Willamette Week

Art Exhibit “Utopia Without You” Attempts to Escape a Hostile World Using Balls of Trash and Video Games

Each piece in Utopia Without You is a synecdoche of a disheveled gamer’s bedroom—the rock of trash that is B-16, a hand-painted miniature elf displayed on a wooden table, a flat-screen TV playing a video game that Nikolai programmed, and Rich Inner Life, a gurgling fish tank filled with mineral oil and the electronic circuit that controls the video game. With its technological guts resting in goopy fluid, Rich Inner Life almost looks like a cyborg animal.

We Talked to the Portland Artist Whose Graphic Illustration of Trump Stirred National Controversy

Compton Creep is watching his back. One of the Portland artist’s illustrations recently went viral—a graphic illustration of President Trump with a knife to this throat and blood spewing from his neck. Creep—who declined to share his given name—had already sold the image on a few hundred T-shirts for about a year. But late in July, a blown-up version of the image was displayed in the window of One Grand Gallery on East Burnside Street, as part of a show called Fuck You, Mr. President.

“Sun Kittens & Moon Puppies” Imagines a Post-Patriarchy World

Sun Kittens & Moon Puppies lends the exhibit its name and, in a way, its manifesto. The show as a whole attempts to imagine what the world will look like after the fall of the patriarchy. To Rachel Rosenkoetter, it will look like vibrant paintings of exploding eggs. To E.M. Fuller, it will look like large ribbons of raw denim arranged in a pile shaped like a lopsided pyramid. To Maggie-Rose Condit, the impending social change will look like red-tinted photographs of hands clawing at cherries.

In Ori Gallery’s Third Exhibit, Two Emerging Artists Create Their Own Conventions

Printmaker Lo Smith had a formative experience on an art-school elevator. “I ran into a hijabi woman on an elevator who was silently crying,” Smith says. “This big, white professor man was trying to make small talk about the weather with me. Like, we’re pretending that this person who’s obviously crying next to me doesn’t exist.” The interaction led Smith to a question that informs several works in their new show, Linoleum Flowers: “How do we protect and defend each other’s humanity in this space where all of us are fading in and out constantly?”

A VR Program That Attempts to Replicate the Experience of Solitary Confinement Is Now in Portland

Welcome to Your Cell gives plenty of statistics about solitary confinement. Before 6×9 begins, white letters floating in a black void inform visitors that between 80,000 and 100,000 U.S. prisoners are currently held in solitary confinement. Gallery brochures offer information about organizations working to end solitary and improve the lives of prisoners. But the show is more concerned with conveying the horrifying experience behind the facts.

Here Are the Five Art Openings We’re Most Excited to See This Week

In an attempt to burst their art world bubble, Portland museums and galleries are turning to a similar solution—hiring someone else to do it for them.

Yale Union is Hosting One of the Last Exhibits By an Influential Belgian Artist

When Yale Union was preparing its Jef Geys exhibit, getting the artist’s work through TSA was a nerve-wracking ordeal. The late conceptual artist has a series of works called “bubble paintings”—paintings encased in bubble wrap. When two bubble paintings were flown from Geys’ native Belgium to YU’s Buckman neighborhood building, the organization worried the packaging would be removed in an overzealous security search by a TSA agent who didn’t realize the bubble wrap was actually a famed piece of art.

Art Gym’s New Director Wants to Create a Platform for Emerging Pacific Northwest Artists

In 2012, artist Manuel Arturo Abreu was evicted from Reed College housing after a campus drug raid. After struggling to find a new place to live, Abreu moved into the garage of a punk house in Southeast Portland. A few years later, Abreu wrote a blog for San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art about the experience. Titled Notes on the Garage Residency, the essay stuck with curator Ashley Stull Meyers ever since she read it. So when she decided to work with Abreu for Place Names, the first exhibit she curated as the director of Art Gym, she knew the garage had to be in the exhibit.

Art Gym’s New Director Wants to Create a Platform for Emerging Pacific Northwest Artists

In 2012, artist Manuel Arturo Abreu was evicted from Reed College housing after a campus drug raid. After struggling to find a new place to live, Abreu moved into the garage of a punk house in Southeast Portland. A few years later, Abreu wrote a blog for San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art about the experience. Titled Notes on the Garage Residency, the essay stuck with curator Ashley Stull Meyers ever since she read it. So when she decided to work with Abreu for Place Names, the first exhibit she curated as the director of Art Gym, she knew the garage had to be in the exhibit.

An Exhibit of Vulva Photography Attracted Unexpected Controversy

Arkady Brown, who works as a boudoir photographer, began taking the photos for the Vulva Art Project almost a year ago after posting an open call for models on her Facebook page. Since then, she’s been struggling to find an art space willing to display her work, not to mention a printer willing to print it. “The labs that I normally use for boudoir, they equate this with pornography,” says Brown.

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