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The title feels like a mistake, and not just because it slaps the name of a movie about rappers on the Rose City. Straight Outta Portland is more about what Portland is bringing in.
The group show (on display at Stephanie Chefas Projects), is a beautiful illustration of how Portland is still drawing artists from all over. Yes, the painters, collage-makers and portrait photographers call Portland home now, but they're from England, Sarajevo, Japan, Ohio and more than a few from the Bay Area.
This is next-gen PDX. What Stephanie Chefas has come up with is a wonderfully-curated show that reads like a love letter to future Portland, not the popular nostalgia for token Northwest icons.
Yes, "Portland as Fuck" comes to mind: Chewbacca dressed as a lumberjack, logs filled with rainbows, a bird superimposed over the Made in Oregon sign. There's a bear wrapped in a snake that's colored like the PDX carpet and that Chewbacca figure laying on the PDX carpet. And at the opening party, guests in beanies, thick black glasses and beards ate artisan pizza and Coco donuts.
But no one is crying gentrification here. Instead, Chefas avoids dumping canned Portlandia on us by lovingly protracting what makes us Portland to include the visions of artists from Detroit, China, etcetera.
One sculpture stands out—an assault rifle made of silicone, 24 karat gold and human hair made by Oaklander Peter Gronquist. The piece looks like a half-melted gun wrapped in pig skin and blinged-out by Kanye.
It is an oddity that welds familiar things together—gold, skin, a gun—into an unnerving, morphing object that's too interesting to look away from. A bit like Portland now.
SEE IT: Straight Outta Portland is at Stephanie Chefas Projects, 305 SE 3rd Ave. #202, through February 29.
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Willamette Week