Laurie Danial / David Eckard / Ellen George

Three artists have a great autumn.

Visual Arts Laurie Danial, David Eckard and Ellen George are not the freshest faces in the Portland art scene. They’re not exactly old school, either. All three have impressive midcareer shows this month, pr   More

 

Wednesday, November 9, 2011 TJ NORRIS

Damien Gilley Infinity Games

Visual Arts No matter how the wavelike vicissitudes of the art world swell and trough as decades pass, artists keep reaching back to geometry. For Damien Gilley, geometry beckons in 1980s-flavored architectoni   More

 

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Q&A: Jim Lommasson

The Portland photographer tells the story of Oregon’s Iraqi refugees.

Visual Arts Portland photographer Jim Lommasson is a storyteller. He has two documentary books under his belt, Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice, and the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms and Oaks Park Pentim   More

 

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 EMILEE BOOHER

Visual Arts Highlights from TBA

Three installations embody the spirit of TBA at its best.

Visual Arts Imagine you’re an office clerk hunting for a specific manila folder. You open the filing cabinet and pull the drawer out, but to your stupefaction, the drawer just keeps coming out, out, out, thre   More

 

Wednesday, September 14, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Carrie Iverson Correspondence / Stephen Scott Smith Burlap 2B

Carrie Iverson and Stephen Scott Smith deconstruct the mysteries of memory.

Visual Arts When we gaze back over our lives, whether through rose-colored or gray-tinted glasses, we see either sunlit halcyon afternoons or dark nights of the soul filled with “What if…?” and regret. T   More

 

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Reading. Writing. Gallery Homeland

The plight of words in a digital age.

Visual Arts To look at an alphabet other than our Roman script—Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari—is to be transfixed by characters divorced from their content. For millennia, we humans have been commin   More

 

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Michael Endo at False Front Studio

Turning pain into paint.

Visual Arts Michael Endo’s haunting show at False Front this month, Pain Scale, is compelling for how uncomfortably it stretched the meticulous painter’s working methods. Endo, 32, normally lavishes time on   More

 

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Brad Carlile/Rio Wrenn

Confronting the myth of the great American road.

Visual Arts This month, two local artists wrestle with divergent but equally mythic conceptions of the great American road. In Tempus Incognitus, photographer Brad Carlile’s striking exhibition at Eva Lake’s   More

 

Wednesday, July 13, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Contemporary Northwest Art Awards

Portland Art Museum scores a hit with this showcase of thought-provoking Northwest art.

Visual Arts The Contemporary Northwest Art Awards live in the shadow of the Oregon Biennial, which, in a sense, it replaced. Like the Biennial, the Art Awards select a small pool of artists from hundreds of no   More

 

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 RICHARD SPEER

Storm Tharp

Storm Tharp’s prints highlight a sexy group show at PDX Contemporary.

Visual Arts There has always been an air of the arch epicene in Storm Tharp’s work: the perspective of a refined but warped dandy looking out at a beautiful world through dark-tinted spectacles   More

 

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 RICHARD SPEER