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NW GALLERIES

AUGEN (DESOTO BLDG)

Made in California.
California in the 1960s and ’70s wasn’t just hot tubs, water beds, and shag rugs—not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Golden State was also the hotbed of a golden age in printmaking, with innovative presses such as Tamarind, Gemini, and Crown Point leading the way to bold innovations in the medium. Utilizing new technology and master technicians, Sam Francis entered a period of enormous productivity with his Crayola-colored splatter technique; Helen Frankenthaler used the presses to walk the line between freedom and fastidiousness; and Ed Ruscha advanced his text- and graphic-intensive statements in ways that continue to provoke thought. In Made in California, Augen owner Bob Kochs curates a selection of some of the gallery’s most intriguing prints made from the 1960s to the present. 716 NW Davis St., 224-8182. Closes Feb. 27. Map

BEPPU WIARDA

Yuji Hiratsuka.
Mushrooms sprouting from Japanese hairdos.... Samurai types with multiple arms linked together like anime versions of M.C. Escher.... Yuji Hiratsuka’s wacked-out imagery in Persona Perspectives doesn’t live up to its wild promise. The brushwork is sloppy, the palette homogenous and the visualizations hackneyed. Alas. 319 NW 9th Ave., 241-6460. Closes Jan. 31. Map

CHAMBERS @ 916

Scott Wolniak.
Patterning is about pattern, yes, but it’s also about Chicago artist Scott Wolniak’s relationship to the Windy City’s miserable winters. He drolly presents a suite of “Simulated Sunprints” made in the dead of winter, not with sunlight but with bleach. The sprawling lawn that makes up his sculptural installation is not actual, verdant, inviting grass but a hodgepodge of trash from his studio, held together with wires. Even his sunny tie-dyed patterns, though meticulously drawn, are leached of all color. Only his trippy video animation, Musical Notes in Harmony With the Attuned Healing Colors, with its soundtrack by Jim Dorling, lets the sun shine in. 916 NW Flanders St., 227-9398. Closes Feb. 27. Map

ELIZABETH LEACH GALLERY

SuperNatural is an apt title for Seattle artist Jaq Chartier’s eye-popping exhibition. Supercharged colors impart a vibratory exuberance to these studies of chemical processes. A cross between a painter and a scientist, Chartier sets up experiments in which scientific stains interact with gesso, spray paint, acrylic, and other materials. The results are rigorous but not dispassionate:  methodical in the extreme but chromatically wild. Think of J.S. Bach crossed with Lady Gaga, and if that image causes your mind to short-circuit, then get your arse over to Liz Leach ASAP and see what promises to be one of February’s best shows. 417 NW 9th Ave., 224-0521. Show runs Feb. 4-27. Map

OGLE GALLERY

Alexis Mollomo.
Alexis Mollomo’s narrative tableaux combine a loose, contemporary sensibility with a fine-honed channeling of Flemish Renaissance portraiture and landscape painting. She peppers her panels with arcane symbols that suggest myriad interpretations, drawing from psychoanalysis, myth, and shamanism. Totem poles, burning fields spewing portentous clouds, and androgynous figures wearing sexy boots are among her recurring motifs, populating a world that seems post-apocalyptic, yet somehow ripe for hope. 310 NW Broadway., 227-4333. Show runs Feb. 4-March 27. Map

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART

Bean Finneran.
Bay Area sculptor Bean Finneran takes hundreds, sometimes tens of thousands, of ceramic coils and places them side by side, one atop the other, in compositions that spiral, circle, and tower. The components aren’t glued or adhered to one another in any way; only gravity keeps them together. While they’re visually suggestive of cells, algae, or sea anemone, they do not mimic nature per se.  With their thoroughly unnatural Day-Glo palettes, they are more about the idea of nature than nature itself. It takes Finneran hours or even days to install some pieces, only for them to be disassembled at the end of each show. The sculptures in Incidence and Pattern manage to come across as both whimsical and lyrical. 925 NW Flanders St., 222-0063. Closes Feb. 28. Map

SW GALLERIES

NORTH VIEW GALLERY AT PORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYLVANIA CAMPUS

Becca Bernstein & Gwenn Seemel.
It’s an intriguing concept: Becca Bernstein paints a portrait of one of her friends or family members. Then Gwenn Seemel paints the same person—except she doesn’t know them from Adam. Next, it’s Seemel’s turn to paint her kinfolk, who are unknown to Becca. Switching off like this, they’re left with a series in which two portraits hang side by side, each painting of the same individual, one created by an intimate, the other by a stranger. Would you be able to tell which was painted by which artist? 12000 SW 49th Ave., 997-4264. Show runs Jan. 7-Feb. 5. Map

NORTH PDX GALLERIES

DISJECTA

Jenene Nagy.
“Hello, my name is Jenene Nagy, and I’m here to invade your personal space.” That’s the subtext of this ambitious artist’s vertiginous, stomach-churning tsunami of an installation, Tidal. Massive, magenta-painted drywall planes float above 2-by-4 support beams. These broad sheets suggest geographic forms: an island, a peninsula, a subcontinent colliding with a continent. As if shoved upward by tectonic forces, these plates climb the wall, all 35 feet wide and 20 feet high of it—and they don’t stop there. At the rafters they jut forward over your head, the formerly contiguous parts shattering into shards suspended by more 2-by-4s, floating like crystals from a psychedelic chandelier. Tidal is Nagy’s biggest statement so far, and short of mounting an installation in the Rose Garden, it would seem there’s not a helluva lot more she could do to advance this particular aesthetic. Then again, people were saying that about Christo and Jeanne-Claude back in the 1970s... 8371 N Interstate Ave., 286-9449. Closes Feb. 28. Map

NE GALLERIES

SE GALLERIES

FOURTEEN30 CONTEMPORARY

In 2006, the artist collective Blood Rainbow Family was responsible for Disjecta’s Haunted, perhaps that year’s most ambitious show. Now they’re teaming up to curate Dark: A Show to Winter at Fourteen30. Conceived as a meditation on the long Portland winter, this group show aims to draw panache out of our seasonal doldrums. You gotta love the curatorial statement, which ought to be set to a Morrissey song: “The grim, the cold, and the black will mingle with the solitary, the contemplative, and the transcendent...”  Aaaaah, if only it had mentioned a stone-cold tombstone bearing names of people like you and me! 1430 SE 3rd Ave., 236-1430. Show runs Feb. 5-March 13. Map

WORKSOUND

Corey Smith.
Rock-band frontman, snowboard whiz, and Oregon-to-California defector Corey Smith is known for his irreverent Pop-inspired paintings. Who can forget his wall-spanning installation of Paris Hilton portraits at Backspace or his image of a boy snorting a line of coke, entitled After-school Pick-me-up? In !Obsolete Dreams., his curiously punctuated show at Worksound, he pilfers and perverts cherished Americana imagery such as astronauts, Stealth Bombers, and the good old Stars and Stripes as he critiques and subverts our overinflated cultural icons. 820 SE Alder St., myspace.com/worksoundpdx. Show runs Feb. 5-28. Map