Art Openings Portland Westside
Portland has design skills. Talented clothing, industrial, shoe, architectural and brand designers. Once a year they and other 3d designers stretch out and experiment with furniture design. For some it's a chance to break design blocks, maybe with a purely conceptual project, for others it's a chance to maybe have their designs picked up for production. Some brilliant design world judges have selected their winners from 40 entries. You can see the entries and hear the judges speak Wednesday October 4 between 6 and 9 at Design Within Reach for $10. Or see the show free at PNCA between October 5 and 28.
DWR corner of NW Everett and 12th, PNCA corner of NW Johnson and 13th
Details: http://www.showpdx.com
Valantines shows mixed media drawings by Cassandra Ann Adams themed on poppies. Inspired by Sylvia Plath's poems linking poppies to love's intoxication, Adams has refracted the connection through her own experience.
Art 6-10, open late 232 SE Ankeny
MK Guth, one of Portland's few artists working effectively in video, shows her work at Elizabeth Leach. Video art is tricky as we are immersed in moving images spanning the pedestrian on youtube to cinema's grand emotionally manipulative narratives. Also showing is Stephen Hayes known for his impressionistic portraits and landscapes in oil or as prints.
Until 9 417 NW 9th http://www.elizabethleach.com
Powell's Basil Howard Gallery shows Brandland, creative work by the WK12.3 gaggle. These twelve are a creative school within an advertising agency doing work that gets published, often for local nonprofits. As each has a varied background and are not exclusively sourced locally, the show might be interesting. On the other hand, it could be a not quite post ironic admixture of culture jamming and soft targeting.
Reception 7, show business hours at Powells Burnside and 10th
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/calendar#1194
Pulliam Deffenbaugh shows seductive constructions by Jen Pack. She stretches brightly colored sheer fabric on wood frames. Her canvas is transparent, specular ambient light casts an impression on the wall behind. Pack has added wiglike falls to some pieces perhaps amping a conceptual facet, welcome because the work itself can be too beautiful. http://www.pulliamdeffenbaugh.com/Artist-Detail.cfm?ArtistsID=208
929 NW Flanders closes early 8:30PM
Mona Superhero has the seventies down. She extends the pop graphics entry into the fine arts world in the 1960's with imagery of the disco era of the seventies, a time when black and white Americans really experimented with mixing socially on an equal basis, dancing. Her images are constructed of brightly colored duct tape. Mona comes off sucessful shows at Gallery 500 to show this month at Berbatti's. http://www.ducttapeart.com/gallery.html 19 SW 2nd until late
http://www.berbati.com/
Rake gallery shows the real sixties and seventies to complement Mona's show, portraits of the Black Panthers, as effectively wiped out then as the American Indian Movement and now perhaps the animal rights movement. Photographer Eve Crane, also known for documenting San Francisco's Hell's Angels, has selected these from hundreds of photographs she made as an intimate of the Panthers, an armed community development group of the day. http://www.rakeart.org/ 325 NW 6th
Blue Sky Gallery shows Zona, photographs of the Siberian gulags today. Now they are not filled with political prisoners, but for example by a 15 year old boy serving three and a half years for stealing 2 hamsters from a pet shop. Despite the bleak landscape and bleaker yet history of the camps, people there still leave a creative mark on the place, and photographer Carl De Keyzer has captured it. Perhaps this show is a touchpoint for contempation of our own justice system and our emerging special justice system. 1231NW Hoyt http://www.blueskygallery.org
Sarah Shields shows paintings at Stumptown on Third. Her imagery includes cities, figures and forests. Her forests appear as lensed through a sensor of heat, her figures seem vaguely Eastern European. The strong, almost fall palette produces a feeling of mystery.
Stumptown Downtown 128 SW 3rd
As always the Everett Station lofts are recommended for the sometimes experimental nature of the work...
If your eyes are not too tired, Holocene hosts Vision+Hearing, collaboration between moving image artists and moving sound artists. Strategy, Unrecognizable Now + gasp, Flora, Deelay Ceelay, Rob Tyler, Phillip Cooper and Chris Larson. I have found the crowd anything but hippie. Mixing live visuals with music is an emerging art form, now at the stage of DJing in Brooklyn in the 70's. DJ's such as DJ Spooky are expanding into visuals; the reuse of visuals is challenging copyright traditions and people are making a living as visualists - see VJCentral. 9PM $5
http://www.holocene.org
