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Shit Portlanders Say

"Has anyone seen my growler?"

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Feb 9, 2012 03:23 pm by Ruth Brown  | Comments 4
 

One More Round of Fertile Ground Reviews

Arts & Books Groovin’ Greenhouse 1Fertile Ground is best known for its showcases of new theater works, but the ... More

Jan 31, 2012 11:17 pm by BRETT CAMPBELL  | Comments 0
 

Live Review: 4x4=8 Musicals at the CoHo Theatre

Arts & Books 4x4=8. Yes, they know the math is wrong, but the title is still apt. Live on Stage Productions’ co... More

Jan 27, 2012 11:46 am by MARIANNA HANE WILES  | Comments 1
 

Live Review: The Tripping Point at Shaking the Tree

Arts & Books There's a reason fairy tales have been plumbed for art's sake so deeply: they're bottomless. Murky w... More

Jan 27, 2012 11:06 am by JONATHAN FROCHTZWAJG  | Comments 0
 
 
 
Home · Articles · Arts & Books · Visual Arts · Hap Tivey and Gregg Renfrow at Elizabeth Leach
January 30th, 2008 RICHARD SPEER | Visual Arts
 

Hap Tivey and Gregg Renfrow at Elizabeth Leach

Can SoCal Light and Space cure the Portland winter blues?

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If you’re prone to SAD (and who among us doesn’t get a little seasonally affected during a soggy Portland January?), then run, don’t walk, to Elizabeth Leach’s dream-team double bill of light sculptor Hap Tivey and painter Gregg Renfrow. Both artists were part of the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ’70s, a movement born of the area’s mythic confluence of sea and sun (and perhaps smog): Think sunsets filtered through Malibu haze, vast blue horizons striated with orange and red. Both artists are indebted to the formalist tracts of minimalism and color-field painting—as well as, obliquely, to Impressionism—but in different ways. Tivey uses canvas, acrylic, and LED lights in works that have neonlike appeal, but with a cooler visual temperature. In the aurora borealislike Wavelength of Speech the artist suggests not only the amplitudes of sound waves, but also air and ocean currents, separating and flowing as their viscosities dictate. Sand Grain , with its circular form and breastlike shadow, grades downward from blue to green, while Galaxy Particles features a striking blue crescent moon, counterbalanced by a shadow bank on the work’s opposite side.

At Gregg Renfrow’s First Thursday opening, he explained the inspiration behind his polymer-and-pigment-on-cast-acrylic pieces: a kind of rapture he experienced while standing in front of Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria at the National Gallery in London. He says he was suffused with “pure pleasure in my body,” which he wanted to re-create in the chromatic ambience of his paintings. (Renfrow should get a MacArthur Grant for saying something so unabashedly, unfashionably hedonistic.) The artist succeeds in his goal, his matter-of-fact titles (Crimson and Carmine with White Center ; Green-Yellow-Green ; Maroon over Yellow ) encapsulating the works’ simultaneous vacuity and pregnancy. The visual equivalents of the music of Brian Eno, Renfrow’s and Tivey’s styles posit color as mood as meaning; meteorologic atmosphere as expressionist atmospherics. It is eye candy, wallpaper; it is groovy and shallow and trancy and blissfully nonconceptual, and if it doesn’t cure your SAD, you need a soul transplant.


SEE IT: Elizabeth Leach, 417 NW 9th Ave., 224-0521. Tivey closes March 1; Renfrow closes Feb. 2.
 
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