PLACE

Best Mallrats

Most people who’ve spent the better part of the year at a shopping mall have a sort of defeated air about them: They are second-mortgage shoe junkies, perhaps; goth-liner anemics; mall cop second-chancers; perfume-counter asthmatics. Up on the third floor of downtown’s Pioneer Place Mall, however, it feels a little different. In one corner there might be a woman cutting up old letters from her mother for a wall installation, while a man nearby paints ink onto a massive polyester sheet; in the adjacent room, someone else is conducting a seminar on “leisure.” Place Gallery (placepdx.tumblr.com) is “basically an arts residency in a shopping mall,” according to Palma Corral, one of the gallery’s three curators/directors. Perhaps it’s a tax write-off, perhaps some retail executive’s genuine notion of synergy, but Place (along with its adjacent counterparts “Store,” “People” and “Vehicle”) has existed there essentially for free since last September, aside from minor-league sales commissions and partial utility bills. So in one bifurcated 4,000-square-foot space there are constantly evolving installation pieces, in another room there’s a gallery with work from local art students and in another there’s an arts retail store. In a fourth, the art faces the unsuspecting street from two stories up. And as for the equally unsuspecting mall patrons who wander into the very contemporary galleries? “They ask a lot of very interesting questions,” says Corral. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.