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The exhibition 'Vantage Point' features works from the National Museum of the American Indian's permanent collection of contemporary art, including the work of PDX artist's Marie Watt and James Lavadour.

If an image can be didactic without a title, and Michael David's often are, removing the imagery, as David does in his current encaustic paintings seen at Bentley Gallery (Scottsdale, Arizona), focuses your attention first on optics. But check the title of the show's central work, "The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," and the cinematic quality of the blood red sun of a tondo, and see if that doesn't take you in some surprising directions. If the landscape's presence is indirect in his body of work, it couldn't be more explicit to both the form and content in Vanessa Renwick's current project at PDX Contemporary (Portland), "as easy as falling off a log." Given the Pacific Northwest locale, shades of Ken Kesey's Stamper family, the show conveys how immersion in the environment pushes us to anthropomorphize it. A send-up image like "flat as a board (knot)," translating a bit of tree bark and pine needles into a frontal nude, helps puncture, without contradiction, the environmental polemic.

by John Motley

Throughout her new exhibition, "As Easy as Falling off a Log," Vanessa Renwick fixates on wood and sex, pairing her interests in the great outdoors with the bedroom, so to speak.

by John Motley

In his past work, Kemp, who serves as chairman of PNCA's MFA in Visual Studies program, has explored ideas of blackness as a means to understand and express his experience as an African American.

by Patrick Collier

In 1957 the State of Oregon outlawed the use of splash dams on Oregon waterways. Splash dams were built on rivers and creeks as a way to back up water in a sufficient volume to propel logged trees downstream. The flood caused by the sudden gush of water, plus the massive number of logs, scoured the waterways down to the bedrock, thereby making those streams inhospitable to the spawning salmon that required gravel beds (redds) to lay and fertilize eggs. Only after a series of lawsuits by anglers and environmentalists was the practice terminated nationwide.

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/11/vanessa_renwick_2.html

November 11 - January 2, 2011. Click on image for more information.

"Drawing Room": Ellen George & Jerry Mayer
November 4 – November 28, 2010
Nine Gallery (inside Blue Sky Gallery)
12:00 – 5:00pm Tuesday - Sunday
122 NW 8th
Portland OR 97209
503-225-0210
CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION

http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2010/11/filmmakerartist_vanes….
"Vanessa Renwick, the Portland filmmaker/artist/provocateur who serves as doyenne of the Oregon Department of Kickass brings a new show of video and photographic work to the PDX Contemporary Art's Across the Hall gallery this month.

Entitled "as easy as falling off a log," the show includes video, sculpture and photography, musical themes by Sam Coomes and the collaboration of the design collective Von Tundra.

The show opens on Tuesday November 2, with a reception during First Thursday on November 4."

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/10/flechemuller_at.html. Click on image for more information.

November 18, 2010 – February 26, 2011
Curated by: Gerri Ondrizek, Reed College; Barbara Tetenbaum, Oregon College of Art and Craft; and Namita Gupta Wiggers, Museum of Contemporary Craft.
The artist’s book is an object that extends work beyond the boundaries of a gallery setting. Through selections from the significant 20th century modern and contemporary artists’ books in Reed College’s Special Collections, this exhibition explores the book as an object which defies the boundaries between art, craft and design, and moves along a spectrum from a recognizable to a deconstructed form.