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 OVERVIEW Artists Archive Experience Some of the best exhibitions of 1998 addressed the preservation and categorization of memory, as artists retooled found objects into works of art. BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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Order/Disorder Gallery 114 1100 NW Glisan St., 243-3356 Ends Jan. 3 Christmas @ tidbit tidbit gallery 4631 N Albina St., 460-2882 Ends Dec. 30 Deep Storage: The Arsenal of Memory, an intriguing exhibition that originated in Germany, traveled to New York City this past summer and is currently on view at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery. Including pieces by such well-known artists as Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, it is a collections of works meant to preserve and categorize aspects of the human experience, and many of its pieces were created from found objects. As I thought about the premise of this show, it struck me that many of Portland's best exhibitions in 1998 also relayed these themes in a broad sense. Many artists disassembled pre-existing images or objects and then reassembled them into artwork chronicling the complexity of contemporary existence. In May, for example, Froelick Adelhart Gallery exhibited the sculptural baskets of Gail Tremblay, a Native American filmmaker who synthesizes the customs of Pre-Columbian basket-making and post-industrial filmmaking by weaving scraps of exposed and discarded 16mm film. Iroquois craft techniques thus bring together fragments of recorded history. In September, the same gallery showcased Robert Yoder's abstract wall sculpture created from weathered street signs. The final products bordered on the sublime because of their understated aesthetic, and also because they were made from recycled materials, reflecting the environmental concerns of our time. Lisa Lockhart's artwork, shown the same month at PDX Gallery, is similar to Yoder's in that it exudes the import of the previous life of the materials. The Illinois artist uses levels and plumb bobs, tools of the building trade, as components for sculpture. Her combinations of tools, rocks, antique handwritten letters and found printed images address the fragile equilibrium between nature and culture. September also marked the opening of Tri-Met's westside light-rail line, which incorporated art into the architecture of its 20 stations between downtown Portland and Hillsboro. The Washington Park station is one of the most remarkable, thanks to a historic time line by Portland artist Bill Will. A tempered glass tube mounted to the station's granite walls encases 300 feet of core samples drilled from the rock above this underground transit stop, the deepest in North America. Above the tube is carved imagery pertaining to human history, and below it is a corresponding geologic diary. The artist archived earth extracted from the site as the focal point for the piece. The wall pieces of newcomer Sally Finch, exhibited in December at both tidbit gallery and Gallery 114, also record human experience in a more abstract way. Finch cuts up existing texts, such as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and then attaches the isolated words to hand-dyed and stitched paper according to an obscure but consistent numerical system. The destruction and reconstruction of a literary masterpiece questions its iconic status and gives it new life and meaning. The use of found objects, images and text in modern Western art began at least as long ago as 1912, when Pablo Picasso mounted pieces of newspaper and wallpaper thereby creating the first cubist collages. Recently many artists from Germany to Portland have been disassembling items that have had previous uses and reassembling them into works of art that archive and preserve contemporary experience. Perhaps they are attempting to order their world, one that they perceive to be out of control, on the brink of chaos and demise.
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