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Jodie Cavalier’s Strange Overtones is an exhibition that coalesces materials from eras gone by, either discovered or passed down, into mobile sculptures that stir up a sense of nostalgia and lingering intrigue.
These works hang on view at PPSTMM—the King neighborhood art gallery that, according to its Instagram profile, is pronounced “pastime” and is “committed to art-as-verb.” PPSTMM doubles as an artist studio for local artist, educator and curator Mack McFarland and Sharita Towne, a fellow artist and educator who, among her accomplishments, initiated the multisite endeavor A Black Art Ecology of Portland. PPSTMM last opened to show Strange Overtones on Saturday, March 22. Unless the gallery’s Instagram announces otherwise, its next showing is Sunday, April 6.
Portland is a mini metropolis that (from my perspective as a working artist) lacks enough formal outlets for the number of makers who live and create here. In the wake of this deficit, people like McFarland and Towne build opportunities for artists through PPSTMM and BAEP, respectively. The resultant web of interconnected relationships runs deep, generating shared history, lore and, dare I write that inescapable buzzword, “community.”
PPSTMM has no storefront and is located inside a building up a flight of stairs with no elevator. Inside the space, intersecting connections grew apparent and abundant, with Cavalier’s works encapsulating this ethos so effortlessly. Strange Overtones’ show statement describes Cavalier’s process, which involves working “with the discarded or ignored materials.” Encountering these objects in their peculiar assemblages, suspended around the space with wire and cord all the way up into the studio rafters, revealed sites of overlap and divergence between my and Cavalier’s personal histories.
Nothing encapsulated this quite like Cavalier’s sculpture Heavyweights. Though not an initial reference for the work, its title recalls the ’90s Disney movie starring Ben Stiller. In that Heavyweights, weight loss campers revolt against the camp’s aggressive new owners. In this one, Cavalier’s 1993 soccer trophy dangles from a rope by its golden figurine arms, reminding me of how the coolest kids played soccer during my middle school years (and how I could barely kick a ball back then).
Above Cavalier’s trophy, held by the same rope, were a glob of Beanie Babies. I recognized the precious Patty the Platypus, a Beanie Baby I had owned in childhood. Thanks to an informational episode of You’re Wrong About with local podcaster Sarah Marshall and guest Jamie Loftus, I recently learned these toys were designed to appear as if they look back at viewers. Certainly, their eyes carry a sense of emotionality as their pellets weigh them downward from within. Here, Cavalier managed to home back into that heavy sense of childhood longing for carefully engineered luster—the shiny soccer trophy and formerly fetishized toys. The desirability of these fraught objects, with their social signifiers not quite lost to the past, remains potent in nonlinear time.
Cavalier had arranged each set of mobiles by themes with pithy titles, but then created crisscrossing connections between them in a manner that drew my eyes from work to work. I noticed an array of other familiar toys from my childhood and adolescence balanced and dripping from the various mobiles: a Hot Wheels Volkswagen Beetle, a miniature Furby, and a plastic jumper frog. For the mobile Balloon Fiesta, Cavalier paired a string of brightly colored turquoise beads with nostalgic hot air balloon trading cards and a milagro charm.
At the edge of the exhibition, a set of matte black objects caught my attention. Were these ceramics? No, they were orange peels and a soda can painted in black and positioned next to an unpainted, crumpled brown paper bag. McFarland explained that this work was titled Cold lunch and added some context:
Cavalier’s parents would purchase a hot lunch for her rather than send her to school with a cold one. The latter was more common among students with families who had the necessary time and resources to prepare food in advance for their children at her school. McFarland noted that at his grade school, this status signifier was the inverse—underscoring the inherent slipperiness of Cavalier’s referents along the lines of intersecting experiences, such as geographic location, race, class, age and ability.
Cavalier’s mobiles also include objects that belonged to her late grandfather, such as scratch cards, a bandanna and a minnow lure. Here the tendency to preserve, archive and find fascination in the minutiae of materials manifests as a generational penchant. After her grandfather’s passing, Cavalier cleared out his workshop and found many different objects he had saved for one reason or another. Some of these ended up in her recent works.
Traces of who we are, how we have transformed and changed, and the habits and patterns we have yet to recognize all live in the most mundane objects surrounding us. With her sculptures, Cavalier brings to light the overtones of this materiality, ready to reflect back our profound strangeness—that is, if we dare to engage.
SEE IT: Strange Overtones by Jodie Cavalier at PPSTMM, 323 NE Wygant St., #203, instagram.com/ppstmm_203. 10 am Sunday, April 6; 11 am Sunday, April 20; and by appointment. Free.