Visual Arts It may have been the quietest First Friday opening ever: hushed gallery-goers huddled in a darkened room, watching Kelly Rauer’s high-definition video installation, Shaping Sequence. The piece h ...   More

Visual Arts Northwest artists love wood. For good and ill, from old-growth forests to the ethical and environmental complexities of the modern logging industry, wood in its many forms lies deep within the region& ...   More

Visual Arts There is a strain of Northwest artist who finesses the line between biological symbolism and painterly abstraction. The preeminent exemplars, Jaq Chartier and John Dempcy, live not in Portland but in ...   More

Visual Arts The collages and assemblages in Jascha Owens’ Paper Trails look like something the cat dragged in. With their jumbled cardboard panels, tattered paper and clumps of hair, glue, charcoal and coff ...   More

Visual Arts More than ever, we live in two or more worlds at once. We’re on the beach but on the cellphone. We’re at a show blogging our impressions of the show. It’s no longer acceptable to jus ...   More

Visual Arts In his photographs, as in his films, Gus Van Sant is a prince of indeterminacy. The computer-manipulated images that make up his art show Cut-ups at PDX Contemporary are suffused with a woozy, synesth ...   More

Visual Arts In the intimate Manuel Izquierdo Gallery, Josh Smith’s architectonic sculpture, Working With Doubt, holds forth in blond Russian plywood, smooth and gently curved on one side, slotted and rectil ...   More

Visual Arts Disjecta scores a huge hit with the first of eight installments in its two-month, citywide exhibition series, Portland 2010: A Biennial of Contemporary Art. This invigorating show goes a long way towa ...   More

Visual Arts In the Old World there was candlelight, there were velvets and silks and halls of mirrors bedecked with gilded sconces and chandeliers. Today, alas, there is only glitter, and you find it at the mall, ...   More

Visual Arts It takes guts to look into the mirror and regard your best and worst features with equanimity. In April Surgent’s Reflect at Bullseye, the artist alternately reflects and deflects her identity a ...   More