NW GALLERIES
Window Shopping.
New exhibit of Anaglyph portraits by George King. Opening reception from 6-9 pm Thursday, July 3.
1928 NW Lovejoy St., 227-6667. Closes Sept. 6. Map
Art of Politics 2008 .
Political Poster Launch Party: Life, Liberty and Libations.
115 NW 5th Ave., 248-2900. Closes July 31. Map
Mitchell Freifeld.
New works.
327 NW 9th Ave., 222-1862. Map
Group show feat. Keenan Havens & Lisa Greif.
You don’t think of sea monsters and severed heads when you hear “elegant neo-Baroque semi-abstraction” but Keenan Havens’ gel pen drawings are just tight enough to change your tune.
420 NW 9th Ave., 224-2634. Closes Aug. 2. Map
Clifford Rainey.
Conceptual artist Clifford Rainey fills the cavernlike upstairs gallery at Bullseye with a moody, meditative retrospective that tackles themes such as globalization, aging, cancer and censorship. It’s not all so serious, however. Rainey shows his playful side in
Art Committee No. 2, which consists of 12 glass penises mounted on the wall like trophies, and
Odalisque, a hilarious nod to Ingres’ famous painting, complete with brocade and peacock feather.
300 NW 13th Ave., 227-0222., 227-0222. Closes August 16. Map
Sonia Kasparian.
Sonia Kasparian has long used porch screens as an element in her haunting paintings and multimedia works. Now she repurposes those screens, using them as the basis for dramatic abstract wall hangings like
Double Mothra and
Rodan, which resplend with neo-Baroque luxuriance. Sculptures such as
Loving Cup and
For John combine animal bones and antlers with candelabra, velvet and painstaking metalwork. The show shows Kasparian in fine form, leading us into realms where joie de vivre and memento mori jockey for position.
520 NW Davis St., 2nd floor., 248-9378. Closes Aug. 2. Map
We can't top the press release: "Erotic self-portraits document artist's obsessive daydreams."
134 NW 8th Ave., 287-3886. 11 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday. Map
Jaq Chartier, Melody Owen.
They may be pseudo-scientific, but Jaq Chartier’s paintings are the real deal. Chartier, a Seattle artist and founder of the Acqua Miami art fair, excels at saturated abstract paintings that reference stains used in biological experiments. They sear into the retina like sunspots. Also appearing at Liz Leach is Melody Owen, erstwhile Biennial darling known for her igloo installations and paper crowns. Owen’s work in this show is based on recent travels to Iceland, Paris and Quebec.
417 NW 9th Ave., 224-0521. Closes Aug. 2. Map
Seven exhibition: Corey Arnold, Ryan Bubnis, E*Rock, Caleb Freese, Justin Gorman, Jason Greene, Sara Padgett and Ryan Jacob Smith.
Works from of the some of PDX's best up-and-comers, featuring "photography, painting, illustration, design and video installations."
23 NW 5th Ave., 548-4835. Closes July 31. Map
Bo Joseph.
New York City-based Bo Joseph makes his West Coast debut with twisty, organic sculptures and multimedia drawings that have a neo-primitivist feel. The work feels derivative except for
Eating the Organ of Appetite and
Homemade Ritual, Homemade Religion, both of which contrast visceral and mechanical motifs in delicious cobalt blue atop orange-creamsicle vanilla. Victor Maldonado’s works have a pop flair that promises but never quite delivers the goods.
714 NW Davis St., 222-1142. Map
"We Are All Wrong and It's All Right" exhibit.
New works in scrap materials by Gordon Barnes and Mandee Schroer
325 NW 6th Ave., #102., 724-7300. Closes July 26. Map
Ken Shores' works.
Art or craft? Ceramics or high-art sculpture? Who knows and who cares when you’re veteran envelope-pusher Ken Shores. Generations: Ken Shores is a retrospective of the artist’s 50-year career. With his unique iconography, culled from studies undertaken and influences absorbed in Asia and South America, Shores’ life’s work is overdue for this in-depth treatment.
724 NW Davis St., 223-2654. Closes July 23. Map
Melissa Dyne.
Glass installation.
724 NW Davis St., 223-2654. Closes Aug. 10. Map
Ogle is looking more like a European boutique gallery every day, as evidenced by
Two Belgians in Portland, a somber yet sexy outing by sculptor Gilles Neuray and photographer Tom Schutyser. Neuray’s works look like giant fish bones in a sinuous S-curve—think Donatello’s David meets fileted sea bass. Schutyser’s photos of Iran hang from the ceiling in gray metal frames, while in collaborative works the photos and sculptures coexist seamlessly.
310 NW Broadway., 227-4333. Closes Aug. 30. Map
Brian Borello.
Brian Borello’s new work might be his best ever. The artist can sometimes seem a tad woodsy in that old-school Oregon-bred way, but in the current works he zooms in on the vegetal motifs (twigs, ferns, seeds) until they become radiantly kinetic abstractions. The fact that he uses motor oil as a material gets him bonus points: Paintings such as
2081 are blacker than black and have a ravishing presence.
929 NW Flanders St., 228-6665. Closes Aug. 2. Map
Gerald Slota, David Isenhour and Christopher Rose celebrate city grittiness with new photographs, sculptures and impressionistic works, respectively.
916 NW Hoyt St., 227-5060. Closes Aug. 30. Map
Holly Andres.
Well known for her creepy family tableaux of waxen WASPs staring vacantly into televisions and turkey dinners, photographer Holly Andres debuts a new body of work called Sparrow Lane. The series riffs on Andres’ childhood fascination with
Nancy Drew and the
Hardy Boys mysteries, and it showcases her gift for staging complex, preternaturally lit vignettes that invite the viewer in, even as they retain a sense of enigma.
916 NW Hoyt St., 227-5060. Closes Aug. 2. Map
Glass Art of Native America.
Quintana’s Glass Art of Native America features the work of contemporary Native American artists (including local treasure Lillian Pitt) translating time-honored traditions into the glass medium.
120 NW 9th Ave., 223-1729. Closes July 31. Map
Falling Light .
Live installation by Portland artist Scott Sonniksen.
108 NW 9th Ave., Suite 300., 823-5111. Closes July 25. Map
Jim Valentino.
The First 500 Years: A look at the 30-year-plus career of Jim Valentino, co-founder of Image Comics.
328 NW Broadway, #113., 916-9293. Closes Aug. 2. Map
SW GALLERIES
Kinga Czerska, John Dempcy.
Augen has a yummy treat for fans of abstract painting: Kinga Czerska at the gallery’s DeSoto location and John Dempcy at the downtown location. Czerska sees the world in puzzlelike slices, as if all optical input has been flattened into abstract planes of arcing, rhythmic color. Dempcy is a master of process, dripping paints of differing viscosities onto clay board and allowing them to seep, weep and congeal into compositions that enrapture the eye and drain the vocabulary of sufficient adjectives—gorgeous, sumptuous, voluptuary—and send you hunting for your thesaurus. Augen Downtown, 817 SW 2nd Ave., 224-8182. Augen DeSoto, 716 NW Davis St., 546-5056.
817 SW 2nd Ave., 224-8182. Closes July 26. Map
CAMP.
New art installation and book release by Justin "Scrappers" Morrison.
917 SW Oak St., #218., 827-0249. Closes Aug. 31. Map
Tamara English and Phyllis Trowbridge.
There is beauty in the manicured English garden but also in the untamed weed patch, as Tamara English demonstrates in
Imaginal/Manifest. The paintings celebrate overabundant vegetation via pentimento effects, chalky outlines and flat, encausticlike surfaces with deep berry reds and hunter greens. Works like
Here in the Betwixt feature wallpaperlike strips that walk the line between still life and decorative art. While the body of work feels one-note, the imagery is ripely seductive.
817 SW 2nd Ave., 224-5475. Closes Aug. 2. Map
Sue Allen.
Wild + Tame screenprints.
7688 SW Capitol Highway., 823-2787. Closes July 23. Map
Michael Curry.
Puppetry: An Out of Body Experience, features Oregon native Curry's puppetry works from
The Lion King and Cirque du Soleil.
1200 SW Park Ave., Closes Oct. 19. Map
If this group show is, as titled,
Kinda Like a Buffet, I’m skipping lunch. While Richard Wilson’s three-panel
Y.B.G. is an agreeable etude on shades of yellow and Midori Hirose’s white pyramids delight with their hidden, multicolored patterns, the remainder of the show leaves a bad aftertaste.
333 SW Harrison St., 802-1041. Closes July 31. Map
Klaus Moje retrospective.
German-born glass maestro Klaus Moje has a major retrospective at the Portland Art Museum, showcasing the artist’s 30-year career combining influences from his European roots and his many years in Australia, leading what is arguably the world’s premier glass studio. Moje is a kiln-former; he fuses glass into intricately patterned works that can be intimate in scale, but can also fill a 24-foot wall. Says exhibit curator Bruce Guenther: “He creates objects that have reference to tradition but explode and reorient into an experience that’s purely optical.” Moje will go down in history as one of the greats of his medium, and this show will go down as a watershed moment.
1219 SW Park Ave., 226-0973. Closes Sept. 7. Map
Every Picture Tells a Story.
Persian narrative paintings.
1219 SW Park Ave., 226-0973. Closes July 27. Map
Contemporary Northwest Art Awards with Dan Attoe, Cat Clifford, Jeffry Mitchell, Whiting Tennis, Marie Watt.
The Contemporary Northwest Art Awards is a tight survey of mostly thirtysomething regional artists of a certain persuasion: self-aware, unconcerned with beauty, and studiously unstudied. The big $10,000 prizewinner Whiting Tennis contributes paintings of dingy suburban homes, along with an effective sculpture called
Boogeyman, while Dan Attoe scores big with a towering neon paean to stripper culture. Jeffry Mitchell’s kitschy cabinet distills the soul of a generation overflowing with nostalgia, but Cat Clifford is nowhere nearly as effective with her sophomoric, one-note video installations. Lone Oregonian Marie Watt owns the front gallery with her soaring, circling fabric extravaganzas.
1219 SW Park Ave., 226-0973. Closes Sept. 14. Map
Ed Ruscha.
Features new works in a three-part wall motif.
1219 SW Park Ave., 226-0973. Closes Sept. 21. Map
Department of Prints and Drawings.
30th anniversary celebration.
1219 SW Park Ave., 226-0973. Closes Oct. 5. Map
Northwest Down Syndrome Association's "All Born 'In'".
Cross-disability exhibition.
1221 SW 4th Ave., 823-4000. Closes July 31. Map
Behind The Shoji.
Art show and sale featuring pottery, photography, glass, jewelry, textile art, tonkin metal art, sumi-e paintings and antique Japanese furniture.
611 SW Kingston Ave., 223-1321. Closes Sept. 2. Map
Icons & Iconoclasts.
Regional artists take on musical icons. The group includes surrealist Stuart Ellis, satirical symbolist Jacquelyn Bond, expressionist character studies by Michael Orwick and Celeste Bergin, digital surrealism by Tom Repasky, and iconic photography by Allan Bruce Zee, among other works.
15450 SW Millikan Way, Beaverton., 626-6338. Closes Sept. 5. Map
APEX : Marc Dombrosky.
Hand-sewn paper art.
1219 SW Park Ave., 226-2811. Closes Oct. 26. Map
Adam Bacher and Oregon-based Itafari Foundation.
Photography exhibit,
Rwanda—Return to Peace. Artist reception Thursday, June 19, from 5:30-8 pm.
4033 SW Canyon Road., Closes Sept. 1. Map
NORTH PDX GALLERIES
Disjecta’s new home is up on North Interstate Avenue in the Kenton neighborhood. It’s a trek, but Rocksbox is close by, and in the past, galleries like Haze (which was way up yonder in St. Johns) proved that art lovers will come out in droves if the programming is meaty and the ambience buzzy. Decide for yourself if Disjecta is worth the MAX Yellow Line ride at the new space’s inaugural show, Immaterialized. Curated by Igloo Gallery director Damien Gilley, the show promises a mind-bending take on the relationship of painting and sculpture to architectural space.
8371 N Interstate Ave., disjecta.org. Closes Aug. 13. Map
F.X. Rosica.
Rosica presents a solo exhibit of prints and paintings titled
Still Lives: A Community In Motion. 5340 N Interstate Ave., Closes July 26. Map
NE GALLERIES
Palimpsest: Photographs of Environmental Ice Installations.
New photographs by Nicole Dextras.
623 NE 23rd Ave., 927-4409. Closes Aug. 2. Map
SE GALLERIES
Esque Studio.
New glass works.
1028 SE Water Ave., 542-5000. Closes Aug. 2. Map
"Angels in the Architecture": 3rd Annual Architectural Heritage Center photo contest.
Submissions accepted through Aug. 16. Entry and rules at visitahc.org or prophotosupply.com.
701 SE Grand Ave., 231-7264. Closes Aug. 16. Map
Very loosely curated around Noam Chomsky’s ideas, Universal Grammar is an engaging if not fully cohesive group show. Members of the Thin Ice Collective contributed works such as Zefrey Throwell’s short film
The Grasp, which is about new communication patterns in the wake of the cellphone. The most interesting piece is Sham Saenz’s two-panel
Eden, with its alien-like figures vaulting among gray and orange architectonic forms. It looks like a group of cyborgs got lost on the way to the transhumanist convention and wound up at the Beijing Olympics. We like that.
2505 SE 11th Ave., 819-9656. Closes Aug. 8. Map
Jacob Wooton, Keith Rosson, Larry Cyr.
New works in paintings, sculptures and stencil art.
2845 SE Stark St., 239-9292. Closes July 28. Map
Rochelle Koivunen.
Rochelle Koivunen’s drawings portray a kinder, gentler post-apocalyptic world. Instead of Mad Max scavengers, Koivunen’s survivors have learned their lesson and decided to band together and respect the earth. Through the artist’s sheer conviction and narrative carry-through, she rescues this premise from preciousness, building a world where humans, animals, and indeterminate in-betweeners coexist peacefully with Gaia herself, joined together by tentacles and squishy viscera. It’s an inventive vision worth checking out.
534 SE Oak St., 971-227-0072. Closes July 27. Map
Jacqueline Ehlis.
Jacqueline Ehlis’ first show in three years is called
Serenade, and child, does it ever sing. Elegant, witty, understated yet overachieving, Ehlis’ minimalist etudes are not to be missed. Full review in next week’s
WW.
922 SE Ankeny St., Closes Aug. 10. Map
SAA Project Space : Transplants.
New works in mixed media and found objects by Andries Fourie, mixed media by Jonathan Bucci and mixed media by David Oudeis
600 Mission St., SE Salem., Closes Aug. 1. Map
Unconscious Mind.
New works in nude photography from Daniel Howlett.
3711 SE Belmont St., 234-0915. Closes July 31. Map
Nationality.
New works by Jessica Breedlove, Laura Campos, Don Fox, Mina Bella Kreiter, Joy Leising, Troy John McCray, Nathan Orton, Beth Ann Short, Maureen Sunderland, Chris Tardi, Lesli Tardi and Anna Todaro.
110 SE 16th Ave., 232-3457. Closes July 27. Map
This up-and-coming gallery has a vibe that harkens to the early days of Gallery 500: hot bands, hip crowds and visual-arts programming that seems to be on an upward arc. The standout in the group show Likeness is Kirstie Louderbough’s 12th and Stark, a glorious multimedia mess of a piece that turns the American flag into a goopy, sticky, filthy, waxy amalgamation of honeycomblike squares embedded with litter.
820 SE Alder St., Closes July 31. Map