February 27 Land of Dreams

Iranian American artist Shirin Neshat is known for her photography and video art work. With Land of Dreams, she steps out into long form art film with professional actors. 

The protagonist artist, played wryly by Sheila Vand is a field worker for a future fictional census bureau. Her job is to collect dreams for the census. That leads to many surreal adventures. Her side gig is to steal the dreams and reenact them on her social media channel. Along the way, she collects a proposed paramour, played by William Moseley, and a bodyguard played by Matt Dillon. It is artfully shot in the American Southwest with an additional cast of strange characters. The feature film is paired with a gallery show by the same name. The gallery work is a large collection of straight black and white portraits of Southwesterners, and two video artworks.

The film center at the art museum shows the film, which is making its rounds of film festivals. It is yet rarely seen, but you can. Land of Dreams at the Northwest Film Center in the Portland Art Museum Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park 3PM $12

February 20 Thank You for Supporting the Arts

Gene Youngblood (1943-2021) wrote Expanded Cinema and was an inspiration for the culture of the Internet in his famous essay Mass Media and the Future of Desire, 1977. In a Portland lecture, the recording of which was lost, he proposed a venn diagram of art within a circle and not-art without. No one would argue that the Mona Lisa and David are safely within the center of the definition of art enclosed by that circle. What is interesting is the boundary for an individual, a subculture or tribe, and how it varies over time.


Viva Las Vegas is a writer, musician, and a dancer. Her work, over years, is an intellectual exploration of sex work, social politics, and the experience of exotic dancing. Thank You for Supporting the Arts her film biography.


We live still in the Victorian age, in a puritan land, immersed in the media of beauty to sell soap. Our brains engage neuro-aesthetics formed from birth. In that neural wiring, emotion is entwined too. Viva Las Vegas is interested in how that all unwinds performing, and in individual personal conversations, in the club. The film is her explanation of how dancing is art within the circle.


PICA put together a fine exhibition of the history of sex work politics in Portland, the community of workers, and their artworks. https://www.pica.org/events/symposium-art-activism-publishing-sex-work. Oregon's famous First Amendment of the Constitution of 1857 is stricter than the federal one of 1787. In State v. Robertson, 1982, stripping moved into the circle of legal, from outside, not-legal, in Oregon. Now the line between art and not art is increasingly being discussed for the variety of sex work.


Film Thank You for Supporting the Arts https://hollywoodtheatre.org/events/thank-you-for-supporting-the-arts/ at Hollywood Theater 7:30PM $10