Tonight I propose a fashion sandwich. You must get an early start though. Begin at City Hall's sustainable fashion show Locally Grown at 5pm. Finish at Holocene's Design Your Own Fashion Show. The details are below.
We have a new batch of commissioners in City Hall and they are shaking things up. Live bands on the steps. Art openings early on first Thursdays, from 5-7. This one I recommend and it's a chance to talk to city staffers about what artists need in Portland.
If you have ever visited the bins, you are aware of fashion's resource intensive short life. Cotton requires large doses of pesticides to grow while synthetics are made of who knows what. Vegans eschew wool, leather and all manner of skins too. So one approach is reuse. The artist Pipiloti Rist, in a 1998 interview, proposes people "sew labels into their clothes; on the labels they would write where the clothes had been worn, what happened when they wore them and so on. Every piece of clothing would carry with it a full record of everything it had experienced." Last summer the Red 76 art collective produced their own version of this idea. Some of the clothing isn't landfilled but ends up in Africa as detailed in "How Susie Bayer's T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama's Back", the oddessy of a piece of clothing traversing continents by returned Peace Corps volunteer George Packer.
Portland designers who reconstruct clothing are tapping this reuse meme too.
Another approach is to use bamboo fibers or fiber mixes and this is the approach Anna Cohen and Sameunderneath have taken. So for more information, just go to the event:
Portland Designers Anna Cohen, Sameunderneath and Saffrona show clothing of sustainable fabric.
Accessories of sustainable fabrication will be shown by Entermodal, Lucina, Nora Catherine and DoubleCross Belt Co..
Artists showing work include: Roll Hardy, Faulkner Short, Miss Mona Superhero, Pasha, Mary Culbertson, Shirley Barley, Shannon Richardson , Matt Raufman, Alia Smith, Colleen Coover, Jennifer Hazzard, Brian Parnell, David Burkvan, Saska Schmidt, and Terence Healy.
They will have food and drink too.
City Hall 1221 SW 4th Between Madison and Jefferson 5-7pm Free
The Music Population Project plays new chamber music in he street on NW 13th between Davis and Everett. Expect two sets, one at 7 and one at 8. L&C music schooled composer, conductor, director, Brede Rørstad, creates cinematic music from traditional classical instruments and sometimes electronic sounds. The Music Population Orchestra only performs a few times a year, so see this. http://thempp.com details the project's raison d'être. 7pm and 8pm sets, NW 13th between Everett and Davis. Free.
The Laura Russo gallery shows watercolors by Henk Pender. Pender is known for somewhat dark interior landscapes with perhaps a touch of surrealism. Dutch, he extends the masters' traditions into much more psychologically complex territory. Until 9 805 NW 21st Ave http://www.laurarusso.com/
Augen shows very bright geometric paintings by Eva Lake. Some would call them op-art, art that taps the base mechanisms of the retina and lower visual cortex in our very complex and not well understood visual system to produce a sense of vibration in the image. Until 9 817 SW 2nd http://www.augengallery.com/
Leach Gallery shows work by late career artist Lee Kelly. Kelly is welll known for large stainless steel sculptures installed outdoors around the Northwest. Any art that involves a crane is worth extra points with me. Where would we be without Sera's Tilted Arc or Seattle's Hammering Man? Perhaps there are clues for Portland's emerging artists, how do you get to late career and working large in stainless steel?
Also on view are works by Hans Haacke, Dinh Q. Le, Ken Lum and Kimsooja inspired by their relationship to their home countries. Le, from Viet Nam, is known for weaving photographs of Viet Nam War cinema stills and photojournalism snaps; he was born in 1968 and relates to that wartime through its artifacts.
Until 9 417 NW 9th http://www.elizabethleach.com
PDX presents Sun Spots, new landscape paintings by James Lavadour. Lavadour is known for his individualistic abstract landscape paintings inspired by Eastern Oregon vistas.From the artist's statement: "Every painting talks about some ancient thing that is as old as ground we walk on and connects us all in a shared existence." If you are interested in landscape painting, you might want to take a look at Lavadour's work.
Until 8. 925 NW Flanders Street http://www.pdxcontemporaryart.com
The Everett Station spaces are always worth a look. I rarely get the whole scoop ahead of time, but did get word of these:
Tilt Gallery shows Freeway Hypnosis paintings by Jonathan Leach and soft sculpture-prints by Amy Steel.
625 N.W. Everett St., #106
Melissa Armstrong shows Entomology 211 themed on bugs in the lobby 625 N.W. Everett St.
Love Punk is a show of visual art and music by hey Lover http://www.heylovermusic.com. Music at 8. Hovercraft 328 NW Broadway #114
Influence, a show by Nicky Kriara, Hadley Hutton & Winnie McDonnald will be at Backspace.
http://www.backspace gallery.com 115 NW 5th to midnight
Just be design presents a new show by Kobe's Digmeout design collective. Details at http://www.justbedesign.com/JBD03/compound/0806_digmeout06/digmeout06.html . Please someone in Portland, let's get something like this going here. 107 NW 5th
Motel Gallery shows Wind Inside by Liz Harris, a show of drawings and a drawing installation. I'm interested to see how this relates to Linda Hutchins work of a few months ago. Harris recently relocated from Oakland to Portland. http://www.motelgallery.com NW Couch between 5th and 6th.
Upper Playground of San Francisco, as we have written previously, opens a store in the old Fashion Incubator space. Artist designers Herbert Baglione, Sam Flores, Jeremy Fish, Mike Giant, Estevan Oriol and Saber will be showing their work. They are out and about Saturday doing graf-murals and then having a book signing Sunday. Stop into the store or check their web site at http://www.upperplayground.com for details. They are a store with a blog too: http://upperplayground.blogspot.com/ Corner of Couch and NW 5th
The Portland Art Center presents several shows in their new space: a show of Art Media employees, past and present, with 40% of sales going to support PAC; Eclipse, a sound installation by David Abel and John Berendzen in the Light and Sound Gallery; Waiting Room, an installation by Scott Wayne Indiana; and Focus Group, an installation by Houston. http://www.portlandart.org 32 NW 5th
Kendra Binney, a talented lowbrow artist, maybe a kindler and gentler Mark Ryden* crossed with some serious kawaii sensibility, shows her paintings at Berbati's. Usually I view this type of work with a jaundiced eye, but in this case it's well executed and I like it. Oh, and very reasonably priced too. 19 SW 2nd until late
http://www.berbati.com/
*Ryden has gotten darker as his painting skills have advanced; in the style of filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet who made Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. Binney's work works for children as well as older children while Ryden's and Jeunet's works are strictly adult.
Sonia Kasparian shows dreamy portraits, rendered in layers. Sometimes the layers are window screen, patterned with bright pigments, suspending the images' highlights in parralax. Also outstanding is a full scale wedding dress in window screen. In lesser hands this subject material would be merely mythical, however Kasparian tempers this tendency by mixing industrial materials and a sensitive touch. http://www.buttersgallery.com520 NW Davis
Valentine's present a show by Alicia Cortney Eggert. Music by Gary Wiseman, Tre', and Bark, Hide and Horn
From Valentine's press release: "Alicia Cortney Eggert was born and raised in New Jersey as the daughter of a Christian minister, and spent four years of her early childhood living in Cape Town, South Africa, where her parents were missionaries during the Apartheid. She studied Scandinavian architecture and design at Denmark's International Study program in Copenhagen, and graduated from Drexel University, in Philadelphia, with a degree in Interior Design. Using common household objects and accessible materials, her artwork explores the essence of human nature in modern society, revealing it's presence and impact on aspects of every-day life, and examining it's relationship to the natural world. In addition to creating and exhibiting her own work, Alicia also organizes and curates multidisciplinary art events in Portland, Oregon, under the name of Kitchen Sink.
All My Clothes is a series of studies relating to the ideas of ownership and identity that focus on the artist's personal wardrobe. Every item of clothing was scrutinized, catalogued and drawn in detail. Each and every tag and label were removed from the clothes and sewn together one-by-one to create a vague shape of the artist's physical profile. The project's culmination will be an installation consisting of every single clothing item tied together to form an enormous mass, which will hang on the wall and be on display for the entire month of August."
Art 6-10, open late 232 SE Ankeny
Consider ending your evening at Holocene for Design Your Own Dance Party with actual designers spinning on the tables along with DJ SewWhat and DJ 1996 Olympics. There will be a raffle of some sweet custom clothing, a showing of 10 Minute Creations, impromptu designs, and an "I'm a top model" photo booth. $5-8 sliding scale at the door goes to support the production costs for the upcoming September Fashion Week 1001 SE Morrison http://www.holocene.org
