News

Flechemuller featured in "This is Fly" online magazine

an interview with an online fishing magazine

Storm Tharp: Northwest Film & Video Festival, Judge's Selection

Sat. Nov 8, 6:30 p.m. Whitsell Auditorium
Sat Nov 15, 6 p.m. Whitsell Auditorium
Portland Art Museum

GREY ROOM (also on view at PDX Contemporary Art during Tharp's exhibition)

Like the poem of the same name by Wallace Stevens, GREY ROOM examines the fluttering heart and worrisome mind of a sitter in pleasant surroundings. (11 min)

D.E. May at The Hallie Ford Museum of Art

D.E. May The Artist as Archivist
November 8 - December 21, 2008

Storm Tharp: Review of ARM & ARM in The Oregonian

a review by DK Row

Tad Savinar interview in Oregon Humanities

an interview by Tim DuRoche

Storm Tharp interview on PORT

Ryan Pierce posts an interview with Storm Tharp on PORT

Brad Adkins: "Homage" at The Art Gym, a group show curated by Terri Hopkins

Brad Adkins: Adkins is re-creating a work that Oregon artist and musician Nate Slusarenko created in The Art Gym in 1991.

The Art Gym: Homage
November 3 - December 7, 2008
Re-enactments, copies and tributes by Sherrie Wolf,
Brad Adkins, Christopher Rauschenberg and Michelle Ross

Marylhurst University
17600 Pacific Highway (Hwy 43) / PO Box 261 / Marylhurst, OR 97036-0261
Phone: 503.636.8141 / Toll-free: 800.634.9982 / Fax: 503.636.9526

D.E. May: "meta" group show curated by TJ Norris

D.E. May: "meta" group show curated by TJ Norris at Linfield Gallery, Miller Fine Arts Center, 900 SE Baker Street, McMinnville, OR
October 15 - November 29, 2008,
www.linfield.edu/art

Storm Tharp at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to introduce large-scale portraits by Ben Durham and Storm Tharp in
a show running from October 24 - November 15, 2008. An opening reception will be held on Friday,
October 24, from 6-8 pm.

Terry Toedtemeier "Wild Beauty"

Exhibition • October 4, 2008 - January 11, 2009
Portland Art Museum • 1219 SW Park • 503.226.2811
"Wild Beauty," the book by Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen
Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge 1867-1957

Storm Tharp: Review of ARM & ARM in The Portland Mercury

a review by John Motley

FEROCIOUS MOTHERS | Exhibition Walk Through

Click here to view a video walkthrough of PDX CONTEMPORARY ART's December 2020 exhibition, Ferocious Mothers:

https://vimeo.com/489993393

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART presents the work of women artists who have managed to make art, and build successful careers while being attentive mothers. This is not an easy task, particularly today.
It takes strong belief in the value of their art, a strong will to produce it, and a strong heart for their families.

With Work by:
Natalie Ball
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Ellen Lesperance
Maya Lin
Senga Nengudi
Heather Watkins
Marie Watt

FEROCIOUS MOTHERS is on view at PDX December 2, 2020 - January 2, 2021
Open by appointment Wednesday - Saturday, 10am-4pm

James Lavadour: Being, Painting Nature

To look upon the paintings of James Lavadour is to see worlds you know like your own backyard. Nevermind that you can’t place the exact peaks and drainages, that you can’t claim to have seen these exact combinations of color cast upon the Missions or Beartooths. These are landscapes we Montanans know by heart: jagged cliffs slicing red-streaked sunset skies, cascading sheets of rain plunging from blustery clouds.

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.

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.

Best Painting: Adam Sorensen - Willamette Week

Best painting: For Portland Art Museum’s APEX series, Adam Sorensen created his biggest painting ever: a 7-by-10-foot masterpiece called Tabernacle. In impossibly saturated jewel tones, it presented a landscape resplendent with waterfalls, mountains and rivers that looked more like the stuff of psychedelia or fantasy than reality.

Arnold Kemp at Louis B. James: "You can never go home anymore"

Opening Reception Wednesday Sept. 7, 6-8 pm

Louis B. James
143 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Louis B. James is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition You can never go home anymore, featuring the work of Travis Boyer, Kelly Jazvac, Arnold J. Kemp, and Virginia Poundstone. Through diverse media, the four artists grapple with the materiality and origin of an object, creating subtle transformations and minor displacements. You can never go home anymore is a verbal stumble, a deviation on Thomas Wolfe’s title sung by the Shangri-Las, a story of a regretful runaway whose home has disappeared. The work on view betrays this inconspicuous though definitive shift away from one’s origins.

Vanessa Renwick included in Museum of Contemporary Craft show: "Object Focus: The Book"

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.

Storm Tharp: PICA TBA visual arts catalogue excerpt

This collection of essays and interviews was published on the occasion of Human Being, a series of exhibitions, installations, and happen- ings curated by Kristan Kennedy, for PICA’s 2010 Time-Based Art Festival. Projects were on view from September 9—October 17 in the classrooms and common spaces of the decommissioned Washington High School in Portland, Oregon.
Copy editors: Patrick Leonard, Scott McEachern Catalog design: Tim Kamerer Typeset in Miller Printed by Bridgetown Printing
in Portland, Oregon.
© Portland Institute for Contemporary Art 224 NW 13th Avenue, Suite 305 Portland, Oregon 97209 www.pica.org
Cover Image: In 2005, the then-shuttered Wash- ington High School was quickly converted by the Red Cross into a refuge for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In the end, the residents were rerouted to Texas, and the school remained empty. “Art and colors are better than sadness” is text from
a handmade card found inside the abandoned High School, written by an anonymous child for the victims of Katrina.

Human Being
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever.” —Carl Sagan
Wandering around in bodies that support and betray us, we obsess about the material and immaterial. We are a species with mysterious origins, which despite centuries of investigation have yet to be explained. To exist and to question our existence is our destiny. Here, under the banner Human Being, I have gathered a suite of artists’ projects, which attempt to develop a cul- ture around the perception of beauty, aesthetics, philosophy, and this particular human condition.
The artists included mine the deeply personal in order to explore the universal, constructing work that contrasts the confusion of the present with the seemingly concrete nature of the past. They are linked by their distillation of history through a kind of genetic memory or direct refer- ence. They have inherited an art history and a societal history in which the aesthetics, ideas, and morals of past eras appear less subject to the chaos of our world’s present moral and ethical uncertainties.
Confused by inheritance, we wonder: Are we at the endgame of abstract reasoning? Are we so far removed from the literal, the concrete, that we don’t know what it is to be human? Are the fragments produced from our lives worthy of inclusion in our art? Is the search for meaning and beauty possible in a post–everything society?
It is through this questioning that I hope to present not one theory, but many, all of which col- lide and explode when side-by-side, leaving us in a cloud of dust. The very stuff we are made of.
Kristan Kennedy
Curator, PICA

Storm Tharp
High House
Storm Tharp has been looking in the same mirror for more than a decade. It has moved with him from studio to studio, accumulating paint marks, bits of tape, and various scuffs. The mirror is as great an influence on his work as any other single tool, piece of research, beauti- ful peony, or sad song. For his residency at PICA, Tharp brings together objects and ephemera that provide the hidden, joyful, and meaningful subtext to his work to form arrangements in a room that is part studio, part gallery, and part home: a still life.
Kristan Kennedy: High House is an arrangement of things and a constructed environment that is both of the studio and of the home. How do you define this space, is it in-between or a blend- ing of the two?
Storm Tharp: My house and my studio are where I spend the majority of my time—but there are ideas in High House that are about other spaces. Being outdoors, being in the sun, eating alone— these kinds of things. The intent was to showcase real inspiration, or the ideas that fill life.
However, constructing the room and building the stage for High House was so amazing to watch happen. I love the room with nothing in it, as well. The sculpture of the room is inspirational on its own. Something to remember.
Putting this show together has caused me to think long and hard about my tendencies. There will be a very tidy presentation going on. Very formalized; an almost fetishized version of what surrounds me.
KK: I know that both of us turn to the writings of Agnes Martin from time to time, and I love her quote: “When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” What do you think of beauty and its place in art?
ST: I have spun this answer for way too long. So many different versions resting in a word document, flooding my mind.
The question almost doesn’t make sense to me. My faith in beautyis so wild and devout that I don’t even think about its place in art. Beauty is everything. It is not a choice. Art is an idea that is beautiful. To question beauty is to broaden beauty. New forms, new ideas: the new beauty. Beauty does not dissolve.
I know it sounds all very correct and Christian-minded of me, but I guess, when you ask me about beauty and art, my mind explodes. I believe in the big picture of that question. I think it’s all beautiful and I think it’s all art. To believe otherwise is like building fences.
It reminds me of the Warhol quote that goes something like, “If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.” I love that!
Perhaps you wanted me to comment on the value of pretty? Because that would be fun. Some other time...
KK: Who lives in High House, meaning, who is the subject of this space, it is of you or of them? (Them being the people, things, and places you reference, directly or indirectly, in the objects, draw- ings, photographs, and plants in the installation.)
ST: I love the idea that someone might actually get to live in High House. A shape-shifting existence: a transformer, a reflection of all its facets. A dark-and-hairy-Popeye turns a corner, becoming a lanky, stoned teenager. A sexless figure with crystal eyes and super-human sonar capabilities sits in a chair. Science fiction. An animal. A mother with a moment to herself. A memory.
I don’t know. I guess it’s me. But it’s funny; I don’t think of myself when I think of the things. I think of them. Beauty beyond me. So it’s tricky. It’s like that poem by Wallace Stevens that I sent to you last week: “I am what is around me... A black vestibule; A high bed sheltered by curtains.”
KK: We have been talking about High House in some incarnation for many years. I still remember our late night studio conversation all those years ago, the one with the bottles of wine... I have a note on my wall that you posted to my door the next morning that says, “Was last night a trick or a sign? by the way that is a good name for a show. x ST.” I think I had just started working at PICA, and we were both on the cusp of solo shows at our respective galleries. Do you think this show is also a reflection of our relationship: artist- to-artist, curator-to-artist, friend-to-friend? And, if so, do you think that the show ends when the exhibition closes? Or will you forever be building High House (and asking my opinion of it)?
ST: Ha! I will always be building High House, and you will always be subject to its change. But yeah, this show is not the suite of draw- ings that we discussed over a year ago. High House is happening because you were listening and doing some thinking for me. Artist- friend–to–artist-friend. You were looking out for me—challenging me—to look at a drawing not as a drawing but as a cup of coffee, or a plant that grows in a window.
KK: What does it mean to be human?
ST: The first thing I did was look up the word, humane. Being humane is a nice way to be human. But it doesn’t seem to address all of the mess and disaster that comes with humanity. What does it mean to be human? To have a conscience, I suppose. To ask ques- tions. To make out with your boyfriend.
Tharp is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York), and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva).
human being | 22

Megan Murphy: "Illiterature" California State University

August 24 - September 18, 2010, "Illiterature" University Art Gallery California Staet University, Chico, curated by Mark Carter.
Artists: Vuk Cosic, Linda Ekstrom,John Himmelfarb, Linda Hutchins, Yeal Kanarek, Stephanie Lempert, John Patrick McKenzie, Megan Murphy, Larissa Nowicki, Jill Sylvia Masako Takahashi, Cody Trepte. Curated by Mark Carter.

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