Skip to main content
Death and Donald Duck loom large over popular imagination. Both icons feature in Brassworks Gallery’s three ongoing shows, on view at the Kerns art gallery through April 5. The eastern side of the gallery, divided roughly in half between black-hued works and a dark rainbow, holds Is It Still Life, a pop surrealism guest show curated by KRK Ryden.
KRK Ryden is a pop surrealist—an artistic movement blending the styles and references “high” classic art with “low” pop culture art, often for abstract, absurd or irreverent effect—perhaps best known for making the band Devo’s cover art on the rarities album Recombo DNA (2000). KRK’s younger brother, Mark Ryden, has created album art for musicians and bands, including Michael Jackson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tyler, The Creator. The pop singer Tove Lo has part of Mark Ryden’s work for the band Jack Off Jill tattooed on her arm.
The Ryden brothers are two of pop surrealism’s most well-known figures. Is It Still Life offers a rare chance to see these makers under one roof, before their quickly sold-out art vanishes into private collections.
Mark Ryden’s oil painting Abraham Lincoln, Barbie Roberts, and Bee is one of the show’s biggest attractions and smallest works at less than 9 square inches. It hangs behind plexiglass to keep it safe from patrons’ pockets, and sold quickly for $20,000.
Other standouts from Is It Still Life include Heiko Muller’s oil painting Melting, which shows a molten blob of colors standing in the dark. Ron English’s oil painting Dead Duck shows two unsettlingly glossy depictions of Donald Duck—one with realistic webbed feet, and one with an exposed skull and bones—standing on a barren landscape in front of a giant fish with legs. Camille Rose Garcia’s watercolor and ink drawing The Guardian of Io depicts a fish woman’s weary profile as she wears a conch shell around her hair. Mark Bryan’s oil painting The Metamorphosis shows a cockroach smoking a cigar, drinking beer and watching TV alone while a despondent woman faces the kitchen light alone, like a scene after the novelty of Franz Kafka’s horror story wore off.
Paintings aren’t everything. An ornate cake sculpture by Scott Hove, Sixteen Point Pearl Drop, is topped with a tongue and catlike fangs for a dessert that bites back. Josh Keys’ clay sculptures of trash food, sold out entirely at $250 per dish. And would it really be an art show without stacks of television sets? Joshua Ellingson’s Three Sears Televisions clumps antique TVs together around a bowl, which at times projects vintage holograms inside, seemingly from the TV set viewers have the least ease to watch.
Brassworks’ west side and solo space are more devoted to the macabre. Lana Crooks, who invited KRK Ryden to curate as part of her monthlong showing at Brassworks, has her own solo exhibition of gothic felt sculptures, In Due Time. The fabric re-creations of animal skeletons sit under bell jars on shelves that look like tiny curio cabinets. She curated the western wall outside her show with two dozen artists of mixed mediums depicting morbidity and mystery with the show In Shadows. One standout is tummy by Portland artist Dusty Ray, showing a decapitated nude male torso divided into a nightmare kaleidoscope by either refraction or butchery. Music fans might remember Dusty Ray after the pop star Doja Cat and the metal band Chaver both commissioned spiders from him for their album cover art, which released right around the same time.
Not every artist has the King of Pop or rap’s finest provocateurs in their contacts, but the inclusive nature of the shows fits Brassworks’ interconnected goals to benefit the artists, collectors, nonpaying patrons who are no less passionate followers, and gallery staff.
SEE IT: In Due Time, In Shadow and Is It Still Life at Brassworks Gallery, 3022 NE Glisan St., 503-593-9311, brassworksgallery.com. 3-8 pm Wednesday-Saturday. Free.