First Thursday Preview: 25th Anniversary Edition

WW art critic Richard Speer previews tonight's First Thursday openings.

Horia Boboia
In Horia Boboia’s last installation in the Nine project space, he deconstructed an ARTFORUM magazine by cutting the pages and flipping them, weaving an arbitrary but oddly meaningful narrative. For this go-round, entitled I Am Sorry, he returns to one of his first loves, painting, with a series of diptychs. The two sides of each piece metaphorically wrestle with one another, informing the other component’s formal and conceptual crux. As such, they comment on the ambiguity of contemporary life. Nine Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210. Oct. 6-30.

Gregory Grenon
One of the Northwest’s iconic painters, Gregory Grenon uses a reverse-glass technique to create distinctive figurative work in a deliberately naive style. This style is not for everyone. Grenon’s work tends to polarize viewers into “Love it!” or “Hate it!” camps. Stylistically, it has not evolved much over the years but has stayed reliably quirky. His new body of work, entitled Behavior, is the latest exhibition in his long association with the Laura Russo Gallery. Laura Russo Gallery, 805 Northwest 21st Ave., 226-2754, laurarusso.com. Oct. 6-29.

Sarah Ellen Taylor
Marylhurst University graduate Sarah Ellen Taylor now lives in the north of England. The mixed-media works in her lovejoy series transmute imagery of jewelry, cosmetics, and clothing into elegant, whimsical semi-abstraction. Interestingly, she sees the consumerist subject matter as a fitting tribute to the religion she practices, Buddhism, which preaches a resolutely anti-consumerism asceticism. Many of the works are dipped in silk clothing dye, then gilded with various metals, imparting a multifaceted appearance. Augen Gallery, 716 NW Davis St., 546-5056, augengallery.com. Oct. 6-29.

Sally Finch

Sally Finch’s Weather Studies meticulously plots global climate data onto grids, assigning a different color to each time period of climatological measurement. In the midst of creating these compositions, the artist saw similarities to electrocardiogram printouts, suggesting a link between human respiration and nature’s own breathing in and breathing out over the eons. Finch’s work is both conceptually challenging and visually rapturous, a one-two punch all too rarely seen. Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis St., 222-1142, froelickgallery.com. Closes Oct. 29.