at Onda Arte Latina, Mˆximo Laura's tapestries of alpaca wool interweave stories of the Inca and their modern descendants, the Quechua. A group of Ecuadorean folk artists contributes enamel paintings that make up for in color and Boschian pastiche what they lack in dimensional perspective. Contemporary Cuban photographer Cirenaica Moreira offers the gallery's most challenging work: black-and-white self-portraits informed by neo-surrealism. Often posing nude, Moreira presents herself as a fetishistic object simultaneously fetching and fearsome. In one photo, her disembodied arm protrudes from a corset and petticoat. In another, her breasts and belly are suspended from a closet hanger, an outfit for seduction to be donned and ditched at will. In yet another, she poses with a sewing needle stuck through her forehead. This is woman as vagina dentata: dangerous and delectable. Bon appétit.
Painter George Perrou presides over his Atlas Living opening. "These pieces are good, but you should check out my work in April at the Littman Gallery," he says. Perrou's semi-abstract paintings, which he describes as "Joan Miró meets the Pink Panther," are of late incorporating more aquas and turquoise, moving away from his signature blacks and reds.
Outside the Alberta Arts Pavilion sits Sean Patrick, who crafts necklaces, bracelets, belts and enigmatic cubes from chain mail. "These prices aren't even serious," he confesses, inviting bargaining. With his fur-and-leather jacket, longish hair and androgynous face, he looks every inch the late-medieval artisan. Inside the Pavilion, Joe Mus strolls amid his watercolor panels on rice paper. The twentysomething artist divides his time between Portland and Guilin, China, a balmy region where the heat and humidity have their way with his watercolors after he's finished them, causing the paisleylike shapes to seep and grow into one another like lichen. His art, he says, uses "the heavy swamp night" to create "a fog of flowing dreams." Somehow this sounds genuinely deep evincing from Mus' Keanu Reeves baritone. He pulls back his sandy-colored hair into a ponytail that dips down the back of his beige gui. His formidable beard is Summer of Love redux, his aura that of the globe-trotting hippie gone off to the East to find enlightenment, returning to his native sod a changed soul--or is that just my corny fantasy?
I am chatting with Mus when a ruckus erupts outside. It's "March Forth, the Marching Band," parading past in a procession worthy of Mardi Gras. There's a dude on stilts, a gaggle of ghoulishly made-up girls hoisting gas lanterns, and an oversized blue puppet, the word "Create!" painted across its sternum. They march off, and as their drumbeats recede, a reggae band warms up close by. A woman in belly-dancer garb breathes fire and charms a snake. A fast-talking chef hawks barbecued chicken from his grill. "No, thanks," says a girl walking by, unseasonably dressed in half-shirt and capri pants. A man works his way through the crowd, offering handmade greeting cards. I buy one: carpet swatches in rectangular planes glued atop one another--De Stijl, vacuum-ready.
Everywhere there is street art, some of it inspired, some of it not, some of it destined, perhaps, for the other side of the Willamette. There is only a river in between, after all, not a gulf.
Shahjahan Sheriff's paintings are on view at his gallery at 2730 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 10 am-6 pm Monday- Saturday. 249- 8542.
WWeek 2015