Ellen George: At Nine Gallery Review on Port

I've made no secret that I'm a little tired of the curatorial crutch of installing grayscale work (photography exempt of course) but two shows this month, titled Memory and Anonymous explore both the reasons for my antipathy and a secret appreciation for the underlying aesthetic. These conflicted feelings are interesting as less colorful shows always seem to be both an easily achieved form of elegance and a well worn road to generic art world accessibility.

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.

George and Mayer have created a piece that shows just how memories of difficult times (which they like most people have overcome) can become sweeter with time. Also, it was the right decision to show only this one piece in the gallery. Serializing the work would have diminished it.

As an existential road map the piece's shadows and texture are mesmerizing and takes the avowed ideas at play in the physical abstraction show Interior Margins (a few blocks away) up a notch and reminds us why Ellen George is one of the five most interesting/challenging/accomplished ladies of kinesthetic abstraction in Portland. (Eva Speer, Midori Hirose, Linda Hutchins and Jacqueline Ehlis are the other four if you must know,) .

Abstraction and memory have a long history and having recently seen the de Kooning retrospective last year at MoMA only reemphasized this relationship. His late period (dementia) works are particularly chilling and interesting but Mayer and George's work is different... closer to Agnes Martin and Dorothea Rockburne's more intimate practice. All that said Memory is one show you should not miss this month. Itis unforgettable because it so nonspecific, leaving room for the viewer's cognitive response. -Jeff Jahn

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2012/01/memory_and_anon.html