Tuesday, September 29, 2009

October 2-4 Dowsing, Mushrooms and HP Lovecraft

We love weird in Portland. If you are bored, there are great weird opportunities this weekend. The HP Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhucon is a festival dedicated to horror and weird films inspired by brilliant and tortured writer HP Lovecraft. It is the first and only annual Lovecraftian film festival. Both amateur and professional films, short and long are included.



The Salmon and Mushroom Festival is teaming with the Dowsing and Extra Terrestrial Conference on Mt Hood. That would be the same Mt Hood where some scenes from The Shining were filmed! The featured speaker is the James Gilliland from the Self Mastery Earth Institute and Enlightened Contact with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - ECETI. Workshops and lectures include ancient astronauts, crop circles, the Mayan calendar, hypnosis, geomancy, Lecher antennas and all manner of dowsing. See the web sites for information.

October 1 Westside Art Openings

Portland State University opens a new video gallery tonight. Video in art is approaching 50, so no need to wait longer. Our lives are flooded with moving images from infancy, which makes us sophisticated in our aesthetics. Video art is its own beast, distancing itself from commercial cinematic modes while slyly referencing them.

Tonight the gallery opens with a show of video projects by Harrell Fletcher. Fletcher is a well known proponent of social practice art, art with roots in Joseph Beuys' social sculpture. Fletcher was included in the 2004 Whitney with Blot Out the Sun, an open source Ulysses by Joyce which took place at Jay's Garage, the first Portland fueling station for B99 biodiesel.

In the PSU art building lobby, 2000 SW 5th. Inside hours M-F 10AM-5PM. Opening 5PM-6. Projections ongoing evenings visible from the street.


Meanwhile the mid-cycle PSU MFA candidates Lori Gilbert, Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Constance Hockaday, Ariana Jacob, Hannah Jickling, Michelle Liccardo, Motoya Nakamura, Ralph Pugay, Helen Reed, Miles Sprietsma, Zach Springer and Jason Zimmerman present Reply All. It is in the Autzen Gallery, Neuberger Hall (2nd Floor) PSU 725 SW Harrison. Opening 5PM-6



Compound presents Three Pins on a Map work by Krista Huot from BC, Jeni Yang from SF and Ana Ohtsuki from Kyoto. All very cute! At Compound Gallery www.compoundgallery.com 107 NW 5th



Coniferous is a show celebrating Bark, a public interest group working to preserve Mt Hood forest. Bark is 10. Native Oregon artists Olivia Bolles and Nicole Mark spent time in the woods and this work represents that inspiration. Opening 6PM-8. Reception for Bark Saturday October 3rd 6:30PM-8:30 At Stumptown www.stumptowncoffee.com 128 SW 3rd



Tom Prochaska is a master Portland printmaker and painter. He creates sensitive impressionistic figurative and landscape work. At Froelick Gallery www.froelickgallery.com 714 NW Davis



Tom Cramer, a PNCA graduate, has been a carver of totems and infinitely detailed abstract panels, panels pigmented with seductive color. They are beautiful meditations. See for yourself. At Laura Russo Gallery www.laurarusso.com 805 NW 21st



Dina Kantor shows portraits of the Finnish Jewish community. Thomas Michael Alleman shows Los Angeles urban landscapes made with Holga toy cameras. Vanessa Renwick shows found film from 1938, portraits of children from Britton, South Dakota. At Blue Sky Gallery www.blueskygallery.org 122 NW 8th



Chambers presents works on paper and a video installation by Chang-Ae Song. Very dreamy but with and idea behind them. At Chambers Gallery www.chambersgallery.com 916 NW Flanders



Good Herb is a show of illustration by Jess Hirsch. Fascinated by the wide world of healing modalities, Hirsch has made drawings of traditional healers, particularly in the Native US culture and in Mexico. Their healing incorporates herbal medicine with history extending for millennia. At Fontanelle www.fontanellegallery.com 205 SW Pine



The Everett Lofts and associated spaces, bounded by NW Broadway, Everett, 6th and Flanders are always recommended for your viewing pleasure.



PNCA, the Pacific Northwest College of Art is 100. To celebrate, over 20 Portland galleries show work by faculty and alumni. The list is here. The galleries cover the East and West sides.

Monday, September 21, 2009

October 1 Pecha Kucha#6

Pecha Kucha returns with instance #6 in Portland. Pecha Kucha a Japanese expression approximating the sound of conversation. Pecha Kucha is also an international phenomena of design-oriented short presentations - 20 slides, 20 seconds each. So each presenter has a six minutes and forty seconds. In six years, Pecha Kucha has spread from Tokyo to over 230 cities! Portland Pecha Kucha#6 presenters include Adam Arnold, Bill Bruder, Kevin Duvell, Lusia Adrianzen Guyer, Jeff Schnabel, Jean Pierre Veillet, Severin Villiger and Works Partnership, designers of the hosting building. Music by Linger and Quiet. Portland Pecha Kucha At the BSide6, 524 E Burnside, 7th Floor. Doors 7:30PM, talks 8:20PM (20:20) Free

September 27 Peace Summit

TED is broadcasting the Vancouver Peace Summit this afternoon. We like peace. You would never think by the actions of those against it that it is also good for commerce. It is peace is good for commerce, families, just about everything. The conference is a result of 2008 TED Prize recipient Karen Armstrong's proposal. Watch at www.ted.com/webcast/watch/event/peacesummit 1PM-3 Free

Sept 25-27 Slow Wave: Seeing Sleep

EMPAC, far from here but not from New York City, presents an event dedicated to sleep. Not only do you get a night in the museum, you can sleep there. It's Slow Wave. Installations and discussions, films and music. There is a robot that sleep walks to the brainwaves of its sleeping makers. Andy Warhol's five hour film Sleep is available for you to sleep under, bring your favorite blanket. The program is a meditation and exploration of the interplay between the creative fields of art and science, of which we would like to see more. It is Rensselaer www.empac.rpi.edu $5-15

September 26 Art Cult Leader at Rocksbox

Shows and events at Rocksbox are always messy. That's perfect because Portland art always needs a challenge. Curator, owner, impressario, musician and rabble rouser Patrick Rock brings artist Mary George from London for a performance Saturday at 9 and show for three weeks, Camouflage. George maintains an extended artistic presence as cult leader. Born in Ohio, George studied at CCA and SF Art Institute with Rock before moving to London for an MFA from St Martins. Her performance installations often involve the audience in functional interaction, sometimes with her creations. Patrick's punk unit will also play.
At Rocksbox Fine Art www.rocksboxfineart.com 6540 N Interstate Opening 7PM-11 See the website for continuing hours.

September 25 Harvesting Project Grow

Project Grow is a brilliant social practice art project with a heart. Tonight celebrates their first harvest and launch of monthly events with film, music and speakers.

Project Grow is what happens when social practice artists, initiated by Natasha Wheat, now at CCA, engage a sheltered workshop for disabled adults, Port City Development, to create an urban farm. Grow also brings Portland's Street Yoga and art sessions to the workshop's clients. It is the dimension of social practice art I dub "socially conscious social practice art", which focuses on needed worldchanging, while potentially employing artists in social work settings.

The urban farm, built with new soil on a brownfield, is a community supported agriculture project, CSA, in which neighbors subscribe to the harvest. It includes vegetables, eggs and a project with goats, surprisingly charmingly expert at clearing blackberries. The project is for spinning goat hair into yarn, no animals were harmed in its making.

Tonight a panel comprising Linda Colwell, Dan McClary, Tim Donovan, and Ryan Pierce discuss "What Does Sustainability Mean"

Music is provided by Brainstorm and Jeffrey Jerusalem; films curated by Jesse Malmed.

At the Port City Development Center. 2124 N Williams Ave at Tillamook. Enter in the back of the building on either Tillamook or Thompson. 6PM-11 Free

Saturday, September 19, 2009

September 24 Strange Film and Beauitiful Musics

In 1973, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky made one of the strangest, La MontaƱa Sagrada, The Holy Mountain, combining a background as psychotherapist, actor, playwright, composer, mystic and writer-illustrator of comics. The surreal film presages Matthew Barney's films, but is even more odd.

After its premiere at Cannes, this and another Jodorowsky famous film, El Topo, were denied distribution until 2004 by the producer Alan Klein. Exposed to feminism in the early 1970's, the filmmaker refused to direct a production of The Story of O for Klein, who also produced rock bands the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and was the label bad guy in pursuing the infamous sampling case over the song Bittersweet Symphony, against musicians, The Verve.

The film includes a Christ-like main character, and may be based on books The Ascent of Mt. Carmel and Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, which also inspired a famous Bill Viola piece.

Tonight the NC-17 film, sometimes bloody, is accompanied live by musicians Ilyas Ahmed, AAN, Dash! Ghosting and Why I Must Be Careful. At Holocene 8:30PM Free

September 23 Diaries of Jonas Mekas and Saxman Coltrane Remembered

Jonas Mekas is a giant in experimental film. He began his work in Williamsburg in 1949; today at 87, he is working on experimental short films for Apple. Along the way, he has made innumerable films, started key institutions in experimental film and collaborated with many, many key figures in the art and experimental film worlds. His insatiable drive to document his everyday experiences and encounters with the creative people around him has driven him to compile video diaries from 1949 onwards. That would make him the godfather of video blogging, podcasting, the MMS diary and YouTube. Tonight you can see one of his diaries, Walden (1969), shot on film, and tonight, shown on film. It was compiled between 1964 and 1969 and edited by hand chronologically. It's poetic and includes his encounters with creative cotravelers filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Harvard psychonauts Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert/ Baba Ram Das, poet Allen Ginsberg, artist Andy Worhol, muses Edie Sedgewick and Nico, artist Hans Richter, musician Lou Reed, artist Michael Snow, playwright Richard Foreman, writer Norman Mailer and artist-musicians John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Presented by the Cinema Project www.cinemaproject.org. At the Cinema Project space 11 NW 13th Ave, top floor. Elevator access is provided, please come to the door to request. Leave some extra time to find the space. 7:30PM $6 (cash/check)


After you have wrapped your mind around that, and if you want a musical challenge, stop by Worksound later. They are celebrating the birthday of saxophonist John Coltrane, who many consider the best, active from the early 1950's to his death in 1967 at age 40. Coltrane was a musical genius responsible for innovations such simultaneous improvisation in which he blew solos rapidly interleaving several symultaneous harmonic and melodic themes within a few measures. He also incorporated influences from Indian ragas. Jazz is the music many love to hate, it is brain music which takes warming to stepwise. Listen for yourself as you like at WorksoundPDX 820 SE Alder 8PM-11 $5

September 21 Designing a Space for Design

This month, the Bright Lights series hosts Jeff Stuhr and John Holmes from Holst for a discussion with Ziba founder Sohrab Vossoughi. The architects have created a new office for design firm Ziba, known for industrial design, branding and shaping the identity of many Portland architectural projects. It is the perfect collaboration for an architect: a visionary, creative, experienced client. This series draws architects, planners, designers and those with an interest in civic policy. Usually at Jimmy Mak's, this talk will be in the building itself 810 NW Marshall. Doors 5:30PM, discussion 6. Free

Thursday, September 17, 2009

September 20-21 Performance for the International Day of Peace

Peace is a "know it when I see it thing". We know that we are far from the ideal. So there is a day each year set aside to think about it. That day is this week. Sunday and Monday in Seattle there are free outdoor performances in commemoration.

Performers lead by butoh master Diego Pinion begin Sunday slightly before 2PM at Kobe Terrace Park, S 7th Avenue and Main in the International District, going through City Hall Park, homeless park, around 2:30PM, descending upon Occidental Park, Occidental Ave S & S Main Street about 3PM, and finally flowing to Jackson Street's intercept with Elliot Bay around 4PM.

On Monday, at 4PM the performance is at Victor Steinbrueck Park, Pike Place Market Park, Virginia and Western.

Performers include Styliani Goutani, Jessica Galuska, Isaac R. Bekker, Sylvie Badwin, Katy Fogg, Alex Haverfield, Heather McKee, Jessica Ludescher, Deborah Butler, Julia Papps, Keylaira, Viola Rose, Haruko Nishimura, Angela Martinelli, Selena Patschek, Sheri Brown, Diana GarcĆ­a-Snyder, Lin Lucas. Trinidad Martinez and Gregorio Acuna.

Both events are free, as is peace.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

September 19 Night at the Museum

The Art Museum will be activated this evening by the Portland State University Art Department's social practice crew. Each artist has arranged an interactive event around items in the museum's varied collection to practice social practice with you. The whole schedule is here. Events range from music composed and performed for specific art pieces to beers brewed in celebration of art in the collection. We think social practice art is a great thing, especially socially conscious social practice art, as has been noted here with Project Grow. The SOPRAC's are in effect sampling the museum collection, remixing it and distributing it to their networks of networks - it's an example of the phenomena identified by Nokia Research and dubbed Circular Entertainment. Nokia didn't invent it, you did. In the same way, tonight is an opportunity to invent your own relation to the Museum, and to art. The event, dubbed Shine a Light, takes place at the Portland Art Museum www.pam.org 1219 SW Park 6PM-midnight $12, $9 students, free members.

September 18, 20 Not All Advertising is All Bad

Art & Copy is a new documentary about the second oldest profession. Running parallel to Frank's book The Conquest of Cool, it focuses on the mad men and women of advertising between the late 1950s and the late 1990's. The film mixes classic campaigns with reminisces by the people who made them. A recurring message is the necessity to convince the client to fund something they think can never work, but ultimately results in deeply moving the viewer.

The film traces creative revolution of Doyle Dane Bernbach which introduced "anti advertising" in the 1950's. It was critical, self conscious, emotional and at the same time entertaining. Think Adbusters. The interviewees were inspired by that movement and went on to create iconic ads. Examples include the original Volkswagen Beetle, I Want My MTV, Where's the Beef?, the 1984 Macintosh launch, Just Do It, Nike women's sports, Got Milk?, Think Different, I Love NY and others. Recent trends in authenticity and emotion advanced by Kevin Roberts, Marc Gobe and Clotaire Rapaille are not new, they were understood intuitively by these creatives, and demonstrated in their work.

You can see the film at the Northwest Film Center and deconstruct the advertising ingredients of your own cultural history. It is also a call to push your own creative boundaries and trust your intuition. The film is at the Art Museum Whitsell Auditorium, www.nwfilm.org 1219 SW Park Friday, September 18, 7PM; Sunday, September 20, 4:30PM & 7. $6 members/$7

September 17 Sparking Portland Architecture on Film and Bodies on Stage

The Designs on Portland series presents Portland architecture on film, featuring experimental film meditations on Portland architecture. It's film night! Brian Libby is well known as Portland architecture blogger at portlandarchitecture.com. He is also a filmmaker. He has curated a collection of films from Andrew Curtis and Karl Lind, Matt McCormick and Rob Tyler. Andrew Curtis specializes in time lapse images of Portland. Karl Lind has shown many works at the Portland Experimental and Documentary Film Festival and in local gallery shows. Matt McCormick has been doing experimental city landscapes for many years, starting with his hits The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal and Sincerely Joe P Bear. His work is in installation as part of the Nines Hotel art collection curated by Paige Powell. Rob Tyler is known for his VCR100 hand painted abstract piece. The screening also includes a 1955 time capsule, a CBS documentary The Day Called X, about preparations for a nuclear attack in Portland of the time.
At DWR Portland Studio 1200 NW Everett. Doors 6:00PM, program 6:30 Free


BodyVox is a [modern] dance company of experienced dancers who combine collaboration, for instance with the Zoobombers, and film. Their work is humorous and never boring, very accessible in a good way for those left lukewarm by more abstract dance. They have moved to a new beautiful old building where they reherse, teach and perform. Tonight they open it for an open rehersal by the company principals with commentary by OBT artistic director Christopher Stowell.
At BodyVox Studios, www.bodyvox.com 1201 NW 17th Doors 6PM, rehersal 7-8 Free


Art Spark is a networking event for the arts. It occurs monthly from 5PM-7 with a short presentation, performance or game by an invited arts organization of 10 minutes at 6. It's a project of RACC and the Creative Capacity Initiative and you should come to meet other artists. This month the presenters art the organizers of Art on Alberta, who are shutting the street Saturday for art.
At Vendetta www.myspace.com/vendettapdx 4306 N Williams x Skidmore 5PM-7 Free

Saturday, September 12, 2009

September 13 Pat Boas at Marylhurst

Portland artist Pat Boas makes schematic paintings that would not be not at home with the works of MC Escher. The Marylhurst Art Gym does a great job showing the work of mid career artists, that means they have found a way to make a sustainable living with art. Live and learn. At the Marylhurst Art Gym at Marylhurst University www.marylhurst.edu/theartgym/ Check the campus map to find it. 3PM-5 Free

Thursday, September 10, 2009

September 12 Craft+Design MFA Open House

The history of craft extends back into prehistory. In Portland a notable event was the establishment of an Oregon crafts school, now Oregon College of Arts and Craft in 1907; and the founding of what has become the Museum of Contemporary Craft in 1937. PNCA, founded in 1909, originally associated with the Portland Art Museum, itself founded in 1892, the earliest art museum on the West Coast.

It's all new now. PNCA+OCAC+MoCC are embarking on a new MFA program including craft and design, essentially a meditation on materials in the service of three dimensional objects.

OCAC is expanding its facilities in the West Hills. The MFA studios will be under their own roof on the East side. Today they open their doors with a party. The studios were constructed by the students themselves in collaboration with noted design-build advocate Steve Badanes.

At the craft+design MFA studio 421 NE 10th x Glisan 8:30PM Free

Sept 10, 12, 13 Video Curios Curated by Melody Owen

Portland artist Melody Owen is known for visually elegant, idea-infused, minimalist work. East Coast and international studies have brought her into contact with a myriad of inspirations. Tonight she curates two international selections of video pieces for the big screen, Circles and Spinning Wheels, and If I Could Crowd All my Souls Into That Mountain.

Circles includes a recurring theme of curves and circles. Crowd is organized around artists who are symultaneously subject and maker in their films. The artists are Boris Achour, Guler Ates, Barak Bar-am, Jean Charles Blanc, E*rock, Ben Fino-Radin, Liz Haley, John Hey, Gretchen Hogue, Cassandra C. Jones, Alexandra Lakin, Chris Lael Larson, Zak Margolis, Alicia McDaid, Ma Qiusha, Daragh Reeves, Michael Shamberg, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson, Catarina Simoes, Matt Underwood and Ola Vasiljeva.

The program is at the Art Museum Whitsell Auditorium, www.nwfilm.org 1219 SW Park Thursday, September 10, 6:30PM; Saturday, September 12, 6:30PM; Sunday, September 13, 2:30PM $6 members/$7

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

September 9 Video Echo Gap

Valentines hosts a one night show of video art, a perfect complement to the historical show at Lewis and Clark College. Modou Dieng, artist-curator at Worksound, has assembled the show. The artists are Hannah Piper Burns, Sari Carel, Posie Currin, Sean Carney, David Eckard, Jeff Jahn, Arnold Kemp, Stephen Slappe and Kelley Rauer. At Valentines myspace.com/valentineslifeblood 232 SW Ankeny

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

September 8 Broadcast Art at Lewis and Clark

Portlandorusnow has been on holiday from the matrix. We resume tonight noting a show opening on media art, a personal interest, Broadcast. The collection covers the late era of mass broadcast media, repurposed by artists. Radio and broadcast media receivers have achieved nearly 100% penetration in American homes, but it is the end of their era.

Artists began using cheap video making equipment as soon as it became available in the 1960's to create narrow channel broadcast art, communicating with their social networks. That effort by artists has now become mainstream, as was envisioned by media and arts theorist Gene Youngblood, over the Internet.

The show includes Korean artist Nam Jun Paik, widely considered the first video artist. He was active in the 60's Fluxus movement with artists such as Yoko Ono, and continued his career into the mid '90's. His work, Video Tape Study No. 3, 1967-8 is a remix of press conferences by President Johnson and Mayor John Lindsay.

Dangerous performance artist Chris Burden shows TV Hijack, 1972, in which he took a cable access announcer hostage at knifepoint in reaction to the station rejecting his art programming proposals. He demanded that the recordings of the show be destroyed. This exhibit includes stills of the event. Also showing are Burden's Four TV Commercials 1973-77 and 2000.

Christian Jankowski shows Telemistica, 1999, he documents his calls to broadcast television psychics in Venice to ask how his artwork will be perceived by the public in the Venice Biennale.

neuroTransmitter shows 12 Miles Out, 2005, themed on 1960's-80's offshore pirate radio stations in Europe, now made obsolete by the Internet. It's an audio piece. They also shows Frequency Allocations, 2005.

Dara Birnbaum is known for her piece Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, and is notable for her successful lawsuit to decommission a work when a client wanted to show advertising on her public artpiece, Rio Videowall. Birnbaum's Hostage,1994, is a six channel piece comprising news footage from a German politcal hostage situation of 1977.

Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter, working as Ant Farm, show The Amarillo News Tapes, 1980, the result of being artists in residence at a television station.

Gregory Green shows WCBS Radio Caroline: The Voice of the New Free State of Caroline, 89.3 FM, 2007 is a 1 watt pirate radio station. Much of his other work has involved being arrested by police.

MacArthur fellow IƱigo Manglano-Ovalle operates across media, often making work commenting on technology, such as several beautiful series on human genetics. His piece is Search - En Busquedad, 2001 is a simulated radio telescope using a Tijuana sports stadium. It is a comment on the parallels between the search of space aliens and the search at the border for illegal aliens.

MIT professor Antonio Muntadas shows The Last Ten Minutes, 1977, a three channel installation showing the last minutes in th elate night of broadcast shutdown in The US, Germany and the Soviet Union.

Long running San Francisco video collective Top Value Television, TVTV, active in the '70's shows Four More Years, 1972, their own news coverage of the 1972 election campaign of President Nixon.

Siebren Versteeg shows CC, 2003, news broadcasts captioned with unrelated random Internet blog content.

The show, curated in Baltimore, is at the gallery at Lewis and Clark College www.lclark.edu/hoffman_gallery Opening 5PM-7 Free