Review: Pat Boas Record Record

This review initially appeared on the Culturephile blog I write for Portland Monthly.

Portland artist Pat Boas takes selective readings of the world, processing received information such as front page news or signage through filters that result in, for example, some of the remarkable drawings in her current one-woman exhibition, Record Record at Marylhurst’s Art Gym. Her readings are experiment, expose, illumination.

I’m partial to the work that is more procedural, in particular, her series here that uses as source material pages from the New York Times that become a critical editing of the edited, of, “all the news that’s fit to print,” when by “fit” we mean, what exactly? By isolating certain typographic or photographic elements, her drawings get at questions like this in very elegant ways.

For “All the Heads on the Front Pages of the New York Times,” Boas traces, on a single sheet of vellum the silhouette outline of all of the heads that appear on the front page of the Times for a month. These are ghost crowds of the news-makers, the victims, the heroes, the bystanders. Similarly, for her “NYT Little People” series, she does finely wrought gouache paintings of only the non-famous figures that appear on the cover of the Times. The figures float in isolation on a white ground, holding their places in the invisible layout on which the paintings are based. She titles these pieces with a headline from that day. Both of these series raise questions about who is newsworthy and what the structures are that determine their newsworthiness, and in fact the rules are that dictate what makes anything worth reporting for the Times.

“A3” jarringly isolates incidences of the ad for Tiffany’s jewelry and the international news photos (of disaster, war, death) beside it that shared that page of the Times for many years. “If that’s all there is my friend, then let’s keep dancing,” you can hear Peggy Lee sing. This series is the best example of perfect-pitch political work that says what needs to be said sans sledgehammer.

In contrast to those works that foreground the people on the front page of the Times, “Alphabet (NYT 01/01/01)” isolates the letters of the alphabet that appear in the type on the page (one drawing per letter displayed in calendar form) via solvent transfer. The pieces are beautiful, as if letters were randomly shot through screen and stencil at the paper. It’s as if the practice of recording these letters might reveal a secret and it does: the layout of the page foregrounded with the image areas left blank, and of course, the codebreaker’s cheat, the letter frequencies in the English language: etaoin shrdlu.

Boas’ more current work, her 2007-2009 series “What Our Homes Can Tell Us” suffers in that its methods are more ad hoc. The artist tiles lyric phraselets from photos she’s shot in her home and on her travels of words she finds on signs, packaging, book spines, &c. Because the artist subjectively shuffles the words, these are best seen as micro-poems rather than the mystical readings of a medium as Boas asserts. Higgledy-piggledy framing of the individual words might be deliberate, emphasizing their found nature, but it thwarts any visual rhythm that could create structure. So we’re left with whether Boas’ phrases resonate as phrases.

I’m glad curator Terri Hopkins honed in on this info-related work of Boas’. An exhilarating show overall.

Taking Stock

Taking Stock is a piece I wrote for Portland Monthly's Mudroom (FOB) on my favorite new Portland arts microgranting project, STOCK.

Interview: Artist Ward Shelley

Recently for Culturephile, I both summarized a lecture about his work given by Brooklyn-based artist Ward Shelley and followed up the next day with an interview. My first audio interview, complete with funky lead-in mini-theme by Tim DuRoche (see if you don't think it sounds a little Courvoisier), it's the launch of a series I'm going to call Stop and Give Me 30. Shelley, brought to town by PNCA, does both performative architectural installation and informational drawings. Both branches of his work are interesting, AND, as it turns out, he's a good guy. Check it out. And thanks PNCA for arranging the interview.

10,000 Invitations

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Review: Brian Lund, New Work

One of my favorite visual art exhibitions of the recent PICA TBA:09 festival was Brian Lund's New Work at the Feldman Gallery and Project Space at PNCA curated by Mack McFarland. I found Lund's diagram/drawings of Hollywood movies pretty thrilling. Here's the review of Brian Lund, New Work I wrote for Culturephile.

Review: MK Guth Terrain Change

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Review: Bobbi Woods at Fourteen30

I review Bobbi Woods solo exhibition at Fourteen30 for Culturephile. "Woods’ decontextualized (unlike collage which recontextualizes) images float literally as well as figuratively, but they never fall far from the tree of sensuous commercial image from which they were plucked."

Review: Jason Charles Rens at Nationale

I wrote a short review Jason Charles Rens' Non-Jewelry at the tiny eastside shop/gallery Nationale.

"There is much delicious in-betweenness in this series. The jewelry is made unprecious by its material—hydrocal (a white gypsum cement), humble rope, and equestrian hardware—and precious again as a work of art. It apes a wearable form but is made unwearable by scale. And the form of the individual jewel or bead is very cleverly somewhere between faceted gem and a stud you’d find on a black leather jacket."

Review: Echo Gap

I review Echo Gap, the one-night exhibition of video art at Valentine's curated by Worksound's Modou Dieng with work by Stephen Slappe, Arnold Kemp, Hannah Piper Burns, Kelly Rauer, Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, Posie Currin, David Eckard, and Jeff Jahn for Culturephile, the arts blog I write for Portland Monthly.

Review: Oregon Painting Society at TBA

I wrote about Oregon Painting Society's performance for PICA's TBA:09 Festival. I'm really intrigued by this art-making group that does everything BUT paint (well, maybe a little).