News
Arnold Kemp and Molly Vidor: DARK: A SHOW TO WINTER
A group show curated by The Blood Rainbow Family at Fourteen30 Contemporary.CLICK FOR MORE INFORMATION
Read moreAnna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen: Art Gym gallery talk Thursday, Feb 4 at Noon
Don’t miss the conversation in The Art Gym with Brandy Cochrane,
Ryan Wilson Paulsen and Anna Gray. We may have Paul Middendorf
on the line via Skype... Yet to be seen.
Thursday, February 4, Noon.
Free
We will be talking about our two current exhibitions The Dregs
by Cochrane and Middendorf, and The Imaginative Qualities of
Actual Things by Paulsen and Gray.If you teach, bring your students.
Both shows continue through February 11th.
Read moreJacques Flechmuller, Elizabeth Knight, Vanessa Renwick: Tacoma Art Museum
Jacques Flechmuller, Elizabeth Knight, Vanessa Renwick are among the artists featured in the group show "The Secret Language of Animals."
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Opening Celebration
Saturday, January 23, 7:00–9:00 pm
Celebrate with us as we open The Secret Language of Animals. Many of the living artists represented in the exhibition will be present as we honor their humorous and poignant works.
The Secret Language of Animals
January 23, 2010 – June 27, 2010
To purchase tickets, call 253.722.2455 or email Education@TacomaArtMuseum.org. http://www.tacomaartmuseum.orgStorm Tharp in Saatchi Collection
The Saatchi Gallery has acquired the piece "Love Nothing More" by Storm Tharp. It is slated to be in an exhibition titled "The Power of Paper" in 2010.
Read moreVictoria Haven: Archer Gallery
Curated by Blake Shell, The Archer Gallery presents Vantage, an exhibition of artwork exploring perspective - visually, contextually, and perceptually. Featuring regional and national contemporary artists working in sculpture, video, computer animation, sound, photography, and installation, Vantage invites viewers into uncommon worlds, where meaning is reconstructed and reality subverted. CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Read moreBean Finneran: Art Ltd Artist Profile
Richard Speer interviews Bean Finneran. She has resisted suggestions to create permanent sculptures because such permanence would
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preclude “the absolute possibility of transformation,” which she finds
essential. To her, the time-intensivity and steady-handed high-wire act
of creating and installing these works her years in theater. “Both
are about arriving in an empty space and putting something together
for a limited period of time,” she observes. “And in both, you have a
sense that you’re not totally in control. I think that’s a wonderful thing.” CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE FULL INTERVIEW.Mary Henry: art ltd artist appreciation
"Mary Henry: The Last Constructivist"
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I want my work to overpower me, to be more dominating than
I am, to have a life of its own so that when one of my paintings goes
out into the world, it can establish itself with no further help from me.” CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATIONKristen Miller: Visual Art Source Editorial Review BY RICHARD SPEER
Visual Art Source: art ltd.
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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 ARTICLEAdam Sorensen: on the cover of The Stranger
Painting by Adam Sorensen, "Banks I", 2009 Oil on Linen,40" x 44", courtesy of James Harris Gallery
Read moreStorm Tharp: selected for the Whitney Biennial 2010
Congratulations Storm!
Read moreJessica Jackson Hutchins: selected for Whitney Biennial 2010
Congratulations Jessica ! the ceramic, "Standing in the Corner" ( 2007
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Salt fired ceramic8.25" x 7" x 4.25" courtesy of Small A Pojects) was among the work in the PDX group show July 2008 "Kinda Like a Buffet". PDX is happy that Jessica Jackson Hutchins will have a solo show at PDX in August 2010.Kristen Miller: Portlandart.net First Thursday pick
Kristen Miller installation view (photo Jeff Jahn)
PDX Contemporary presents Here and Gone, an installation by Kristen Miller. The installation features delicate compositions in which beads are repetitively stitched onto the surfaces of tissue paper, found papers, and glassine. "Investigating presence and absence, memory, and time, Miller gives visual form to the delicate transience of life and the fleeting experiences that linger on in our memory."
Read morePDX: Dec 3-6 visit us at Pulse Miami booth B201
PULSE Miami 2009 to Feature Enhanced and Expanded Presentations and Programming
PULSE Contemporary Art Fair will move to Miami's Ice Palace this December with an enhanced and expanded presentation of international galleries and programming. PULSE enters its fifth season with a continued commitment to presenting high-caliber contemporary art from an internationally-diverse roster of exhibitors. The new venue provides PULSE with an expanded platform for their special programming series, including the launch of an ambitious performance program featuring daily outdoor concerts.
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Pulse Miami Art Fair , Dec. 3-6, 2009
This year's Fair will feature an array of expanded special programs, enhanced by the Miami debut of PULSE Performance. The series will feature daily performances and concerts by young emerging artists such as Maria Jose Arjona, who recently collaborated with Marina Abramovic, and whose daily performances will be among the highlights of the new programming. Notable musical talents, including The Vivian Girls, The Blow, and Exene Cervenka, will constitute some of PULSE Performance’s other highlights.
paint by Storm Tharp,"Dark Glove",2009Arnold J. Kemp: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, read from forthcoming book of poems
Arnold Kemp will read from his book of peoms "Practice Zero"
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave,Detroit MI 48201
READING:
Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 7PM
Fall ’09 literary series curated by Tyrone Williams
Arnold J. Kemp and Kim Hunterhttp://www.mocadetroit.org/upcomingevents.html
Read moreArnold J. Kemp: Oregonian Review
Review: Arnold Kemp at PDX
By D.K. Row, The Oregonian
November 27, 2009, 10:15AMkvitka.jpgDan KvitkaInstallation view of Arnold Kemp's show at PDX Contemporary Art.Sometimes, a work of art isn't as commanding as the idea behind it. Sometimes, something just gets lost in the transmission of ideas.
Looking at the paintings, photographs and mixed-media works in Arnold Kemp's show at PDX Contemporary Art, I'm fascinated by the ideas he presents, ideas about race and the African American experience. Those ideas linger, float and hover in and around this eclectic body of work.
But that's the quandary with this show, which arrives with a slightly pretentious title: "This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen." These quiet, even lulling works aren't as intriguing as they should be, aren't as potentially commanding as the ideas behind them, which are themselves enigmatically transmitted. I'm not convinced the works stand alone formally.
Kemp has been living in Portland for just several months, having moved here from the Bay Area to chair the new and much anticipated visual studies program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. That important position has quickly made Kemp a presence here, a person of interest.
That position is one reason why Jane Beebe, owner of one of the best and most coveted galleries in town, gave Kemp a show, even though the number of artists long vying to get a show at PDX Contemporary could fill Memorial Coliseum. Skeptics charging another example of Portland clubbiness hardly matter, Beebe says. It's her gallery, after all. Besides, Kemp's work rises above on its merits, she says.
Inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem, "This Quiet Dust Was Ladies and Gentleman," Kemp's show has been described by the gallery as "elusive." Indeed. The paintings are small, monochromatic works called "Vampire" and are, on the surface, all black. Look closely, however, and vestiges of colors painted first can be glimpsed.
A similar aura of suspense, a kind of pregnant pause, suffuses the mixed-media pieces. Kemp liberally applies paint, glitter and doll's eyes to craft patches and swells of color and texture that are both creepy and lovely. At times the doll's eyes seem, in fact, like eyes staring out at you. An ugly specter concerning race looms as well: Think of Al Jolson's eyes when he was painted in black face.
On the other hand, there's an almost mournful quality to the dense, bare branches Kemp has photographed. These funereal prints connect viewers to the "quiet dust" of the title. Are we looking up, skyward, from the earthy burrows?
It's not clear. Kemp's work operates on the fringes, on the margins. It helps to know that Kemp is African American and that much of his past work has explored issues of race and identity. That knowledge gives his black paintings and mixed-media works a current, a charge. Powerful ideas are embedded within the different shades of black color, literally.
But in this show, I find those ideas vaguely transmitted. They're searching for a more articulate messenger. And for the lack of it, these ideas are murmurs, waiting to be heard.
As for the works, they are lovely whispers.
Read moreArnold J. Kemp: Port Review
I particularly liked Arnold Kemp's debut at PDX Contemporary. Perhaps the tightest show put on in that gallery since Storm Tharp's 2007 tour de force, Kemp's effort is an interesting kind of rehabilitated formalism related a tiny bit to Yves Klein... it is obsessed with the color black while inviting all its myriad associations (rather than a proscriptive prophylactic discourse). I like the approach. Even the all black paintings went over well on 1st Thursday. Sure, Kemp's 2007 solo outing in PNCA's Swiggert commons for TBA may have been scale challenged mess of an exhibition but here the glitter, photos, black paintings and googley eyes play with the graphite black floors in meaningful ways. Often curators who make art end up juxtaposing disparate yet related bodies of their own work and Kemp's first PDX outing shows just how well this can be done. Most of Portland's artist curators do solo shows that include too much but this is a focused myriad... not simply an unchecked exercise in pluralism.
http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2009/11/a_gaggle_of_nov.html
Read moreArnold J. Kemp: Art Forum review
It is tempting to view Arnold J. Kemp’s new work strictly in formal terms: modest collages with black paint, glitter, and googly doll eyes that form abstract patterns and pleasant landscape arrangements. Yet the paint used in each piece seems not simply an aesthetic choice and suggests further musings on the elasticity of Black representation, as well as the personal biography of Kemp, an African-American artist. In several small monochromes, such as Vampire (Titled), 2009, one can see evidence of bright primary colors that were applied prior to the surface coat, a black “skin” of paint. In other works, Kemp affixes groups of googly eyes together, which rummage through the picture and impede on dense patches of black glitter, the mixture both kitschy and mildly foreboding.
The title of the exhibition, “This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen,” is an adaptation of an Emily Dickinson poem. Dickinson’s original line reads, “This Quiet Dust was Gentleman and Ladies,” implying quiet dust is the resting ground where men and women now lie. The slight alteration in the text wryly casts Kemp as a host, announcing the entrance of the dust to the audience.
In another series, “(Them) Changes and (Them) Trees,” 2009, photographs extend for the length of a wall. All the images depict a dense crowd of tangled, leafless tree branches at the top of the sheet and reaching beyond the pictures’ frames, as well as a muted sky in the backdrop. Each offers a different composition of the same branches, implying a shift in perspective as one strolls along. The subject might also be someone lying on the ground, gazing at the varied configurations on an overcast day. Or perhaps Kemp is trying to mimic the perspective of the actual ground, the quiet dust exerting its own point of view, after its proper introduction. — Micah Malone
Read moreArnold Kemp: " Whispering Amid the Darkness, Shining in the Light" by TJ Norris
Arts & Culture
Arnold J. Kemp: Whispering Amid the Darkness, Shining in the Light
By TJ Norris
A simple and eloquent tone rises up in a new grouping of work by Arnold J. Kemp—recent Portland transplant and brand-new chair of Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies program.
The title of the exhibition, This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen, quotes Emily Dickinson, though for some the reference may be far less literal. The much-anticipated show, his first with PDX Contemporary Art, is on view in the Pearl District during the month of November.
The solo exhibit marks Kemp’s return to Portland after his residency with PICA during 2007’s TBA Festival. With very few African-American artists in our backyard, his voice is heartily welcome, but it’s what he’s saying—and what he’s not—that delivers the buzz beyond the glittery surface. His paintings are more like composites or encounters, employing common materials you may find in a preschool classroom to provoke the sense of the familiar—but instead of a construction-paper slogan reading “I Love Mom” magnetized to the Frigidaire, his compositions are deeply imbued with his own “black experience.” After our discussion, and a closer look at his studio process, that experience can be very broadly defined.
The soft-spoken Kemp recently moved from San Francisco, where he acted in a lauded curatorial role with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for a decade. Before that time he worked for world-renowned photographer Nan Goldin while living in New York City for a half-dozen years or so. Kemp talks about the culmination of “blackness” as being not only skin deep but also referenced in the roots of punk rock music, and even in the essence of the black arts, or occultist magick. This brings with it a certain framing or embodiment of queerness into light.
As we talk more about his roots it is most interesting to discover the logistic commonalities we readily shared growing up gay punks in Boston in the ’80s and ’90s. He worked in a used camera store in Harvard Square, where I shopped and lived just blocks away. While I was studying at MassArt, Kemp was pursuing his undergraduate degree across the street at the Museum School at Tufts University. We had never met until now, some 20 years later. Learning how music of the era helped to inform his “Daydream Nation” series—the big black stretched linens dotted with plastic googly eyes atop a huge field of shiny black glitter—a vortex, a void, suddenly clicked.
In time Kemp craved a larger sense of critical engagement of his work, its growing penchant for the conceptual paving the way to his inclusion in a pivotal Thelma Golden-curated show entitled Freestyle (2001) at Harlem’s Studio Museum. This was one of the decade’s focal exhibitions showcasing young black artists, and it would have a profound effect on Kemp’s career. It also bridged the artist’s sense of identity with canvases that were sized per his own body height and would eventually become the basis for his graduate thesis at Stanford University.
During our conversation, he mentions Robert Ryman and late great dadaist Marcel Duchamp as key influences. The impact of such modern minimalists fits well into works such as “Cant,” “Descant” and “Recant”—pieces he’s been working out since 2007 using patterns of tiny stick-on doll eyes across bands of pure black Flashe and mixed media. The work stares right back at the viewer, a collective of hundreds gaping like surveillance through a midnight sky.
In This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen, the artist has also included a selection of sizable photographic carbon prints titled “(Them)Trees/(Them)Changes,” which he commonly refers to as “prosthetics.” The title makes lyrical reference to the jazz-speak of Duke Ellington, while the ranging field of tree limbs is truncated by the act of cropping. These works seem more personal, less about the surface. There’s something more cinematic here—perhaps about the misgivings of false starts/endings.
The artist discusses the gestural splattering of the world’s most cherished expressionist, Jackson Pollock, but for me the work speaks of the body and its internal circulatory system, passing through the flesh and digging much deeper, revealing another level of a common humanity. In these trees, a disquieting subtext emerges while Kemp spins a lovely web with which to be reckoned.
TJ Norris is an interdiciplinary artist and curator. For more information, please visit www.tjnorris.net.
Arnold J. Kemp’s This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen, runs November 3-28 at PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders Street, Portland. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, www.pdxcontemporaryart.com
Read moreArnold J. Kemp: Portlandart.net First Thursday pick
PDX Contemporary Art presents Arnold J. Kemp's first solo exhibition in Portland since he was named chair of PNCA's MFA in visual arts program. Titled "This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen," the show according to the press release, "insists on being at once unforgettably black, dusty and glittering." One PORT staffer has called it, "a kind of rehabilitated formalism."
Read moreEllen George: Nine Gallery installation
SCAPE
Ellen George and Jerry Mayer collaborate.
Opens 6 PM, Thursday, November 5 through Sunday November 29
NINE Gallery at Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th, Portland, 97209
Tel: 503-225-0210.Noon - 5 PM, Tuesday - Sunday
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