News

Sun . Sept 6 . 6:30-10 pm "Younger". Ethan Rose, Laura Gibson, and Ryan Jeffery. Audiences are invited to experience the live mixing from outside the gallery, where sound will spill out and projections will fill the windows.Younger
Ethan Rose, Laura Gibson, and Ryan Jeffery
Go See It !
location:
* PDX Contemporary Art
* 925 NW Flanders
* Portland OR 97209
* 503.222.0063
* Free Admission
* All Ages (More TBA Info. PICA phone # 503.242.1419, http://www.pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?eventid=501)

The late curator and photographer Terry Toedtemeier is widely remembered for his impish charm and off-the-wall humor. With few exceptions, however, his silver gelatin landscapes of the Pacific Northwest are resolutely "on-the-wall" artworks -- aesthetically restrained and dry to the touch.

Mary Henry at Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Ketchum, ID

Collaborating with the Fabric Workshop and Museum Marie Watt is creating an inhabitable felted cave complete with a storyteller hologram component. Image of the work in progress. The show opens at the FWM on Friday October 2nd, 2009

The Container Show
RE-opening 5pm, Friday, August 7

The Center's newest exhibition space is showing four new artists starting Friday, August 7 - Jan Cox, Amanda Hamilton, Megan Murphy and Angela Tsai. the containers will be open for Gallery Walk until 8pm.

Gus Van Sant and 10 Counter Cultural Sights of Portland
"PDX Contemporary Art is another arty fav of Van Sant. The space is run by his friend Jane Beebe who used to live down the street from him on Glisan, and showcases some of the best contemporary art in PDX."

Nine Gallery - inside Blue Sky Gallery, 122 N.W. Eighth Ave. through August 2,2009
( photo: Calvin Ross Carl)

Nude Reclining

PORTLAND
Mary Henry: “Paintings And Drawings”
at PDX Contemporary Art
Nationally lauded although most consistently exhibited on the West
Coast, veteran painter Mary Henry enjoyed a long and fruitful
career. Her death on May 20—during the course of this show’s run—
at the age of 96, lent an unanticipated poignance to this chronolog-
ically expansive, formally cohesive exhibition. Born in Sonoma,
California, Henry earned her undergraduate degree at CCAC in the
1930s and her MFA in the 1940s at the Chicago Institute of Design.
There she studied under László Moholy-Nagy, gleaning from the
preeminent constructivist a predilection for the hard edge. In the
1960s and ’70s she combined Pop’s unabashed colors with
Minimalism’s austere forms.
There are other influences and integrations from the arc of 20th-
century abstraction. In the bright, blocky Metaphor(1995) and more
subdued Sarabande(1997) we see a reshuffling of De Stijl. A cheeky,
Stella-esque concentricity enlivens the bold bullseyes of On/Off 8A
On/Off 8B (1967), and Lichtenstein hovers around the cartoonish
lines and outlines of It Even Rains in California (1971). But the artist
shows her own sui generis hand in paintings that evoke her native
Northern California. Nowhere is this achieved more poetically than
in Full Moon Over the Mendocino Headlands(1971). A melding of
elegantly cinematic proportion (48” x 72”), finely honed gradations
of color, and archetypal imagery, it posits horizon line, silvery orb,
and cool, flat black stretching out implacably, evoking the chill of
windswept cliffside, the white noise of surf pounding rock. This is
the kind of painting you can feel on your face like droplets of salt
water on a midnight hike. Mystical in atmospherics, muscular in its
graphic punch, it balances Zen quietude and Western ambitious-
ness, intoning its own soundtrack in the mind’s ear: part bamboo
flute, part fugue, an Alan Hovhaness tone poem in acrylic paint.
Other geometric motifs include the mirror imagery of Memory Field
(1991) and Vermillion(1975) and the witty semantic juxtaposition of
Language Barrier with Orange(2005). A selection of works on paper
includes Social Realism-flavored landscapes from 1941 and a suite
of eight watercolors and ink drawings from 1964, showing the
artist’s movement from organic curves to rectilinearity. With its 64-
year span—from the 1941 drawings to a 2005 painting of
undiminished freshness—the show opened with the feeling of a
retrospective and ended on the heels of Henry’s death, providing a
fitting valediction.
—RICHARD SPEER

“Black Page,” D. E. May’s fifth solo exhibition at this gallery, furthers the artist’s hermetic examination of the material ephemera and vernacular traces of the Pacific Northwest. His new drawings and assemblages consist of serial works on paper housed in reflective transparent document holders installed throughout the gallery in a variety of grid forms. With nearly forty drawings in the exhibition, the room is electric with the raw and refined energy of May’s passionate exploration of spatial forms, language, and storied materials such as weathered cardboard, old notebook paper, and other unidentifiable objects flattened and compressed by life on the streets.

May collects and reuses materials that he affixes to intricate drawings of grids and architectural forms, or uses them as the surfaces for other similar drawings. In Untitled (459), 2009, for instance, a rectangle of sagging, stained-brown “skin” is positioned in the center of a square, vertical grid. It is impossible to discern the precise nature of the material or whether May had a hand in its transformation. This ambiguity, which runs throughout all the work, habitually refocuses the viewer’s attention on the organization and observation of experience. The exhibition might read like an archive, but the system at work is cryptic, private, and self-sustaining.

Most of the works in “Black Page” are either mounted on or incorporate thick black paper. One group, bearing the title of the exhibition, consists of plans, schematics, and notations for the construction of various improbable objects. These pieces are drawn in fat white marker on the black paper and are the humorously erratic unconscious of the exhibition, containing instructions such as ARTIST’S STATEMENT BASED ON THE FILM THE SWIMMER W/ BURT LANCASTER IN WHICH THE ARCHITECTURE ALONG THE HILLSIDE OF SWIMMING POOLS BECOME THE SUBPLOT INSTEAD OF THE BORED HOUSEWIVES. One can imagine each drawing in this extraordinary body of work as a frame from a long-lost documentary or cartoon.
-Stephanie Snyder