This is a big deal—maybe the biggest deal to hit the Portland art scene in a decade. New York-based painter and printmaker Peter Halley, an international sensation since his breakout moment in the 1987 Whitney Biennial, is coming to Portland to create an enormous installation at Disjecta. Halley pioneered the style known as “Neo-Geo” (short for Neo-geometric conceptualism), in which squares and rectangles stand in for cells and prisons, critiquing both the grandiloquence of modernist attitudes toward geometry and the insidiousness of present-day technology. The installation, Prison, is the last installment of Jenene Nagy’s remarkable curator-in-residence stint at Disjecta. The piece will wrap itself around the cathedral-like gallery space, with DayGlo paint and colored lights complementing printed “wallpaper” featuring Halley’s iconic prisons. The show promises to be an immersive experience, equal parts sensory overload and thematic complexity. Halley will lecture at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (1241 NW Johnson St.) at 7 pm Friday, Jan. 20. The Disjecta show opens the following evening (6-9 pm Saturday, Jan. 21, 8371 N Interstate Ave.) and closes Feb. 25. The lecture and show are free and open to the public.