Skip to main contentThings are bound to get a little screwy when First Thursday falls on Second Thursday. Since First Thursday fell on Jan. 2 this month, gallery owners cut Alka-Seltzer-plopping art lovers some slack and postponed the art walk a week. But judging from the scant turnout Jan. 9, not everyone got the memo. Or perhaps pooped-out partiers were still in rehab mode, eschewing wine, havarti and Elizabeth Leach.
Whatever the case, the slightly dazed and confused crowds downtown and in the Pearl seemed as fuzzily focused as David Levinthal's photographs at Augen. In Levinthal's "Wild West" series, plastic cowboys wearing plastic fringe jackets ride plastic horses into the sunset. You can pay for the photos with plastic, too, at $6,000 a pop--if you're loco. Upstairs at Augen, Andrew Yound's overlapping squares with dragonflies and butterflies painted inside have all the charm of a high-school entomology project.
Next door at Froelick, Jeremy Longstreet offers flatly painted still lifes of wooden blocks, tea kettles, and dingy metal rings that look vaguely like auto-engine parts. Generally speaking, a still life is only as exciting as its subject matter. Do dingy metal rings work for you?
Granted, it is possible for an artist to portray everyday objects or events in a dramatic light. Consider Christina Gyulafia's photographs at Zeitgeist. Shooting in a photojournalistic style, Gyulafia focuses her lens on a woman giving birth with the aid of a midwife. As befits natural childbirth, the woman is naked. What is that hairy black circle in the middle of those monstrously distended labia? Why, it's the first sight of the baby's head!
There's an undeniable intensity in Gyulafia's photographs, derived from our empathy with the mother, her face wrenched in pain as the midwife puts her through the motions, including a doggie-style delivery position that had gallery-goers gasping. Why does this subject matter shock us? Why do we freak out when the photographer zooms in? We all came from this fount, after all. All our mothers endured this, so that we might stand here and recoil from Gyulafia and her subject's courageous collaboration.
Second Thursday marked another birth: the new gallery at Everett Station, Genuine Imitation, whose inaugural show featured paintings by Jason Mitchell. Mitchell paints iconic monkeys wearing different hats: pirate, wizard, Valkyrie, coonskin, bowler and, most hilariously of all, state trooper. He found his inspiration for this monkey madness during a visit to a New Orleans voodoo shop, where monkey claws are used to summon spirits. You can't help but smile at these simian multiples, which are more fun than Cary Leibowitz's forced "faggy faggy boom boom" multiples a few doors down at SoundVision.
Gavin Shettler held court during his namesake gallery's last First Thursday show. After a short retrospective from Jan. 23 to 31, the space will close, only to be reborn Feb. 1 as headquarters for an arts nonprofit tentatively called the Portland Center for the Advancement of Culture--a constipated-sounding name that may get flushed after a booze-fueled brainstorming session coming up later this month.
Butters offers an ambitious group show called Womankind, featuring the art of seven artists. "What's tying these artists together, other than the fact that they're women?" I ask Jeff Butters. "My taste," he replies. Lynne Haagensen's photocopies of domestic scenes don't do much except hang on the wall: living-room scenes, dogs dozing under kitchen tables. Pamela Harris' works on paper seem little more than arching scribbles. Edith Hillinger paints watercolors of leaves that look like anatomic renderings in medical-school textbooks. Susanna Speirs contributes sculptures of glass pears and twigs hanging from wires, while Stephanie Serpick paints tubas and rabbits. Margaret Evangeline grinds her aluminum pieces with a sander, then drizzles them with oil paint. The standout artist here is Carole Silverstein, whose A Voluptuous Interlude is exactly that: ink drawings in intricate, intertwining patterns that evoke vines climbing over arches in a Hindu temple. It's refreshing to see an artist revel so shamelessly in the opulence of her imagery.
The night's most invigorating antidote to post-New Year's blahs is Tim Bavington's tour de force at Pulliam Deffenbaugh. The artist's rainbow-prism vertical lines are pure sensual joy, yet there is a method here. Bavington takes guitar solos from Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull songs, assigns each note a color, then charts the melody on canvas. Along with his fellow University of Nevada at Las Vegas classmate, Portlander Jacqueline Ehlis, Bavington studied under art-as-pleasure preacher Dave Hickey. The two are part of a generation of painters currently reinvigorating the art world after its dour detour into postmodernism.
With their daring use of color, materials and method, these artists are defying the fussy, theory-bound creations of their postmodern progenitors, just as every generation worth anything defies the previous one. Bavington's paintings may look like glowing sticks of Fruit Stripes gum, but they and their ilk may finally burst the postmodernist bubble for once and all. Chew on that, Jacques Derrida.
Things are bound to get a little screwy when First Thursday falls on Second Thursday. Since First Thursday fell on Jan. 2 this month, gallery owners cut Alka-Seltzer-plopping art lovers some slack and postponed the art walk a week. But judging from the scant turnout Jan. 9, not everyone got the memo. Or perhaps pooped-out partiers were still in rehab mode, eschewing wine, havarti and Elizabeth Leach.
Whatever the case, the slightly dazed and confused crowds downtown and in the Pearl seemed as fuzzily focused as David Levinthal's photographs at Augen. In Levinthal's "Wild West" series, plastic cowboys wearing plastic fringe jackets ride plastic horses into the sunset. You can pay for the photos with plastic, too, at $6,000 a pop--if you're loco. Upstairs at Augen, Andrew Yound's overlapping squares with dragonflies and butterflies painted inside have all the charm of a high-school entomology project.
Next door at Froelick, Jeremy Longstreet offers flatly painted still lifes of wooden blocks, tea kettles, and dingy metal rings that look vaguely like auto-engine parts. Generally speaking, a still life is only as exciting as its subject matter. Do dingy metal rings work for you?
Granted, it is possible for an artist to portray everyday objects or events in a dramatic light. Consider Christina Gyulapia's photographs at Zeitgeist. Shooting in a photojournalistic style, Gyulapia focuses her lens on a woman giving birth with the aid of a midwife. As befits natural childbirth, the woman is naked. What is that hairy black circle in the middle of those monstrously distended labia? Why, it's the first sight of the baby's head!
There's an undeniable intensity in Gyulapia's photographs, derived from our empathy with the mother, her face wrenched in pain as the midwife puts her through the motions, including a doggie-style delivery position that had gallery-goers gasping. Why does this subject matter shock us? Why do we freak out when the photographer zooms in? We all came from this fount, after all. All our mothers endured this, so that we might stand here and recoil from Gyulapia and her subject's courageous collaboration.
Second Thursday marked another birth: the new gallery at Everett Station, Genuine Imitation, whose inaugural show featured paintings by Jason Mitchell. Mitchell paints iconic monkeys wearing different hats: pirate, wizard, Valkyrie, coonskin, bowler and, most hilariously of all, state trooper. He found his inspiration for this monkey madness during a visit to a New Orleans voodoo shop, where monkey claws are used to summon spirits. You can't help but smile at these simian multiples, which are more fun than Cary Leibowitz's forced "faggy faggy boom boom" multiples a few doors down at SoundVision.
Gavin Shettler held court during his namesake gallery's last First Thursday show. After a short retrospective from Jan. 23 to 31, the space will close, only to be reborn Feb. 1 as headquarters for an arts nonprofit tentatively called the Portland Center for the Advancement of Culture--a constipated-sounding name that may get flushed after a booze-fueled brainstorming session coming up later this month.
Butters offers an ambitious group show called Womankind, featuring the art of seven artists. "What's tying these artists together, other than the fact that they're women?" I ask Jeff Butters. "My taste," he replies. Lynne Haagensen's photocopies of domestic scenes don't do much except hang on the wall: living-room scenes, dogs dozing under kitchen tables. Pamela Harris' works on paper seem little more than arching scribbles. Edith Hillinger paints watercolors of leaves that look like anatomic renderings in medical-school textbooks. Susanna Speirs contributes sculptures of glass pears and twigs hanging from wires, while Stephanie Serpick paints tubas and rabbits. Margaret Evangeline grinds her aluminum pieces with a sander, then drizzles them with oil paint. The standout artist here is Carole Silverstein, whose A Voluptuous Interlude is exactly that: ink drawings in intricate, intertwining patterns that evoke vines climbing over arches in a Hindu temple. It's refreshing to see an artist revel so shamelessly in the opulence of her imagery.
The night's most invigorating antidote to post-New Year's blahs is Tim Bavington's tour de force at Pulliam Deffenbaugh. The artist's rainbow-prism vertical lines are pure sensual joy, yet there is a method here. Bavington takes guitar solos from Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull songs, assigns each note a color, then charts the melody on canvas. Along with his fellow University of Nevada at Las Vegas classmate, Portlander Jacqueline Ehlis, Bavington studied under art-as-pleasure preacher Dave Hickey. The two are part of a generation of painters currently reinvigorating the art world after its dour detour into postmodernism.
With their daring use of color, materials and method, these artists are defying the fussy, theory-bound creations of their postmodern progenitors, just as every generation worth anything defies the previous one. Bavington's paintings may look like glowing sticks of Fruit Stripes gum, but they and their ilk may finally burst the postmodernist bubble for once and all. Chew on that, Jacques Derrida.
WWeek 2015