Skip to main content
LeBrie Rich displays her work in the aisles of art examining junk food: mass-produced snacks engrained in everyday American diets despite holding little to no nutritional value. For more than 20 years, her felt fiber sculpture practice has re-created packaging for nearly everything a Plaid Pantry could offer, from candy to energy drinks, celebrating consumers’ nostalgic connections to each re-created brand and reflecting on the countless dollars and hours poured into making products pop on shelves.
Her latest Portland art show, Crackers (& Cookies), displays bite-size and larger-than-life-size sculptures of titular tidbits including saltine, Ritz and graham crackers, as well as Mother’s pink- and white-frosted, candy-sprinkled Circus Animal cookies. On view at Nine Gallery inside of Blue Sky Gallery through April 26, Crackers (& Cookies) also includes whimsical, functional furniture and snack appliqués on lace.
Though the work appears less realistic in real life than it appears even through a camera’s viewfinder inside the independent member gallery, Crackers (& Cookies) is still an impressive optical illusion to witness in person. Even strict dieters wary of empty calories can appreciate the details Rich has honed since 2004 as she stabs colored wool with a needle until it meets her stencil shapes. It’s her use of wispy, ultra-fine detail that makes sculptures more realistic, like how Rich uses subtle darker hues to crisp Cheez-Its and their salt flecks. The show is easy to understand, packing in excited visitors during its First Thursday opening on April 3.
Rich’s smallest pieces begin at $35 and climb to $225 before inflating scale and price point. The fun-size sculptures, like a $45 Ritz Bits cheese spread cracker sandwich or a $110 mini bag of Funyuns embellished with shimmery ruby-hued tinsel-tone fabric, hold a remarkable amount of intricate detail.
A vial of 5-hour Energy ($275) befits caffeine junkies with a sense of humor. Larger packaging for Pop Rocks ($400), Barnum’s Animals Crackers ($850) or SuperPretzels ($1,150) painstakingly re-create the original boxes and bags’ colorways, font lettering and magnified product details while intentionally leaving information like nutritional facts obscure. Contemporary logos woven into antique lace speaks to cultural exchange and the legacies of consumer brands—Ritz was founded over 90 years ago, while the Cheez-Its centennial was in 2021. If you missed the celebration, why not commemorate it now with a $3,000 hyperrealistic Cheez-Its chair with iron legs and felt cracker seat and back big and strong enough to hold a person?
The Cheez-It chair is most lifelike in gallery documentation photos. Textured enough to beat AI allegations, Nine Gallery’s photos of Rich’s chair require a deep study to notice fibers. A quick glance immediately elicits excitement. Is that a giant cracker? How’d she do it and why do I want to sit on it even though it could break immediately? It’s nothing deep enough to overthink. Cutting out processed sugar and salted morsels likely isn’t enough to see Rich’s work and feel a wave of revulsion or think about the geopolitical mechanisms that prop up the Nabisco. Honestly, with what life seems to throw at us intellectually, why not bask in the simplistic wonder of seeing a footstool in the shape of an ice cream sandwich or Nutter Butter cookie?
An unusually warm early April evening likely lent to the busy First Thursday reception, so a return visit to Nine Gallery will afford visitors more time and room to have up-close experiences with Crackers (& Cookies). Well worth the free admission to Blue Sky Gallery—Nine Gallery shares walls, hours and a door, but not curators—are its two main exhibitions.
Portland photographer Nykelle DeVivo’s Tha Crossroads is a 12-year photo project showing scenes evoking spirituality. DeVivo’s practice views photography as a way to reflect light and technology for divination, according to a show statement. Arresting images—like a landscape with a red hole seemingly burning through another dimension, or a dark, high-contrast black-and-white photograph of a woman in a white dress standing in beach waves, her gleaming eyes her only discernible features—require long visual reads.
Boston photographer Laura Beth Reese shows #influenced for Critical Mass, an annual contest sponsored by Blue Sky Gallery and nonprofit organization Photolucida. #influenced is a multimedia showcase of Reese’s appreciation for influencer aesthetics first established by Paris Hilton, perfected by the Kardashian-Jenner sisters and endlessly duplicated. Reese demonstrates how Hilton turned her personal life into profit by filling a promotional cutout of her namesake dress-shaped perfume bottle with scenes from her infamous sex tape released more than 20 years ago. She also Facetunes a photo of Kim Kardashian into progressively cartoonish proportions.
The galleries’ shows aren’t planned together, but Crackers (& Cookies) is a sturdy bridge between DeVivo’s mysticism and Reese’s exploration of the shallows’ depths. Brands pay untold fortunes to study how their art affects us in an effort to form a long-lasting emotional connection to their products. If art viewers want to chew on that legacy, why not fill hungry eyes with familiar food, as a treat?
SEE IT: LeBrie Rich’s Crackers (& Cookies) at Nine Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 503-225-0210, blueskygallery.org. Noon–5 pm Wednesday–Saturday. Free.