If I were to ask you to stay, I would embarrass myself. I want to, I always want to, but it means that I need you, that I need something, and I want to be something that needs nothing. I want to be solid, unflappable, impermeable, able to withstand all forms of loss with a stoic grace because...Read more
MONTHLY ARTIST TALKS SERIES CONTINUES AT PORTLAND ART MUSEUM
JUNE 10th - STORM THARP
The second Thursday of each month offers the unique opportunity to casually explore pieces in Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection through the inspired lens of a local artist. All talks depart at 6 p.m. from the Hoffman Lobby and are followed by a lively happy hour with the artist until 8 p.m. that includes complimentary food, beer, and wine. Free for members or with Museum admission, but tickets are required. Space is limited to the first 45 ticket holders. Advance tickets are available at the box office.
On June 10th, Storm Tharp will lead a discussion about the biographical, philosophical, and aesthetic building blocks shared by Agnes Martin’s painting, Untitled #15, and Shirakura’s four-paneled literati painting, Visiting A Mountain Recluse. He is drawn to how Martin essentially abandoned her life in New York in order to pursue a humble and rigorous practice, living alone in New Mexico. Regarding his selection, Tharp expounds, "It may not be accurate to say that Agnes Martin was a recluse, as she maintained friendships and business relations with a select few. But it is fair to suggest that she turned her back on the voices and the influence of her day in order to locate the purest form of unadulterated inspiration within herself that she translated into painting." Considered a Minimalist in the canon of art history—suggesting a contemporary intention of formal reduction and essentialism—Tharp rather romanticizes her practice to be "reminiscent of a master Chinese calligrapher from the 12th century."
Storm Tharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon. He attended Cornell University and received a BFA from the College of Architecture, Art, and Urban Planning in 1992. Upon graduation, Tharp moved to Portland, Oregon where he presently resides. His work is representational—by both figurative and conceptual means—and expressed through a variety of media. Tharp was one of fifty-five artists selected to exhibit in the prestigious 2010: Whitney Biennial for which he created a series of new portrait works. He is represented by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York City, Galerie Bertrand & Gruner in Geneva, Switzerland, and PDX Contemporary Art, where his solo exhibition Hercules will be on view June 1-26, 2010.
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Read moreShawn Records, Stupid People Love High Places: Recent Photographs of the World
The Japanese have an expression: "Stupid People Love High Places." Recently, Shawn Records had the opportunity to circumnavigate the globe in just 18 days, with stops in Paris, London, Madrid, and Tokyo. PDX...Read more
Artist Victoria Haven has shown her abstract paintings, drawings and multimedia pieces in galleries from Seattle Art Museum to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But her current exhibit may be the biggest yet — at least in terms of audience. Clearly visible to anyone commuting to and from downtown via Highway 99 (as well as brave souls taking Mercer Avenue eastbound), “Banner Year” consists of regularly changing signs facing out from two windows in Haven’s fourth-floor studio in South Lake Union...
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Read moreTo mark the opening of its new textile galleries, the Denver Art Museum is covering nearly all of its public spaces with fabric, yarn, and needlework. The museum-wide project “Spun: Adventures in Textiles” will bedeck the atrium with a four-story quilt, send a crocheted coral reef snaking through galleries, and culminate in a massive blanket sculpture by Marie Watt . . .
Read moreThe show makes a strong argument for photojournalism’s interacting with art. In the context of Nina Berman’s photo series depicting a soldier disfigured by a suicide bomber in Iraq and Stephanie Sinclair’s gruesome shots of Afghan women who have self-immolated as a form of protest, the stained, splotchy faces in Storm Tharp’s washy gouache portraits begin to evoke abrasions or burns. The theme of bodily disfigurement is continued elsewhere in the juxtaposition of Thomas Houseago’s hulking, seemingly hacked-at sculpture of a crouching figure with David Adamo’s installation comprising an ax, its wooden handle cracked and eroded, stuck into the wall and surrounded by whittled-down canes. Adamo’s ax appears to have done a number on Houseago’s statue, while the canes evoke missing limbs.
Not that "2010" doesn’t make missteps. I wanted to like the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s installation: a hearse, headlights ablaze, playing on its windshield clips from various TV shows and movies to a soundtrack ranging from "A Whiter Shade of Pale" to the "Star-Spangled Banner" and including a voice-over recounting an aborted love affair with the U.S. ("We fucked America to make America disappear"). But the work comes off as juvenile, bathetic, too tongue-in-cheeky by half. One marvels that light fare can be so heavy-handed; Josephine Meckseper displays a far more nuanced take on capitalism’s ills in her brooding video meditation on Minnesota’s sprawling Mall of America. And although Lorraine O’Grady’s sepia-tinged photographs of Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire convey something ineffable about the romantic nature of celebrity and America’s worship of it, their pairing with the Bruces’ piece feels ponderous. Still, O’Grady’s photos beat out by miles Daniel McDonald’s kitschy sculpture in the museum’s lobby of Jackson with Uncle Sam being rowed across the river Styx by Charon, which has all the subtly of Beetlejuice-era Tim Burton.CLICK FOR FULL REVIEW
Visual Art Source: art ltd.
In the finished piece, the strings dangle like long raindrops, each signifying a deeply personal narrative. Together, they cascade like a downpour of celebrations and sorrows. The installation, like the wall pieces, is fastidiously executed and emanates a quiet poignancy. CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE
Cynthia Lahti receives Twenty-fourth Annual Bonnie Bronson Fellowship Award...
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