Skip to main contentDavid Eckard's feet are bound together, and he's wearing a straitjacket made of dainty lace. He's on the ground, crawling all the way from Marylhurst University's entrance gate to the administration building, then pulling himself up three flights of stairs to the school's gallery, the Art Gym. There, an hour and a half later, the sculptor-cum-performance artist will end his self-described "calisthenic endurance test," a feat notably similar to William Pope.L's trans-New York crawls. Eckard hopes to pull off a similarly bizarre feat this summer within the normally staid walls of the Portland Art Museum.
Several miles north of Marylhurst, a 23-year-old woman is climbing into a dumpster, looking for boxes of candy. Chandra Bocci is neither hungry nor homeless, and she's not after the candy; she's after the boxes. She makes art from refuse, and if her wish comes true, she'll be hanging trash in the Portland Art Museum come June 28.
A woman more than twice Bocci's age stands in a Milwaukie studio and stares into an abyss of her own creation: a painting of an intractable black line emerging from miasmas of color. Katherine Treffinger doesn't know what this vaguely menacing motif means, only that she had to paint it--and that she wants the painting to hang in the Portland Art Museum.
Eckard, Bocci, Treffinger and 924 other Oregon and southwest Washington artists are competing for a few precious feet of wall or floor space at the Oregon Biennial 2003, the state's most prestigious invitational art exhibition, which takes place at the Portland Art Museum. On Tuesday, March 10, when the Biennial's sole curator, PAM's Bruce Guenther, announces his roughly 20 selectees, hearts will soar or sink. The Biennial has the power to transform emerging artists from "not" to "hot."
"The last Biennial was a wonderful experience for me," says Portland artist Melody Owen, whose delicate paper crowns and stacked beehives enlivened the Oregon Biennial 2001. "A lot of opportunities came out of it." Other artists whose careers the Biennial boosted include Heidi Schwegler, Jacqueline Ehlis, Brenden Clenaghen and Hildur Bjarnadottir, all of whom entered past expos unrepresented and went on to enjoy gallery exposure.
The stakes are also high for the cultural currency of Portland itself. "The Biennial," says Jeff Jahn, art editor of NWDrizzle.com, "is the single best chance for the museum to show that sophisticated contemporary art and art produced in Oregon are one and the same."
Not everyone is on the Biennial bandwagon. Nic Walker, Trish Grantham and Tom Cramer opted out this go-round for various reasons. Others are entering with the express aim of subverting from within. Red76 Arts Group's Sam Gould proposed an indie-artist database/installation but submitted only a one-page diagram, thumbing his nose at the Museum's more involved, slide-centric application process. Brian Borrello, who was in the 2001 Biennial, entered this year but doesn't expect to be picked. "I didn't find the last one very adventurous. There was nothing in it that challenged anyone's interpretation of what we call art. What I'm proposing this time would happen outside the Museum's white box and have political overtones. I'd be very surprised if the management chose this kind of project."
Still, many artists--including Eckard, Bocci and Treffinger--feel the show confers a stamp of legitimacy.
Eckard, 38, a Pacific Northwest College of Art instructor, grew up on a farm near Spirit Lake, Iowa. The heavy, sometimes dangerous machinery he worked on as a young man imprinted itself on his mind and emerged years later when he confronted his psychosexual fears and fantasies through art. Tournament (lumens), his January-February show at the Art Gym, features a 14-foot-wide pinewood "gameboard" that looks like an overgrown ceiling fan. Its eight blades are designed for players to take turns subjecting a ninth volunteer, strapped in the middle, to any number of unspeakable acts. This brand of perverse object, along with his own flamboyant performance pieces, may give Eckard an edge over other Biennial contenders in an artistic climate that values persona as much as product.
Bocci lives in a cramped loft in Northeast Portland and only recently acquired a bank account. A couple of years ago, when she worked checking coats, she kept her tips in a paper bag and paid her rent in $1 bills. "My landlord thought I was a stripper," she recalls. Although Bocci's paternal grandparents came to this country from Italy, the artist is as American as they come. Perhaps that's why she loves trash. While studying art in New York City, Bocci began using garbage (more politely known as "post-consumer waste") to create complex works that updated Kurt Schwitters' and Joseph Cornell's found-object work with a Gen-Y spin. In her show last fall at Disjecta, she turned toilet paper, junk mail and bubble wrap into miniature cityscapes of dazzling intricacy. Bocci is proposing similar projects for the Biennial, although if she's chosen, she would prefer to break out of the museum's "stuffy" atmosphere and "do something outside on the steps or in the Park Blocks."
Unlike Bocci, Treffinger came to painting later in life. A self-described "hippie who never recovered," she gave up her career as a licensed massage therapist to paint. Working mainly with a palette knife to impart luxuriant, choppy textures, Treffinger has created a signature abstract style that belies her lack of formal training. In her most compelling works, she gives herself over to nebulae of swirling color, dominated by enigmatic black gashes that resemble the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings films. Since moving to Oregon four years ago, she has shown in several local art spaces and won juried shows but has yet to get the call from a Charles Froelick, Tracy Savage or Mark Woolley. At 52, she is in the unusual and in some ways enviable position of being a hot new commodity poised on the brink of a big break. The Biennial could be it.
If Treffinger and the other contenders want to, they'll have to make it past the Biennial's version of Are You Hot? judge Lorenzo Lamas--Bruce Guenther. Guenther, who in 2000 succeeded Katherine Kanjo as the museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, is known for neither subtlety nor sweetness, but his taste is nearly always on target. He put his mark on the 2001 Biennial by choosing artists such as Jennifer Hoover, Todd Ros and Ann Shiogi, edging the show toward minimalist-influenced geometric abstraction.
What aesthetic is Guenther going for this year? He ducks the question: "Hopefully, the engagement in the artists' work will remain consistent, regardless of the 'look' of the works included." Alas, we will have to wait a few days longer to see which artists will shape Oregon's state of the art.
WWeek 2015