PLACE
PLACE is a gallery space on the third floor of the Pioneer Place Mall (Atrium Bldg) in downtown Portland, OR. placepdx@gmail.com
A very special thank you to Pioneer Place!
Hours: Thursday - Sunday, 12:00-6:00 PM
Shawn Patrick Higgins Injury Memories: JC Injury Memories explores the interplay of banality and trauma of refashioned childhood memories of pain. Playing with the intimacy of the photo booth, the artist will collect stories from attendants in a comfortable, relaxed environment. Thank you Recess for curating Shawn into IN(ter)DEPENDENCE!
Shawn Patrick Higgins
Injury Memories: Palm Sunday
Injury Memories explores the interplay of banality and trauma of refashioned childhood memories of pain. Playing with the intimacy of the photo booth, the artist will collect stories from attendants in a comfortable, relaxed environment.
Thank you Recess for curating Shawn into IN(ter)DEPENDENCE!
Free Money for the Fountain
Wood, aluminum, paper, glass and coins
13” x 9” x 40”
2011
Rose’s motivation as an artist comes from looking at all of products and environments that have built up around us and wondering about how they got there. Who got to decide what it should be like? Who were they making it for? What itch was being scratched, and who was the first to feel it? Rose has always loved going to the mall because each product and storefront he saw could have been anything else, and yet they are all so definitely something. With this particular opportunity to show something at the mall, Rose looked for ways that he could share this experience of wandering aimlessly and wondering why this and not that. He remembers when this mall was new: “I was four years old and my parents took the opening tour. For the first few years, the curvy blue river cut into the floor of the lower level was actually filled with marbles and covered in glass, and the extensions to other city blocks had not yet been built. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have buying power, but the mall felt more like something to be experienced on it’s own than merely the shared real estate of it’s occupants.” Rose offers free money for the fountain as an invitation to take a ride down the escalators, to go with purpose and without cost, and to think of something that is not but could be.
Thank you Appendix Project Space for curating Zach Rose into IN(ter)DEPENDENCE!
Appendix Project Space was founded in the Summer of 2008 as a venue for the production and display of contemporary art and installation work, especially experimental projects that could not or would not be shown within the traditional gallery model. Linked by a short alleyway to NE Alberta Street, Appendix openings have often invited interactions with the neighborhood’s monthly Last Thursday street festival, as well as collaboration with the nearby Little Field Gallery. The adjoined Hay Batch! Performance Space was founded in 2010 to diversify the range of Appendix programming. Hay Batch 2010 was curated by Matthew Green, and is currently curated by Michael Reinsch and Laura Hughes.
Rachel Peterson Schmerge Portable Parks.
Are parks an escape to nature or an extension of urban confinement? In this installation, Schmerge explores the relationship between the natural and the man-made within the urban landscape. She conceived of the portable parks as an entertaining way to insert living green space into a predominantly architectonic environment. However, her attempts to recreate a “natural” environment through tiny fabricated parks emphasized the inherent artificiality of such a project. The plywood walls and interior environment are meant to highlight the grass’s unnatural confinement, raising questions about the role of parks as a place to encounter “nature.” At the same time, parks encourage leisure and recreation, and this is no exception. Schmerge encouraged visitors to freely interact with the boxes- roll them around, pet them, decorate them, sit on them, kick them, or reconfigure them.
Cuated by Recess Recess is not a place and time, it’s an open-source context. Your parents can’t tell Recess what to do, but they’re invited. Recess is dedicated to nurturing emergent, experimental, contemporary practices in a universally accessible environment (well, as much as we can without deluding ourselves into believing in “the myth of a universally accessible environment”). We aim to foster new forms of cultural inquiry and spark a discourse of change within the art community and the community at large. Partially, Recess developed in response to the exaggerated gap between studio and exhibition practice, between what you want and what you can afford, between “real life” and “art life,” between me and you, between the spectacle and it’s spectator. Through formal exhibitions, informal events, and other stuff in between, Recess provides a public place to practice where typically institutionalized exhibition frameworks can be both utilized and renegotiated.
Rina Liddle and Nola Semczyszyn’s DIY Lover consists of a textual reading that directs the onstage construction of a lover. The text Liddle delivers is compiled from a number of different dating guides, self help websites, and how to manuals. Semczyszyn reactively builds the lover from objects solicited in advance from participants who were asked to donate something they considered gendered. DIY Lover (Portland) is a performative inquiry into the material configuration of contemporary dating advice. Part of the project was concerned with exposing the absurdity of these texts and their essentializing of gender in laying out rules to get a partner. The interplay between the text and the construction highlights the focus on control and responsibility in the dating advice, and the implications for identity in acquiring and maintaining a relationship.
Thank you Recess Gallery for curating the performance into IN(ter)DEPENDENCE!
Lexiconspiracy (Clogosphere)
Video, television monitors, found objects 2011
Weird Fiction is an interdisciplinary arts group operating on the innards of the technocultural imagination. Based in Portland, OR, regionally and intergalactically, Weird Fiction has produced speculative fiction blogs, multimedia performance, videos, interactive installations and book works since their inception in early 2009. Exploring the possibility spaces between fact and fiction, hype and horror, residual media and networked technologies; Weird Fiction explore the outer regions and ramifications of today’s pervasive information environments.
visit their ficto-quizzical milieu at weird-fiction.net
Weird Fiction – IN(ter)DEPENDENCE Performance: Saturday March 26th @ 5pm
CURATED BY ELIZABETH LAMB
THANKS SO MUCH ELIZABETH AND WEIRD FICTION FOR PARTICIPATING IN IN(ter)DEPENDENCE!
Deep Leap Microcinema dis/play
Ugh! Mom! Get out of here! Stop walking through my room! Being at the mall. Living at the mall. Art video games. Art Bart. Art gallery. Teen room. Ugh! I hate you and no one understands.
Highlighting prime exemplars of the nascent independent/art video game world, these works challenge notions of playability, object and rules.
Philippe Blanchard - Springfield Eternal (2009, Flash animation loop)
Springfield Eternal is a Saturday morning memento mori. An appropriated Bart Simpson is subjected to a Sisyphean eternal punishment as he ages, withers and dies over and over again, steadfastly staying on his skateboard or staying true to character. Questioning how time is represented in cartoons, this short looping animation uses morphing techniques to create subtle animation effects in an attempt to blur the time of the narrative and the time of the viewer.
To see the entire video go HERE
Deep Leap Microcinema is peripatetic screening and exhibition series dedicated to thematically-curated experimental film, video art and new media work. Past programs include: Sacred Geometries, The Internet Is a Terrible Place to Live, Zaum/Beyonsense and In the Light Cone. www.deepleap.net
Thank you Jesse Malmed!
Green Chain
Mixed Media Installation
2011
In Green Chain, Ditch members Donald Morgan, Jared Haug and Rob Smith confuse their chosen materials into a tableau of Pacific distortion.
Green Chain
Sculpture
Window Dressing/Layout
2011
Ice Water
Video
2:51
2011
Annabelle Introduces Her Black Cat to Its Expanded Reflection
Video with Sound
0:20
Window Dressing/Layout
2011
Founded in 2007, Ditch Projects is an artist-run studio, installation and performance space located in downtown Springfield, Oregon. The mission of Ditch Projects is to supply a progressive and permissive venue for the visual and performing arts while maintaining an open, experimental and festive atmosphere.
Mack McFarland
Well there ain’t nobody left to impress
And everyone’s kissing their own hands
(material of things unsaid)
This work was made possible with the labor of:
Morgan Ritter, Tesar Freeman, Claire LaMont, William Rihel, Kelly Rauer, Rebecca Gates, and Andrea Raijer.
Mack’s socio-political installation comments on the correlation of skin tone and it’s relationship to those who are invited to art’s party.
Thank you so much Kelly Rauer for curating this portion of the show. We absolutely love it!
Chatted with Michelle Liccardo about material, vessels, and the body.
Thank you Half/Dozen for curating her into IN(ter)DEPENDENCE.
Born: Princeton, New Jersey Lives and works in Portland, Oregon Michelle Liccardo makes paintings, drawings and objects by using paint, paper, wood, soft sculpture, papier-mâché and found objects. She explores the human experience of the conscious and subconscious states, in her work, as presented through the relationships between representation and abstraction. Liccardo’s way of working in the studio is as intuition driven as the activity of play and she often explores presentations of her pieces by combining two and three-dimensional works. Liccardo’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2009 Time Based Art Festival. In 2010 her work was featured in Portland’s Performance Works Northwest, Alembic #6, DOMESTIC/WILD, and she worked as a collaborative artist with Nanda D’Agostino on her digitally projected, public art installation, Intellectual Ecosystem, installed at Portland State University’s Recreation Center, December 2010. Liccardo earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University. She is currently teaching college level art while producing a new body of work in the studio for a collaborative installation, summer 2011, at Disjecta’s Vestibule space. Thank you Half/Dozen Gallery for participating in IN(ter)DEPENDENCE. Half/Dozen shows contemporary works from emerging and mid career artists in all mediums.
andreview’s contributing artist Morgan Ritter presents her installation Composite Column. Made of composite parts, the installation will undergo reconfiguration on a daily basis, give or take. Morgan will come in, draw the orientation of the composited column on her pink scroll, and take notes reacting to the psychic debris left in the space while she was away. Maybe somebody touched the ceramic object on Tuesday, or maybe a passerby was wearing too much perfume on Thursday? She will experiment with reconfiguring the column based on experiential, spontaneous feeling (and being defiant in the mall). As a structure, Morgan’s column illustrates her ongoing exploration of charged objects, being embedded with movement, tension and poetic logic.
Follow Morgan Ritter on Flickr or Facebook
andreview is an artist-run free publication that nurtures the work of local and international writers and artists. For each issue, we showcase historical and contemporary trends in thought and art-making. As readers, researchers, artists, and designers, we are interested in collections—connected ideas that can be compiled and offered as food for thought.
J Brown and Courtney Cullen’s LASHES: Notes on Violence
AMAZING!
