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Vanessa Renwick at the Keep Portland Weird Festival, Paris, France

20 March, 2012

Vanessa Renwick, founder of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass, will be presenting two shows of her films "Portrait #1 Cascadia Terminal" and "Medusa Smack" with musician Tara Jane ONeil playing the score live at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Centre Pompidou/Metz. She also will screen a selection of films that she curated of contemporary Portland artists, as well as a curation of her own short films.
From the 19th to the 29th April 2012, at La Gaîté Lyrique and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Centre Pompidou-Metz and Le Lieu Unique in Nantes.





Watch James Lavadour on Oregon Art Beat March 1st 6:00pm

Painter James Lavadour has been prolific since Art Beat visited him in its first season back in 2000. He describes his inspiration and process of making art in this update. Take a drive with him out onto the lands of his Eastern Oregon home, then back into his studio where invites us to look closely at his paintings, their surface and the messages they hold. Listen and watch as explains his engagement with paint and the unfolding of image.




Adam Sorensen on HI-FRUCTOSE blog

24 January, 2012

Alongside the epic resurgence of non-traditional figurative and narrative art, the time honored tradition of landscape painting has morphed quietly itself, producing a sub genre of artists who create works of serene yet semi-apocalyptic landscapes, such as Jean-Pierre Roy (HF Vol.18) and Gregory Euclide (HF Vol.17) for example, an emotional tug of war between the longing for the diminishing natural world versus a painful look at what seems destined to be. Portland painter Adam Sorensen falls within this category, with his imaginary worlds of crystalline structures and bright irradiated colors contrasting with smooth, lava flow dark bumps and luminous waterfalls. Oddly cheerful in it's otherworldly- ness, the work invokes the idea of a melted, post-mankind landscape and gives the landscapes their star turn as seemingly sentient personalities of their own. -Kirsten Anderson


Ellen George: At Nine Gallery Review on Port

First off is Memory by Jerry Mayer and Ellen George at the Nine Gallery housed within Bluesky. Extremely simple and elegant the show consists of one large sheet of paper that has been folded and unfolded so much that it resembles a topographic map of the Himalayas. This is riffing on the trope of art as palimpsest as the paper records the wear and use of each move. The end result is lived-in, like a favorite article of clothing but the whiteness and light paper of the entire enterprise presents itself as a kind of relief after the existential burdens of the past signified by the paper folds. Here a past survived is a past with no sting. The folds also resemble the synaptic structures of the brain.